This is a limited edition 1.000 kg solid gold bar from German designer Martin Saemmer. Its shape is mathematically interesting because, at least in its ideal form, it will “develop” its entire surface area when rolled. In other words, if you were to let it roll down an inclined plane covered with paint, its entire surface would be covered when it got to the bottom. It belongs to a class of shapes, all sharing this property, which can be characterized as the convex hull of two perpendicular circles or sectors on the same axis, which is a fancy way of describing the surface you’d get if you were to shrink-wrap two disks slotted together at right angles to one another. Oloids and sphericons are members of the same class, but each term implies a specific relationship between the radii of the two disks and the distance between their centers which this gold bar does not have. So “stretched oloid” is about the best I can do to describe it.
The familiar two-circle roller or wobbler toy (an example of which we showed you how to make make from two coins back in MAKE 15) is basically the same thing but without the “shrink-wrap.”
Read more | Permalink | Comments |
Read more articles in Science |
Related posts:
- Shapeways goes gold
- FACT: iPhones invented for people to be sedated when they take their mac computers to the genius bar and their comps taken to the back.
- Umbrella buckyball bar
- RT @fixie_bot fixie_bot: RT @FilmedByBike “Fixie Gold: The Treasure of Elites is Now as Commonplace as Computers” by Rhiannon Coppin h…
- Lucky Makers drive pots of gold in St. Patrick’s Day parade
- Rose-shaped map of Bohemia
- #BigFlix – customer support tells me all disks are checked before delivered. i tried with 3 computers and 1 dvd player. all get read failure
- OMG, the “high tech” computers on #OfficeSpace are making me laugh! Windows 1 & floppy disks!
- Swiss bar to merger stalls TDC share sale (source: FT)
- Wi-Fire(TM) Earns Top Reviews … hField Raises the Bar on Value! (source: prnewswire.com)