What I Do

(Other Than This and The Nerdy Stuff I Write About)

Dumbasscience: Science is not always smart. Oh no sir-ree-Bob. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. That's okay, I won't judge. I'll just point it out and mock it mercilessly. These articles will contain rants from history and breaking news where scientists are pursuing through-and-through bad ideas. From the 'flying your car to work' pipe-dream, to various plans of how to forcibly reverse global warming, if it's technological and perilous to rationalists, it's Dumbasscience.

Over the past year and a half, I've been working at an awesome, steady job in a technical field that is moderately controversial these days. Due to disclosure agreements and the fact that right now I'm a contractor in my position, I can't specify my employer. But I can talk with you a little bit about what I do: 3D printing. Its controversy over the past three years had been almost purely driven by ignorance regarding the technology itself and the products 3D printing can produce. Which makes it a perfect cross between "A Day in the Nerdery" and "Dumbasscience".

It's worth noting that I work specifically as a Rapid Prototype Specialist, making form models using Zcorp printers from 3D Systems. These machines produce unique products that can yield full color parts equal to early inkjet printers across an entire three dimensional model, but they almost certainly aren't the ones you've heard of, if any. No, the popular 3D printers in the headlines these days are usually either the latest from Makerbot or Objet printers by Stratasys. I work with Objet printers in my shop as well, though I'm not the primary operator associated with them, and I've researched and prepared to work with Makerbots for our purposes here at work, so I'm fairly qualified to speak on them. In a word, Makerbots are inferior machines that take longer to make lower fidelity parts than almost any other product in the field, and they're held together by Makerbot's outrageously aggressive PR campaign. Objet machines, on the other hand, are some of the most accurate 3D printers on the market, yielding plastic parts of several different materials in fixed compositions.

What Wired Magazine Thinks I Do

Every time I see a new article come up on Wired.com or in some other even more mainstream media, I choke back a little bile in my mouth. Almost every article written for mainstream audiences takes a stance that it has to explain what 3D printing is by comparing it to Star Trek: Next Generation's replicator technology. Really? First of all, I must've missed that moment we slipped into an alternate dimension when plot-expedient technology from ST:NG became common parlance? You couldn't think of anything more relevant to everyday readers? More importantly, however is that if a person is ignorant enough that the replicator-allusion is at all helpful to them, they'll get the exact wrong impression of what a 3D printer is. It gives them the impression of a physical object duplicator, implicitly promising scanning, processing, functionality, and fidelity. All 3D printers are based on realizing a form of a model based on the loaded materials, but that's as far as the analogy to replicator technology goes. Scanning in the 3D printing field is crude and superficial to the point of being only a novelty for rough approximations of a model. Processing is a very specialist-intensive process and requires a large amount of finesse from the printer's operator. 3D printers don't reproduce mechanical functionality unless that functionality is extremely basic and scrupulously programmed by the operator, anything as simple as a threaded piston requires a lot of careful engineering, which means you can forget about the requisite dumb question "can you 3D print a 3D printer?".

No. Just, no.

So what is a much better shorthand explanation for 3D printers? They work by printing hundreds of thin cross-sections of a model in a stack to approximate the model's overall shape as far as layer thickness and accuracy will allow. It produces things of a pre-determined material that merely mimics the shape and form, but not necessarily the function, of the part. Zcorp machines even use a roller for distributing a fine, flour-like plaster powder across the build layer. Other machines distribute resins and use lasers to 'cook' the shape into place. So here's the skinny: 3D printers are basically advanced cookie-cutters for making physical objects, with limitations comparable to that comparison. There. A simple, clear explanation that doesn't require the audience be Trekkies nor burden their impression of the technology with overladen imagery.

What the President Thinks I Do

In recent months, various government officials have made passing comments at the potential of 3D printed firearms and used that specter as the pretext to opening up dialogue to control these machines. Now, I'm not getting political with this, I promise. I'm just going to point out that such discussions of 3D printed firearms fundamentally misunderstands both the printing technology and the technology of firearms themselves. As far as I've found, the most successful use of a 3D printed part in a firearm is right here. As you can see, the 3D printed part jammed on the first shot and broke altogether after the sixth. And the only part of that gun that was printed was the lower receiver, which is nothing more than the part which connects the magazine to the handle, stock, and firing mechanism. So no actual moving or stress-bearing parts were fabricated in this manner, and yet it still broke before exhausting its first clip. Experiments to 3D print more elaborate parts will inevitably result in results comparable to ammunition spiking--which at best just destroys the gun and at worst maims or kills the shooter.

