Something that’s fascinated me for a while (if you’ve been been keeping an eye on my blog for any length of time) is rapid prototyping, or the use of automated systems to build modular components by laying down successive layers of plastic, ceramic, or other materials. While the technology has not advanced sufficiently to make it truly useful to end users (i.e., your grandmother won’t be using one to make a new coffee mug anytime soon) it’s a subject of heavy development right now and the state of the art is advancing every day. For …

RSS is one of the buzzwords of the modern Internet - it's an XML file format that packages text and links to longer articles that can be viewed with a web browser (or more often, a feed aggregator of some kind). It works like the headline blocks of the newspapers of yestercentury: "Dow Jones Average falls 300 points - see p. A14!" The idea behind it is that you can glance at a website and look at a summary of articles and decide which ones to look at more closely. If you've ever used Google News you've used an RSS feed aggregator …