Man cannot live by bread alone, but hummus and carrots are probably sufficient.
is a medieval siege weapon. It's also a fun summer camp project. Unfortunately, these were the only two pictures of the one that I helped build in summer '03 at the NYSC - and both of them are cropped out from the background of an ultimate frisbee game, so the trebuchet detail isn't really there. In the last two images I've labeled the different parts of the trebuchet, hopefully that will give you some idea of how it worked.
is a building system consisting of a variety or rods that can be slotted into balls at a variety of angles. It provides much more construction flexibility than the building toys you may have encountered as a child. For example, the structure in the first image is a projection onto three dimensions of a truncated 600-cell. I helped build these models in January 2004.
(The second picture is much better quality on my computer, but for some reason seems to have issues when I post it.)
is an annual robotics competition held over a month at MIT. My team of NOT mechanical engineers built this awesome kludge-y robot (that worked pretty well) in 2006. As you can see from the design that I sketched on my hand, though, it wasn't quite the death-inspiring roller-blading mecha that we were imagining...
Photos of the Random Hall tensegrity are from the Random Hall blog and were posted by Ternus.