And that's before you call into question the cost of 3D printing at this fundamentally inadequate level. These weapon tests are being proposed and conducted for Stratasys Objet printers, which run $150,000 on the low end and easily cost tens of thousands of dollars to supply and maintain in a year of moderate to heavy use. The tagline that a kid could print this up in their living room must presume that said kid is Jaden Pinkett Smith and can blow a house-worth of dough to make an unregistered gun that is going to be less reliable than a Wal-Mart rifle he could've bought for a couple hundred bucks and some paperwork. And that price tag I've estimated above is what 3D gun-proponent Cody Wilson identifies as 'getting cheaper' when he stresses how accessible 3D printers are becoming.

Now, 3D printed guns will eventually become a viable production method, but only after many years of people risking their lives testing obviously unsafe weapons, and even then hobby gun makers are going to be at the mercy of how fastidiously they maintain their printers. Because one quality all 3D printers share is that maintenance and repair issues often impair part quality without impairing build ability--meaning that before your machine actually breaks to the point of inoperation, you're very likely to produce a part that is just close enough to spec to get you into trouble. The shrapnel kind of trouble, that is.

What my In-laws Think I Do




Here I'm using in-laws as shorthand for anybody outside the Rapid Prototyping field. I can't speak for all other 3D printing specialist out there, but I find that once I explain the technology and its innovations to someone, I can't really stress that the job is taxing in anyway. It doesn't matter that being a full-time rapid prototyping specialist requires cross-discipline finesse involving simple mechanics, engineering, 3D design, physical modeling skills, and working in conditions that vary from physically irritating to hazardous to one's health. The second I bemoan being exhausted from work I get treated like George Jetson wailing about how sore his button-pushing finger is after a long six-hour day of work.

What Designers Think I Do

In my discipline amongst 3D printers, I have to coordinate with designers as I help realize their computer-aided designs in a physical prototype. Some designers are better at keeping their work printable than others, but almost everyone on the front-end of my workflow seems to think that once they send me their data--no matter how bad and in need of tweaking--I just hit a button, sit back, and have Miller time until my easy-bake prototype machine poops out their part a couple of hours later.

What I Feel Like I Do

As I mentioned above, I work with designers, and they have their own timelines and objectives based on what's being evaluated and when. But once the requests filter down to me my timeline and my objective is always the same: as fast as possible and as good as possible. Though oftentimes it's needed faster or better than possible, so I need to make accommodations for that, too. The quality of the data and parameters for the models I build, however, vary terribly from clean and specific to vague and fragmented. So on any given day, my machine-battling rage undulates between frustration at fixing other people's work to trying to pound a square peg into a digital hole.

What I Actually Do

3D printing is a fantastic and sophisticated technology. It involves layers of technical rigor, procedural endurance working with 3D software, and artistic competence. I can spend one day mostly seated at my desk doing data and standing at my worktable polishing finished models, or on another day I'll trek back and forth across my work's entire campus several times, lift 40-pound kegs of printing material, and push and pull my way behind 200-pound machines to examine them for cleaning and repairs. It's a technical job that requires a good back, delicate hands, and an artist's eyes.

Fortunately, I have an extra of each in my desk at work.

"3D printers are basically advanced cookie-cutters for making physical objects, with limitations comparable to that comparison."

Warning: Radiation Bad, Keep Away From Head.

Dumbasscience: Science is not always smart. Oh no sir-ree-Bob. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. That's okay, I won't judge. I'll just point it out and mock it mercilessly. These articles will contain rants from history and breaking news where scientists are pursuing through-and-through bad ideas. From the 'flying your car to work' pipe-dream, to various plans of how to forcibly reverse global warming, if it's technological and perilous to rationalists, it's Dumbasscience.

You may not be aware of this, but exposure to radiation can contribute to cancer.

Yeah, I know. Thunder in the heavens. Flash of lightning. Tight pants ripping. This must be quite the revelation for the modern world.

