Think about something as simple as a household appliance.  Got it in your mind?  Good!  Now think about all the materials it is made out of.  That's metal, plastic, glass, heating elements, wiring, etc.  Lots of different stuff, right?  Now think about how many people were involved in making these things.  Think about the mining of raw materials, getting the materials into a usable form, the manufacturing of the actual product, etc. 

This is what modern industrialization has created!  An amazingly effective system that produces everything around you.  I once watched a TED talk on the subject (forgive me, I don't remember which it was), and the speaker talked about how production has changed from expert craftsmen creating everything by themselves to modern production, which is segmented into small, simple tasks spread to millions of people.  He talked about how it would be nearly impossible to recreate something from scratch because every step is so desensitized to the others.

Well, one man has (somewhat) done this nearly impossible task.  Thomas Thwaites decided he wanted to make a toaster from scratch.  And to him, from scratch meant from scratch: from mining and refining the material to the final product.  The article I read from Gizmodo explains his struggles.  Some of the most difficult parts seemed to be refining the iron for his toaster into steel and finding the right designs.  The article is a great and interesting read, so you should go read it.  His final product was a toaster that melted about 5 minutes after it was plugged in.  But still, the 9 months put into this project is amazing, and proves how amazing industrialization has become.

Here is a link to the article: http://gizmodo.com/#!5794368/why-its-harder-than-you-think-to-make-a-simple-toaster

A while ago I found an enteresitng application for the Mac.  It is called BetterTouchTool.  It is an application that can add gestures.  It can add gestures to the trackpad, a magic mouse or a keyboard.  I have been using it with my laptop's trackpad, and it is amazing.  With 55 different gestures, as well as 5 modifier keys, 275 different gestures could be added to do things such as scale text, scale windows, control volume, open applications, etc.  The application is very user friendly, and the possibilities it has for gesture based computing are amazing.

Here is the link to a download: http://blog.boastr.net/

In class, we have discussed web browser rivalry quite a bit.  About whether Firefox or Chrome was better and about how hardly anyone likes IE.  Well, I found an article about web browser popularity, and it organizes it graphically in a really nice way:

http://gizmodo.com/#!5788665/the-popularity-of-web-browsers-visualized

It is interesting to look at the graph and see how the popularity and features have changed with web browsers through the years.  I had almost forgotten about Netscape, literally the browser back in the day.  The graphical organizer makes it easy to analyze the data on the subject and see the rise and fall of browser empires.