Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
August 2018
- When This Executive Was Fired, He Took Charge
- Obeying The Speed Limit Has Never Been More Fun
- London Black Cabs Helped Uber Grow
- Bette Graham Created A Product To Fix Her Mistakes
- Flamin' Hot Cheetos Had An Interesting Start
July 2018
- Fear This Instead Of Failure
- Re-Releasing Songs Created Success
- A CEO's Purposeful Mistake
- The Tardy Student And The Unsolvable Problem
- Fixing Potholes Through Graffiti
June 2018
- A Surprising Mistake In The Oxford English Dictionary
- US Army Embraces Mistakes
- Blocking A Hymn
- Eddie Shore Was Truly A Tough Guy
- [Video] Elon Musk Didn't "Pivot" He Failed
May 2018
- 8 Examples of Mental Toughness Part 2
- Necessity Turned Accessory: Allen Iverson's Sleeve
- This Doctor Has Continued To Fail
- 8 Examples of Mental Toughness
- MIT Accidentally Creates New Smelting Process
April 2018
- Johnny Cash Quit Singing Lessons
- Cruise Control Came Out of Frustration
- Time Spent Gaming Pays Off In The Navy
- Rock Around The Clock Was a Commercial Failure
- Sigmund Freud Should Have Been Discouraged
March 2018
The Physics of Discarded Paper
Crumple it up, toss it away. We all know that feeling. But apparently, discarded jumbles of paper are a huge mystery in physics.
A piece recently published in New Scientist discusses the
the peculiar physics of crumpled paper. From the piece:
How can a sheet of paper become an unaccountably tough projectile simply by the act of crushing? The answer might seem simple, but it turned out that finding a sound explanation required complex instruments and a lot of brain power. Now, though, Cambou and Menon, physicists at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, have come up with some unexpected answers.
Photo © Flickr User Turinboy
That’s just one of the mysteries of this everyday object. But scientists have discovered many more, including:
One property of crumpled paper remained, though, resisting all forms of analysis. No matter how tightly you crumple paper into a ball, you’ll be hard-pressed to come up with a structure composed of less than about 90 per cent air. “It’s technically possible to compress them further,” says Cambou, “but that will take a lot more force because the crumpled sheet increasingly opposes the external force as it’s crushed.”
If you begin to think about crumbled paper, it’s actually quite fascinating. We pack heavy objects into boxes filled with crumbled paper, and it supports and cushions their weight just fine. This is despite the fact that a piece of paper only has a fraction of the mass of whatever it’s holding up!
Failure is the secret to success. If you’re looking for a new field of research, you may need to focus on what others have already discarded. And even if you’re tossing something away, it might be the foundation of an entirely fresh point of view.