See, once upon a time people thought cells were these indestructible blocks, the irreducible core elements of all matter. Eventually, that understanding passed to atoms, and--quickly--to the sub-atomic particles composing them. Now the modern concept of sub-atomic particles is much more fluid, encompassing almost completely theoretical elements we only get brief glimpses of thanks to particle colliders. And, what do you know, we now freely recognize that atoms aren't so indestructible after all. Radiation is a great way to knock your average atom down a peg or two.

There's two types of radiation--ionizing and non-ionizing. In the specialist's eagerness to pose as a political hegemony and not scientists, you'll commonly be told that ionizing radiation is the dangerous radiation. And you certainly should avoid it. Ionizing radiation has the ability to shear the charge off of atoms, creating ions, which changes their fundamental function on a chemical level. If ionizing radioactive material is ingested, a person's entire metabolism can be subverted so that a person's very organs work against itself (see Polonium-210 for the gory history). We're told, in turn, that non-ionizing radiation--including the radio wave and microwave--has no deleterious effect on organisms unless it comes in quantities large enough to cause direct heating.

Of course, since this non-ionizing radiation is stable and natural, it can't be unhealthy right? Sunlight can't be unhealthy (oops, see melanoma). Or what about electromagnetic waves (ignoring childhood leukemia, of course)? Alright, just forget it.

You know what's totally safe, though? Cell phone radio transmissions. No reason to actually think about putting a non-ionizing radio transmitter to your head four times a day.

Right?

Right?

So it turns out that this panel reporting to the World Health Organization suggests that cell phone use, especially amongst children, can contribute to the development of brain cancer.

Who'd a thunk it, hm?

In fact, the study compares the danger of cell phones to DDT and gasoline fumes. You keep your kid away from those, right? Of course, before May 31, 2011, the World Health Organization was actively promoting the belief that cell phone use was completely harmless. Frak the fact that they hadn't actually done the scientific leg-work yet, apparently it was perfectly healthy to pick up one of the billions of cell phones in existence and give them to your kids. Sure, it turns out that it may lead to glioma, but isn't it worth it to be able to 'connect' with your kid? And so much more fun than actually, you know, spending time with your third grader?

Science is an inherently self-serving pursuit in at least two ways. The pursuit of scientific answers inevitably leads to more questions--the very methodology of experimental rigor showcases this effect. Consider a few centuries ago how limited a body of knowledge you'd need to learn to be considered a scientist; today, even the field of computer science is prohibitively broad, and is accordingly broken down into computer programming and computer engineering fields at the very least. Furthermore, science is self-serving in the sense that science as a pursuit is intended to make people's lives easier, which in turn frees up more people to support the sciences either directly or indirectly by producing and supplying the quality products yielded by science. This is the strength of ethical, rigorous science. And it had been short-circuited in the case of the W.H.O.'s previous stance on cell phones.

When scientists release statements without scientifically examining their own claims, they inherently preclude good rigorous experimentation to examine the process. Scientific experimentation holds that whatever being tested is held to be false until proven under controlled circumstances or observed under exhaustive conditions. In this case, cell phones ought to have been considered a health risk until thoroughly demonstrated and researched to the contrary. Instead, health authorities the world over made hasty conclusions based on short-term research, released a statement of fact, and thereby put the onus on other researchers to thoroughly prove that cell phones could be demonstrated to cause or contribute to brain cancer.

So, allow me to help you out:

Now, before you cast me as an anti-technology alarmist (with a blog), let me tell you that I'm not giving up my cell phone. It's still strapped to my hip everyday, and I don't feel a strong urge to slip into a pair of tin-foil skivvies or anything. But I'm certainly not giving my son one anytime in the next decade, either.

And this makes me think of the minor controversy surrounding people who allege they have electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Virtually all countries say that this is a false condition with no medical support, and Sweden is the only country I know of that actually recognizes some of these claims as legitimate. Those who debunk the EHS claims do so by illustrating that the vast majority of claimants cannot pass blind experimentation--they don't exhibit symptoms in response to EM fields and only EM fields--and the rest of the tests were conducted under faulty conditions or methods. I'd be inclined to accept such arguments if it weren't in the interest of modern countries to actively deny such claims. It does strike me as telling that Sweden recognizes the condition, and that sufferers of EHS there live in the remote mountain regions of the country, safe in their isolation. As it is, though, it seems plausible that certain individuals could develop hypersensitivity to fields that can cause similar problems over the course of long-term exposure in normal people.

