I was able to attend some talks at Tech Fest Northwest today. The founder of Dollar Shave Club spoke first and while his talk was quite funny and engaging it was really just a long advertisement for his company. Justin Ferrell gave a great talk about Stanford’s d.school and referenced the book Make Space which I ordered while he was still talking. I think it might provide some great kitchen ideas and general use of space ideas for the house. Tad McGeer spoke about his company and the drones they are developing. He touched on privacy and danger related to drones and strongly feels they pose no danger at all. He mentioned that we have had piloted aircraft with cameras on them for a very long time so doesn’t understand the uproar over unmanned aircraft having them. Genevieve Bell from Intel gave the final, very interesting, talk about the prehistory of robots. She covered a lot of stuff but one thing that stood out was the fact that up to the 1980’s only one African American and only three women robots were made. The rest were modeled after white men. It’s just another example of the people running things modeling the things they make to look just like themselves.

Today I learned that in 1914 The Colorado National Guard massacred men, women and children because of a miner’s strike over unfair wages and an unsafe workplace. http://www.umwa.org/?q=content/ludlow-massacre