Live-blogging the Iowa Caucus results, Reason's David Weigel makes a good point about the caucus winners:
I'm by no means the first person to say this, but here's the key difference between the parties tonight. Half of Democrats look at this picture and feel neutral; half of them look at it and feel elated. Half of Republicans look at [t]his picture and feel worried; one-quarter feel enraged; one-quarter are happy, but it's that bitter, Kurt Russell dropping the truck on the bad guy in Breakdown kind of happy. If they weren't Christians they'd be flipping the bird.
A lot of Republicans and independents are glad to see Hillary come in third. As a Republican-leaning independent, I'm one of them, even though I (gaggingly) prefer her to Edwards or, for that matter, Huckabee. Could she please just go away?
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Blogger Frank Piller has a nice roundup, including links to previous posts, on growing trend toward do-it-yourself user innovation, manufacturing, and distribution. It looks like the price of a 3-D printer has finally dropped to less than $5,000, though that doesn't mean you can just "print out" anything you can design on a computer. As this recent WSJ article (PDF file on non-WSJ site) reported, an early application is to make figurines of user's characters from World of Warcraft and other games. But some features, notably flowing capes, can be tricky.
I wrote about MIT management professor Eric von Hippel's research on user-driven innovation in this NYT column.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
Click here for the winners of the second international Benoit Mandelbrot Fractal Art Contest. View all the entries here. In an example of copyright protection at the expense of publicity, the site makes it impossible to display an image here.
And here are the winners of the Materials Research Society's Science as Art Contest for 2007 (including the one above), 2006, and 2005, downloadable as wallpaper.
[Via Good Morning Silicon Valley.]
Posted by Virginia Postrel on January 03, 2008 • Comments
