Decorative gourds are basically pumpkins without muscles, their skin lies flat in their bones. This makes them look disgusting and beautiful at the same time. They grow like pumpkins off the end of pretty stiff vines, and their shape shows you how they were sitting on the ground as they grew, due to the influence of gravity.

So have a robot arm that holds the budding gourds directly up in the air and slowly turns it so that you can use gravity like a slow knife to sculpt the gourd into any shape you want — to make beautiful mistakes — to experiment.
-- JesusHChrist, Oct 18 2017

The idea is preheated, albeit on a redwood-sized scale https://www.e-readi...The_Smoke_Ring.html
Search for references to " burl " [normzone, Oct 18 2017]

I was waiting for this to segue into yet another plan for world domination by and for the [JHC] penis, but it didn't. [+]
-- pertinax, Oct 18 2017


I think the shape of gourds is largely determined by genetics rather than by gravity, but you might get some interesting results if you grew them in a clinostat.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 18 2017


Clearly we need a gourd experiment on the ISS.
-- RayfordSteele, Oct 18 2017


computer: mouse: cord IS the logical category - I don't know why it didn't occur to me.
-- normzone, Oct 18 2017


Because if you could really get accurate information from that stem, as you wave the gourd through the air, it is deforming slightly and that could make it a 3D mouse.
-- JesusHChrist, Oct 18 2017


If you stuck a feather in it and rolled it around it would fly also.
-- normzone, Oct 18 2017


Don't encourage him.
-- MaxwellBuchanan, Oct 18 2017


You could also insert a tube that introduces low but steady nitrogen gas under pressure, during the growing period, for larger and rounder gourds.
-- mylodon, Oct 18 2017


True <norm>
-- JesusHChrist, Oct 18 2017



random, halfbakery