In any case, do yourself a favor and think things through before you blithely accept a W.H.O. claim that something is perfectly safe--they might change their tune in a decade or so when they actually do the math.

Dumbasscience: Flying Cars Part 4

Dumbasscience: Science is not always smart. Oh no sir-ree-Bob. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. That's okay, I won't judge. I'll just point it out and mock it mercilessly. These articles will contain rants from history and breaking news where scientists are pursuing through-and-through bad ideas. From the 'flying your car to work' pipe-dream, to various plans of how to forcibly reverse global warming, if it's technological and perilous to rationalists, it's Dumbasscience.

Last time in Dumbasscience, I dissected just a handful of the myriad safety issues with the concept of the flying car. In this, the last installment of the Flying Cars series of Dumbasscience, I will address a few more issues with safety and expound upon the fabulously Verhoeven level of violence that would need to be employed in Sky America's law enforcement.


Think back to the last time you were on the road for a long period of time. For a road trip, perhaps. Think of all the crappy cars you saw--plastic-wrap for a driver's side window, duct-tape holding the mirror in place, a spare tire for both front wheels, and string suspiciously fastened to the windshield-wipers. Pathetic, but not too frightening at anything but the fastest and busiest interstate highways. Now put that a couple thousand feet above the ground and moving four hundred miles per hour. Suddenly that wiggling hood stops being comical and becomes a potential air-to-ground missile.


Even today, when airplanes are relatively rare compared to cars, and its operators are appropriately moderated by expense and licensing designed to keep pilots and plane owners in an extreme minority, aircraft maintenance is becoming more of a concern. Think about all the clamour in the airline industry today because some commercial companies--who employ full-time, dedicated mechanics--aren't keeping their fleets in pristine condition. Imagine if every pickup-owner out there suddenly became responsible for the use, care, and maintenance of a flying car.


Yeah, it ain't pretty.


Or imagine the number of road-rage and alcohol-related incidents that will occur a mile high going at two-thirds the speed of sound. When everyone has their own personal conveyance waiting to be converted into a missile, sobriety will become a major issue. This is doubly true when you consider that buzzed flyers won't have the shoulder of a road or median rumble-strips to shock them into realizing they are too drunk to fly. Much like our contemporary heart attack commercials, the first symptom will be colliding with a strip club at the kinetic energy of a stinger missile.

"Suddenly that wiggling hood stops being comical and becomes a potential air-to-ground missile."

And forget about those dueling ruge you see trying to pass each other on the highway, exchanging lewd sign language and snapping their Hondas around some poor soccer mom in a Chevy. In Sky America, the number one 'sky rage' expression will be using your radar to follow a person home and then buzz their house, Maverick-and-Goose-style.

Then there's law enforcement. With how much damage any flying car could cause, you'd need to enforce strict limits. The most obvious limit would be altitude. Since collateral damage worsens with height, you'd probably have progressive altitude levels become the slow-middle-fast lanes of the future, with a very low ceiling relative to the cars' capability. I mean, you don't want to worry about drivers flying too high and losing cabin pressure, sending them screaming to the earth at hundreds of miles per hour while clawing at the black eels beneath their eyelids, right?

So the highest civilian level becomes the fast lane, except there's no curb, so you know there'd be all sorts of butt-burgers illegally passing in the restricted height zone. This problem would tend to escalate, especially with the road-raging d-bags who populate the traffic arteries marrying Illinois and Wisconsin. The sky-cops of tomorrow, of course, would have different technologies for different infraction levels, with progressive responses. Maybe at the first increment they tap into your Blezinsky's radio and give you a stern warning, Demolition Man-intoned, to go back down to civilian altitudes.

At some point, though, the sky-cops are going to take off the kid gloves and rev up Cautionary Tale, the Skyway Patrol's answer to all unsolvable questions. Cautionary Tale is a lightweight mini-gun with explosive tracer rounds and an integral laser-based range-finder. When the SP determines you've reached your limit of warnings, they use Cautionary Tale to vulcanize you, your ride, and your legacy in a hail of 1,000 exploding shells per second. You and your reckless driving ways are converted into a mist of blood, motor oil, and vaporized metal that drizzles down onto the law-abiding traffic-bound flyers below.

