Technology

I’M OLD ENOUGH…:

US students to 3D print hypersonic vehicles with Mach 5 speed for military might (Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, 3/26/25, Interesting Engineering)

The U.S. Army has approved a fresh $3.1 million funding to make hypersonic vehicles faster and more affordable.

A team at the University of Arizona College of Engineering is exploring the use of multiple metallic alloys and additive manufacturing to enable fabrication of Mach-X – pronounced mock-ex – aerospace technologies as part of a federal governmental push.

The team, led by Sammy Tin, revealed that the Mach-X vehicles will travel at speeds faster than Mach 5, which is five times the speed of sound and the hypersonic threshold.

…to remember when we’d only ever be able to print shower curtain rings…

THE MODERN QUILL:

What’s in a Name: Signatures, autopen, and the question of verifiable identity (David E. Brown, Winter 2001/2, CABINET)

An Autopen looks like a cross between a school desk and a pantograph—an arm jutting out of a 1960s-looking enclosure grips a felt-tip pen. Inside the machine is a model of a signature; the penned arm extends out onto the desk and accurately re-creates the signature “matrix” inside, hundreds or thousands of times a day. Early users were presidents and CEOs, who could have spent weeks signing their names, barely making a dent in the demands of the important identity. (A more recent application is direct-mail marketing, which benefits from a “personal” touch.)

The Autopen was a lifesaver for important men. But the Autopen undid some of the progress that had been made in identification. Your signature, with its practiced flourish, is as close to you that writing can get. “I am that I am,” your signature wants to say. And that closeness-to-you is what convinces governments and banks and landlords that you are who you claim to be. But how can that certainty exist along with a machine that can sign and sign and sign, with no care as to who has told the machine to sign? (It can’t, as evidenced by a series of unauthorized, autopenned Donald Rumsfeld signatures that appeared on official documents in early 2001.2)

To say nothing of value. After the Autopen was adopted by US presidents (LBJ was a big user, as was Nixon and everyone since) it found new markets among celebrities. It really is hard to sign your name for hours and hours, but maybe not so hard as disappointing one’s fans. So by the late 1960s many famous people had their own Autopens churning out signatures for the people. And while Autopen signatures from presidents and business leaders had been accepted at more or less face value, they did not have to deal with the invisible hand of the collectibles market. An Autopenned document may be good enough for the Department of Defense, but don’t try to convince a collector that a machine carries the emotional—and thus, in the irrational economics of nostalgia, financial—weight of a real autograph.

A recent eBay search turned up just two Autopenned items among the 60,000-plus autographed 8x10s, books, and other baubles up for sale. And of that multitude of signatures up for bid, hundreds of their sellers went out of their way to point out that they weren’t Autopenned. If we accept the opinion of the collectibles market—and as odd as that market is, there seems to be no reason not to—then eBay has become the ultimate measure of desire, value, and authenticity. And that measure says that more than a century of effort to create a mechanical stand-in for the human hand, for the written personality, has come to naught.

CAIN IS THE HERO, NOT ABEL:

Natural doesn’t always mean better: How to spot if someone is trying to convince you with an ‘appeal to nature’ (Amanda Ruggeri, 2/12/25, BBC)

Often called an “appeal to nature”, or the “naturalistic fallacy”, it is one of the most commonly-seen types of logical fallacies, or flaws in reasoning that can make a claim sound surprisingly convincing. Anytime you hear someone make a claim that a product or practice is superior because it is “natural”, or that one is inferior (or even harmful) because it is not “natural”, this is the naturalistic fallacy at work. So are arguments that something is “as nature intended”, or that something is bad specifically because it is a “chemical” or “synthetic”.

Nature is, in many ways, wonderful. And it has a great deal to teach us. So why isn’t it true that something is better merely because it comes from nature?

For one thing, because nature, of course, does not have intentions – not in any conscious sense. As such, nor does it have intentions to be good, or to help humans, specifically.

We don’t need to get too philosophical to grasp this. Just consider a handful of nature’s creations. Arsenic, which can kill an adult with a dose as little as 70mg, is natural. So is asbestos, which causes cancer. Cyanide, which can kill with as little as 1.5mg per kilogram of body weight if ingested, is a phytotoxin produced, naturally, by more than 2,000 different plant species, including almonds, apricots and peaches. This is also why some “natural” remedies frequently marketed – such as ground apricot seeds – can in fact be dangerous to consume.

And this is the trouble with the use of the word natural that is so commonly used to market products. It is a poorly defined term that doesn’t necessarily mean the product labelled as such will be better for you, or indeed safer, than any other alternatives.

I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER…:

Researchers design mind-blowing construction material to replace steel: ‘This technology holds a lot of promise’ (Simon Sage, January 20, 2025, The Cool Down)

Researchers at the University of Maine have managed to 3D print an organic building material with the strength of steel. […]

The nice thing about this set-up is that these panels can be printed in bulk off-site and get shipped to the construction area. Since there are already channels in the floor for electrical and plumbing, the only other thing that needs to be applied by hand is soundproofing and floor covering.

…when the Right insisted 3-D printyers would never be more than glorified Play-doh Factories….

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Writers voice anxiety about using AI. Readers don’t seem to care (Tiernan Ray, Jan. 15, 2025, ZD Net)

“Throughout the study, writers expressed concerns about audiences’ reactions to their use of AI assistance for their writing,” the authors note.

However, the survey results indicate readers didn’t find that much difference in the writing samples. “By contrast, readers in our study held a more positive view toward the use of AI writing assistance,” the study notes.