Aluminum foil (2021)

dofm•8 minutes ago

Photographers and cinematographers are like: ohhh let me sit you down and tell you all about my love of blackwrap.

Aluminium foil is amazing stuff. Aluminium foil adhesive tape, in particular, is incredibly useful.

Being a multi-domain kind of geek my toolbox also contains mylar tape and fashion tape (or "tit tape" as a friend calls it) but the aluminium foil tape has proved to have many useful applications.

0-_-0•29 minutes ago

This made me wonder about a 3D printer alternative that builds things by folding a thin sheet of metal into arbitrary shapes instead of extruding filament.

delichon•about 1 hour ago

I appreciated the paean to aluminum foil in Project Hail Mary where (spoilers) the hero uses it as bowling pins and to reproduce astrophage to eventually save two worlds. It's right up there in the pantheon of useful things with duct tape.

t1234s•about 1 hour ago

This was on S01E01 of How It's Made. Probably one of the best segments in the shows history.

vessenes•about 1 hour ago

I was enjoying the ADHD hyper focus writing, kind of following along, then:

  > If we figure that the foil can meaningfully change direction every 20 μm, then we might think of an aluminum-foil machine as being made of “moving parts” on the order of 1000 μm² (50 μm × 20 μm), 1000 “parts” per square millimeter of foil; a roll of kitchen aluminum foil is enough to fabricate some 4 billion “parts”. A bootstrapping compiler might require 100 000 parts and thus a square centimeter of aluminum foil, cut and folded around into a shape a couple of millimeters in diameter. If it were doing only one thing at a time, and needed 10 seconds to construct/assemble each moving part, it would take about 12 days to recompile itself. This is probably adequately fast, barely, but probably not adequately robust against errors. It would probably be better to design it to have more parts and do many things at once, enabling it to be faster and correct errors.

Um, what? I'd like to see a sketch of this 100,000 part compiler very much. I have no idea what he/she is talking about here, in the slightest. But I am intrigued!

wgd•38 minutes ago

I've read a lot of his other writings so that context might be informing my reading here but it sounds like he's pretty straightforwardly discussing the potential of aluminum foil as a uniform-feedstock-slash-construction-material for a hypothetical self-reproducing microfabricator.

proee•about 1 hour ago

Im interested in using honeycomb aluminum panels for some projects but curious why its so freaking expensive?

secretslol•28 minutes ago

Another thing not mentioned on there about aluminium foil is how clean it is. We work with a laminar flow hood and pull a fresh layer of foil anytime we are working to create a clean base to work on. I can guarantee you that if you run a swab over a fresh sheet of foil and smear it onto sterile nutrient agar that it won't grow anything - that said, we use costco foil which is thicker gauge and not the budget thinner stuff which is definitely inferior.

IshKebab•about 1 hour ago

This is pretty much just rambling about how amazing aluminium foil is because it's so thin and that might enable all sorts of wonderful imaginary applications. Very HN. It's aluminium foil.

post-it•40 minutes ago

That's the neat part though, isn't it? It's a product that's so good that there's no everyday alternatives to it. I was researching cat litter options recently and cat owners do a lot of thinking and talking about litter, because there's a variety of different materials, none of which are solidly better than all others in all situations. But aluminium foil is so good that we don't even think about it, because it's by far the best product for every application that we use it for.

nyeah•12 minutes ago

What's really thin is the oxide layer on the surface

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anodizing

When exposed to air at room temperature, or any other gas containing oxygen, pure aluminium self-passivates by forming a surface layer of amorphous aluminium oxide 2 to 3 nm thick,[4] which provides very effective protection against corrosion. Aluminium alloys typically form a thicker oxide layer, 5–15 nm thick, but tend to be more susceptible to corrosion.

Forgeties79•37 minutes ago

You sound like someone who hasn't explored the upper limits of what aluminum foil can solve!

whynotmaybe•13 minutes ago

Has a kid, my mom used to pack my lunch in aluminium foil and everyday was a challenge of trying to make the perfect aluminium ball and throw it in the trashcan[1] on the first try!

1. Recycling was a vague concept in the 80s & 90s

Aluminum foil (2021)

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