Standley, 44, starts by sketching the geometry of a piece on paper, then drawing its four key layers in CorelDRAW vector-graphics software. The rest of his craft is progressing between those way-points by drawing intermediate paper layers. "That's where the left side of the brain takes over and I get into the tiny detail." Standley's largest piece, Demeter, (in photo) is 134 layers deep and took three months to make. He's not worried about his niche being commodified, though: "It's not like everyone has a laser."
Google's Moonshot Factory
"As the polymath engineers and scientists who work there are fond of saying, Google X is the search giant’s factory for moonshots, those million-to-one scientific bets that require generous amounts of capital, massive leaps of faith, and a willingness to break things. Google X (the official spelling is Google [x]) is home to the self-driving car initiative and the Internet-connected eyeglasses, Google Glass, among other improbable projects."
"The biggest moonshot of all may be the skunk works itself: With X, Google has created a laboratory whose mandate is to come up with technologies that sound more like plot contrivances from Star Trek than products that might satisfy the short-term demands of Google’s shareholders. “Google X is very consciously looking at things that Google in its right mind wouldn’t do,” says Richard DeVaul, a “rapid evaluator” at the lab. “They built the rocket pad far away from the widget factory, so if the rocket blows up, it’s hopefully not disrupting the core business.”"
"Google X seeks to be an heir to the classic research labs, such as the Manhattan Project, which created the first atomic bomb, and Bletchley Park, where code breakers cracked German ciphers and gave birth to modern cryptography. After the war, the spirit of these efforts was captured in pastoral corporate settings: AT&T’s Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, for example, became synonymous with breakthroughs (the transistor and the personal computer among them) and the inability of each company to capitalize on them."
BusinessWeek
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May 25, 2013 in Industry Commentary, Smart Autos, Homes, Sports, Restaurants... | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)