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World's Longest Slinky
Orlock writes: "I was trawling google for something, and came across this. Apparently the world's longest slinky, created as a kinetic sculpture showing visible low frequency waves travelling down it."
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Who walks the stairs without a care
It shoots so high in the sky.
Bounce up and down just like a clown.
Everyone knows its Slinky.
The best present yet to give or get
The kids will all want to try.
The hit of the day when you are ready to play
Everyone knows it's Slinky.
It Slinky, It's Slinky
for fun the best of the toys
It Slinky, It's Slinky
the favorite of girls and boys.
Interesting story about the inventor of the Slinky, his instant success, his wealth, his joining a religious cult...
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
A friend made me promise to contact the Guinness Book of Records about Sliiiiiiiiiiinky. I haven't done so yet. James Industries - who have manufactured the Slinky since 1945 - say they don't know of anything like it.
.wav on the site soon. In the future, there will be some video too.
That's the algorithm - just hold the 'i' key down for as long as you like!
The suspension is elastic - not wires. This is my attempt to firstly free the Sliiiiiiiiiinky from the constraints of gravity and secondly unite a small number of Slinkies, or rather create some subset of the one true Sliiiiiinky, since the factory insists on chopping Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinky into such short fragments.
Yes, they should do this in the new Space Station - it would be a lot easier than all those elastics!
I don't have any audio samples on the site, but now that techie slashdotters are perusing it, perhaps I should. Sending an impulse at one end - by tapping with a coin - generates a short pulse of all frequencies. The high frequencies travel faster than the lows, due to some effect of the stiffness of the steel. (This is apparent at the 0.5 to 5 Hz range of the big visible waves too.) At the other end, a piezo pickup gets a "chirped" sound, a high tone rapidly descending to a very low tone. It sounds just like a swept oscillator. Since I figure no-one else has 645 metres of wire = 2,116 feet suspended in a way which supports vibrations of frequencies almost from DC to daylight, I figure I could get another gong in the Book of Records for the world's most serious *chirp*. Let me look around and see if I can put a
Stairs are boring by comparison - Sliiiiiiiinky enables anyone at all to make transient three dimensional kinetic public art - and there's no electronics involved.
Sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinky may be having another outing at Beckett Park in late March or early April - write to me if you want to come.
As for the favorite photo of the Space Cadets, this is part of a page http://www.firstpr.com.au/slinky/tourism/ Well gents, isn't true that so much of our efforts go, ultimately, to keeping fabulous women smiling and gyrating? Ms Yellow Cadet worked at a computer shop and now is one of the organisers of Melbourne's best trance techno outdoor parties. Ms Blue Cadet worked on a very high floor of some god-awful city building, for a *bank* of all things. I hope she has transformed since then. . . . . . . and fellas, when it comes to this particular approach to getting girls gyrating, mine's longer than . . .
- Robin
Csound, 21 metre Sliiiiinky, the Gentlemanly Art of
Alright, theres a problem with welding loads of slinkys together and setting them off down stairs:
:)
When your slinky has finished unspooling off the top step, its rear coils then swing over the top of the slinky to fall on the next step, this after a point will preclude an indoor venue due to the height clearance required. The Pyramids may be the only option.
As slinkys get longer, they also fall over more than one step at a time (I know they shouldn't but its something to do with rigidity) - Is this cheating?
And finally, very big slinkys with small diameters (across the coils) become unstable (I know; I'm a muppet, but I just tried this:) and fall flat after the first step and slide to the bottom. So your longer slinky needs a wider 'foot'.
All in all, it make the challenge of creating the woulds largest working slinky look quite something
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Saw that this summer. At Wallops Island Museum (NASA) I saw
a move made on various shuttle flights with astronauts
playing with various toys in 0 g. They spun tops, bounced balls
and did a slinky. I don't know if you could find
the film on a NASA site but try.
--jim
"If you put a downward-going Slinky on an upward-going escalator, will it just go on like that forever? We tried it but it didn't work; the escalator in question had steps too big for the Slinky to go down properly."
h tm l
http://segnbora.crosswinds.net/diaries/diary4f.
Thank you, Google. (Search: escalator slinky)
Actually, they're not ALL made of plastic. Check out:o un d&Waves_products.asp#Slinky
http://arborsci.com/Product_Pages/Sound&Waves/S
No, I don't work for this company, but this one is nice...worth the $
I sell the machines that make slinkies. They are actually uncut piston rings. Occationally the cutter breaks and record lengths are made for as long as it takes for the operator to notice.