The Future of 3D Printing?

I was thinking about Star Trek today, and gold pressed latinum. I was wondering why anything was rare in a universe with replicators when it hit me... the replicators aren't magic. They can't make something from nothing. What they do is kind of the same as the transporter and they take stuff from one place and arrange it properly 3d printer style somewhere else.

Now I'm not saying there's a ton of liquid Earl Grey tea kept at the perfect temperature.... more that the "recipes" for everything tell the replicator how to arrange the basic elements into what you ask for. That being said, if you don't have latinum (or gold), you just can't get the replicator to make gold pressed latinum. 

This led to thinking about huge blocks of carbon in a storage bay somewhere and the slow creeping realization that since they can sort atoms, there's no such thing as waste. All the carbon and nitrogen and hydrogen and oxygen in the air, or left over on the plates, or in the washrooms, are easily converted into tomorrow's birthday cake.

One thing I am still confused on is dilithium crystals. If they get overworked they get cracked... but why can't they break down the cracked one and replicate an un-cracked one? For that matter, why do away teams need to be rushed to the medical bay? Why can't they just be fixed by using their beaming down patterns as the recipe to rebuild on the way up? Infections and brain damage might not be do-able due to complexity but a giant hole in the gut? easy peasy. They might lose memory of those hours away but that's a small price to pay for not bleeding to death.

What do you think?

In and Out

Breathe with me... in, and out. 
In, and out. 
Again in, and out... 
Now out some more, 
out, 
all the way out, 
out til it hurts, 
then keep breathing out.

Life has rhythms. The tide has to come in before it can go out, you have to fill a dish before you can empty it, you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. That last one seems to be my lesson this life time.

I thought I'd learned after the psycho-ex, after the man-child, after the lump, but still I give too much too often and leave myself empty and running on fumes. There's no longer an anchor, a leech, or a vampire... now it's all me.

I'm saying yes to more than I can handle. I'm helping everyone under the sun except me. I'm making sure loved ones eat and sleep regularly, while ignoring my own physical needs. I'm putting on a brave face and powering through, when all I really want to do is sleep for a week solid.

Taking stock today: I haven't eaten enough the past few days, when I do eat it's usually junk, I'm dehydrated, I haven't been sleeping well, my bedroom's a disaster which keeps me from relaxing fully in it, I even haven't gotten to updating the address on my health-card yet.

This is not good.

I thrive when all my ducks are lined up neat and tidy. This chaos just breeds more chaos. I feel exhausted. I forget things. I feel too lazy to do the little tidying things that makes my room so much more comfortable. I'm too lazy to make food so I eat little besides what mom makes so I get even more tired. This is not a good spiral to be in. I want off this ride.

I kept telling myself that this month was a wash. Just power through and get-shit-done and next month I'll take the time to take care of my food, exercise, organization, social, and introspection needs.

That was a crappy plan.

Tomorrow's the clean-up of the old house. If I can I'm going to nap this afternoon, cuddle up with my sweetheart this evening, and spend most of Sunday taking care of my stuff so I can start the new week with less stress and more energy.

I'm frustrated by the "wrong" things

Customers call in yelling that their product is beginning to fail after 25 years of use. They are very upset because when they bought it, they were told it had a lifetime warranty. For those who are confused as I was, they seem to think this means that nothing would ever go wrong... not that the company promises to fix it when it does.

 

The other day my housemate showed me that my stainless steel utensils have a few blemishes after years of use and dishwasher abuse. I didn't know what he was getting at and was waiting for him to continue... He was waiting for me to be upset, and we both just kind of looked at each other, waiting.

I talked to someone a few weeks ago who was furious that the snow plow came by after they had shoveled their driveway. Face beet red furious. 

For some reason people are, and expect me to be, angry/frustrated/upset about things I find so trivial... and yet they're suprised when I put my foot down against rude or unkind behaviour.  

Somehow I just don't fit in this society.

Exhausted

Last night the cat knocked a box off my dresser and it landed with a loud BANG waking me from deep sleep with a gasp. My adrenalin must have still been churning because when I got back to sleep I dreamed a horror movie trailer.

 

- - -

 

We were working in an indoor garden/jungle type building when I noticed a huge snail. The shell was as big as a spread hand and the body was longer than an arm. It looked weird so I reached out to touch it and instead of normal slime, it was thickly slathered with butterscotch-pudding looking stuff. I remembered a previous dream telling me to "follow the Glue" because the large snails were someone's science experiment and the butterscotch looking "Glue" was the key to it all. 

 

The dream cut to a later scene where an over head speaker was announcing "catastrophic failure" in the pod/building next to ours. Looking through the adjoining glass everything looked normal. Lots of waist and shoulder high greenery and nothing moving then SPLAT! a human that was little more than Glue covered skeleton in a space suit with no helmet crashed against the glass in a last desperate attempt to escape. As they slid to the ground dead, the greenery started to give in to the Glue that had transferred from the running human and within seconds, all the greenery yellowed, and browned, and dissolved into nothing showing the walls of the pod also dissolving and letting the last of the air escape from the pod onto the alien surface of what ever planet we were on.

 

The people around me were in a panic shouting and milling around. Half wanted to try to rescue any survivors, half wanted to run away, there was a leader telling us there was no way anyone survived but that the reinforced bio-hazard barriers between pods should protect us...and the whole time I was just standing there, in shock, thinking about the snail.

 

 - - -

I woke and decided I did not want that dream again and asked my brain for something a bit less sci-fi as I fell asleep. Unfortunately it just picked a different horror and I had a dream of physical abuse at the hands of a lecherous guardian/captor with the knowledge that reporting the offender would simply get me told by the police that the red marks were no proof cause I could have done that to myself because I didn't like my father/stepfather/husband/? or simply for attention.

 

So you can see why last night's sleep wasn't very restful at all.