Category: Engineering

Five Things #9

Between the Dark and the Dark by Deji Bryce Olukotun is a powerful story about hard choices and the potentially calamitous consequences of failing to recognise cultural differences.

Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci came up with a radically different bridge design to connect the city of Constantinople with its neighbor city Galata. Now, researchers at MIT have proven that his bridge would have worked.

Daniel Crown looks at Hnefatafl, the board game at the heart of Viking culture.

Dean Burnett explains, scientifically, why “Edgy” comedy can get fu*ked.

And finally, Nick Barlow reviews the various parties’ prospects in the upcoming UK general election and concludes that things are far too volatile to give predictions about what the result of the election might be.

250,000 Dominoes

While William and I were looking for something completely unrelated, we stumbled across The Incredible Science Machine on YouTube.

250,000 Dominoes were toppled at Zeal Credit Union’s Incredible Science Machine: Game On! This event features 3 new US domino records: largest domino field, largest domino structure, and largest overall domino project in America. 19 builders from 5 countries spent 7 days (over 1,200 combined hours) building the Incredible Science Machine.

It’s spectacular

Drinkable science

A couple of months ago, Alex acquired a water filter. A small one, obviously, but a working one designed to demonstrate how water filtration works. The system has three layers — containing stones, sand and filter paper respectively — and when you pour the dirty water into the top, cleanish water drips out of the bottom.

A couple of weekends ago, we finally found the time to set it up. So set it up we did and I gave the twins a beaker of water and told them to dissolve a little bit of soil in it.

They excelled themselves.

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Then the time came to start filtering:

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Of course, there is only one way to test the results.

Cheers!

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And before anyone asks, I did cheat a little bit for the final photo. The filter certainly did a good job of clearing the water, but was nowhere near effective enough to clean the findings of a pair of determined eight-year-olds.

I removed that last bit of cloudiness by replacing the filtered water with tap water.