Top-Heavy Towers and Borromean Rings

2013-02-25

Considering the strong correlation between my 20-month blog silence and the amount of time I've spent playing with baby toys in the interim, it seems appropriate to start back with a post about those baby toys.

Borromean rings

To start with there are a whole slew of these broken colored rings lying around, presumably intended to be linked together in a chain.

I noticed that the oblong shape allows them to be assembled into Borromean rings.

Top-Heavy Towers

Then there are all of these stereotypical wooden cubes.

It's probably pretty common to probe the limits of top-heavy structures. It occurred to me to try a single block with two blocks atop it, three blocks on the next layer, and so on as high as possible.

Each successive step seemed equally dubious.

After eight layers I ran out of the standard style of blocks and had to fall back on the alternate.

I tried adding an eleventh layer but everything started falling over at that point.

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