Thu 27 Oct 2005
Been seated at a wobbly table? Don’t shim it with your napkin, rotate it!
Posted by Joe White under Random News
A physicist at CERN in Geneva has come up with a mathematical proof that shows that you can achieve a stable position simply by rotating the table. Of course, sometimes it isn’t possible or desirable to rotate it, but know that it can be done
[hat tip - Boing Boing]
One Response to “ Been seated at a wobbly table? Don’t shim it with your napkin, rotate it! ”
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October 28th, 2005 at 7:27 am
I think his constraints are too great: “We prove that a perfect four-feet square table, posed in a continuous irregular ground with a local slope of at most 15 degrees can be put in equilibrium on the ground by a ‘rotation’ of less than 90 degrees.” I’ve often found that the problem is the table itself, not the ground. Also “continuous irregular ground with a local slope of at most 15 degrees ” seems pretty restrictive, but maybe this is more common than I’d think. Let’s go eat out a lot and see how useful this proof is in the real world instead of the ivory tower of academia