Open Letters.

A trading card set of inventions filed with the U.S. Patent Office.

Most of the time, trading cards leave us baffled and skeptical. With two young kids at home we sometimes scold “stop wasting money, this nonsense is gambling”. Somehow in our respective youths, all instances of trading card craze bypassed our interests.

But as a format, or framework for making, we’re curious. Not as a way to add nonsense to the world, but as a way to cultivate intrigue, coupled with the high-pay-off-reward of discovery.

This is Open Letters.

The name Open Letters is derived from its Latin origin litterae patentes. Unlike sealed letters intended for a single recipient, literae patentes were meant for public disclosure: to be read and understood by all. This openness is the foundation of the patent system - a mutually beneficial exchange between inventors and society.

In the spirit of literae patentes, this pocket-sized archive is more than a stack of legal documents. Open Letters is a testament to human ingenuity and also a call to engagement, intended as a tangible expression of transparency, collaboration and the power of publicly accessible knowledge.

Last night Tree pulled an ultra-rare.

Pau was jealous but happy with the drawing on the refrigeration display card.

McMaster-Card Update.

This past spring we released another trading card art project, a set featuring McMaster-Carr parts. Our art project produced an unexpected frenzy of interest, and we quickly ran out. McMaster-Carr liked the project and is taking it over.

CW&T will no longer be making McMaster-Cards, so we’re removing your name from our waitlist. But, keep an eye out for new editions from McMaster-Carr in the future. Email if interested : [email protected].

Pocket Fiche Golden Fiche website.

Golden Fiche in progress.

People are hard at work collaboratively building the golden fiche. This is a beautiful smattering a contributions ranging from a short Kafka story to images of diatoms (unicellular organisms) to someone (me) who started a game of exquisite corpse.

The golden fiche will be printed onto a 1 molecule thick gold substrate and protected by sapphire. It will last forever. This is the first time technologies used to make microchips will be used at a bespoke and limited scale.

If you'd like to receive Pocket Fiche, which includes this golden fiche slide, you have a few days left to support the project.

We're opening up contributions to our community for the golden fiche. If you'd like to contribute a 500x500pixel image to the golden fiche, reply to this email and we'll send you a special link.

1 WEEK LEFT FOR POCKET FICHE

This is a tricky project to communicate without seeing it in hand. So we appreciate any help sharing this to anyone you think is interested.

Pocket Fiche microscope and golden fiche.

Miles + Josh have been on the side trying to print 1 billion digits of pi for fun. It's impossible to see without a microscope, but this is what 1 billion digits look like. The image is 4.8 Gb and figuring out how to convert it into a format that is readable by the machines in the nanofabrication lab took months.