A math break. This is the future. There are, say, 500 million future Americans living in the sky-high utopia of the future. We'll say one in one thousand is a sky-douche and does something grossly illegal with their flying car in a year. That means that nearly 1400 acts of high-flying stupidity occur every day in Sky-America, or nearly one a minute.

When you look at the spread of fine particulates at high altitudes, that means that the mist of pulped offenders will affect more than enough drivers below and with enough frequency that we will inevitably develop a slang term for it. 'Red mist' is a little too on the nose, so I'll guess our future term for it will be 'legal precipitation'. I'm sure that even for the massively de-sensitized Sky-Americans of tomorrow, after the first dozen or so times you have to clean the 'legal precipitation' off your Blezinsky's windshield, you start to miss the good old days of wheel-based locomotion.

So be a man and say no to flying cars. They're cool, empowering, and generally improve every science-fiction setting's mass appeal, but they're just too much for the average joe, thank you very much.

Dumbasscience: Flying Cars Part 3

Dumbasscience: Science is not always smart. Oh no sir-ree-Bob. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. That's okay, I won't judge. I'll just point it out and mock it mercilessly. These articles will contain rants from history and breaking news where scientists are pursuing through-and-through bad ideas. From the 'flying your car to work' pipe-dream, to various plans of how to forcibly reverse global warming, if it's technological and perilous to rationalists, it's Dumbasscience.

Last time in Dumbasscience, I expounded upon the potential cost of flying cars. This week, I'm going to analyze the safety hazards of driving your flying car of the future in the raging skies of tomorrow.

First, let's get some perspective. I've driven past one hundred car pile-ups on the interstate. No fooling, no exaggeration. One hundred cars, all in one long chain of catamite stupidity, and what was the reason? Fog.


Fog, for frak's sake.


I mean, sure it limits visibility, but it's fog for crying out loud, it's not hiding in the bushes along the side of the road and jumping out at you when it sees headlights. You can adjust your driving, slow down, take an alternate route, or stay at home until it's over. But for at least one-hundred people in one afternoon in a small chunk of the midwest, that would be asking for too much. Just think how bad it would be if people were flying their cars and applying this same crap-tastic illogic. The Blezinsky 9000's will be turning into air-borne confetti before the commercials can get recalled.

Yes, I understand that with flying cars we'd have more distance, and therefore larger margins of error, between vehicles. But that doesn't jive with me, MacReady. We're driving those flying cars somewhere, right? So when we get there, we'll be cramming our cars into the same tight-packed intersections. Imagine all the accidents that will occur outside your friendly floating Golden Arches, with grav-soccer moms obliterating each other's flying caravans while telling their personal Jarvis to adjust their pilates appointments and stock up on cucumbers. It's going to be a bloodbath.

And what about passing and other elements of basic driving etiquette? As Sunday Driving points out, there's a lot of bad drivers on the ground today who ignore simple little concepts of courteous driving of which they must certainly be capable. Putting that into the sky is just an apocalyptic mistake. Do you hate being passed on the right? You should, it's against the rules of the road. Do you like having some sky-douche drop down onto your modest little Blezzy 4000 from two hundred feet above you, his Blezinsky Compensator 9000 all pimped-out gold and a "suck my popsicle" bumper sticker emblazoning his rear? That will happen on the sky roads, my friend. And you know a blind-spot all cars today have in common? Right below them. Think about it.

If the sky cars of tomorrow look like our cars today--or anything like the proposals we've seen over the past century--then they too will have this vertical blind spot. Of course, there will be two ways we can check our blind spots, for those so inclined. One is to have a monitor that is constantly linked to a downward-facing camera. Now the camera's perspective will have to be distorted to give you a more comprehensive view, and it will likely cause just as many problems, as sky drivers will already be too busy eating, texting, skyPadding and facing their tweetbook status to actually use the monitor. Plus, it's not cool enough.

"And you know a blind-spot all cars today have in common? Right below them. Think about it."

