monotremata

Thanks! I haven't actually published these pieces yet. (Well, the slide-glide cyclide thing was published by someone else, but I think it was later taken down--there may be plans for the original mathematician to sell them?) The puzzle box is just a little too kluged together to really publish; I modified a lot of things after the fact to get it together, and I'm not comfortable publishing it in that state, but I also don't really want to put in the work to finish it. The kaleidoscope would actually be okay, but it's limited--it's a bit tricky to actually cut the mirrors, and it really only works to reflect things right up against it. I want to design an adapter for it that will hold an acrylic sphere (which you can get inexpensively from China) so that you can use it to look at scenes as well. But I haven't actually gotten around to that yet either. I'll give some thought to publishing it as-is, though.

I dunno. I agree with this to some extent for sure--I don't print a lot of the meme models that are everywhere on 3d printing forums. But there are toys that would not exist without 3d printing that I think are pretty great.

I designed a kaleidoscope that reflects things not to tile a plane, but instead to tile the surface of a disdyakis triacontahedron: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-kaleidoscope-P4atHey I had to cut the mirrors from acrylic by hand, but the templates for them and the shell that holds them in place are all 3d printed. And that thing is a pretty great toy.

This thing: https://imgur.com/gallery/make-of-cyclidial-iris-by-vergo-henry-segerman-XHN4MC0

is a math sculpture that I didn't design, just printed, but it's completely beautiful, and it's had real staying power as both a toy and a decoration. It sits out on our coffee table all the time, but my niece plays with it every time she's over here.

And this puzzle box I designed: https://imgur.com/gallery/i-made-puzzle-box-nieces-birthday-U1q408R

was a big hit with her too. I'm not sure if she'll continue to play with it long-term, but based on my own tendencies as a kid, I think she might end up investigating the mechanisms involved for some time to come.

Things that you could buy at the store you're generally better off buying at the store. But there are things it's not economical to mass produce, and it never used to be possible to design and make your own toys. Both ideosyncratic toys and bespoke toys are pretty great uses of 3d printing in my opinion.

But physical games that doesn’t require online would work fine.

Do we know this for sure? On the original Switch, when new games came out, they often would refuse to play until you updated the firmware on the console. So depending on whether they allow banned consoles to update their firmware, offline games might not work either.

I use an emulated version of my old calculator. Once you get used to RPN, nothing else really seems fit for purpose.

"If only I'd programmed the robot to be more careful what I wished for. Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!"

I dunno. I think a lot of regular people felt really strongly that it was critical that the Republicans not gain control of everything in this last election, and given how things are going at the moment, it's really hard to argue that was wrong. Which is not to say that the folks criticizing the Democrats were wrong either! The Democrats' feckless centrism and undermining of leftist candidates has been galling for years. The difficult truth is that the system has been so broken that really good people following genuine motivations were arguing on both sides of the leftist/Democrat divide. I was trying to cling to the hope that if we jollied the current system along, we could get reforms like ranked choice voting and the national vote interstate compact in place that would help shift the underlying incentives in the system away from the two-party system, but it's probably really been irreparable for years now.

Of course bullying people was never going to be an effective tactic, and I never endorsed that. But that's just regular tribalism and anger at the nonconformist. That's just regular dumb human stuff.

I mostly agree with this--I commented not long ago in another thread that the political situation in the US has convinced me not to seek any diagnosis right now. But I would say that there can be reasons that aren't specific to medication in particular that you might want a diagnosis. Sometimes there are non-medication accommodations that you can get (e.g. at work) with a diagnosis that they might not be open to giving you without one. Sometimes this can be huge! I've had times where I was in two different different locations in the same office at different times, and in one, half my field of view was taken up by a throughway where people walked across the office, and in the other my view was against a wall and behind a little corner of wall, and I got so much more work done in the second spot. It was just tremendously less overstimulating. So the prospect of being able to get that kind of issue taken seriously is part of what tempted me about seeking diagnosis.

I think this might be more what they're looking for.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/random_number.png

GNU Terry Pratchett

Yes, to an extent they do different things, but that's not what the person you were replying to was talking about. For several years there was this idea that "left-handed people are right-brain dominant, and right-handed people are left-brain dominant." And along with that went this whole astrology-tinged thing about the right brain being the creative half and the left brain being the analytic half and whatnot. It's pretty much nonsense.

The "Scunthorpe Problem" strikes again!

Not as far as I know. Practically speaking there are several disadvantages--the slots limit the light on the markings, parallax effects can mess with the reading, it requires two full surfaces sliding against each other which increases friction, etc. Plus with a regular vernier scale you can see both sides of a line, which could give you a better sense of how they line up ("vernier acuity"). But in a case like this, where precision isn't a top priority and ease of use might outrank it, I think there's an argument to be made for it.