Unexpected Finding

Over the past year or so I have taken up the hobby of juggling. I have gotten better with practice but tonight I realized something that is counter intuitive. When I (and I assume others) would look at jugglers I would be impressed at how they catch all those balls at once. What I have come to realize though is that juggling is about throwing balls not catching them. Perhaps it is just my style but I have found that the better I become at throwing the balls consistently in the same spot, the longer my juggling sessions (jugs) seem to be. Now of course this could simply be a correlation not a causation. I look at it this way though, you have to throw the ball before you can catch the ball. You could be the best catcher on the planet but if you throw the balls just out of arm's reach then it doesn't matter. If on the other hand if you're a great thrower this will make catching that much easier, in theory you may never need to move your hands if you can throw the balls well enough.

Art Prize Inspired Idea.

In between classes yesterday I was able to go check out some art prize exhibits. My favorite one was actually the second one I saw. It is on the blue bridge down by the pew campus. What the artist did was set up a giant pin hole camera that you can stand in. If your not familiar the concept it works like this: if you place a lens on a box and place screen a set distance away from the lens inside the box (using trigonometry will help you optimize the distance for best quality). Whatever is outside the box will be seen inside the box upside down. The image below helps to illustrate how it works, and I believe this concept was how the first cameras worked.

The idea that this art inspired was creating "windows" for your house that utilized this concept. Of course you would need a mechanism to flip the image right side up. The benefits of this would be mostly economic since windows are a HUGE energy drain on a home. This reason is because they let in a lot of heat in the summer meaning you need the AC on more, and they let out a lot of heat in the winter meaning you need the heat on more. The heat transfer from a little lens however will be significantly less. As an added bonus you would only have to clean a small lens outside your house, and you will have no need for blinds/drapes because from the outside all you see is a little lens.