Puzzle Description:

Bonus question: What do you call the slow "wobble" of a spinning top?

#1: Kristen Vognild (kristen) on Mar 20, 2018 [SPOILER]

You're the Coliseum.
You're the top; you're the Lourve(sic) Museum

Uncle Wiki says it's the precession.

Uncle John agrees with uncle Wiki.

Nice top. I can remember being so frustrated because I was too short to make the kind of top you wrap with a string and throw at the ground spin.

Actually, Norma, it's harder to make a top out of a tall person than a short one - aside from spinning in their grave.

I have an old fashioned top like the one Norma described. It is made out of solid wood and has a white string that you wind up around the bottom of the top. You throw it to the ground and hold onto the string and it whirls for quite a while. It's very fun and I've had it for years. I still play with it from time to time.

At least they couldn't accuse me of being dizzy.

The physics of spinning things is quite interesting. Precession is the conversion of a force on a spinning body by 90 degrees.

One way to think about it is to keep in mind how things orbit. When something (say a moon) orbits another thing (e.g. a planet), it isn't held in place by magic orbit-rays. If the moon were not moving, it would fall straight down to the planet. However, it is moving. It is going sideways fast enough to make it fall over the side of the planet...continuously.

Now translate this to the top. If it were not spinning, gravity would make it fall over. Imagine a big arrow pointing from the stem of the top down towards the side that will hit the ground first. Now spin the top. As the top falls, that arrow will be spun away from the ground. Of course, there is always a new "arrow", but it also is being spun away. And so you get the wobble.

Precession is the lateral motion of the top end of the top, parallel to the surface the top's sitting on, in a circle. The vertical part of the wobble carries the name "nutation."

gesundheit. :)

Thank you, Gary Webster - I did not know that.

I'm sure that what Gary meant to say was that the herpolhode rolls without slipping on the polhode in the invariant plane. Right Gary?

Tough to see at first, then it was a great image.

All this jargon is making my head explode. Heh heh, I guess I just blew my top. Nyuk nyuk nyuk.

Grooooan, Aurelian. All these comments over a top are over the top.

Can't top that one. Lets move to another top-ic. Top of the morning to you.

So, John, you think we've topped out?

No, there's always one more over-the-top pun to be had. Once you get started, you just can't sTOP. So, keep sending in your box tops.

I think it's getting a little top heavy around here.

Nice puzzle, but big words make me as vertiginous as an Australopithecene.

Greggo, do you have hippopotamonstrosesquipedaliaphobia?

Bonus play-on-words: the word "top" is hiding backwords in the above ridiculously long word.

I got nothing. <sigh>

Why should Greggo have a fear of hippopotamuses (hippopotomi?)?

I was going to append a link to a song about hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, but they mispronounced it so egregiously that I just can't. Instead have an evil raccoon: https://kamilat1997.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.jpg

:)

Thank you Joe, for knowing what that word means. It's my favorite useless word in the whole English language. And the irony is delightful!

Goto next topic

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