Stories — Technology

Slinky Toy

Posted by Remo Giuffré on

Slinky Toy

In 1943, mechanical engineer Richard James was designing a device that the US Navy could use to secure equipment on ships while they rocked at sea. As the story goes, he dropped the coiled wires he was tinkering with from a shelf, and watched as the spring "stepped" in a series of arcs to a stack of books, to a tabletop, and onto the floor, where it re-coiled itself and stood upright. Classic Slinky behaviour right out of the gate.

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TED

Posted by Remo Giuffré on

TED

TED, co-founded by architect, designer and author Richard Saul Wurman and Harry Marks, was initially the name of a one-off conference held in Monterey, California in 1984. It featured talks from a variety of fields. The goal of the conference was to bring together people from diverse fields to share their ideas and spark conversations that could lead to positive change.
 
The origin story is personal and interesting.

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QR Codes

Posted by Remo Giuffré on

QR Codes

What do they remind you off?

There’s a reason why QR codes might remind you of something else.

"I used to play Go [the Japanese game involving black and white stones played on a 19x19 grid] on my lunch break. One day, while arranging the black and white pieces on the grid, it hit me that it represented a straightforward way of conveying information. It was a eureka moment."
  ~ Masahiro Hara on Nippon.com, 10 February 2020

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Möbius Strip

Posted by Remo Giuffré on

Möbius Strip

Single Continuous Surface

What do the Google Drive logo, old fashioned conveyor belts, and Gabriel Garcìa Màrquez’s novel One Hundred Years of Solitude all have in common? They each pay homage to the Möbius Strip, a single-sided, non-orientable surface.  

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Gömböc

Posted by Remo Giuffré on

Gömböc

The Shape that Shouldn’t Exist

Have you ever wondered how a dome-shelled tortoise turns itself back the right way up when placed upside down (a survival reflex known as “self-righting”)? It’s because its shell resembles a Gömböc (pronounced goemboets), the first-known three-dimensional homogenous object that has just one stable point and one unstable point of equilibrium when placed on a flat surface.

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