Month: June 2021

One intercepted!

Something new indeed – “remote guides”. You walk up to the monitor, ask a question, below which a real-time voice recognition subtitle runs – both for you and the guide. The same kind of monitor is installed at the museum information stand. The only humans present are security staff.

In the photo behind the remote guide is the shuttle Discovery. This particular one flew to space 39 times from 1985 to 2011, covering 240,000,000 kilometers.

Didn’t I mention that I got into volleyball? Just came out of the infrared oven. About 10 cm in size. The design isn’t mine, of course, but I’ve been learning for several days in a row how to do such things in Blender from scratch using photos.

Now the phone holder is beautiful. I can post patterns on Thingiverse

I’m diving into the topic of Prohibition in the USA — it’s when they added an amendment to the constitution prohibiting all alcohol, completely, including beer. Back then, Fruit Industries was producing briquettes of dried grape juice, which, of course, being dried, contained no alcohol (by the way, the pills called “dry alcohol” sold in the USSR also contained no alcohol, as alcohols cannot be in a dry form). So, in this packaging, as stated on every corner, there was an instruction: “After dissolving in water, do not allow the mixture to stand in a dry and dark place, or it will turn into wine.” Apparently, millions of Americans hoarded these briquettes for two years and, of course, didn’t dilute them. Until the court finally banned them. It’s claimed that they were sold across the entire USA, and only in the first year a million gallons were sold (hm, dry concentrate in gallons?). But what’s interesting is that there are almost no images of these packages on the web, and absolutely no images of that very instruction. How can this be? Such things always puzzle me. Either they sold too few, or someone made up the instruction, or both. https://grapecollective.com/articles/prohibitions-grape-bricks-how-to-not-make-wine

Another piece of art. A gyroid intersected by a sphere. A gyroid is a continuous (non-self-intersecting) structure that infinitely repeats in three dimensions and lacks reflection symmetries. By the way, it’s the only such structure known to science. Essentially, it consists of sinusoids along three coordinates.

With the new 3D printer, I realized that not everything I designed could be manufactured at all. It seems obvious that the design must be not only beautiful but also technologically feasible. An example of a non-technological design is on the left. With a regular FDM printer, I knew the limitations and thought that for stereolithography, I just needed to flip the model upside down, and the errors would only be in the fact that many ideas simply wouldn’t print. Well, it turned out everything works differently there. One error just stops the printing process. That is, you only find out that it has been idly working because of an error about an hour and a half after the start of printing.

I have always had (and still have) the idea to learn how to manufacture parametric models of complex shapes, what is called “generative design” and “bio design”. This is a design where programming and art intersect. Here are some good examples https://3dheals.com/generative-design-in-healthcare-3d-printing-and-3d-bioprinting. So, with these, the complexity needs to come at the end, not the start, because there are too many situations where something goes wrong and ruins the entire model, and something inevitably does go wrong.

Here the situation has been like this for a while. The Walmart, not far from home, spans 19,000 square meters (slightly larger than the Auchan Mega in Khimki) and is operated by one cashier during the day and none at all in the evenings and at night. Several times, I found myself unable to locate anyone in the store to ask a question. Of course, there are always some people around the checkout area. If a cashier calls for help, they come running. However, they certainly don’t monitor the customers to ensure they don’t sneak out merchandise without scanning, nor do they scan items for the customers themselves.

We also have an ALDI nearby. It also has no cashiers, but neither does it have self-checkout stations. You either have to wait for a cashier or wander around the hall looking for one since they multitask quite a bit. Furthermore, there are no free bags at the checkouts in ALDI. Only purchasable bags (not disposable) are available, though they are fairly cheap. The store justifies this as a cost-saving practice that allows them to keep food prices low.

A little further away, there’s a Wegmans. We buy everything there that feels too risky to purchase from Walmart due to uncertain quality. Wegmans is a very old chain. It’s already 105 years old.

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/walmart-looks-to-remove-all-cashiers-from-stores