Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Name Rectification: Transparent Wood

In reality it's acrylic using a wood-derived composite reinforcement. The lignin-free non-wood functions essentially the same way rebar functions in concrete.

Cellulose-reinforced acrylic or something of that nature. 

It's a hilariously expensive way to get low-quality acrylic that is as strong as a somewhat thicker piece of acrylic. I won't say it's definitely useless, because there's more things under heaven and earth etc, but I will say the applications are... non-obvious.

Also since it is really cellulose-reinforced acrylic, rather than deriving it from wood it would be better to polymerize cellulose directly or some other more direct method of stringing the stuff through the acrylic.

 

To get transparent wood properly, you need genetic engineering. Give trees the ability to grow using acrylic directly. I'm sure there's an enzyme for that, but nobody knows what it looks like, nor does anyone know how to code the regulation tags.
Have to give up control. I broadly call this chaos tech. Most humans are primarily interested in demonstrating as much control as they possibly can, which conflicts with the demands of the technology. 


P.S. That above linked guy is at least doing the chemistry more or less properly. E.g. by showing his failures he models how to deal with failure, and secondly showcases the errors that lead to failure, that someone may learn not to fuck up so much.

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