The Utility of The Ping Pong Ball
This video doesn’t quite do it justice (or maybe i’m just turned off by the fact that the struggling matchwork is matched only by the struggling camerawork), but burning a ping pong ball is a helluva lotuvfun. Ping pong balls are cheap and they burn as interestingly (imho) as any item that simple.
But it turns out there’s a whole lot more you can do with ping pong balls. I read today two stories regarding those simple white spheres and technology among the most advanced in the world. The first is about the very exciting Large Hadron Collider they’re getting ready to power up in Switzerland and France. Before actually colliding frozen protons at gazillions of miles per hour to unlock the secrets of the physical universe, they did some tests with ping pong balls. Of course.
The second story was from Wired magazine about Olympic training device Robo-Pong 2040 which:
spits out balls at up to 75 mph. The oscillating cannon can imitate serves, dish up vicious spins, and even simulate lobs. It fires up to 94 shots per minute, and players can test their accuracy by aiming returns at “pong-master” sensors.
Sounds like a lot of fun, but has anyone thought about combining the two yet? Imagine shooting ping pong balls at near the speed of light around the 27 Kilomoter LHC tube and have players try to whack it back around and hit a “pong-master” sensor. We’d have the best table tennis team in the world.
However, if you find yourself without matches, professional ping pong training equipment, or the world’s largest particle collider/philosophical implication tester, you can still use those ping pong balls you’ve been saving up to search for sunken treasure… Provided the treasure is in a sunken ship… And provided you’ve saved up 27,000 ping pong balls.
And then again, if all else fails, you could try playing table tennis.
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August 8th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Well why shouldn’t a Large Hardon Collider feature balls flying at people’s faces?
(For the record, I know it’s Hadron, but I simply can’t look at the LHC without perversifying it.)
August 8th, 2008 at 4:01 pm
Heh, heh. You know, in all the articles i’ve been reading lately about the LHC, i never once thought of it as “hardon”, now i probably won’t be able to think of it as anything else.