Our CNC machine is temporarily out of commission due to a shearing off of the small air-intake connector that grabs and holds the tools. The size of the hole in the picture is a mere 5/64 of an inch.

Thankfully the machine’s maker in Burlington, ON has a replacement part otherwise I might have needed to order one from Italy

One snapped off fitting in a usually safe location.

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Given that this is an institution of visual arts and design it is amazing that so few people who come to me with a proposed cutting project have no drawing at all of what they want me to do. To date I have cut 25 projects and the number of drawings I have seen is zero (none, nil, nada, not one). This is down by about 3 from last semester.

Yes, I am being provocative as a small number of people did present me with a computer file on first contact but eliminating them we are still left with zero.

Not even James Randi’s “skeptical brow” and the question “Do you have a readable drawing of what you want made?” have been enough to help convince people to bring a drawing.

Oddly enough some of the most detailed drawings of a proposed project do not come from the communication or industrial design students (although you would think that should be their stock in trade) but from painters.

Do you have a readable drawing of what you want made?

Back when the “World Wide Web” was new, and was not referred to as the “interwebs”, if you wanted information you had to seek it out. Then along came RSS (Really Simple Syndication) from TLA-land (Three Letter Acronym) and information was delivered to you for viewing in a dedicated RSS feed reader.

Instead of visiting this site to see what has newly been posted you can have you’re e-mail receive those posts as they are made. Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook and Thunderbird each have their own idiosyncratic ways of adding feeds. The easiest way to do so is to scroll down to the bottom of this page and under “Meta” click on the “Entriess RSS” link.

You can also e-mail yourself a message with the text http://blogs.eciad.ca/cnc/feed/ in the body of the message. Then, when you receive the message, click on the link in your e-mail program and it should walk you through the subscription process.

…While it is true that every curve which can be described by a continuous motion should be recognized in geometry, this does not mean that we should use at random the first one that we meet in the construction of a given problem. We should always choose with care the simplest curve that can be used in the solution of a problem, but it should be noted that the simplest means not merely the one most easily described, nor the one that leads to the easiest demonstration or construction of the problem, but rather the one of the simplest class that can be used to determine the required quantity…

René Descartes, 1637, La Geometrie, Book III, page 152.

A provisional post to meditate on.