Techknow Thursday!

Bear with me here, this post really does pertain to today's topic. There is an actual relevance, and if you make it through the first part, I'll make up for it in the second half. Thanks.

Okay, so when I was quite a bit younger and first learned that bananas grow "upside down," I didn't really think much of it, but a few years later, when I began learning about biology and nature and how there is a certain order to nature, I began to wonder again about the growth of bananas. This led me (yes I ponder some of the strangest questions sometimes) to wonder why we, as a society in general, eat bananas from the opposite "top" than how they grow, but this question was just a hypothetical that I quickly blew off.

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Fast forward to yesterday, when I found the video below which made complete sense of this ridiculous and very miniscule predicament. Of course, I should have just paid attention to the monkeys earlier! Oh, well...now I know, right? And on a funny note, if you have ever watched Aladdin (version a la Disney), you'll notice that when Abu, as an elephant, is trying to eat bananas, he does so like in the video below using the correct top of the banana, but he ends up just squishing them into his face. At least Disney gets some things right in their movies!



And as I promised, for being such great sports and reading my insane drivel, here's a more intriguing entry for Techknow Thursday! I actually just found out fairly recently that my dad is restoring/modifying a 1990 Ford Mustang for drag racing, and when I found this article/video, it made me think of him and really anyone else looking for outdated car parts. The video below is from Popular Mechanics and Jay Leno's Garage (he's got a massive and wonderfully diverse collection of cars). It basically describes and demonstrates the re-engineering of obsolete car parts via a 3D scanner and 3D printer which forms the part in hard plastic.

Now I've heard of 3D printers before that do 3D renderings using glue and paper dust, but this is amazing. Not only are there uses for recreating obsolete car and machine parts, but it can save tons of time machining working models of new products! It's great, and now I'll leave you with the video!