Conversation

Amazing how much of learning any hobby or diy skill in the US is about learning what to buy and googling and reading forum posts. And how far you can get with zero conceptual understanding of what you’re doing, based purely in such shopping/forum knowledge and trial-and-error.
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I now know a ton about the prices and form factors available for blue painter’s tape and kapton tape, and tips for getting them on/off surfaces. But I know nothing yet about polyamide chemistry or how kapton tape actually works, or about the chemistry/physics of adhesion.
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Telescopy and astrophotography is somewhat better than 3D printing. The practical knowledge is all industry standards and terminology like f-numbers and lens speeds and costs and sizes of different types of optics. But you can’t help learning a bit about the optical fundamentals.
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I worked out the basic tradeoffs between aperture size, exposure time, and f-number myself based on optics before reading the forum posts and comparison shopping tips for lenses around those 3 parameters. But you could make decent decisions without knowing any of the concepts.
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And the thing is, the practical knowledge keeps going far past the point where your conceptual knowledge fails you. You’d have to be a deep expert in several different fields to actually conceptually understand everything that goes into a great 3D print or astro photograph.
Replying to
For anything you do, you have to be satisfied with only understanding a few pieces all the way. The rest, you do stuff based essentially your n=1 trial and error logs against the backdrop of shopping catalog lore and subreddit wisdom.
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Of the 3 things I’m messing around with rn, 1. making a pendulum clock, 2. taking astro photographs, and 3. 3D printing, the conceptual legibility is 1>>2>>3. No wonder clocks and telescopes are where Galileo started the scientific revolution. They are exceptionally legible.
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I basically get clocks. Transparent kinematics Astro-photography is 40% science, 30% art, 20% mystery atm 3D printing is 5% kinematics which I grok, 10% adhesion+thermal physics, which I grok less, 15% CAD stack which I half-ass remember from college, 70% chemistry black magic
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Note my standard isn’t trying to understand every mystery in the stack of an artifact. Just everything that is presently understood by *some* group of specialists somewhere and written up in some textbook you could in principle study and get through.
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Gonna take a serious stab at pivoting ribbonfarm into a maker-ish blog. Got a few posts outlined on these adventures.
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“You’re not a hobbyist, you’re a redditor studying Chinese suppliers as a business anthropologist. Your hobby is an anthropological research method”
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Replying to
After becoming conceptual experts, people tend to forget that reality is messy and always contains noise. It takes a very disciplined and mindful conceptual expert to not loose the respect for the randomness in the real world.