Archimedes says:

Neat!

In high school, I was kicked out of math for being “disruptive”, by correcting the teacher’s arithmetic mistakes on the blackboard. 🙂 They sent me to “Problem Solving Class”, which was a roomful of us troublemaker long-haired leather-wearing metalhead kids, who coincidentally also had some of the highest IQs in the school. Go figure, genius stoners get bored in math class.

In Problem Solving, we worked on very elaborate puzzles and projects, which usually involved applied math and logical thinking. One of the projects was to build a structure out of a few balsa wood sticks and glue, which would hold as much weight as possible. We went down to the gym, and entered the weight room with our projects.

Now, these weren’t rigid structures, they were made out of long square balsa sticks no more than 1/4 inch on a side. We received very few sticks, and had to make spindly open-air towers, similar to the Eiffel Tower, but with much less cross-bracing. I came in second, with my 6 inch structure holding about 200 pounds before it collapsed. The guy that came in first had a slightly better design than mine, but blew everybody away. It got to the point where the stack of weights on his balsa stand was over 5 feet high, and nearing 1000 pounds. He was a wrestler, and everybody thought he was a moron — except me, he had thoroughly kicked my ass in chess a few times.

I suggested to the teacher that he give the guy an ‘A’, and we remove the stack for safety, and to preserve the excellent piece of engineering. Unfortunately, as we were carefully removing the weights, somebody induced a slight torsional twist, and the pile collapsed on his balsa tower. The structure was reduced to balsa wood powder.

I’ll always remember John Perko’s balsa stand, and how brilliant the ‘stupid wrestler jock’ was. I hope life’s been good to him. Thanks to Dave Adney for taking on us troublesome geniuses. 🙂

John Wofford says:

They must have had a lot more time back in those days.