From: Charles Norton (cnorton@ncpleasing.com)
Date: Thu Mar 24 2005 - 22:23:11 EET
Einstein also said "The difference between genius and stupidity is that
genius has limits".
Charlie Norton
(513) 333-0221, x1
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi [mailto:owner-rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi] On
Behalf Of Andres Chamorro III
Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 9:32 AM
To: rp-ml@rapid.lpt.fi
Cc: Adrian Bowyer
Subject: Re: [rp-ml] New machines could turn homes into small factories
(My 2 cents..)]
Albert Einstein once said, "If at first, the idea is not absurd, then
there is no hope for it".
Andres
On Thu, 24 Mar 2005 12:24:33 +0000, Adrian Bowyer <A.Bowyer@bath.ac.uk>
wrote:
>
> Bathsheba Grossman wrote:
>
> > That's not exactly my experience of how tolerance failures tend to
> > work; I doubt it's a general principle that they fall on a bell
curve.
> > If they did, a complex part might have 20 dimensions, and if one of
> > them happens to be right, you'd still rolling the dice on the other
> > 19.
> >
> > I'd bet a dollar that the author of that paper has never operated a
> > milling machine. A vertical mill with all the trimmings is the
> > closest thing I can think of to a large-scale self-replicating
> > machine, and think about what would happen if you took a Harbor
> > Freight mill and tried to make another one.
>
> Not only do I operate one, I own one. It's in my workshop at home.
> In all this talk of accuracy, remember this: people have been making
objects
> accurate to within the wavelength of light since medieval times using
nothing
> fancier than a knife edge and a candle...
>
> > There are only a few types of self-replicating machine in the known
> > universe, all biomolecular: DNA-based life, RNA-based machines
> > contingent on the "RNA world" hypothesis proving out, and parasitic
> > prions if the "protein-only" hypothesis is true.
> >
> > If I were building such a machine, I'd be looking very hard at the
way
> > analog and digital mechanisms interact in those systems. There's an
> > entropic principle that has to be overcome, and the way DNA does it
is
> > an awesome hack; any other such machine would have to be built
around
> > an equally awesome hack. DNA relies on the uniform nature of
> > elementary particles, and therefore its existence may not imply a
> > useful model for larger scales. If this problem did turn out to be
> > soluble on the macro scale, that would have consequences far beyond
> > having cheap SLA in every household.
>
> Hmmm. Doesn't human engineering as a whole also constitute a
self-replicating
> machine?
>
> Yours
>
> Adrian
>
> http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensab
>
>
-- _________________ Andres Chamorro III 98 Boston Ave. Medford, MA 02155 V: 508.566.3499 F: 508.405.0134
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