Spent the day binging Ancient Stamps Alive hosted by Idris Elba with my pecan half brother on the couch.

Ugh. If anybody can give me advice on how to get the 4D printers to behave it would be greatly appreciated. The Psychic IT dept says they promised Professor Saqqara never to touch them after the last time.

The thing is they want us to print “the object of our greatest desire” but I’m just not that materialistic.

Turns out 4D printing isn't as far-out as you'd guess. It just means printing on stretchy stuff that stretches. You still have to have a command of geometry, engineering, and electromagnetism, but it lacks the multidimensional element I was really hoping for.

However, it did help narrow my options in terms of the “the object of our greatest desire” project.

I made a sweater.

After discovering that 4D printing wasn't exactly what I was after, I found this in the back of the course catalog:

Introduction to 11D Printing

I. Course Prefix/Number: CID 27

Course Name: Introduction to 11D Printing

Credits: 2 (2 lab; 1 lecture)


II. Prerequisite

Seeing in 2D 301

III. Course (Catalog) Description

Course is an introduction to 11D printing with emphasis on operation of 11D printers and design of 11D printed parts. The Quasi-state (QS) printer will be used by students to create 11 dimensional models and prepare the models to print using extensible modeling material. Course content covers step by step approach to creating models and setting up a 11D printer.


I'm in!

I’m surprised at how simple 11D printing is. I thought it would be a lot of super hard math and hours of meditation, but it turns out there’s a bunch of tutorials to walk you through your first project.

The trick is the conceptualization. It’s not like you can just pick something in a catalog. In fact, you can’t even know what it’s going to be. If you try and make it into a “thing” you’re actually thinking of then it won’t work.

So, I placed the thing in my mind without seeing it and hit the button.

And now it's there! I can only barely see it out of the corner of my eye if I turn real fast. It's like a feather laying on some scales. Not like the Egyptian Judgement kinda scales, but snake scales. It's like a closeup of a @Quetzalcoatl.

A thing about 11D printing is that the thing you printed is always right there. No matter where you go, there it is.

By which I mean, because of its eleven dimensionality, it doesn't appear to change position no matter where you move. And at the same time it's always the same distance away from you. So no matter if I'm in the cafeteria or the gardens of lower campus, there's a @Quetzalcoatl patch just right past the corner of my eye.

It's like the thing you think you printed was already there, and you didn't make it, you just filled it in. Maybe we don't print them, but they imprint on us?

I'm keeping my eye on it. Almost.

It was time for another project in 11D printing.

This one appears to be an eye. A giant serpent eye.

Like the feather and scale, it’s always the same distance from me no matter where I go. And it’s always the same distance from the feather and scale.

I’m using dynamical cascade information decomposition to capture the underlying data clusters, and, using scale-space wave information propagation, accompanied by the inherent uncertainty relation in the information expression, I am going to measure the length of this @Quetzalcoatl.

Just so long as it stays still...

I’ve really got command of the interface now, and even developed some macros that let me mass-produce! It’s like an 11D production line I’ve got going.

Though I’m careful to keep my “intent” for each piece just off the conscious radar, there’s a remarkable similarity to all the pieces that are being created. A claw here, a scale there, a whole feather there... they’re all separate, and quite distant from each other, but all part of a whole.

It’s like the @Quetzalcoatl is all around us—the surface of the 11D topography itself. If I end up filling the whole thing in, will there be room for anything else? It’ll make a pretty sweet final project.