Back in the beginning of the school year I decided to make a doorstop. I had a design idea that was too simple not to construct. Forget wedges; this was going to be compression-based. My idea involved only three parts.
compressible foam
a hard square
duct tape
It's a simple one-way mechanism. It seemed strange to me that I hadn’t seen the design before. Just apply a bit of planned duct tapping and it’s all set. Push the door far enough, and the foam does the work for you. When you want the door shut, just step on the plate. Voilà!
You can put some duct tape on the upper corners to avoid scraping. Within a few days multiple people on the floor had these in their rooms. It’s fun, easy, and helpful!
I've always enjoyed counting in binary on my fingers, where up means zero and down means one. For those of you unfamiliar with binary, the first few numbers look like this;
0 => 0
1 => 1
2 => 10
3 => 11
4 => 100
5 => 101
6 => 110
7 => 111
8 => 1000
9 => 1001
10 => 1010
ad infinitum. Notice that all the powers of two are a one followed by zeros.
One day while sitting at the piano I decided to see what it would sound like if I played the same thing; a key pressed down meant 1, and a key up meant 0. To my surprise, it was a half-decent song! Here is the sheet music done in Finale Notepad.
There are 3 main reasons this is a reasonably enjoyable song.
The first two digits provide the beat by cycling through 00, 01, 10, 11.
The highest digit provides a melody which gets higher at a decreasing rate. This causes tension, especially when the highest digit is playing a B for about half the song. Since the C, or tonic note, is right above B, your brain feels pulled toward it.
The chord "progression" created by the middle digits has a tendency to clear up as soon as things get cluttered. As you can see in the video, this is intrinsic to the nature of counting in binary. Moreover, the clearing up slows down as the song continues (eventually leading to a full mess of 01111111) which further contributes to the tension.
I decided to end with 10010101, giving a nice major chord, and more time after tension release than ending at 10000001.
What else would you do late at night with a big bag of M&Ms? Since I only had three colors (I ate the rest) I first built a hexagonal grid, just like pixels on a screen.
This perspective shows translational symmetry along same-color rows.
This perspective shows adjacent translational symmetry.
Next up, spirals; a two branch hexagonal spiral,
a four branch (though two color) square spiral,
a three branch hexagonal spiral,
and a six branch (though three color) hexagonal spiral. Notice the missing center!
Then I just mushed together the colored piles.
Third act: fractals! Sierpinski's triangle was the hardest thing, because it relies on a triangle grid, not a hexagonal one. This means that the circle M&M is taking the place of a triangle pixel, so the M&Ms couldn't be tangential to six others.
Here I add red M&Ms to the areas that would continue to gain iterations to make it clearer.
I didn't have enough M&Ms for many iterations of the next fractal, so I decided to make them decay as you go northeast.
And here I truncate some rows to fill up the picture. I love how you can see clearly that the lines start to converge to a repeating pattern! This also happens on the right side, but I didn't have enough time to make a right-aligned one. Maybe next time!
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