Aluminum foil (2021)

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• Hacker News
• >Alternatively, though, it might be possible to stiffen the foil by making the equivalent of corrugated cardboard out of it, maybe using aqueous boric acid (US$1.70/kg according to Potential local sources and prices of refractory materials) or borax as the glue. The surface tension of water is ample to hold aluminum foil in place until the water dries.

  Hello Amazon? Billion dollar idea here. This needs more attention. You could have fully recyclable aluminum boxes instead of cardboard. Imagine your box supply chain literally being a circle.

  by 1970-01-01
• Cardboard is very recyclable already.
  by hilariously
• That would be hell on everybody's box-cutters (and fingers). I already cut myself too often on shipping boxes.
  by InitialLastName
• aluminum foil is generally not something you can recycle. Not that it can't be recyled, but the oxide to pure aluminum ratio is high and so you don't gain much since you need all the energy of refining in the first place to get back to something usable.

  Amazon needs stronger boxes than foil anyway. Cardboard is likely best for them.

  by bluGill
• I don't know about corrugated aluminium, but aluminium honeycomb is definitely a thing: https://www.easycomposites.co.uk/aluminium-honeycomb
  by jstanley
• 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!
  by vessenes
• It reads like a rambling of a mad scientist, but I think simply adding pictures would make this feel absolutely normal (in the crowd of other blogs featured on hn)
  by Perz1val
• I do not currently have a sketch of a matter compiler, just a rough estimate that most of its parts count would probably be RAM, and that it probably needs several kilobytes of RAM.
  by kragen
• 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.
  by wgd
• I just skimmed and read parts but I really enjoyed reading this. It's like my own handwritten notes which are just stray thoughts about a subject. Maybe I should publish more of those and I love the idea of just musing about a single thing, like Aluminum Foil (though it's very interesting stuff).
  by codazoda
• > 50¢/m² is 50¢/kWp in a solar concentrator, or 0.05¢/Wp, which is noticeably cheaper than photovoltaic cells, currently around 18¢/Wp, 360 times more expensive.

  A photovoltaic cell is a solar panel, and a piece of aluminium does nothing, am I missing something here?

  by jstanley
• I think the implication is you can use it to reflect additional light onto your photocell, improving the power output for a smaller cost than purchasing an additional cell.
  by cdu1
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
  by radialstub
• At my previous job we made >1m wide 8um thick copper foil by electroplating it onto a giant titanium drum from blue copper sulfate solution. It was quite impressive.
  by s0rce
• This was on S01E01 of How It's Made. Probably one of the best segments in the shows history.
  by t1234s
• 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 the random tapes section of my tool drawers 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.

  by dofm
• Such as?
  by mvdtnz
• My go-to "real nice when you need it" tape is to have a roll of gaffer's tape. Stuff's amazing for what it does.
  by bombcar
• 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.
  by delichon
• > A paean or pean is a song or lyric poem expressing triumph or thanksgiving

  From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paean

  by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe
• >Robert Lang recommends laminating tissue paper on one or both sides of kitchen aluminum foil to make “tissue foil”, which for years he considered the ideal origami material.

  The sculptor Kim Beaton likes to champion foil as a "metal clay" for sculpting. Keep it full of air pockets and it's easy to shape. You can use hot glue to put parts together, and then cover it in other clays for fine details and coloring. She does quick demos for tour groups at Weta Workshop in New Zealand.

  by goda90
• It's non-toxic and food safe, and yet a significant number of people on the internet still act like it's poison that will give you Alzheimer's. I wonder how many of those people touch their lips to the lid of an aluminum beverage can. Or how they might bake a lasagna at home.
  by badc0ffee
• 1) all of them

  2) glass dish

  by jagged-chisel
• I will not give up my Jiffy Pop when camping!
  by Crunchified
• Nothing against aluminum foil here, but we make lasagna at home all the time in a square ceramic baking dish.
  by georgeecollins
• That aluminum beverage can (and also tin cans) is lined with a kind of plastic, so you and food aren’t in contact with the actual aluminum in that case
  by manwe150
• how funny things work - from Napoleon serving his special guests on aluminium utensils [1] to everyone taking it for granted, even treating it as if it is toxic!

  cost and availability somehow has a negative correlation to how we treat something.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_aluminium#Early_ind...

  by rldjbpin
• I've only seen people concerned with it in antiperspirants, where it's a salt. (And to be clear, I think it's BS.)

  As with NaCl, it's at least possible that the salt and the pure-ish variant aren't quite the same thing.

  by ceejayoz
• i heard aluminum food containers are often coated with toxic liners, like plastics, bpa, and pfas. If Alzheimers isnt a risk with pure aluminum metal, id say those liners are a huge risk. Are kitchen foils coated? Im pretty sure cans are most of the time.
  by br0ceph
• You shouldn't use aluminum foil with tomato/lemon/vinegar/brined foods or as "grilling packets" (direct fire/high heat) because of leaching risk.

  There's no concern with using aluminum in most cases (with dry/non-acidic foods) but leaching is a real problem with acidic/salty/wet/high eat.

  by jacobgold