The Hoberman Switch Pitch Throwing Ball is a $12 toy that instantiates a dual polyhedron: every time you throw it, it turns inside-out; there's a wealth of scientific literature that explains how this works, including this open-access paper from the Journal of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures. Here's JWZ's summary: "The curved body panels that make it look like a sphere hide an internal structure that is a cube; or really, two tetrahedrons embedded in a cube; and when it its its activation energy, the tetrahedron becomes its dual, swapping faces and vertices."
Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Popular Posts
-
Looking for something to illustrate a post about crunch-time in game development, I ran into this video depicting many forms of footwear (...
-
The guest this week on my Cool Tools show is Madeline Ashby . Madeline is a science fiction writer and futurist living in Toronto. Her mos...
-
"Come and play with us, Danny... for ever, and ever, and ever." The bigscreen adaptation of Doctor Sleep , Stephen King's 201...
-
Created as a stop-gap to save undocumented migrants from getting killed by cars on Interstate 5 near the San Diego area border with Mexico,...
-
Christopher Ferguson, an off-duty cop in Algood, Tenn., going 20 miles over the speed limit, will not be inconvenienced after ramming into ...
-
Martin from Antique Typewriters writes, "The Alexis typewriter is the result of a small town inventor with the desire to design and m...
-
The Sound Archive posted a 1930s-era recording of a conversation in a British pharmacy . The received-pronunciation chatter isn't quite ...
-
Kosmic is the first human to beat Super Mario Bros in 4 minutes and 55 seconds , a time so good it is less than a second slower than the b...
-
* Government Releases N65bn For Social Investment Programme The Federal Government has directed the immediate release of N65bn for the tak...
-
In the course of any day, we encounter many different audio environments. If you are wearing earbuds, the ambient noise level can affect you...
Powered by Blogger.