aeblog

reading list

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell
Still Life With Oysters and Lemon - Mark Doty
FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication - Neil Gershenfeld

This FAB book is pretty eye-opening. Gershenfeld goes into significant detail to describe how personal fabrication laboratories are a reality of today and how they can be used to enable individuals to design and create physical things that they want or need. We are all used to the powers of computers and how we can create digital 'things' using them, but this book shows how technology has progressed to the point at which we can take these highly customized digital designs and actually turn them into real-life objects that will, in fact, perform the functions we intended for them. Gershenfeld has set up "Fab Labs" in under-developed parts of the world and has seen amazing results of the empowerment these tools give people to help themselves out of their difficult situations. This is powerful stuff, and could possibly be a MAJOR factor in the global fight against hunger and poverty. Very exciting.

And in the words of Alan Alda "I don’t care what anyone says, being able to email a bicycle is a paradigm shift." Yes, it is.