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mircea_popescu: Sep 12 14:43:18 * mircea_popescu has quit (Ping timeout: 240 seconds)
mircea_popescu: Sep 12 14:43:18 * Rothbart (51674d2b@gateway/web/freenode/ip.81.103.77.43) has joined #trilema
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: (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: ikr ? which is why yes decent material, not so much used.
mircea_popescu: you can rebake this ; or grow it. it's not some mystical secret itam.
mircea_popescu: you'll run out of elephants before you run out of stupid.
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: 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: 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 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: a fine example : porcelain does not swell. metals dilate significantly. suddenly, a different sort of brittle emerges.
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: 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: man pizza is part. so are various vehicles (such as de-icers) and etc.
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: 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: and similar, emerald-and-citrine "double injection molds
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: 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: 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: 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".
mircea_popescu: hence material science and materials engineering are different disciplines.
mircea_popescu: facts aren't open to engineering, they're the subjects o' science.
mircea_popescu: we weren't discussing an application ; we were discussing a fact.
mircea_popescu: notwithstanding that in many applications in the past back when we were 3 yo those were equivalent categories.
mircea_popescu: which is why proper dimensional comparison counts relevant dimensions, not intuitively familiar ones.
mircea_popescu: similar situation with porcelain, counterintuitively it is rather unbrittle.
mircea_popescu: it is a very uninformed argument. in point of fact the "Fragile" spider web is one of the strongest materials known.
mircea_popescu: ben_vulpes not so. dimension here is not properly taken as "same kg" or "same m3"
mircea_popescu: but this hides the proper argument. ben_vulpes would you say "paper is stronger than spider web, i can tear the latter without noticing" ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform both items used in the intended manner. sword, as sword, cup as cup.
mircea_popescu: (million dollars is perhaps not enough to buy either, but let's pretend fiatola has some modicum of value)
mircea_popescu: understand : if you spent your million dollars to buy knight's sword, it came with a "will not make it 20 years" guarantee. if spent same million dollars to buy china set, it came with "forever as long as your family line shall be" guarantee.