floating

Showing 3 posts tagged floating

The New York Times’ video profile of Max Mulhern’s “Aqua Dice” shows how the artist’s love for the sea and his interest in unknown outcomes came together into one project.

Fate adrift, these two giant sea dice were constructed out of plywood, pine, PVC and epoxy. Technically illegal — “you’re not allowed to put an object on the water that’s unattended, and you’re not allowed to go to sea if there’s not a constant watch on-board,” explains Mulhern, — they are designed to collapse on impact so as not to be a danger to any other vessels, and are brightly painted. They also have GPS in both of them, customized by technology students, to track where ocean currents are taking the dice and how far apart they are from each other.

“I’ve spoken to a lot of ocean scientists and they’re thinking that the dice will separate quickly,” he said. “What I like about that is the dual possibilities: there’s one throw and two outcomes, two possible destinations — and destinies.”

Whether you love art, love sailing or love the unknown, you can track the dice (and even bet as to where they’ll eventually land) on Mulhern’s site, on this map, or follow the journey on Facebook.

via Visual News.

Flying Frogs! Sort of… The short answer is that living things — even humans — can levitate when a ridiculously strong/large magnet is used to repel the frog’s atoms’ magnetic fields. 

Here’s a more in-depth explanation, edited down here: 

…all matter in the universe consists of small particles called atoms and each atom contains electrons that circle around a nucleus. This is how the world is made. If one places an atom (or a large piece of a matter containing billions and billions of atoms) in a magnetic field, electrons doing their circles inside do not like this very much. They alter their motion in such a way as to oppose this external influence.

As you probably saw many times when playing with magnets, magnets push each other away if you try to bring together their like poles, for example, two north or two south poles… 

In this field, all the atoms inside the frog act as very small magnets… One may say that the frog is now built up of these tiny magnets all of which are repelled by the large magnet. The force, which is directed upwards, appears to be strong enough to compensate the force of gravity (directed downwards) that also acts on every single atom of the frog.

So, the frog’s atoms do not feel any force at all and the frog floats as if it were in a spacecraft.

More levitating things: a grasshopper and a strawberry.

Thanks, DJ!