Comments | pozorvlak: Achiral fans

pozorvlak

Achiral fans

May 03, 2006 12:59

It's a little-appreciated fact that fans are chiral (ie, they come in left-handed and right-handed versions). Don't believe me? Lend your favourite fan to a friend, and watch them try to open it the wrong way, messing up the spokes. This has two downsides: first, the fact that your friends will infallibly open your fans the wrong way and damage ( Read more... )

cold, art, projects, duct tape

Comments 18

azrelle May 3 2006, 12:28:28 UTC

you need to get into burlesque mate. Modern fans, particularly the feather fans, open both ways. You can buy flat bamboo fan staves in art shops usually.

At the moment i'm coincidentally building an ostrich feather fan. Nobody will be getting to borrow it anyway but it does open two ways

pozorvlak May 3 2006, 12:46:36 UTC

Ta! I'll look into that. Do the achiral ones work as I suggested?

I don't find the feather ones work as well as paper for actually keeping you cool, but maybe I've only used rubbish feather ones.

azrelle May 3 2006, 13:01:34 UTC

it does, but i'm not so convinced it will work with paper. Feathers dont have to reverse fold themselves

pozorvlak May 3 2006, 14:00:12 UTC

I don't think that will be so much of a problem - though it depends on the stiffness of the paper, I suppose. I could always use silk...

Thread 11

problem 1 susannahf May 3 2006, 12:46:32 UTC

can you fold the wire back on itself and crimp to make a "hole"?

Re: problem 1 pozorvlak May 3 2006, 12:47:13 UTC

Aha, nice one.

johnckirk May 3 2006, 12:50:18 UTC

I read "fans" in the first sentence as "people" (e.g. science fiction fans), so when you said "some are left handed and some are right handed" I thought "Well, yes, obviously". Things then got a bit weird when you talked about lending them to your friends :)

pozorvlak May 3 2006, 12:57:56 UTC

Yeah, that was deliberate, hence only putting the clarification in the second paragraph :-)

michiexile May 3 2006, 16:23:00 UTC

And here I was wondering why on earth you'd want to lend out your case fans; and what this would have the recipient do...

michiexile May 3 2006, 16:24:02 UTC

And then ... at least I didn't immediately associate to Gröbner fans y'know... But ... wait ... if you want to do Gröbner walks between different noncommutative Gröbner bases, you may end up looking at the (possibly) different fans you'd have to traverse for a right resp. left basis... :P

Thread 5