for Tu B’Shevat sounds like a good idea. The cantor certainly thinks so and, seriously, there’s a crazy etrog! What’s not to like?
A Seder
A Clapperless Bell
lurks randomly on the sidewalk. I have no idea why it’s there.
A trebuchet
is a medieval siege weapon. It’s also a fun summer camp project. Unfortunately, these were the only two pictures of the one that I helped build in summer ’03 at the NYSC – and both of them are cropped out from the background of an ultimate frisbee game, so the trebuchet detail isn’t really there. In the last two images I’ve labeled the different parts of the trebuchet, hopefully that will give you some idea of how it worked.
Zometool
Zometool is a building system consisting of a variety or rods that can be slotted into balls at a variety of angles. It provides much more construction flexibility than the building toys you may have encountered as a child. For example, the structure in the first image is a projection onto three dimensions of a truncated 600-cell. I helped build these models in January 2004.
Maslab
is an annual robotics competition held over a month at MIT. My team of NOT mechanical engineers built this awesome kludge-y robot (that worked pretty well) in 2006. As you can see from the design that I sketched on my hand, though, it wasn’t quite the death-inspiring roller-blading mecha that we were imagining…
