Coke can planimeter
durealeyes.com
Coke can planimeter
1–10 of 22 posts
Re: Coke can planimeter
#2My favourite field-improvised planimeter consists of (a) tracing out the figures and cutting them out of paper, then (b) weighing the paper shapes with an analytical balance and dividing out by the weight of a unit area's worth of paper.
Re: Coke can planimeter
#3I can't pass up this opportunity to mention "How Round is Your Circle". It's nerd shit about geometry applied to, among other things, steam engines.
There's a chapter or three about planimeters, the introduction to which is the hatchet planimeter.
Worth a read if you're into geometry and Industrial Revolution stuff, and honestly, probably worth working through with pencil and paper, though I never have.
Re: Coke can planimeter
#4My favourite field-improvised planimeter consists of (a) tracing out the figures and cutting them out of paper, then (b) weighing the paper shapes with an analytical balance and dividing out by the weight of a unit area's worth of paper.
Not surprisingly, this technique is used for numerical integration of complex graphs.
Re: Coke can planimeter
#53 bar linkage computing by Svoboda. MIT rad labs, ww2. Cams and drums did a lot of work plotting bomb angle, gunnery, rate of descent.
Re: Coke can planimeter
#6An experiment from an old physics textbook: trace a convex shape on a piece of paper, wet its contour with a brush and drip some water on it until it beads up. You then place the paper on a still water surface and touch the surface of the bead with a needle. The surface tension will move the shape under the needle until it points at the geometric center of the shape.
Re: Coke can planimeter
#73 bar linkage computing by Svoboda. MIT rad labs, ww2. Cams and drums did a lot of work plotting bomb angle, gunnery, rate of descent.
Computing Mechanisms and Linkages
By Antonín Svoboda
https://archive.org/details/computingmechani00anto
"He shows that with two basic mechanisms, the harmonic transformer and the three-bar linkage, it is possible to perform the fundamental operations of arithmetic, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, and to generate ballistic functions." - JOHN WOMERSLEY (https://www.nature.com/articles/162085a0.pdf)
Re: Coke can planimeter
#8My favourite field-improvised planimeter consists of (a) tracing out the figures and cutting them out of paper, then (b) weighing the paper shapes with an analytical balance and dividing out by the weight of a unit area's worth of paper.
My advisor’s thesis had an entire section on that for computing complex integrals.
Re: Coke can planimeter
#9I always trip on the ability of English has to turn nouns into verbs so after my first parse of the sentence I thought "w.t.f does the verb to planimeter mean?". Then I realized that "can" is not a verb here....
Re: Coke can planimeter
#10I always trip on the ability of English has to turn nouns into verbs so after my first parse of the sentence I thought "w.t.f does the verb to planimeter mean?". Then I realized that "can" is not a verb here....
Right. Coke can can planimeter
What's the difference between a piano and a fish?
You can tune a piano, but you can tuna fish.