Saturday, February 16, 2008

Domino in a supermarket

My blog has been a bit quiet lately. I have once again had the exam season and I am also preparing for my holiday week. I have been writing my post for a meme sent me by Jenny Mannion, but it seems to take more time than the usual ones. You will see it soon.

As I wrote last time, I have been socializing in Digg and to my great fun, one video started to spread there and got quite many Diggs. Its title is Supermarket Domino and people were wondering why anyone would be able to do that; why did the boss not watch what his employees were doing and why these people had time to do this.

In the beginning there is a text: "Toiset oli töissä Joulupäivänä…", which means " some people were working on Christmas Day…". Our shops were open till 1 pm on Christmas Eve and I think they were again open on the second Christmas Day. I think these people have just gotten bored at work with very few customers and finished the project after work. With a massive thing like that I would not take the risk customers ruining it.

This is not actually just fun: I am filing it under physics because it shows the law of conservation of linear momentum. It also shows the principle of mathematical induction, a method used to proving things for natural numbers. I teach the method in school and almost always have an argument about this. The textbook tells the principle: "There is an infinite number of dominos and every time a domino falls, it makes the neighbouring domino fall. If we make the first one fall, does the total row fall down? The arguments are against the word infinity, but as always we mathematicians talk about things you can only imagine, not experience. However, this video makes you think there is an infinity…




4 comments:

Moonshadow said...

Wonderful! I'm going to have to send a link for this to my daughter. Her husband is in management at one of our big supermarket chains here. I'm sure he will appreciate it. Thanks for sharing!

Anonymous said...

Holy Motherfather! This is amazing. I can't imagine how many man hours went into it.

Great video!

Anonymous said...

Thanks Leena for highlighting this video. It is really remarkable for arranging the stuffs in the domino. If learning by anyone is comparable to this effort, more good quality students will be produced!

Liudmila said...

Hi, Leena, excuse ,me off-topic,pls, I wanted to ask you about finnish folklor fables (not by the authors) that you surely know very good. In a recent post I wrote about Great Natural Forces in russian fables and about the Queen of the Snow in Andersen's fable. Could you wright me, pls, in your folks fables how you see similar forces? It's very interesting... Thank you. I'll ad your answer to the post then.