I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make light of a medical condition. I was using the term in a way I commonly hear it used as slang, but I understand some people may suffer from it and I should be more sensitive.
I recently wrote an article [1] about Artaic, a company that uses pick-and-place robots to build massive tile mosaics -- including backlit and QR code mosaics. They put individual tiles (1-inch or half-inch) onto an adhesive backing (12"x12") to ease installation. Swapping out the ceramic or glass tiles for currency would be a cool modification!
Ignoring the time commitment this has got to be cheaper than poor quality laminate and it looks amazing. That said, it would have been pretty cool to just do a quality tile mosaic on the floor considering the writer is a mosaic artist.
Nope, In the US it is illegal to deface currency for any reason.
----------------------------------
Title 18 United States Code, Section 331
Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes,
falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of
the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current
or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States;
or
Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells,
or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the
United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced,
mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five
years, or both
----------------------------------
Someone should point this out to the people who make the penny squishing machines for tourists that they had on the San Francisco docks when I visited many moons ago. Does anybody know if they are still there at all?
It took me a while to parse that statement as well. My thought on the appropriateness (or not) for HN was that it was a moderately disruptive way to produce what is likely a durable floor finish.
I'm not on a tear to get stuff like this killed, but I worry about how much stuff like it is out there if we let it in. It's getting close to imgur territory.
Interesting, a US cent coin is 0.75" in diameter, so .442 sq inches, which means a square foot (144 sq inches) would have not quite 1000 pennies (998 if they were perfectly edge to edge. So $10 sq ft for floor covering. Suggests their kitchen floor is about 32 sq feet :-).
Seems like it would be pretty durable, and if you didn't do the whole 'line them all up so they are looking the same way thing' then could put them in pretty quickly.
Did you take account of the fact that hexagonal circle packing is ~90% dense in calculating the cost per square foot?
Edit: doing the math myself, I get 295 pennies to the square foot (0.906*144/0.4417 = 295). Not sure how you got 998, unless you somehow digit-reversed 144.
Your right I screwed up the math in my head I was holding the .375 squared (about .141) and dividing 144 by that rather than the area. That makes the economics a lot better, as a straight up division its only on the order of $3.25 a square foot and certainly as durable as tile in that regard.
Now he just needs to wait for the economy to collapse, so that he can do matching banknote wallpaper. Or get some of the old billion dollar notes in from Zimbabwe.
Sounds like the Flying Saucer - except the one in Addison, TX has the back of the bar decorated with pennies behind plastic. I always thought it looked fantastic, and will be doing that to something if I ever own a house.
34 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread[1] http://www.hizook.com/blog/2012/08/02/artaic-revolutionizing...
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1405/is-it-legal-to...
---------------------------------- Title 18 United States Code, Section 331
Whoever fraudulently alters, defaces, mutilates, impairs, diminishes, falsifies, scales, or lightens any of the coins coined at the mints of the United States, or any foreign coins which are by law made current or are in actual use or circulation as money within the United States; or
Whoever fraudulently possesses, passes, utters, publishes, or sells, or attempts to pass, utter, publish, or sell, or brings into the United States, any such coin, knowing the same to be altered, defaced, mutilated, impaired, diminished, falsified, scaled, or lightened -
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both ----------------------------------
Please point to the part of the kitchen where the fraud is occurring.
OP is saying that this is too similar to cat pictures. I think that it is worlds better than cat pictures, but still not relevant to the HN community.
Thanks for the explanation.
Seems like it would be pretty durable, and if you didn't do the whole 'line them all up so they are looking the same way thing' then could put them in pretty quickly.
Edit: doing the math myself, I get 295 pennies to the square foot (0.906*144/0.4417 = 295). Not sure how you got 998, unless you somehow digit-reversed 144.
A restaurant did this at a cost of $2.50/sq foot a few years ago (they apparently used more spacing): http://www.notcot.com/archives/2009/06/floor-of-pennie.php
Not really relevant but they also have over 100 beers on tap and the ceiling is lined with tap handles.