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.
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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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The only person I know who does all this shit and lots more and actually understands it all conceptually down to bare metal is
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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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Reddit and Aliexpress eat all hobbies. All hobbies are actually about learning reddit and China.
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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”

