Perfect Sphericity

Don't know if anyones read this but I found it very interesting...

http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/education/EducatorsGuide/Page16.html

I would love to play marbles with that one they have..lol
seriously, very interesting, thanks.,

Ya, I want one.

I read something about the way scientists were gonna tackle that colossal project a few years back. Its kinda amazing how technology and engineering always seem to be able tyo step up to the plate.

Like others said- I want one. I'm just afraid of what each gyroscope would cost.

I actually have to QC and check balls at my job. That is freaking amazing. If that was easy to accomplish it would make my job easy. I wonder what the surface finish measurement would be like. .000000004 ra?

lol if i worked there i would drop it or summat

Interesting article but I have a nit to pick.



999,998 siblings out of 1,000,000! isn't very many siblings in relation to the whole at all. Not what they meant, and it doesn't really matter, but hey, I'm bored.

what? they're saying if you had 999,999 brothers(or sisters) All but one of them would be 100% identical, DNA and all, that is to say if you were one of the 2 who were different.


I would love to have one of them. They don't look very expensive, if you look in their photos page theres a picture where they have about 15 of them on a table

I feel your pain. I remember having to do runout and sphericity measurements while stationed back in WA state. I DO miss having access to a 'flat table', though. Still got my mics and a couple calipers, not to mention a set of snap gauges.

About cost- considering the amount of prep work to mix that quartz evenly, and the whole baking and machining process, I'm not even gonna venture a guess. Suffice to say some stuff I worked on that had much greater tolerance, to the tune of multiple factorial differences, had prices in the millions of dollars range...

My point was there is an exclamation after the 1,000,000, written like this: 1,000,000!. That is some mathematical function. I don't know exactly what this does, maybe someone like QS or DMOS could answer, but I tried putting it in the Windows calculator and it keeps telling me it'd going to take a very long time, and it has been running for 5 or so minutes at 98% CPU usage with no result yet. Looking at the task manager, it keeps eating up more and more RAM, so I think I'm going to stop it and have someone with a faster computer solve it.

the ! is a factorial, it means 1,000,000 times 999,999 times 999,998 times 999,997, and so on till you get to 1

I can't enter it into my calculator, it gives me an overflow error

So that's what it is. I've never worked with it myself, but yeah I can see how it would throw an overflow error. Just taking it to 999995 gives 999985000084999775000273999880000000, which is 36 bytes by itself.

10,000,000! 65,657,059 digits 2,499,999 trailing zeros

OMG i have no idea wot u guys are talkin about

Which is a total of 68157058 digits, at 1 byte each, meaing 66560 kilobytes (rounded up, and using the correct 1024 not 1000 bytes in a kilobyte), meaning 65 megabytes (again 1024 KB in one MB). At least I think one octet is devoted to each number digit? Argh, I can't remember all the binary unit conversions.