An Open House at BCIT

This morn­ing I went to the BCIT Cam­pus where Pam works dur­ing the week. It was entirely a coin­ci­dence that a focus group that I was invited to be a par­tic­i­pant in was being held hap­pened to be on the cam­pus. As a fur­ther coin­ci­dence, this was a big week­end for BCIT. They were hold­ing their Open House, which comes around once every other year. It’s a com­bi­na­tion Career Day, Car­ni­val and Sci­ence Fair. Stu­dents and Fac­ulty vied for who could come to their par­tic­u­lar demon­stra­tion, be it weld­ing, food tech­nol­ogy, con­crete fab­ri­ca­tion, robot­ics or any other tech­no­log­i­cal or trade-oriented field you could imag­ine. For me the high­light of wan­der­ing around tak­ing in all these giz­mos and other fun (and some­times daz­zling) equip­ment and stu­dent projects was com­ing into close con­tact with a device that I’d only read about in Wired Mag­a­zine: a 3D Printer. The idea here is that there’s a device about the size of a large office copier with a bin full of corn­starch. Layer by layer, it cre­ates a solid model of what­ever you send to it, much like send­ing a 2D image to a laser printer. You can see a typ­i­cal one here. It’s used these days to make pro­to­types of designs. The pro­fes­sor who was on hand to show it dis­played a bot­tle and a small Egyptian-style sculp­ture, and an entire ball-bearing assem­bly, all ‘printed’ on the device. This was the cheap­est type of stere­olith­o­g­ra­phy, he said, and the corn­starch in this one could be replaced in other types of these devices with plas­tic pel­lets that could be melted pre­cisely so that you could get a real, usable squeeze bot­tle. Onboard the Inter­na­tional Space sta­tion, he said, rather than ship items up from Earth, they planned to fab­ri­cate items right there using some­thing like this. So those transporter-based food repli­ca­tor units from Star Trek are really not that far away!

Later, when I got home, I kept think­ing of that ball-bear assem­bly (which was cre­ated not piece-by-piece, but all at once!), I was reminded of the scene in Woody Allen’s early film Sleeper. It’s when he and Diane Keaton have infil­trated the Orwellian gov­ern­ment build­ings and are imper­son­at­ing doc­tors who are going to clone the dic­ta­tor, who’s nose is all that’s left from an acci­dent. Des­per­ately bluff­ing (and squab­bling) as they stall for time, Woody lays out the cloth­ing on the bed and places the nose where it would be on a face, claim­ing that they would clone the leader right into his clothes. “When we’re done you’ll have a fully clothed man lying here.” Those lit­tle balls of corn­starch rolling around in the corn­starch flange or what­ever it was are what reminded me of the Fear­less Leader being cloned into his clothes.

The teacher quoted William Gib­son: “The future is here. It is just not widely dis­trib­uted yet”.

What a cool place to get some fresh future.