TMNTing Wikipedia Pages: A Twitter Account

This is the right type of Twitter account. ;)

Pseudo-random number samplinghttps://t.co/bTMMPJhmlL pic.twitter.com/Sh8cScM65b

— Wiki Titles Singable to TMNT Themesong (@wiki_tmnt) December 19, 2019

(Tip of the cap to Evelyn Lamb.)

Dungeons & Dragons Enters the National Toy Hall of Fame!

Dungeons & Dragons has entered the National Toy Hall of Fame!

The swing and Little People also entered the Toy Hall of Fame this year. I previously blogged about the 2016 finalists.

2016 Finalists for Toy Hall of Fame

The 2016 finalist nominees for the Toy Hall of Fame have been announced. Wow, I need to choose between Transformers and Dungeons & Dragons. Those are clearly the best two in my book, and I am definitely going with D & D.

(Tip of the cap to Dungeons and Dragons Memes.)

Spirograph for MATLAB

Wow. This Spirograph GUI for MATLAB brings back some memories from my childhood. According to the Wikipedia entry, it is still in production. And of course I am sure that you are all shocked --- shocked, I say! --- that I liked drawing with this toy when I was a child.

(Tip of the cap to whoever posts for MATLAB on Facebook.)

Advanced Lego Devices

This article details (and shows videos of) several advanced lego devices. Very cool! (To be honest, I just looked at the still pictures, but I am sure the videos are cool too.)

(Tip of the cap to Jeff Mach.)

'Heroes of Science' Action Figures

Sadly, these 'Heroes of Science' action figures are not real. I also don't agree with some of the choices, but let's not quibble.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Tales from the ArXiv: It's Slinky

As a matter of principle, I approve of articles on the topic of the physics of toys. Here is a new one on the Slinky. (I believe that Mark Levi wrote a paper or two on the Slinky many years ago.) Here are some details:

Title: Modeling a Falling Slinky

Authors: R. C. Cross, M. S. Wheatland

Abstract: A slinky is an example of a tension spring: in an unstretched state a slinky is collapsed, with turns touching, and a finite tension is required to separate the turns from this state. If a slinky is suspended from its top and stretched under gravity and then released, the bottom of the slinky does not begin to fall until the top section of the slinky, which collapses turn by turn from the top, collides with the bottom. The total collapse time t_c (typically ~0.3 s for real slinkies) corresponds to the time required for a wave front to propagate down the slinky to communicate the release of the top end. We present a modification to an existing model for a falling tension spring (Calkin 1993) and apply it to data from filmed drops of two real slinkies. The modification of the model is the inclusion of a finite time for collapse of the turns of the slinky behind the collapse front propagating down the slinky during the fall. The new finite-collapse time model achieves a good qualitative fit to the observed positions of the top of the real slinkies during the measured drops. The spring constant k for each slinky is taken to be a free parameter in the model. The best-fit model values for k for each slinky are approximately consistent with values obtained from measured periods of oscillation of the slinkies.

Lego Transformers Tetris Gameboy!

I so want this custom-made toy.

(Tip of the cap to Very Demotivational.)

Schrödinger's Cat Executive Decision Maker

This particular geek toy is pretty damn awesome.

If the shipping cost to get this to the UK weren't so expensive (it costs about the same as the object itself), I would have purchased it. Se la vie.

(Tip of the cap to Jed Yang.)

How did this toy get to market?

Shouldn't somebody have noticed something odd before this toy was made available to the public? I'm just saying.

Flawed Design

Um, who designed this? That's a bit of a fail...

The subtitle, however, is excellent.

Lego Printer

This printer made out of Lego is seriously awesome.

(Tip of the cap to Puck Rombach.)

"Stick" joins National Toy Hall of Fame

In very important news, the stick has become one of three new inductees into the National Toy Hall of Fame. The full list of members includes the Atari 2600, Silly Putty, Monopoly, Scrabble, G.I. Joe, and Cardboard Box.

The CNN article praised the stick as "a universal plaything powered by a child's imagination." (I would argue that it can also be powered by an adult's imagination, but let's not go there---though that kind of makes it even more universal...)

How to choose between parallel sessions (+ coffee bars and toys!)

The next set of parallel sessions starts in just over an hour. I was deciding between two of them in which I was interested, with an a priori minor preference for one (call it Session A, even though that's not it's real name) versus another one (similarly, call it Session B). I was mildly more interested in A versus B, but Session A is in a room that is horribly ventiliated and gets fucking hot (as I found out yesterday), whereas the room for Session B is much bigger and has air condition. Conclusion: I'm going to attend Session B. A major reason I've been feeling really tired this conference and not exploring as much as usual has been the hot, humid weather and Hellish lecture rooms are seriously exacerbating the problem.

I am writing this from a coffee bar at the university at which the conference is being held. I had meant to try it earlier but finally go to it today. (In fact, I was going to hang out here last night after the last lecture, but I was tired so I went back to the hostel and crashed.) Their latte is only ok, but I was able to get them to make it iced without a problem! Between that and liking the coffee bar environment, this definitely improves my mood. (Being able to camp in a cool coffee bar is one of the great pleasures in life! It's such a simple thing, but I value it a great deal.)

As for the toys, I'll hopefully have more to say on Friday. Michael Berry was mentioning during the session this morning (as part of his comment to a talk) that there is scientific toy shop near the downtown area of Zurich (where the conference is being held) that he says is really awesome and will apparently do demos of lots of their stuff. In particular, they supposedly have a very good (though very expensive) Chladni plate, which are really hard to get to work in practice. The store is only open on Fridays and Saturdays, but it's something like a 10-15 minute walk from two of the train stations to which I've been going anyway. My flight on Saturday is going to occur before it opens, but I'll make time on Friday to go there. We'll see if I can afford anything they have, but that seems like my best opportunity for me to find a souvenir I actually want. (And I'm all over cool demos whether or not I actually buy anything.)

I hope to be able to write more about scientific toys later...