Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
May 2012
April 2012
- [VIDEO] Harrison and the Diving Board
- The Tasty Failure of Oranges
- What's in a Band Name
- The Upside of Being Dishonest
- A Case For Failing
- From Broke to Multimillionare
March 2012
- [VIDEO] The Most Famous, Unused Poster
- How Angry Birds Became Successful
- Vendor Says: Failure Is a Huge Success
- Winning the Rejection Game
- Fred Astaire on Making Mistakes
- Roundoff Error: Failure and Success
- [VIDEO] Dr. Kate on Failure
February 2012
- Where The Sun will Finally Shine
- Use Errors, Make Training Efficient
- Unfinished, But Inhabited
- The Success of Failure, via CNN
- Einstein Actually Had Excellent Grades
- The Physics of Discarded Paper
- The Power of Failing
January 2012
- Offensive Advertising, Increased Sales?
- I Sold Out For Millions, Then Worked At McDonald's
- Steve Jobs on Failure
- The Famous Western Failure
- Thank Goodness for Drug Addicts
December 2011
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.
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.
