Here's something you don't see every day:
I think it may be something that nobody has ever seen before.
It occurs to me that it actually might be a quite decent way to start training people to do fiddly work underwater, though.
Via. (Includes edifying comments!)
The latest CrabFu robot-made-out-of-servos is...
...the robot fish out of water.
What does capitalism mean?
I'll tell you what capitalism means.
It means this.
(Via.)
Y'see, there was this one fireworks store, and then another one opened up across the street.
And then it kind of turned into a theatrical performance.
Here in Australia, the only place where you can still buy proper fireworks - we DREAM of these sorts of things (from the same site as the video) - is in the Australian Capital Territory, a strange little place where the high-level politicians live, and which is also the only place where hard-core porn is still legal.
You may draw from this whatever conclusions you wish.
I-Wei Huang of Crabfu has a link from his SteamWorks page to his non-steam-powered remote-controlled contraptions. That link is called "Steamless Crap".
He's now given that section of the site a more dignified name, Crabfu MotionWorks. In which the latest creation is...
...the R/C Tortoise.
(Once again, the cat is unmoved. If something in the Crabfu back yard doesn't blow hot steam and shriek like a banshee, it's not worth worrying about.)
Like its ancestors the Swashbots, the Tortoise is a creature that converts movement of normal R/C servos more or less directly into leg movements. It's operated as an animatronic puppet, with no automation beyond servo mixing on the controller.
But the Tortoise is a quadruped rather than a triped - with legs that look as if they're made from the same low-temperature polycaprolactone thermoplastic as Swashbot 3's disturbingly organic parts - and so it can walk much better.
The Tortoise still turns with a Swashbot-esque wiggle, but when it's going forward or backward it's much more efficient. And it's all based on only three servos - each pair of legs is one arch-shaped piece of plastic. (There are actually four servos in the Tortoise, but one just moves the head.)
The Tortoise's clumsy high-stepping gait makes it look, to me, like a creature that's going to be very very large when it grows up.
(Via.)
When I-Wei "Crabfu" Huang created his third Swashbot last month (previously), I never got around to mentioning it here.
Duly rectified:
The grouper mouth and skull-like carapace make it look kind of malevolent... until it starts moving. It still kind of looks as if it's positioning itself to jump onto your face, though.
The "Shapelock" plastic from which Swash3's made is to regular plastic as Wood's Metal is to normal casting alloys. The plastic's chemical name is polycaprolactone, and it's available under other names, too. The bags of it that've been hanging on my wall waiting for a purpose are branded "Polymorph", and I got them from Jaycar here in Australia.
I-Wei's made three videos about building the bots:
(Via.)
This Toolmonger post about a novel right-angle socket adapter led me to the interesting concept of Hobson's Coupling, in which round rods bent to a right angle transfer torque around a ninety degree corner, because they're all free to turn in their mounting holes on each leg of the coupling.
Hobson's Coupling is, as any fool can see, an obvious candidate for adaptation into a steam/air-pressure engine. The result is called an Elbow Engine, and it's a thing to behold:
There are several more on GooTube. If the concept's still not clear to you, this page about making a ten-cylinder version (only seven moving parts!) from scratch may fill you in.
The previously mentioned SwashBot now has a page on the CrabFu site, featuring the original dome-headed creature, which includes this...
...the (much bigger) SwashBot2!
Stick with the video for more explanation of the concept.
These are my Not Very Useful Dice.
The "crooked in every sense" red six-siders are oddly satisfying objects. They're classic, if rather large, sharp-edged casino dice, except for the obvious.
I haven't thrown them enough times to see what kind of result distribution the crooked d6s give. In the aggregate they're probably actually quite fair, since they're all somewhat close to cubic and they have the proper numbering scheme, with opposite sides adding to seven.
(I think they're actually likely to throw a bit low, since the smaller sides on four of them are all ones, plus one two and one six. Frankly, I just want to try sneaking them onto a craps table some day. If you want some of your own, here's an eBay search. A set of six shouldn't set you back more than $US15 delivered.)
The other three dice are perfectly fair. Just... not very useful.
The blue one's a d24, a tetrakis hexahedron (which is one of two possible shapes for a d24 - the other is, of course, the deltoidal icositetrahedron). In gaming, you actually can use a d24 to quickly determine on which hour of the day on some random event takes place. But you can also do that in various other ways on the rare occasions when you have to - like, for instance, a d4 to determine the quarter-day and a d6 to pick the hour of that quarter.
So the d24's appeal remains... specialised. Dungeons and Dragons used to use d24s for a few things, but it doesn't any more. (D12s seem to have been similarly deprecated.)
The larger polyhedron is a rhombic triacontahedron, a d30. It's the big brother of the surprisingly antiquitous, famously malicious, icosahedral d20 that's become the very symbol of gaming nerdery.
I think the d30 has a certain... machismo.
"Oh, you roll twenties, do you? Well, I beat that a third of the time."
It's hard to top that, if you don't have big brass ones.
The d30 can also be substituted for by other dice, though I don't think there's any terribly elegant way to do it - perhaps a rolling-pin d3 (itself substitutable by a halved d6; the cheapest "d3s" are just d6s with only three numbers on them, but "real" d3s aren't terribly more expensive) for the tens, plus a d10 for the units. This isn't something you're likely to need to do very often, though, since d30s are almost as unpopular as d24s. People use them now and then to represent some sort of boost (lucky artifact, you're the son of a god, you bought the DM a pizza) for what would normally be a d20 roll. That's about it.
(There's another design of d24, which is a cube with each face broken up into four flattened triangular facets. I'm not crazy about that type, but since you can get one along with a d30
The red sphere is a more commonly seen item. It is, of course, Lou Zocchi's hundred-sided "Zocchihedron".
Lou is probably royally sick of the sight of his d100, since he spent ages trying to make the darn thing work right, and it still doesn't, really.
(It's a bit hard to find these days, too; most "d100s" currently for sale
The main problem with a 100-sider is that it's basically a golf ball, and so any sort of fair roll will take ludicrously long to settle compared with the normal "d100", which is just a pair of d10s, one for tens and one for units.
To address the rolling-across-the-room problem, Lou made his d100 hollow and partially filled it with teardrop-shaped metal weights, which slow its roll considerably, and also make it usable as a very small maraca. The d100 is still really only a curiosity, though, and may or may not be biased in favour of the more-widely-spaced numbers nearer its equator.
Companies like Chessex, Koplow Games and Lou Zocchi's Gamescience make a number of other impractical novelty dice. The d5, d7, d14 and d16, for instance, and even the majestic d34. Unfortunately, though, most of the weird-numbered dice that I don't already own are of the pyramids-stuck-together trapezohedron type, which as the side-count rises makes them look more and more like a spinning top rather than a die. The d34 has a particularly severe case of this disease.
I'm still tempted to acquire them, though, so I can have a whole Crown Royal bag full of dice that nobody can use.
If you're at all interested in the aesthetic appeal of dice, by the way, allow me to highly recommend sleight-of-hand grandmaster Ricky Jay's book "Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck", a slim volume which alternates gambling - and cheating - history with a lot of gorgeous pictures of decaying six-siders.
