Talk:2865: The Wrong Stuff
the design is very timeghost-esque 172.71.167.165 21:42, 8 December 2023 (UTC)Bumpf
personal similarity
NOTE: people are misleadingly adding comments below this lengthy topic. Looks like the interface is defaulting to that.
I made a post to the derelict cypherpunks list right before this about ghost visits. It’s notable because I used to post to the same derelict list about making a spaceship out of tissue paper, specifically pursuing the wrong materials in response to a ghostlike experience preventing me from effective work (which i now understand as a dissociative disorder).
Thu Dec 7 20:57:06 PST 20232249
a ghost visits you
you: “oh! a ghost! are you a spirit of a person who is now dead?”
the ghost looks sheepish
ghost: “i am a psychological result of something you went through!”
the ghost grins, trying to put on a great-looking appearance
you: “awww frack”
the ghost stops grinning and looks crestfallen and depressed
ghost: “i want to repeat something that perturbed you from the thing you went through, over and over … would this be okay with you?” [translator may have taken liberties with this line]
you: “oh no that would um be really perterburing! um !!”
ghost [looking sheepish again]: “um !”
you and the ghost both put handkerchiefs over your mouths to represent politeness or something and you go for a walk down a lane in your town called “memory la—
Mon Jan 30 18:35:20 PST 2023[crazy][spam]
let’s reduce the tension and go back to a concept spammed to this list before
let’s make a space rocket out of tissue paper! or s9mething similarly incredibly flimsy like cobwebs or dustballs.
[crazy][spam]
- we can use an nlp bot to scrape the internet for materials
properties and perform the rough design
- we can make bots that replicate like a reprap generator to collect
the materials
Model Spaceship Made Of Snow
I'm guessing we can make it out of ice when it is really cold. We
could press or melt the snow to make it into ice, and cast, cut, or
assemble and fuse parts into a spaceship shape.
Rocket fuel could melt the ship when it burns, maybe need a way to
cool it significantly, but with a model maybe it could hold compressed
air somehow? it does seem hard
how to make spaceship out of ice?
so, ice is likely to melt when traveling at escape velocity, maybe
imagining a huge buffer around the ship: like, design it to melt its
exterior. big wide giant spaceship near ground, little tiny spaceship
at edge of atmosphere
The Questioning Spam
A worker was building a rocket ship out of grass.
Questioner: "Why don't you use, I dunno, like, steel and ceramic
plates, to make your rocket ship, rather than grass?"
Worker: "It's just a hobby project."
Questioner: "Why don't you make it a serious proiject?"
Worker: "I really have more time than money, honestly."
…
[ot][spam][crazy] holding community goals
stone soup is kind of a puzzle, no? like building a spaceship out of
wet noodles
Making a Spaceship out of Wet Noodles in C
It's hard to make a C program that builds a spaceship out of wet noodles.
But, at the end of the day, it's down to your free time,
experience+ingenuity, and the libraries you have available to call
into.
[spam][ot][rambling][crazy] Building a Spaceship Out Of Something Ridiculously Weak and Flimsy
I like to daydream around hard challenges.
I don't know how to build a spaceship. But maybe it would be fun to try.
To make it harder, let's make it out of only something ridiculously hard to
do it with, like toilet paper, or leaves, or old newspapers.
I don't know what kinds of problems one runs into when building a
spaceship, but when I start planning it I think the first problem will be
getting something to go really, really far against gravity.
Another problem I hear about is burning up as you accelerate through the
atmosphere.
I imagine aiming what direction you go in is pretty hard too.
I'm thinking I'm probably okay with there being some guidance computers and
robotics on the craft, but that we would _mostly_ make it out of tissue
paper or whatnot. Making computers out of tissue paper can be considered a
separate problem, for now.
One way to make tissue paper move is to burn it. Could we use a
tissue-paper-fueled rocket to accelerate the craft? Almost certainly not,
but doing the calculations for this could inform what thing to consider
next.
I have no idea how to make a rocket, or how rockets work, but I imagine
that when you burn something, it turns into gas, and the expansion of the
gas is much larger than the thing you burned, so if you direct this gas in
some direction or another, it might push something further. I dunno. Like
getting up from a chair because of a fire you sat in. Maybe? I dunno.
Maybe I'll briefly websearch for "solid fuel rocket" and see what I get.
… the post goes on and I then replied with more things for a few days. Rereading it turns out I was playing with my psychological triggers from social influence AI, and it’s hard to continue cause my amnesia and dissociation is kicking in (might try a different part not sure). I think of this xkcd as about me though!
172.71.254.32 21:48, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
It's probably worth a mention that the title is most likely a reference to "The Right Stuff" (film). 172.69.247.65 22:57, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
The title is probably a reference to "The Right Stuff" (TV Series) instead, since the title's unusual capitalization aligns with the series's title's font style but not the film's title font. 172.71.146.43 00:04, 9 December 2023 (UTC)
- I don't understand why the Trojan Horse is considered an example of building something out of the wrong stuff. Within the legendary context of the Trojan War, the Trojan Horse succeeded at exactly what it was built to do, namely, transport the Greek warriors into Troy so they could sack the city. An actual horse made out of skin and muscle and bones would not have been able to fit the Greek warriors inside.[citation needed] That's like saying that Lunar Module Eagle from Apollo 11 was built of the wrong material because it didn't have feathers. --172.70.127.57 06:34, 9 December 2023 (UTC)