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Fidget Spinners Are Over (fivethirtyeight.com)
Walt Hickey, writing for Five Thirty Eight: The toy craze that has swept the nation -- cheaply manufactured fidget spinners of dubious metallic constitution -- is probably on the way out, with the high-water mark of fidget obsession appearing to be about a month behind us and the interest in the glorified ball bearings plateauing or declining. [...] Even if there's a long tail on this trend, it's very likely that peak fidget spinner is behind us. The kind of content now doing well on YouTube is either fidget-adjacent stunt videos or videos that have taken a particularly weird turn. This doesn't mean the ball-bearing business is doomed, just maybe don't go long on the spinner industrial complex or quit your job to live off a fidget-related Kickstarter idea at this point.
Fidget Spinners will see a massive, nostalgia-fueled comeback in the late 2030s.
Finding God in a Dog
So ... what's the next ridiculous craze that I should work to prevent my daughter from getting into?
Thanks for letting me breathe a small sigh of relief from having dodged this bullet...
"Diplomacy is something you do until you find a rock." --Richard Pound
Your five friends are not cool, is what this means.
Don't worry, you can just put a red hot nickle ball on the spinner, crush it in a hydraulic press, and toss the result into a blender.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Then submit something better. Or did you not know /. gets its news as user submissions?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Fidget spinners are the "pet rocks" of the 2000 era.
Pet rocks don't do anything, unless you put them in a sock and hit someone with them (My pet rock named Schleprock who slept in a tube sock?) but spinners are kinetic toys. They don't do anything by themselves either, but they're a hell of a lot more interesting than a pet rock. I'd say they're almost all the way up to gyroscope. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you need a fidget spinner, you're doing it wrong. A fidget spinner is likely to be taken away from you by your teacher, because it distracts from learning. Instead, learn to fidget with a pen or pencil. No teacher would dare take one of those from you, and it doesn't cost $12 and chew through batteries.
Going by social media trends: Probably.
Going by actual usage in classrooms: Not even close.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You can still buy Pet Rocks.
The Pet Rock was a pointlessly pointless idea, which was the point of the fad.
Fidget spinners let you feel precession forces with your fingertips, which most people, being uneducated in physics, find endlessly fascinating.
Gotta admit, despite my PhD+ in physics, I find great joy in rolling Buckyballs across the floor (try it), and in watching airplanes taking off. It never gets old.