Thursday, May 19, 2011

Boredom in Statistics

So one day a long time ago in my AP Statistics class we were conducting an experiment with dice. I didn't feel like paying attention that day - for whatever reason - so I had to find some way to occupy myself. So I did this:


No that's not an optical illusion and no I did not use glue. That is actually a die balanced on the corner of another die balanced on its corner on the face of another die.  Tricky stuff trying to get it right. But it took less than 5 minutes to perfect my technique, and soon I was able to stack dice like this in only seconds. So I decided to move on to something a bit harder:


It doesn't look much harder but it is. Adding the extra die on top takes a heck of a lot of balance and extremely stable hands, because the added weight causes even the slightest imbalance to become detrimental to the structure. The dice are in the same arrangement as the picture before because I had been practicing this awhile before we decided to take pictures. But I got bored again, so I decided to go further:


This was ridiculously hard to do. It must have taken me a good 20 or 25 minutes to get this. I think I was only able to get this far twice the whole period. It is probably the most difficult thing I have ever done in Stats class. I tried for a 6th die but I failed miserably.

Maybe next time I'll be able to obtain unreached heights and get to the 6th or possibly 7th die.

28 comments:

  1. How many tries before achieving this ?

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  2. That is crazy, I almost can't believe that you really did that!

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  3. Thats amazing. I immediately tried to duplicate your results but I don't have enough patience to accomplish this haha.

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  4. Damn son. That is the power of boredom in class!

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  5. wtf seems to be stuck with glue! amazing

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  6. interesting. never seen that before

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  7. Wow, only one way to the top. =P

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  8. Get into a D&D game, stack some of those dice!

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  9. Dude, I love this blog! Great work!

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  10. This reminds me of math class back in high school.

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  11. were you wearing your robe and wizard hat while doing this?

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  12. cool.
    you should start a speed-dice-stacking compedition on yt

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  13. is it real? i saw one day on guiness world records primetime a dude that stacked 9 bowling balls like that (not using the holes!!). still wondering if it is possible

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  14. Nice job on the dice balancing :3

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  15. i'm doing that the next time i'm around dice, 100%

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  16. wow, interesting, I'll try to do the same, but it seems very difficult !

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  17. lol wow that looks really hard

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  18. I would love to see video of this.

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  19. whaat? thats pretty crazy. There's no way I would be able to do this... I shake like I've already got parkinsons.

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  20. There wasn't the occasional jerk who shook the table just for the hell of it? Haha. They'd deserve a punch to the face.

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  21. I had a stats exam today... how did you manage that?!

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