Same title as my Core entry. Same link. More verbose. But mainly I just can’t upload an image to Blogger for some reason, and I have to post this photo taken by Bruce Sterling somewhere (don’t sue me, dude).

I’m looking at that wheel and thinking,”what a tooling nightmare” to get those recesses on the “tread” (and I’ve got to believe the inside area is one big undercut as well). I wonder if they used an early version of a metal rapid prototyper. Probably not. It’s more likely some extremely talented craftsmen assembled it with alot of effort. But just imagine being able to create any shape – even something as seemingly simple as this wheel – press a button and have a machine generate a part. That’s the future of fabrication, and when it comes we’ll all discover a newfound beauty in these kinds of relatively mundane objects.

It kills me to watch some futuristic SF movie and see that some designer is inventing/creating objects (or using some modified manufactured item I actually designed) that are limited by current manufacturing processes. Right, like Star Trek folks worry about draft and parting lines in the future!

Makes me want to ask if NASA is hiring. Check out some of the other pictures on his blog.