Links for 2010-08-09

"Using little more than a webcam and a laser, a young engineer has built a cheap 3D scanner that dovetails perfectly with the Makerbot and other desktop fabricators. It could be used as part of a copying system that would allow hobbyists to duplicate solid objects at home.

"The technology exists to do this kind of thing, but it's much more expensive," said Andy Barry, a research engineer in the Autodesk Innovations Lab at NASA Ames Research Laboratory in Mountain View, California. "My goal is to make it really cheap, so we can build a million of them, and get it out to everybody.""

"[W]hile thinking about love, I came to a conclusion about myself which I felt was an solid little Facebook update status. "Seth Brown loves very wisely, but not well enough." And then I realized that while some people would understand my intent to present a reversal of Othello's quote as an explanation that I feel I have chosen very excellent friends indeed even if I sometimes do not show my appreciation sufficiently, on Facebook it would probably sound to most people like, "Seth Brown likes awesome girls but is bad in bed.""

"The question of what will persuade a given politician to resign when he or she is embroiled in a scandal hinges on complex political arithmetic. How vulnerable is the party in the next election? How vulnerable is the politician? Are there compromising photos? Is the politician in question given to moralizing about the very sin of which he or she stands accused? The path of political scandal being well-trodden, the patterns of human behavior in this realm are more predictable than you might suppose. What follows is a flow chart illustrating the various decision points that lead a scandal-ridden politician to stay or go. Slate breathlessly awaits the outcome of the Rangel and Waters affairs to complete the chart."