Three by Krulwich

There's something so gentle and generous about Robert Krulwich's pieces. Not always packed with information, but provocative little hints about different ways of looking at the world. Here are three of his pieces from this week ... with just a taste of each. Follow the links to the full stories.

Robert Krulwich, The Miracle Of The Levitating Slinky

[Rusten: Top of the story follows. Several embedded videos in the piece.]

I should say right off, this is no miracle. The Slinky I'm going to show you does what all Slinkys do, even if it seems so astonishing, you figure, "Oh, come on. Somebody doctored this footage. This can't be."

It can be. It is. Nobody manipulated anything.
Here's what's going to happen. Derek Muller from the Australian science video website Veritasium is going to take a slinky and hold it from the top with his hand. He will then release the lower part. It will slink down to its full extension, elongating, and come to a dangling rest.

Then Derek is going to let the Slinky go. Now comes the miracle. If you keep your eye on the bottom of the slinky, on the last curl at the very end, you will notice that as the top of the slinky starts to fall, the bottom doesn't drop. It just hangs in the air, levitating, as if it had its own magic carpet. It will stay there, hovering quietly, until a wave, or signal, passing through the slinky finally reaches it. Apparently, the bottom doesn't know it's supposed to fall, so it sits there, seeming to defy gravity, until the very end ...

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Robert Krulwich, That Old Rice-Grains-On-The-Chessboard Con, With a New Twist

[Rusten: Top of the story follows. This piece has several Krulwich drawings.]

Once upon a time, says the science writer David Blatner, there was this con man who made chessboards for high-end clients — in this case, a king.
The craftsman was good; his chessboards were better than beautiful. The king, he knew, loved chess. So he hatched a plan to trick the king into handing over an enormous fortune. His plan? He figured, "This king is not too good at math."

So when the craftsman presented his chessboard at court, he told the king,
"Your Highness, I don't want money for this. Or jewels. All I want is a little rice."
"Hmm," thought the king, who was a con man himself. "I've got rice. How much rice?" ...
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Robert Krulwich, Odd Things Happen When You Chop Up Cities and Stack Them Sideway

[Rusten: Instead of giving you the top of this story, I'll just give you two images of Berlin: an overhead depiction of the size and shapes of building plots, and those same plots arranged "after an autopsy. The city has been dismembered, dissected block by block, the blocks then categorized, sorted and stacked by shape". Krulwich compares these with similar images of other major cities, like Paris, New York, and Istanbul ... with his usual, interesting take on the project that produced these. All of the images in the piece are larger, of course.]

     

Berlin from above.                           Berlin in parts.