Who Made That?

Anyone who argues that innovation has stagnated in the last 50 years is ignoring the thing that has changed the innovation process the most. Computers aren't just an innovation in themselves, but also provide a tool for the design of new things which is completely unparalleled in the past. Maybe we haven't seen the step-change of the internal combustion engine (at least in physical designs), but that doesn't mean that innovation is stagnant.

Pointing towards useless inventions as proof that we're not solving the big problems is utterly ridiculous. We may remember the 19th century for the industrial revolution, but the victorians were churning out countless useless inventions at the same time. Just as we don't remember the victorians for their moustache guards, it seems to me that this decade is far more likely to be remembered for the self driving car than the popcorn gun.

I'd love to see a "who made that" google glass app, where you can look at any object and glass will generate a paragraph on the origins of the object.

If you could find a way to isolate the object from what the camera sees / white out the rest of the image, you could search for similar images on google to figure out what the object was. Then scan wiki / a few other sources to generate origin info.

Is anyone else stuck on advertisement? :S

Very pleased to have spoken to the author of the section on "keys" and locks for a good long while. Seeing the final product, and knowing now how brief he was going to have to be, I am impressed by his committed interest. We talked for at least a solid hour and covered everything from the ancient Mesopotamians to every modern variant of the mechanical lock. That he would want to know everything in order to write a brief synopsis, I think, speaks highly of him.

Not you. You didn't make that.