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Windell Oskay made this 8-pound cake with a 3D printer called a CandyFab 4000:
The shape is a 3/4 twist mobius strip with a square cross section and windows cut at regular intervals in all of the sides the side. Even though it’s hollow, it still weighs seven pounds and fourteen ounces– that’s a lot of sugar. We’re bringing this monster to Maker Faire this weekend, so you can see it for yourself, too.
Link -via reddit | Photo: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
Tim Hawkinson made this model sailing ship that’s twisted like a möbius strip:
Echoing the working methods of ship-in-a-bottle hobbyists, Hawkinson created a painstakingly detailed model ship that twists in upon itself, presenting the viewer with a thought-provoking visual conundrum. The title is a witty play on Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, which famously relates the tale of a ship captain’s all-consuming obsession with an elusive white whale. The ambitious and imaginative structure of Hawkinson’s sculpture offers an uncanny visual metaphor for Melville’s epic tale, which is often considered the ultimate American novel.
Link -via Kottke | Photo: Indianapolis Museum of Art
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Wait — a toothed gear that has only one side? Is that even possible? Aaron Hoover, a robotics student at Berkeley, says that it is:
[...] I convinced myself that this mechanism is indeed possible and that with right tools, a functional prototype could be built. (The entire mechanism essentially boils down to an oddly configured set of planetary gears. One can think of the black portion in the image as the ring with a fixed zero input velocity. A single blue gear is a planet, and the white strip is the sun. Output can be taken either from the sun or the planets (with no regard for practicality!). In practice, however, it’s easiest to actuate the Möbius strip (the white portion). So, using a combination of the Scene Language for Dynamic Environments (SLIDE), developed here at Berkeley, Tcl, Python, and Solidworks, I was able to create models of the constituent components. The base was fabricated on a Stratasys fused deposition (FDM) machine and took approximately 86 hrs. to finish. The “spur” gears were molded in silicone rubber using a two-part mold printed on a 3D Systems wax deposition machine (ThermoJet). And the central Möbius strip was also molded using molds printed on the 3DS machine. The Möbius strip was molded as a single linear strip then twisted and the ends were rejoined in a “guiding” mold and additional rubber was poured into that mold to bond the two ends together and form a single continuous ring. The end result is a functional prototype, but rotating the middle ring without having the blue gears pop out is a little tricky.
Just imagine Homer Simpson’s response to this brilliant tee shirt by John Sumrow, “mmm…infinite bacon.”
Link via Laughing Squid
A Möbius strip is a ribbon of material that has only one side. A group of nanotechnology researchers experimenting with manipulating tiny objects was able to reshape a DNA strand into a Möbius strip.
The ability to create complex structures on the tiniest of scales is one of the great challenges of nanotechnology. In particular, chemists are looking for particular topological structures, or structures that keep their basic properties no matter how much you stretch or twist them. A Möbius strip is a good example of such a structure, because no matter what you do it (short of tearing it, of course), it will always have only one side.
Link | Journal Article (Subscription required) | Image: Han et al.
Artist Jim Woodring made a comic strip on a Möbius strip — a flat surface with only one side. At the link, you can view a video as well as each panel in this repeating story.
Previously:
How to Make a Looty
d’Holbachie Yoko’s Syrup 82.
George W. Hart has brought us a milestone in breakfast-related math feats, the mobius strip bagel. Directions for making your own are on the link. The author says these are superior to regular bagels for non-math-related reasons as well.
It is much more fun to put cream cheese on these bagels than on an ordinary bagel. In additional to the intellectual stimulation, you get more cream cheese, because there is slightly more surface area.
This video shows a selection from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Musical Offering (1747) played forwards, then backwards, then both forwards and backwards at the same time. It was created by mathematical illustrator Jos Leys and science/philosophy blogger Xantox. This Bach piece has long intrigued mathematicians:
In each of these canons a musical line is played twice (or four times in Canon 10). The second version is always transformed with respect to the first by shifting in time, but it may also be shifted in pitch, turned upside-down, stretched, or played backwards. Each of these transformations occurs in the mathematics of elementary functions; they are examples of how new functions can be made out of old and of how a function can be tailored to fit a new situation.
Link via Boing Boing
Brooklyn-based artist Ranjit Bhatnagar works with sound installations and homemade instruments. He created this music box guided by a Möbius strip. It’d be perfect for playing “The Song That Never Ends“! Bhatnagar made the music box as part of a project to create a musical instrument every day for a month.
Artist’s Website via Popular Science
Kazakhstan has commissioned BIG Architects to build a library and cultural center in the city of Astana. The design that the firm submitted in response is shaped like a Möbius strip — a structure that has only one side:
The building itself is a complicated juxtaposition of different ideas and concepts. It forms a spiraling circle around a strong vertical core that allows visitors to the library to move between floors. The museum’s curves form a möbius strip, so the interior becomes the exterior and back again; likewise the walls become the roof and the roof transforms back into the walls. The interior corridors are naturally daylit through geometric openings in the exterior shell, creating beautifully lit spaces perfect for reading.
To minimize cooling loads on the library, BIG Architects employed some advanced computer modeling to calculate the thermal exposure on the building envelope. Because of the warping and twisting of the exterior, some parts of the building receive more light than others. By taking that information, BIG was able to create a geometric pattern or “ecological ornament” to regulate the solar impact.
Photo gallery at the link.
You may not be able to travel to Kazakhstan to view the building, but you can experience the same one-sided sensation with our Möbius strip t-shirt, now on sale at the Neatorama Shop.
