4 ms·
Not exactly job related but... Just today while talking to my girlfriend about making plushies, we stumbled on the question of how to make ball plushies. Upon r
by icegreentea 15y ago
Not exactly job related but... Just today while talking to my girlfriend about making plushies, we stumbled on the question of how to make ball plushies. Upon realization that you get cones from flat sheets by cutting a triangular wedge, resulting in a cylinder's whose radius changes at a constant rate (and therefore a cone), we realized to get a dome, we would just have to get a wedge who's sides have the right curve (we're still working it out... got kinda distracted, intuitively feels like a tan or something).
Math pops up in the darnest places (queue Donald Duck in Mathemagical Land).
- stcredzero 15y agoA friend of mine once did the calculus to create his own juggling ball pattern. What he found is that there are all sorts of factors (like the changing stretchiness of the cloth versus direction and details of doing the stitches) that were too hard to calculate, which left lots of room for engineering. (Making a lot of examples, and tweaking the design.)
- wnoise 15y agoDomes have non-zero curvature. Cones have zero curvature. You can't do anything as simple as a cut to get a dome starting from flat material.