ASME, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, is running a quiz about the Ig Nobel Prizes. Here is their introduction: Quiz: The Ig Nobel Prize and Odd Research Not all research is created equal. Try this quiz on the Ig Nobel Prize that calls out what appears to be silly. The Nobel Prize may be […]
Mathematics students learn (unless they are not really students) why people should not try to divide by zero. In this video, CuriousMarc tries to divide by zero on a big, old mechanical calculator: (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) In this video, Khan Academy explains, for those who don’t know or […]
Will you watch an industrial/art video about mechanical carrot peeling? Only you can answer that question. Here is a video of that kind:
Here’s a year-end tiny collection comprising a cow and lots of cockroaches. The cow is mechanical, caught here on video (Thanks to Rachel Ehrenberg for bringing it to our attention): [vimeo]15577865[/vimeo] The University of California supplies this description: Cow: the digestive system’s complex mysteries: Nova Jiang is an artist and UCLA alumna who makes work […]
There’s a new advance in the effort to write prose without any direct involvement of a human brain. Until recently, writing was thought to be a skill that required at least some levels of understanding. The first giant breakthrough was Professor Philip M. Parker‘s automatic book-writing machine, which has produced several hundred thousand books (and […]
Today’s physics exercise is to calculate the mechanical advantage of in this road-roving treadmill: