A few years ago, Mink shot to fame by offering a 3D printer that could print coloured makeup at the comfort of your own home. However, at that time, there were huge issues with Mink’s feasibility. Fast forward to today and you will see that Mink no longer touts its game-changing 3D makeup printer. It has … Continued
Scribble: A Pen that Draws in any Colour
Scribble. A pen that draws in any colour. Too good to be true. Their websites claim to have a pen that can reproduce any colour by mixing a few base colours (cyan, magenta, yellow, black, and “white”) together. However, information about how the mixing occurs and how long it takes for the intended colour to reach the … Continued
Computer Scientists vs. Computer Engineers
To the lay person, the job title “computer scientist” and “computer engineer” may seem like synonyms, but they’re not. If you are entering university and deciding what career you want, it is important to know the distinction between a scientist and an engineer. The main role of a scientist is to study/explore the theoretical possibilities of … Continued
Re: Mink, the Absurd Colour Printer
A recent blog post touched on the feasibility of Mink, the 3D makeup printer. Since then, there have been follow up articles and an early look at a Mink prototype. Sadly, Mink still has the same feasibility issues and unanswered questions. A Harvard Woman Is Blowing Up The $55 Billion Beauty Industry With 3D Printed Makeup How A … Continued
The Allure of Big Data and Analytics Initiatives
The Economist recently wrote an article on how companies are effecting incremental changes through use of data. Examples include Amazon and how every pixel is optimized through incremental tests to maximize sales. Google has perfected it’s search optimization through learning from user data. And of course, the infamous Facebook experiment on its users. Such changes of course … Continued
The B-Team and Externalities and “Social Good”
In the B Team post on capitalism, I talked about externalities and transaction costs and how companies should factor these costs into the prices they charged and that we as consumers should be happy to pay these costs, this is of course, if you are serious about re-forming capitalism. Here is a primer on what … Continued
The B Team – Let’s Rethink Capitalism
So, The B Team recently launched a video campaign asking for a breakthrough. Summary “We know that companies would like to assume infinite growth. We also know the global economy is hitting natural resource limits, that fossil fuel consumption is destabilizing the environment and that our population is growing exponentially. What we don’t know is how … Continued
How Airplane Wings are Not Meant to Work
I remember being taught how an airplane generates lift with its wings in my high school physics class. At the time, I didn’t realise how bad the explanation was (Flight Revisited, and How wings really work). It’s as bad as the “train-track” explanation [1][2][3] of why a ray of light bends when it travels through different optically … Continued
What Tech Entrepreneurs Want You to Believe
Cleaning up the Great Ocean Garbage Patch
The project: The Ocean Cleanup P our resident PhD and expert said: This ocean cleanup reminds me of the solar roadways idea and the wind energy ideas which always pop up, and those oddball ideas with enough marketing that always seem to dupe the soft science/tech media every few months. Some of these are naive. Some … Continued