You may have heard of 3D printing and rapid prototyping. Have you seen videos of concrete printers? We aren’t yet building apartments this way, or even backyard sheds, but the idea has been picked up and its development is now funded by very large companies.

I was thinking about this while spooning up a dish of Ben & Jerry’s 30th anniversary celebratory ice cream flavor, Cake Batter. I wondered what machinery had achieved the perfect swirling of ice cream flavors and gooey frosting. I have toured their factory in Waterbury, Vermont, and I even stood nearby while it was being built, but I’ve never seen up close the twirling, swirling nozzles. I wondered about their capabilities.

We had a 9-pin dot matrix printer when I was a kid. Eventually we got a 24-pin model that printed nicer-looking fonts, followed by a laser printer and a color bubble jet. I disassembled each one to see how it worked, or I read about it if the mechanism was too small. I found that if you ran a page enough times through any printer, the ink would build up on the paper until eventually the printer jammed. 3D printing is easy to imagine but not so easy to do.

Now if Ben & Jerry’s ice cream swirls could be created in a pint of ice cream by moving a rod having individually-controlled swirl ports, you might be able to print messages inside the pint, to be successively revealed by spooning away layers from the top. This has the obvious difficulty of the effect of the rod moving through the ice cream, swirling into oblivion whatever was deposited before.

It would be better to squirt the ice creams and swirls simultaneously into the pint to form one layer at a time. Having on its pint-wide print head a grid of nozzles arranged horizontally, the machine would print while moving the head vertically through the length of the pint. If it had the ability to control the nozzles to squirt different ingredients, the machine would be a 3D ice cream printer and my dream come true.

All of the forgoing occurred to me between bites of Cake Batter ice cream. These thoughts occupied a small part of my mind through the day until I began to think back on older printing technologies. Most interestingly, all of the laser printers I had seen contained a heating element called a fuser which baked the toner that had been deposited on the paper. What if you could automatically deposit cake batter and bake it by layers? You could extrude a fully-baked cake with a different birthday wish in every slice.

One mechanism appeared to me: tiny, retractable, non-stick heating elements would extend into the printed batter at the rate of print head advance, effectively staying put in the batter until it has finished baking and then retracting into the print head to be deployed again. Another idea involved inflating tiny balloons with hot liquid to bake the batter and then deflating them, mimicking the natural consistency of cake with the voids left behind.

I imagined that the resolution of such printing would be directly limited by the composition of the cake. Air bubbles are transparent holes that transmit color from the solid parts at their boundaries. Higher resolution would depend on smaller bubbles. Up to this point I was thinking primarily in the visual field. Bakeries and consumers already have access to frosting printers, which are simply Canon bubble jet printers with edible sheets of “paper” and edible inks, but this is 2D printing and not what I wanted to think about. Continuing on the 3D track, I thought separately about flavor printing and structure printing.

Flavor printing can be imagined very simply in one dimension by equipping a sausage mill with computer-controlled nozzles, each one adding a different ingredient to the filler and being turned on and off to create a pattern of flavors that the eater would experience in a sequence of bites. It is easy to expand the concept mechanically into two and three dimensions, printing out multi-flavored cakes or gelatin molds. I don’t know what consumer need this would fill. Still, I’d like to see it done.

Structure printing (creating, say, a frosted yellow cake in the form of the Statue of Liberty) brings up an important consideration: the physical properties of the food. Where are the compression strain diagrams of yellow cake? What is the tensile strength of frosting with and without coconut? How best to anneal the chocolate rebar?

If you know any mechanical engineering grad students who secretly wanted to major in home economics, or vice versa, please send them a link to this post. I would love to consult on any project that stems from these ideas.

Automattic rides in style. Maya put me up at the Westin on Market. This is a four-star hotel, or “the bomb” in urban parlance, just one star short of “bling bling”. Thus they command six times the nightly rate of the hotels I usually book for myself. I learned this when I checked in.

I’m neither cheap nor, despite Mom’s best efforts, congenitally frugal, but like a boxer to a muffler I wasn’t going to pay a lot for a hotel room. I checked hotels.com for something closer to my range and found the same room in the same hotel available for about 45% less than the hotel’s quoted rate.

With several hours before the cancellation deadline for the weekend stay, I called the front desk to offer them the opportunity to take my money. I told them about the hotels.com quote and asked them to match it. The agent checked with her manager and then advised me to book it online and cancel the existing reservation.

That’s crazy, right? I offered to pay the hotel the full price quoted by hotels.com, saving them a commission and thus increasing their profit and they refused. Book it online, they said. So I went back to hotels.com.

