technomancy

3D printing has been getting a lot of hype, but the question of obtaining all the plastic always seemed a huge limitation. Just what we need, more plastic, right? But now (or coming soon), there's Filabot, which recycles many household plastics into filament for 3D printers. So that soda bottle, or clamshell from the deli, could take on a whole new life. This could get interesting.

Filabot Turns Your Plastic Junk Into Material for 3-D Printers

Filabot promises to help turn your plastic crap in to 3-D printed fanciness, alleviating one of the biggest sustainability problems for 3-D printing.

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Unlike some of the more outlandish promises about how 3-D printing might save the world, McNaney’s project has a point. The world is awash in disposable plastic containers like soda and water bottles. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if that junk could be re-used on site?

On the lighter side: from http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html, something I stumbled across a while back about the history of the ubiquitous and important programming language "C". It seems it may be descended from something named after Tibet's native religion/magical practice:

Challenged by McIlroy's feat in reproducing TMG, Thompson decided that Unix—possibly it had not even been named yet—needed a system programming language. After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, he created instead a language of his own, which he called B. B can be thought of as C without types; more accurately, it is BCPL squeezed into 8K bytes of memory and filtered through Thompson's brain. Its name most probably represents a contraction of BCPL, though an alternate theory holds that it derives from Bon [Thompson 69], an unrelated language created by Thompson during the Multics days. Bon in turn was named either after his wife Bonnie, or (according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas.