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Monday, June 21, 2004
Jack on 
| | On the way out of Big Five on Friday I saw a toy in a bubble pack called Astrojax on sale for $7.99. It looked cool, so I bought one for my kid. The thing now lives in his pocket. All this weekend at the Live Oak Festival, he walked around, making all kinds of fun moves happen with an apparatus that is, by first acquaintence, nothing more than three balls on a strong — but is, in fact, much more. |
| | After a little experimentation, the kid had the balls dancing in the air... orbiting in bounces and loops, alone or together, in countless complex patterns. |
| | Astrojax was invented by the American physicist Larry Shaw. While still at graduate school Shaw discovered the basic principle of Astrojax while playing with hex nuts and dental floss in a physics lab. |
| | Intrigued by the complex patterns this simple arrangement created, he started to develop the idea. What first looked quite simple was actually very hard to solve mathematically. It took almost two years and hundreds of prototypes before Shaw decided on a model and had the principle patented. |
| | Okay, right now the kid is eager for me to look up the other cool thing he discovered this weekend: tie-dying t-shirts and painting on silk, courtesy of goods from Dharma Trading Co. |
| | His only frustration at the came from the absence of wi-fi there. It was hard explaining that for once the old man wanted to get away from The Connected World. |
| | I will now turn the non-tech cool stuff (NTCS) baton back over to The Master who writes about this stuff every day: Bernie DeKoven at DeepFun. |
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