No mention of those clips which require a tool to take them on and off. They are basically like a binder clip without the arms. IIRC they are a Japanese design, I've never seen them for sale in the US but I'd love to know what they are called.
Recently I have been fascinated by the awesomeness of wire bending machines. Has anyone done any really funky stuff purely with wire bending? I am thinking furniture scale creations, green walls, giant sculpture, etc. Haven't quite got the timespace to build one but should be straightforward assuming small guage wire. There are some open source ones published: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=open+source+wire+bending
Took a class a few years ago which was on developing optimization pipelines for engineering design. Was fun, fairly mixed bag of students from all over the institute, both undergrad and grad. Anyways, one student from aero/astro did a project on wire-bending for assembly of truss-like structures… in space! I believe his project was on trying to improve the bending sequence to arrive at an arbitrary desired structure. Not sure if he ended up publishing his work.
Cool. Space would be a great place for it - less opposing forces, plenty of 'space', so simpler processes become more scalable. On folding, there's some interesting similar work from origami academics and noodle nerds looking at things like how you can pre-score or pre-plan to auto-achieve a selected geometry by constricting limited lines of tension across partly rigid planes, or achieve arbitrary geometries on flatpack noodles when rehydration occurs. In general, the flatpack/IKEA notion gets really hard really quickly once you take tooling, protected workspace and dextrous free labor out of the equation.
I've seen a surprising number of these (a dozen? maybe more?), given the years they were introduced... the "Ideal Paper Clip" in particular keeps popping up somewhere every few years.
Also works for drug design! Add a methyl group here or there, and presto, a new drug that probably has the same target and yet is new intellectual property!
Yes. It harkens back, indeed, to what we could call the "Age of Clippy". He might have been annoying. He might have been near-useless, but gosh bang it, he was ours - like the internet of the time - and we want him back.-
First clip's free: An historical drama new to Netflix exploring a parallel historical reality in which all socialist revolutions are pre-empted with funding and covert support by agents of a shady dynasty of paperclip industrialists.
Generally the whole senior class gets addicted to it; other faculty wonder about what's up with this paperclip game... maybe about a third of students take it not just through "monopoly" (the assignment) but to the very end.
So much of what we talk about in micro is in there; price and profit maximization; market power and monopoly; game theory; production possibilities increasing through technology; etc.
>Vaaler Paper Clip
>Patented 1900 (Germany), 1901 (US)
>Vaaler, who was Norwegian, is commonly but incorrectly given credit for invention of the paper clip. His designs were neither first nor important. There is a large
Gem paper clip statue in Norway. Norway might consider giving it to the U.S.
