3D without the headaches

I am not a great fan of 3D movies. The 3D glasses are a pain when you wear your own specs, and the effects generally give me a headache while rarely seeming convincing. You won't see me rushing to buy a 3D TV any time soon either.

However there is a very different side to 3D that I think has huge potential - 3D printing. When I visited the Dyson research centre with BBC Wiltshire one of the outstanding aspects was the way they made trial spare parts for their vacuum cleaners using 3D printers. But it is a very new area to most of us, which is why I appreciated having the chance to take a look at Chris Winnan's book. This provides a detailed overview of the state of play of 3D printing for the rest of us (as opposed to the Dysons of this world) and gives some very interesting thoughts on the way this market will develop.

Winnan suggests, I think absolutely correctly, that at the moment we are in the same state with home 3D printing as they were with the 'homebrew' microcomputers before the mass market off-the-shelf products - first the likes of Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum and now the ubiquitous PCs and Macs - came along. So yes, at the moment, domestic scale 3D printers don't look like real products - but I have little doubt that they will and standards will arise.

Something else Winnan spends a lot of time on is how these printers can be used for fun and profit. After all, there is no point having a printer unless you need to print something, whether in 2D or 3D. This is an area that really gets the reader thinking. Some users will be designers using the 3D printer to produce artworks and models (one big example Winnan uses is all the miniatures bought by sci-fi enthusiasts), just as digital artists print their products now - but this is not the mass market. For the rest of us it is much more likely that we will print spare parts to replace broken bits (yes, even of Dysons), and will print new items other people have designed - so, for instance, instead of waiting for an object to come from Amazon in the post, you would download it to print, just as you now download an MP3 file. I suspect we would also print from scans, whether professionally done or cobbled together from phone camera software, just as phone can now generate quite sophisticated panoramic photos. (Imagine, for instance, a 3D model of your child's hand as a baby, complete with those tiny fingernails. Not my cup of tea, but I suspect it would be quite popular.)

As an ebook, 3D Printing has pros and cons. There's lots in it, and it really makes you think - but it's rather messily put together and you will probably find that you need to skip through pages of detail that aren't necessary to get the message. Having said that, though, the book is extremely well priced and very informative.

A few years ago I would have said 3D printers were valuable in R&D, but wouldn't find their way into the home any time soon. Chris Winnan has persuaded me otherwise and I, for one, can't wait.

Find out more with the book 3D Printing: the next technology gold rush available from Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk.

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's recent gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some ex

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor

Which idiot came up with percentage-based gradient signs

Rant warning: the contents of this post could sound like something produced by UKIP. I wish to make it clear that I do not in any way support or endorse that political party. In fact it gives me the creeps. Once upon a time, the signs for a steep hill on British roads displayed the gradient in a simple, easy-to-understand form. If the hill went up, say, one yard for every three yards forward it said '1 in 3'. Then some bureaucrat came along and decided that it would be a good idea to state the slope as a percentage. So now the sign for (say) a 1 in 10 slope says 10% (I think). That 'I think' is because the percentage-based slope is so unnatural. There are two ways we conventionally measure slopes. Either on X/Y coordiates (as in 1 in 4) or using degrees - say at a 15° angle. We don't measure them in percentages. It's easy to visualize a 1 in 3 slope, or a 30 degree angle. Much less obvious what a 33.333 recurring percent slope is. And what's a 100% slope

Search This Blog