Predicting the tide with an analog computer made from Lego
pepijndevos.nl
pepijndevos.nl
Legos are intended as a kids’ toy, and a few years of experience working within their capabilities and constraints to build increasingly tricky projects is great experience for kids, with lots of skills transferrable to any other kind of creative technical work.
"I wonder if I can do..." ponderings, followed by a wonderfully absurd, but still mostly functional way of doing it, that involves going down all sorts of fun little rabbit holes to work around nonsensical but entertaining constraints like "Lego gears don't exist in an infinite number of forms."
Though as much as it doesn't need to be https, I still think random personal sites should be https. It makes it harder to inject random bonus conntent in the responses, and I include any form of modification there, not just malicious - ISPs have been known to make changes to add their own little ad banners in the past. Denver International is particularly bad at this, or at least used to be.
I feel a bit sad when I read about this sort of stuff. At one time it was the sort of thing I would do, but nothing seems interesting or motivating enough these days. My first thought is "wow that would take a lot of time" and I abandon the idea.
My favorite example is the writer automaton [1]. It's something that never stops to impress me, just because it's something that wouldn't be that hard nowadays, but must have required effectively PhD levels of understanding to do pre-computer.
But still, It is fun and I like these lego projects! I want to buy a few sets and recreate it.
[1] http://pepijndevos.nl/2022/01/30/predicting-the-tide-with-an...
Please make a longer video, explaining how it works.