The Ig Nobel Prize-winning study about why strings get tangled got an appreciative nod in the Veritasium video about knots and knot theory. The mention moment comes at about 31:50 in the video: Of course the video is not not worth watching in its entirety: The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to […]
The field of banana-string detection has taken a big or little step with publication of this new study: “Target detection of banana string and fruit stalk based on YOLOv3 deep learning network,” Rihong Zhang, Xiaomin Li, Lixue Zhu, Maokun Zhong, and Yihua Gao, in 2021 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and […]
“Leibniz’s recipe for determining logarithms in this way is delightfully simple and can easily be carried out in practice using, for example, a cheap necklace pinned to a cardboard box with sewing needles.” So wrote Viktor Blåsjö, in the essay “How to Find the Logarithm of Any Number Using Nothing But a Piece of String,” […]
When is a knot not a knot? • Take a piece of string. Tangle it, and thread it though itself, in any way you choose. Glue the ends together. You may well have created a KNOT. • Take a piece of string. Glue the ends together, tangle it, and thread it though itself, in any […]
A wet string works, for sending information from one computer to another, says a new experiment. This adds to the list of low-tech ways to move data, the most lively method involving a hungry snail. The string experiment is reported on the RevK’s Rants web site, with the headline “It’s official, ADSL works over wet […]
If you are a dentist, or have ever met one, hark back with us to the days of yesteryear, as recounted in this treatise: “The String and the Doorknob: Profile of a Popular Approach to Dental Extraction,” Eric K. Curtis, Journal of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery, vol. 48, 1990, pp. 1084-1092. In the writeup, details […]
Dorian Raymer explains, in this video, his Ig Nobel Prize-winning research about how and why bunches of string will inevitably become tangled: