Author Archive

Some of you might remember that a group of us are working to design and build a smalll vertical axis wind turbine.  One of the great things about working for a product design and innovation firm is the level of resoures at our disposal – both physical and intellectual.  Is there anything these folks can’t do? 

The ultimate objective would be to disconnect my office computer, lights, etc from the electrical grid and see if we can be a president who is… well… err… disconnected, I guess.  Hmmm. Maybe I should think about that a bit.

Anyway, we reached a milestone of sorts after the weekend when our prototype made electricity for the first time.  The turbine was designed and built entirely here at Design Concepts including CNC foam cutting of the blades which you can see here:   http://www.design-concepts.com/blog/hot-wire-foam-cutter-for-our-wind-turbine-project 

My sincere thanks to Design Concepts’ electrical engineer extraordinaire Chris Sherwin for his slick prototype charging circuit.  Chris has a passion for power supplies and charging circuits and whipped together a design which handles cut-in, voltage step-up and even has electric braking!  Not bad for a first generation.   

We have a way to go, but it’s been a fun diversion.

Like many offices, the post-holiday period here is a weird ying/yang combination of New Year’s resolutions doing battle royal with an endless stream of holiday treats and brought-from-home baking offal.  However I feel we reached a new nadir with the appearance in our kitchen of a dozen bacon covered donuts. 

Oh my.  Had I not seen this with my own eyes I would not have believed such a thing could exist. 

I try to remain open to new things but seriously now.  Yuck. 

I couldn’t resist snapping this picture.  One of the reasons I absolutely love working here is because you get to work on some of the craziest stuff.  You never know what the next day will bring. 

I actually have no idea why our prototyping shop is working with a model of a human pelvic bone but I know it’s going to be something cool and important. 

A coworker recently introduced me to the amazing work of Brad Litwin, a self-described multi-discipline artist whose work delightfully spans technical design, engineering, craft and the fine arts.    

Brad’s latest brainchild (brainchildren?) are the wonderfully inspired Mechanicards – essentially playful mechanisms rendered as mail-able greeting cards.  Stuff like this really inspires me! 

You can watch Brad’s Mechanicards in action here: 

Oh and if Brad’s artistic and design skills aren’t humbling enough, he’s also an accomplished ragtime, jazz and blues musician, playing the music heard on the youtube video.  Wow.  Very Cool.

Does a curveball really curve? Really???

For some reason I seem to have done a disproportionate number of baseball-related postings. I guess one of the benefits of being in the field of design is that I can pretty much turn anything into a design issue. Well either that or it provides me a plausible reason to spend a bit of idle time writing about sports. Ahhh the life.

Someone sent me a very fascinating link recently that probably doesn’t end – but certainly sheds some new and interesting light on the age-old debate of whether a curveball really curves.

For those of you who aren’t fans or fanatics, the curveball is a pitch that was “invented” around the time of the civil war by delightfully named “Candy Cummings” pitcher for the Brookly Excelsiors. Cummings found that by snapping his wrist forward as he released the ball, the trajectory would arc and then suddenly “break” or curve causing batters to lunge and swing comically at the place they thought he ball should – but no longer was. From that moment on the curve ball has bedeviled batters. Those who have seen it often describe it as looking like the ball has rolled off a table. I suspect the difficulty of controlling the pitch properly adds to the allure and baseball aficionados speak of “buckling batters knees” as they alternately swing at a pitch that darts out of the strike zone or watch impotently as a ball seemingly well outside of the zone drops in. Or does it?

You see, as long as pitchers have been throwing curves, ball players, engineers and physicists have been debating whether the curve ball really curves or whether it’s all just an optical illusion. Amazingly enough, given the arsenal of brainpower and technological sophistication that’s been brought to bear on the issue – the debate persists to this day.

In 1941 both two magazines simultaneously attempted to use stop-action photography to determine if curve balls really curve. Look Magazine concluded they do. Life magazine concluded that they do not.

Both General Motors and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been commissioned to investigate the phenomena (Why GM is a matter I can only speculate and I suspect they should have stuck to focusing on their cars).

My father-in-law – a pretty good player in his own right – claims to have faced pitchers who could throw a pitch around the side of an oak tree. Hyperbole? Perhaps… but when you’ve married his oldest daughter are you really going to argue pressure differentials? I think not.

My own baseball career sputtered to a halt sometime in elementary school when the only “curve” pitchers threw was in the vertical plane so I’ve never had the pleasure (or terror) of facing a real curve. Thus my own opinions on the issue are anecdotal at best.

As an engineer I can certainly understand the reasons why a curve ball would (or could) curve. The combination of forward velocity and rotation creates a pressure differential that would serve to “suck” the ball towards the direction of rotation. At the same time, physicist and engineers have struggled to empirically or analytically explain the amount of curve which pitchers and batters perceive.
As near as I can figure – and this is really just an educated guess – curve balls really do curve but (and with full respect and deference) NOT to the extent claimed by pitchers and batters. Sorry. And I can’t think of a reasonable engineering explanation for the real or perceived “drop” that curves seem to take towards the end of flights.

So that brings us to this fascinating study and demonstration by Arthur Shapiro, Zhong-Lin Lu, Emily Knight, & Robert Ennis of American University, University of Southern California, Dartmouth College, SUNY College of Optometry –which incidentally won the 2009 “best illusion of the year contest” from the Vision Sciences Society (I wonder what the trophy looks like… but I digress).
To quite from their entry…

In baseball, a curveball creates a physical effect and a perceptual puzzle. The physical effect (the curve) arises because the ball’s rotation leads to a deflection in the ball’s path. The perceptual puzzle arises because the deflection is actually gradual but is often perceived as an abrupt change in direction (the break). Our illusions suggest that the perceived “break” may be caused by the transition from the central visual system to the peripheral visual system. Like a curveball, the spinning disks in the illusions appear to abruptly change direction when an observer switches from foveal to peripheral viewing.

Here is the link:   http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/2009/the-break-of-the-curveball/

Make sure you follow the instructions and give it a look… it’s pretty amazing.