mircea_popescu: srsly, 240 seconds since the microsecond previous n lines ? pshaw.

mircea_popescu: if anyone can explain wtf sense this makes...

mircea_popescu: Sep 12 14:43:18 * mircea_popescu has quit (Ping timeout: 240 seconds)

mircea_popescu: and they do a sort of by-hand injection into hand-made molds, yes.

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform things that fit in mouths are very fine indeed.

mircea_popescu: ie, a dentist's lab out of ten probably has a graybeard who could make you the keys for pay. considering what the item costs irl, prolly >1k <10k for the whole key set.

mircea_popescu: but way the fuck cheaper than making plastic injection molds for a run of one.

mircea_popescu: well, there's also the screw-ins, but same principle.

mircea_popescu: (incidentally, fake teeth are a metal cap with a porcelain top. very wear resistent, you chew 30 years on them)

mircea_popescu: yup. except not cost effective so far, porcelains have a century of refinement in dental prothesis supporting them

mircea_popescu: but generally wouldn't want to ; fake teeth are not made this way because not really good enough.

mircea_popescu: anyway, only reason dentist doesn't bake you a new dentine layer is the temperature involved ; in a lab you can make arbitrarily large un-enammeled tooth.

mircea_popescu: bear in mind dentine is like 2.5 mohs. so not so great (which is why enammeled in actual firing-in-field tooth)

mircea_popescu: you can rebake this ; or grow it. it's not some mystical secret itam.

mircea_popescu: yes but why specify a dubious source for it. you want tooth, beat up some antifa hipsters, take their teeth make kbd.

mircea_popescu: (all teeth are the same material, be it a lizzard's or your mom's ; it's a calcium hydrated salt.)

mircea_popescu: but, "teeth of your enemies" always and everywhere indicated substitute to "teeth of surviving mamooth"

mircea_popescu: i doubt you saw a piano that had non-bachelite keys

mircea_popescu: ivory is actually not proper part of this discussion. not either very good or very valuable, british "tea" nonsense.

mircea_popescu: but a kg of mother of pearl is cheaper to get than a kg of useful slavegirl. put some shell in a tank.

mircea_popescu: it's not even so expensive, in today's terms. if only we didn't live among anodyne barbarians and the tech stack all rotten away.

mircea_popescu: the important point, however, is that nacre has a young's modulus as high as 100. (young modulus being a reasonable measurement of an aspect of intuitive "brittleness".)

mircea_popescu: in the simplest sense, mother of pearl is discs of calcium carbonate "glass" suspended in chitin (the insect plastic equivalent of celulose ; same thing as makes hair in mammals.)

mircea_popescu: (nacre, if you're curious, is the natural alternative to porcelain ; some molluscs even manage iridiscent porcelain non-nacre lining, which is why gigas pearls are valuable)

mircea_popescu: (and for moar lolz, take http://btcbase.org/log/2017-09-12#1712656 etc. these were meant to be SAT on. "oh, ass is soft" "you think so ?" etc.) ☝︎

mircea_popescu: these, amusingly, were also driven by similar processes as the pre-usgification of europe, ie "gotta impress the single solitary unique sultan"

mircea_popescu: if you make your key of ebony or some other high quality wood and the letterface out of say mother of pearl, you have a very good wear profile item as well.

mircea_popescu: (and yes, wood is a plastic is the key to ANOTHER side of "you didn't read up on your art in college, you lose" surprisebox. because yes, wood will do the "Doluble injection cast mold". it was the arab world equivalent of chinese china. look up "mother of pearl"

mircea_popescu: (in fact, there's precious few examples known in nature where we actually have the http://btcbase.org/log/2017-08-28#1704342 spider/coli/etc. trees are readily the largest -- "how to get natural item to secrete high quality plastic???") ☝︎

mircea_popescu: in this discussion wood is a plastic. and other such intuitively-surprising items.

mircea_popescu: the important categories in this discussion are metals (ie, materials where the electrons don't sit with their atom ; form cloud. these -- always conductive electrically) ; porcelains (or glasses, or ceramics, or how'd you call them) and then plastics (polymerized item).

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i was discussing the above "intuitive notion of brittleness is useless"

mircea_popescu: the reason steel loses out is that the carbon is a shittier oxigen (more valences, weaker valences) and iron a dubious silicate.

mircea_popescu: the microscopic reason it is such a strong material is the oxigen-linked silica crystaline patterns that form.

mircea_popescu: (for the curious : porcelain is heat-rearranged Al2 Si2 05 (OH)4 ; glass is more generally heat-rearranged Si + metal)

mircea_popescu: (also "not brittle" item in same sense, at that)

mircea_popescu: glass is a kind of porcelain for the needs of this discussion

mircea_popescu: so you have your letterface "A" made out of gold and then the porcelain put around it.

mircea_popescu: you can formulate porcelain so it adheres to a metal lattice stronglier than the actual metal!

mircea_popescu: BingoBoingo he solves it by fucking getting up to speed with 18th century art as an engineering practice!

mircea_popescu: and what is a spine, or fractured ribs with thereby fine points.

mircea_popescu: well... the 200lb man it's not as kalahsh-SOUNDING as the 3 lb wrench!

mircea_popescu: (if you think "oh, man-pizza is soft np" have your girlfriend fall a coupla feet on top of you from say a fuck sling, get back to me.)

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform everything is a shock to some degree!

mircea_popescu: another problem with the intuitive notion of brittleness is that it is poorly defined in the first place.

mircea_popescu: and y'all have to thank bb for mentioning this, because i don't take iron to the wood so to speak.

mircea_popescu: and thus the question was very much in a similar vein to your kbd from before ; and the last time in human (ie, european) history this was the case.

mircea_popescu: rather than a mass endeavour.

mircea_popescu: and, contrary to diderot & wikitards "reality", there was in fact fascinating work ongoing in the ancien regime.

mircea_popescu: the point being, that this here thing you've stumbled upon is actually a humongous cut branch of the tree of engineering.

mircea_popescu: so we never got to see it, would have been ruby-injected-with-saphire.

mircea_popescu: meanwhile, let us point out the logical next step on porcelain fabrication, which louis & friends were engaged in at the time of their unfortunate beheadal

mircea_popescu: go, do. great reads, great topic.

mircea_popescu: there's no squirreling away out of studying THIS particular end of art.

mircea_popescu: you know not what you speak of, my man. and this time it's sad. go look at the art of the past would you!

mircea_popescu: you know, just like they do.

mircea_popescu: trained slavegirl can make you these by hand in an afternoon, whole set of beautiful keys.

mircea_popescu: anyway, re the original design constreaints : porcelain way the fuck better than plastic for "dbl injection cast mold in qty of one"

mircea_popescu: and thjis for a very good reason.

mircea_popescu: but anyway, the original point was, that "abrication of wear resistant small pieces went through centuries of being porcelain based".

mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i wasn't aware your design envelope was going to randomly expand to "i want a wrench droppable kbd now too".