The cool sky drivers of tomorrow have an alternative method for checking their blind spots. They bank their Blezzy 9000 over to the right at a 70 degree angle so they can look out their right window to check below them. This is cool, makes the ho in the passenger seat scream with sudden arousal at your sky prowess, and has the added bonus of giving you a chance to leer at your date at the same time. Win-win. Of course, you'll probably lose some altitude if you don't manage the bank well, sending you juking down into the sky-lane you were trying to scope out, but that's to be expected. That's what sky-horns are for.

Not to mention(actually, I think I will) that air-traffic controllers will become at least as common as urban parking valets. Just think about that. Imagine the joy-riding valets from Ferris Beuller's Day Off directing the thousands of daily commuters on their way into Chi-town through the 94 exchange.

And all of these concerns are only relevant to incidental safety concerns. There's the sky-ragers of tomorrow, and more serious criminal elements that lead us to the next--and probably final--issue of flying cars: law enforcement. In the mean-time, be thankful that all your road-bound headaches are road-bound and not pushing the sonic envelope at two thousand feet or more of altitude.

Dumbasscience: Flying Cars Part 2

Dumbasscience: Science is not always smart. Oh no sir-ree-Bob. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. That's okay, I won't judge. I'll just point it out and mock it mercilessly. These articles will contain rants from history and breaking news where scientists are pursuing through-and-through bad ideas. From the 'flying your car to work' pipe-dream, to various plans of how to forcibly reverse global warming, if it's technological and perilous to rationalists, it's Dumbasscience.

So in the first Dumbasscience article, I defined flying cars for you readers. Flying cars are not convertible airplanes--those are indeed being developed, but they don't fit our Jetsons' view of the future. Nor can it be something the military uses exclusively--that will just be a new alternative to a helicopter. No, we will have flying cars when ordinary people are zipping cars around town with at least as much congested regularity as you see your average Volkswagen on the road. And that, my friend, will be a dark day indeed.

First of all, there's the cost of the frakking thing. Think needing a car loan for a modern ride is bad? Try indenturing your children or selling the genetic license to your family tree. Any future with flying is going to be bleak, so you might as well sell off little chunks of your soul in order to get a swank ride. And gas? Forget about it, not in tomorrow's economy. I can just see cash-strapped dad's lecturing their porker children: "Okay kids, things are going to be tight until daddy can get a third job to pay for gas, so I want you to be good boys and girls and throw up after breakfast and lunch--we need to keep our flying weight down." Don't worry, though, dinner is yours to keep. Everyone knows that.

"When you're flitting around Chi-town at five thousand feet going four hundred miles an hour looking for something to do and your Blezinsky Compensator 9000 starts to make a chug-a-chug-chunk sound, you stop at the local sky garage and get it fixed. Period."

Assuming that at some point the price of cars and fuel will one day normalize to be comparable with buying new hybrids--which is ludicrous, given the massive component complexity and increased development and safety testing doubtless involved--let's consider the fact that flying car maintenance is never going to be as cheap as regular car maintenance. How could it be? When you're flitting around Chi-town at five thousand feet going four hundred miles an hour looking for something to do and your Blezinsky Compensator 9000 starts to make a chug-a-chug-chunk sound, you stop at the local sky garage and get it fixed. Period. Or you make a greasy smear on the silt-slicked shores of Navy Pier. Your choice.

How would you argue down the outrageous price the brigandage mechanic lays down?

"Eh, that's going to be six thousand sky bucks, chief."

"Six grand? It was just making a noise."

"Sure, it was just a noise right now. But if you'd have kept flying around with a loose flank stabilizer, in a couple of days you would've rode the thing in a merry go-round of death in this old clunker, going into a death spin for a fun last thirty seconds of life. But if you don't want us to fix it..."

"Well, I could totally fix it for no more than a thousand myself. Just look a few things up on the internet, google a few schematics, and so on. My brother's great with sky cars."

"Sure, you do that. Just make sure you have a vacuum-form mold made and ready to replace the paneling. If you don't have the hood seamless, you'll just cause more damage. And be careful when you pull the car's navigation computer to get at the stablizier--you probably don't want to reset the computer's fixed hard points. And don't..."

"Fine, just fix it."

