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Make a bunch of chess sets out of the various parts.

Something like this.
http://www.novica.com/itemdetail/index.cfm?pid=121771

The platters of could serve as the white squares maybe?

interesting quotes include "I create innovative models that meld our roots and my imagination."

...stick to ceilings, turn on a dime, carry three and a half tonnes of groceries and hardly ever crash or get stolen. it would also come in an enormous variety of themes (including the "init 3" theme without any body panels), be linkable together in trains of up to 1024 vehicles and include forklift, bucket and blade attachments. The in-dash TV would double as a street directory and would be able to scan nearby vehicles for threats and vulnerabilities.

And the bonnet emblem wouldn't be a silver lady.

Nana Frimpong is the chief carver for the King of the Ashanti. His works are sold on NOVICA.com, the company I work for. NPR ran a piece on Ghana and Nana Frimpong which discusses many of the issues in this article. NOVICA has a local office in Accra. Our connection to the internet there is through a relatively expensive radio uplink.

Steven Klotz
Web Developer
NOVICA.com

Nana Frimpong is the chief carver for the King of the Ashanti. His works are sold on NOVICA.com, the company I work for. NPR ran a piece on Ghana and Nana Frimpong which discusses many of the issues in this article. NOVICA has a local office in Accra. Our connection to the internet there is through a relatively expensive radio uplink.

Steven Klotz
Web Developer
NOVICA.com

First, American education is not great. It's good enough to turn out middle managers. And it does an adequate job at babysitting. But anyone that is different gets smacked down. That's cultural -- all an individual can do is home-school. So there's no real opportunity or avenue to protect the freaks as a whole.

Second, politics is and has always been a forum for the lowest common denominator. Politics will tend to homogenize relentlessly until everyone is a member of the lowest common denominator. Perhaps it already has. Individualism will get no protection from government. No government has ever put itself on the line to protect the individual. This is due to the instinct for self-preservation exhibited by all organized entities, be they collections of cells or collections of collections of cells. (The rule is recursive.)

Finally, we get to business. Corporatism is pretty horrible, I agree. But I believe that there are loopholes that can be exploited. The tricky part is to guide the evolution of law and culture so that even if Old Individualism dies, New Individualism can still flourish. What is New Individualism? Frankly, I don't have a complete answer to that. Neither do you, Jon, you just want the Old Individualism back, the one that you think was given to you by God and country and our forefathers. But pining for the past is not the American way. The American Way means that you redefine Individualism so that it can flourish again. It means being faster, smarter, and able to turn on a dime, while the culture-homogenizing corporations lumber along behind you, maybe even right at your heels. Does this sound familiar at all? It should, if you've read books about small business, garage startups, and assorted clue-related manifestos. You see, The American Love Affair with business is unlikely to end soon. But we can be sure that the economy will falter if creativity is completely stifled. Where does this path lead?

Back to business. Because business has a vested interest in preserving individuality and creativity. If all businesses in a given market are the same, no business has a competitive advantage. The smart businesses churn through ideas, trying to find the one that that will keep them on the leading edge. The dumber (and often older) businesses try to squash ideas instead of pouring their resources into smart people. The market, as a result, is in a constant state of flux. As a market ages towards death, the companies eventually turn into red giants, engulfing everything around them. (Coke, Pepsi...)

Within a dying market, there is no room for individualism. The Web came out of nowhere and grew magnificently, on Internet time. Now it's dying on the same Internet time. What is my point here? My point is that if you live on the wired planet, all you can see is the red giants relentlessly expanding towards you (like AOL/Time-Warner). But just because Internet individualism is being squashed does not mean that individualism as a whole is as well. Take corporate individualism. Howard Hughes, Walt Disney, true individuals, even if we didn't always like them. Then, dead time. Then later, a fresh crop like Bill Gates and Michael Dell. Small businesses are growing at a fantastic rate right now, in more than just the technology sector. A small business of one person is still an individual. I always bring up this company, but how about Novica? This company has staked its reputation on the individual. Each of its artists is a small business, a subcontracted seller of goods and services. Novica on its own will grab 0.01% of the market for interior decorations - not a threat. A thousand Novicas, tapping a million individual artists, are a threat indeed.

What I see ultimately occurring is a rebirth and renaissance of individuality. Bruce Sterling's essay on the future, where everyone is in business, comes true. But individuality will have to make itself valuable somehow. This may make you cringe -- perhaps you think art is only art if created without respect to money. Or that an idea or opinion that is paid is absolutely tainted and invalid. We have only to look to the Italian Renaissance to see how false this is. Painters and writers and musicians had to convince their patrons to give them money (or be rich themselves). And yet real art came out of the studios of patronized arts.

In conclusion: Use the past as a guide, but don't try to resurrect it. Bend like the willow before the winds of change, little grasshopper.

Best,

Amanda

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However, I do not love the Harlequin romance. I do not love the latest business bore, or the danielle doorstop. I find Stephen King* mildly diverting, though rarely for all 600 pages.

Digitization will stop the disgusting waste of trees (which I also happen to like) on books that are truly consumables. What are the chances that you will keep the latest bestseller on your shelf and pass it down to your children? Very small, which is as it should be.

In this new world of electronic information, precious book-making time and space and labor will go towards creating the books that aren't consumer items. Rousseau's works will come out in marvelous new leather-bound limited editions, perhaps hand illustrated and hand bound, and signed by (for example) the author's nephew's brother's ex-wife. The most wonderful and enduring works will make it onto paper, and the home library will be a joy to walk through. The world is slowly changing to a place where people have enough money to afford material objects created by artisans** instead of by mass manufacture. The reason for this change is and will continue to be gains in efficiency in manufacturing consumer items, as well as the digitization of needlessly tree-based information***.

New books should have to past the test of time before we honor them with the hand of an artisan bookmaker****. I for one am looking forward to the day when I can research Victorian England by downloading scholarly texts, and then enjoy some quiet time on the porch with a beautiful copy of Little Dorrit.

Notes
* The perfect candidate for throwaway e-books, so we can stop throwing away the t-books
** Novica.com
*** Newspapers, most textbooks, newsletters, junk mail, romance novels, etc. -- just to name a few
**** I like maps too

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