Right about then, the hotel internet connection died. Perfect. Challenge me to book it online and cut my internet connection? Not really. The connection came back in a few minutes. I booked it and called the front desk to finally cancel the original weekend reservation and note that I’d keep the room for the new reservation.

Fifteen minutes of my time yielded a very big savings. It’s too bad the hotel will pay that commission. It’s a funny business. Use hotels.com.

I listened to the first two hours of the unabridged 9/11 Commission Report (Chapter 1, “We have some planes”, details the events of that day) while traveling on a domestic flight. Imagine that.

There must be a great many interesting combinations of content and location. Have you ever run into anything like this by accident?

I only got sick once during a flight. I still think it had little to do with turbulence and a lot to do with the way I was dressed up by my well-meaning parents. Those green slacks were just asking to be covered in vomit.

Last year, for my job as a travelling geek, I flew enough miles that Northwest Airlines gave me the status of Silver Elite. This meant free first-class upgrades and priority boarding. I already cashed in the miles for free tickets to my brother's wedding in New Orleans but the Elite status should last through the year. Unfortunately Northwest's flights are among the most expensive I can find; the "free upgrades" come at a cost.

In a few hours I'll be on a plane to San Francisco. The flight is scheduled for 7:11 departure. My usual pattern for an early flight is to stay up all night, clean the apartment and pack my luggage. This morning, as I lay on my bed faking a nap, I wondered why I developed this pattern.

Am I kept awake by a subconscious fear of flying? Do I avoid sleep because I have a terrible time waking up to an alarm and I dread missing the flight? Is the prospect of forgetting to pack an important article enough to prevent sleep? Would three hours of sleep be better than no sleep at all?

My alarm just went off; I've been typing this instead of sleeping. I'll try to catch a few winks on the plane, but if I don't it won't be a problem for very long. I'll be tired enough to fall asleep at a normal hour, several hours before my usual crash time.

During my last flight into Austin, as I often do I pondered the possibility of the plane touching the ground before its scheduled arrival time and at a location not well suited for jet landings. I wrote this down:

If there is no death unordained, and all of the passengers of an airplane will die in a crash, then the likelihood of a plane crash is equal to the likelihood of a plane being filled with people ordained to die.

I find this strangely comforting. 

What? Ducts that were designed to impede cleaning without mitigating the necessity–colonies of unidentified streptococci so large as to be visible on the vents–a palpable hardness to the settling gases they expel–motors that fling shreds of their own wear and tear into the air they move–electric fields whose effects on the air have been neither theorized nor tested–filters that provide breeding grounds for unseen colonies of bacteria who rejoice at the strong winds for delivering nourishment in abundance and whisking away offspring to their hopeful destinies in the respiratory tracts of people–people upon people upon people, packed into spaces with no access to the purifying light of the sun–a death camp for the willing.

You want me to work here? You want me, who was born from flesh into air and has left it only briefly to dive or be buried in sand at the beach, who drinks it every moment, who slips into soliloquy on tasting a rare whiff from a wet pine grove, who dreams of flight as a fish dreams of swimming, who desires fast travel only for the solid sensation of wind against body, who gapes and yawns for the lack of it, who would kill rather than suffocate, to spend a third part of my life immersed in this?

Fuck you.

Last night I had occasion to turn on the air conditioner. The nature of the occasion was more social than thermal: friends were gathering for a small party and I preferred to contain all of the airborne effects so as not to annoy the neighbors while maintaining a lively and comfortable atmosphere. A/C it would have to be.

I hardly mind a little bit of air conditioning now and then. The accompanying sneezes and runny nose matter less to me than my general unease in artificial atmosphere and the unnatural rumble of air handling equipment, and these things hardly have time to encroach upon my joie de vivre before such a gathering disperses into the night.

When I returned home from an hour of taxi driving, I opened the front door and collided with a wall of stale, cool air. It was my fault for not allowing the atmosphere to purge during my absence, I thought as I found something soft to sneeze into. It would continue to be my fault as I lazily fell into bed without opening a window or turning off the air conditioner.

Hours later, unable to sleep, I remembered what had made me so uncomfortable when I walked through the door. Flinging away bedclothes, I stormed to the thermostat and killed the rumbling monster in my ceiling, then opened every window in the apartment. When I felt the warm, fresh air tumble in, I knew it was time to sleep.

Slowly entering my consciousness over the course of the first half of this year, my distaste for air conditioning has taken firm root where I can see it. Years of evidence went by the boards as I ignored my own experience: endurance in nature had never attended the onset of illness in me but this was too deep a revelation. I would not see the truth without walking around it a few times, as a dog circles before settling on the ground.