Iron Man 2's Secret Sauce: 3-D Printing

Iron Man 2 Article from Fastcompany

clipped from www.fastcompany.com Iron Man 2's Secret Sauce: 3-D Printing Exclusive pics of the 3-D printing process behind the Iron Man 2 costumes. Iron Man 2 opens today! Are you excited? Really? Huh. Well, keep reading anyway. You know someone's gonna drag you into a showing. On screen, with all those suits whirling into place, you'd probably assume that the "costumes" are merely virtual. Actually, they're not: Maybe the most cutting-edge facet of Iron Man 2's production was the real-life fabrication of the suits. Using 3-D printers, the film's production company, Legacy Effects, was able to have artists draw an art concept--and then physically make that concept in just four hours. The "Eden" printers, which are made by Objet, work by using an inkjet cartridge to print a layer of powdered plastic, which is then fused with UV light. Each layer is just microns thick, and the product gets printed from the bottom up. Here's video of the process, though not an actual Iron Man costume:

Obama on "iPods, iPads, Xboxes: Information Becomes a Diversion

Great article from Fastcompany

clipped from www.fastcompany.com Obama on "iPods, iPads, Xboxes, and PlayStations": "Information Becomes a Diversion" President Obama gave a commencement at Virginia's Hampton University over the weekend, and used part of his speech to criticize, as he's been doing publicly since his fantastic smack-down of Republican House members, the torrent of incomplete information or downright incorrect information that flows so easily in the modern 24-hour news cycle. He added in what seems at first to be a little dig at gadgetry--but really, he's not criticizing the hardware or software so much as the content. "You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank all that high on the truth meter," Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia.