Friday, December 30, 2016

Use 3D printer as a plotter/cutter

My 3D printer is fun, but I like to extend functionality, so I designed some additional snap-on parts that lets me also use it as a pen plotter and cutter. For instance, I had it draw a butterfly coloring sheet on a blank T-shirt for our four-year-old to color with fabric markers. Here are instructions.

4 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

Dr. Pruss,
This is not on topic, so please answer at your convenience:

is the PSR really just an unjustified inductive inference from common occurrences to an uncommon occurrence? Here is my problem: things may have explanations for their existence, but that seems to only be the case because they are made sense of through an occurrence of the reconfiguration of matter (or some other natural process). So to say that everything must have an "explanation" for its existence just because every contingent fact is made sense of through the reconfiguration of matter (or some other natural process) is to make an unjustified logical leap. As far as "explanations" go in human experience, all we really know of are things being made sense of through reference to the occurrences of natural processes such as the reconfiguration of matter.

Here is why I think this is crucial:

When we say we have an explanation of the existence of a wooden chair, we're really saying we have an explanation of the state of the composites that it is composed of (in this case, wood pieces being rearranged to fit together that way). Thus, the proponent of the PSR is equivocating between there being explanations *of the existence of thing(s)* and there being explanations of *the state of things* in order to evince an explanation *of the existence of something* (namely, the universe)--when all we know are explanations of the states of things, not explanations of the existence of things.

But one cannot infer from a tendency some irrelevant fact! Is this not like saying, "A is true, though irrelevant to B. However, because A occurs often, B must also be the case"? Wouldn't this irrelevance between the existence of an explanation of the existence of something and the existence of explanation of the state of something (the latter being what we have evidence for) refute the Lebnizian cosmological argument?

I hope you can help me resolve this difficulty,
thanks!

Alexander R Pruss said...

An inductive argument is one of the arguments for the PSR. But it's only one of many. For some others, see http://alexanderpruss.com/papers/LCA.html

Unknown said...

I'll look into that, thanks so much!