And so on. Towing expenses really shoot up when you consider that sky tow-truck drivers have to make hair's-breadth-accurate docking maneuvers with a variety of sky cars, thus requiring them to be ridiculously skilled and thus more generously compensated. And sky rentals? The stuff of nightmares. Not to mention that the sky garage is a thousand feet above the ground and taking an elevator down to the ground, then walk three blocks to the rental place and take the elevator back up to its office takes forever. Most people would probably just keep buying new sky cars every couple of years to avoid maintenance altogether, and you know that will add up over the years, too.

And then there's the cost of insurance, which is going to be astronomical(pun deliberately intended). What do you think the deductible is going to be for accidentally driving your Blezinsky 9000 into the 100th floor of Trump City's post office? Not pretty, let me tell you. But when you're serving your sentence for flying without insurance and Juno the gene-modded pretty-boy from Mars is your prison bunk-mate, you'll be glad you sold your genetic license. Real glad.

Which brings us to sky safety in the flying car world of tomorrow. As you can imagine, that's a whole other can of worms, and so I'll save that for next time. Until then, keep your eye on the sky.

Dumbasscience: Flying Cars Part 1

Dumbasscience: Science is not always smart. Oh no sir-ree-Bob. Sometimes it is just plain stupid. That's okay, I won't judge. I'll just point it out and mock it mercilessly. These articles will contain rants from history and breaking news where scientists are pursuing through-and-through bad ideas. From the 'flying your car to work' pipe-dream, to various plans of how to forcibly reverse global warming, if it's technological and perilous to rationalists, it's Dumbasscience.

Additional explanation: I love science, science-fiction, and gadgetry. I write science-fiction, and I have dreams about this stuff. I also have dreams about swimming to school as an adult, that doesn't mean it's a good idea. We need to take a moment, sniff our dreams, and keep them away from reality if they are a little rank.

The flying car.

It is the quintessential piece of future-tech, the emblem of 'tomorrow', the paragon of stupid crap you don't need but really want. Especially in your science-fiction. Without flying cars, a lot of sci-fi chase scenes would have to be as well thought-out and carefully choreographed as your standard action movie car chase. I mean, think about what the flying car chase usually consists of, and then translate that to a mundane car chase--lots of low angles as the car whizzes by, possibly shaking the camera, doing very little in the way of actual maneuvering. Throw that fifty feet or more in the air, give it a decent special effects budget, and you've got a gripping chase in the world of tomorrow. Leave it on the ground and, well, Dukes of Hazzard has you beat. Really. Beat like a gamer husband asking to go to a gaming convention on his anniversary.

Beat, even without the jean cut-offs.

In reality, though, the flying car idea blows. But before I go into graphic detail about how this should not be in our future, some news and definitions. Popular Science has had articles on the flying car as a pipe-dream since the magazine started, and in the past year or so there's been a lot more articles. Dude, Where's My Flying Car? does a comparison of past expectations and near future reality. Flying Car Gets Real covers a car that converts into a airplane thanks to collapsable wings. And The Unexpected Rebirth of the Flying Car overviews how the field is being supported by recent DARPA grants.

But these articles might confuse the definition of the flying car. A convertible plane is not a flying car(and plus, aeronautically speaking, using your canards as a bumper is like using your yahoo as a fist--you could pull it off, but you'll wish you hadn't). And the military will not make a flying car per se, either. Either of these developments might progress the technology, but the flying car as a few integral concepts. First of all, as long as the 'flying cars' being developed require a pilot's license, we have not achieved the flying car of futurists everywhere. The flying car of the future will be at least as common as a Volkswagen. And the flying car of the future must be integrated into civilian society. As long as it is a military vehicle, it's not truly a flying car anymore than an M-16 is a hunting rifle.

A lot of the modern interest in flying cars is supposedly driven by urban interest in circumventing traditional traffic. I'll let you chew on that one for a moment. Yes, that's right--it's Speed Racer logic, people. Sick of waiting in traffic? Push your number seven button on the steering column and jump over that traffic jam, straight to your driveway. Don't worry about mass transit, resource conservation or efficiency, or any of that jazz about pollution footprints, you're late for Desperate Housewives. Turd.

There's a lot of problems with the flying car that are always going to be there, and I'll be spotlighting them in the coming weeks as part of the Dumbasscience feature. So keep your head down and your eye on the sky: the flying cars are coming!