Aluminum foil (2021)
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Aluminum foil (2021)
1–10 of 148 posts
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#2Im interested in using honeycomb aluminum panels for some projects but curious why its so freaking expensive?
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#3This is pretty much just rambling about how amazing aluminium foil is because it's so thin and that might enable all sorts of wonderful imaginary applications. Very HN. It's aluminium foil.
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#4This was on S01E01 of How It's Made. Probably one of the best segments in the shows history.
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#5I was enjoying the ADHD hyper focus writing, kind of following along, then:
> If we figure that the foil can meaningfully change direction every 20 μm, then we might think of an aluminum-foil machine as being made of “moving parts” on the order of 1000 μm² (50 μm × 20 μm), 1000 “parts” per square millimeter of foil; a roll of kitchen aluminum foil is enough to fabricate some 4 billion “parts”. A bootstrapping compiler might require 100 000 parts and thus a square centimeter of aluminum foil, cut and folded around into a shape a couple of millimeters in diameter. If it were doing only one thing at a time, and needed 10 seconds to construct/assemble each moving part, it would take about 12 days to recompile itself. This is probably adequately fast, barely, but probably not adequately robust against errors. It would probably be better to design it to have more parts and do many things at once, enabling it to be faster and correct errors.
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#6[deleted]
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#7I appreciated the paean to aluminum foil in Project Hail Mary where (spoilers) the hero uses it as bowling pins and to reproduce astrophage to eventually save two worlds. It's right up there in the pantheon of useful things with duct tape.
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#8This is pretty much just rambling about how amazing aluminium foil is because it's so thin and that might enable all sorts of wonderful imaginary applications. Very HN. It's aluminium foil.
That's the neat part though, isn't it? It's a product that's so good that there's no everyday alternatives to it. I was researching cat litter options recently and cat owners do a lot of thinking and talking about litter, because there's a variety of different materials, none of which are solidly better than all others in all situations. But aluminium foil is so good that we don't even think about it, because it's by far the best product for every application that we use it for.
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#9I was enjoying the ADHD hyper focus writing, kind of following along, then: > If we figure that the foil can meaningfully change direction every 20 μm, then we might think of an aluminum-foil machine as being made of “moving parts” on the order of 1000 μm² (50 μm × 20 μm), 1000 “parts” per square millimeter of foil; a roll of kitchen aluminum foil is enough to fabricate some 4 billion “parts”. A bootstrapping compile…
I've read a lot of his other writings so that context might be informing my reading here but it sounds like he's pretty straightforwardly discussing the potential of aluminum foil as a uniform-feedstock-slash-construction-material for a hypothetical self-reproducing microfabricator.
Re: Aluminum foil (2021)
#10This is pretty much just rambling about how amazing aluminium foil is because it's so thin and that might enable all sorts of wonderful imaginary applications. Very HN. It's aluminium foil.
You sound like someone who hasn't explored the upper limits of what aluminum foil can solve!