The Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians (SPRAT) certifies all three levels of Rope Access Technician. The organization has spiffy logo: Rope access technicians are technicians who hang off or on ropes, on purpose, for reasons other than burglary, generally involving buildings, monuments, and such. You might wonder who maintains and manages the Certification Requirements […]
Tag: rope
A physics discovery: Why Clothes Don’t Fall Apart
The UK-based team that shared an Ig Nobel Physics Prize in 2012 for exploring the physics of why ponytails (the hair style) are shaped like pony tails, has now looked into a different question from everyday life: Why clothes don’t fall apart. They published a study about it: “Why Clothes Don’t Fall Apart: Tension Transmission […]
Ig Nobel winner Audoly on the physics of the lasso
Basile Audoly — who shared the 2006 Ig Nobel prize for physics with Sebastien Neukirch for insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces — has a new study about the physics of rodeo lassoing. The new paper is: “An introduction to the mechanics of the lasso,” Pierre-Thomas Brun, Neil […]
Tightropes and slacklines – the math(s)
A good number of people would probably find walking across a tightrope or slackline a decidedly non-trivial task. If it helps, assistance is at hand in the form of a comprehensive mathematical analysis which looks not only at the effect of the human on the rope, but also the rope on the human – in […]
Grace Murray Hopper interviewed
Grace Murray Hopper, computer pioneer (and by many accounts the person who coined the term “bug” in relation to computers), interviewed by David Letterman in 1986, not very long after she retired from the US Navy: (Thanks to investigator Anusree Banerjee for bringing this to our attention.) UPDATE: The video has been yanked from YouTube. […]