monotremata

Travel moves wouldn't work, because the wire core has to be continuous.

I think the best bet is to design a model with a cavity that the wire can snap into, and add the EL wire after the print is finished.

Yeah. Honestly I was more interested on whether it could actually work, rather than whether I could sell it. It'd be easier to sell than to actually evaluate :P

Of course! One of the only things I actually did do on that project was get a box of Mr. Sketch markers and look at which ones might be usable as highlighters. The main reason it fell apart was that I didn't really know enough people who did highlighting as a study technique. I knew they existed because I kept buying used textbooks that turned out to be covered in highlighting, but it must be a relatively niche group that does it.

Y'know, I had an idea about this back when I was in college: scented highlighters. Use a few different scents for different categories of information, and test whether it improved recall over using regular highlighters. I never tried to follow through on it.

I don't know. I think "toot" also plays on the English expression "toot your own horn." I think it's more playful and self-effacing, and that its violation of what would be considered acceptable in corporate branding terms is part of its appeal as a rejection of those aspects which came to control and ultimately corrupt its predecessor.

I mean, how much dumber is that than "tweeted"? We just get numb to it eventually.

I think by "close to the sun" they meant "similar to the sun" rather than "proximate to the sun." In other contexts this word substitution wouldn't cause confusion (e.g. "a plantain is pretty close to a banana" would not lead most people to look around them for the subjects) but the context of space makes this word choice a little prone to this confusion.

I really didn't take that as their implication. Apartments in New York are often not that comfortable--they can be cramped and cluttered, and not even all that private thanks to thin walls and sometimes even shared bathrooms. So even an introvert with that kind of apartment tends not to spend much time in it apart from sleeping. Instead they'll go to libraries or museums or parks or makerspaces or cafes. It's surprisingly easy to be alone in public in New York.

I think that's all they meant. I see how you could take their comment differently, but I think they were being sincere. Actually spending a lot of time in their tiny dismal one-room apartment with no natural light is actually a mistake that some introverts make when they first move to New York, and it's genuinely depressing to do that.

A caveat to all this is that I've only spent very brief periods in New York, and I do find it overwhelming, partly for this reason. But yeah. I don't think that person meant to condemn spending time alone; they were just saying that treating a New York apartment like a solitary confinement cell isn't good for your mental health regardless of your socialization tendencies.

The Cambrian had a bunch of strange creatures like this. There was the Opabinia, which had five eyes and a mouth on an arm. And there was the Anomalocaris, which is kinda similar to the new one they discovered (at least from the perspective of a non-scientist just looking at the artists' renditions), but with only two eyes and an order of magnitude bigger.

It sounds to me like it's pretty similar to how home oxygen concentrators work, but with an MOF instead of a zeolite, and driving out the adsorbed material via increased temperature rather than decreased pressure. MOFs are pretty comparable to zeolite in cost, and both can be used as molecular sieves, as in this case. Maybe you can find a video on oxygen concentrators that would help you understand it?

One difference here is that in the oxygen concentrator, the output product is the air, but with the nitrogen sequestered out; here, the output product is the water sequestered from the air. But this leads me to think that maybe this tech could also actually be used for air dehumidification, which could drive down the energy use of air conditioners. That could be another big win, since air conditioning is a major use of fossil fuel energy and contributes significantly to climate change, which is part of what's driving the drinking water shortages in the first place.

Oh, that's a thought, I'm not sure how the strain gauges factor in.

I can't find very good images of the bed mechanism in the machine, but it looks to me like there's a separate piece for the machine that mounts the nut for the leadscrew to the bed. The easiest way to make it more adjustable might be to design and print a replacement for this part that allows you to use a screw to offset this connection slightly. You could probably get away with just making the front two adjustable and leaving the back one fixed.