Yaaay, I can officially cross off one item from my wishlist because I got a present from Panda today.    It’s an early birthday present and it already has my fingers numb from overuse.  What is it?  Well, none other than BuckyBalls!!!  And what is that?  Well, they’re magnetized balls 5 mm in diameter and you get a set of 216.  Can anyone tell me the significance of that number?  A trip to Wolfram Alpha quickly enlightens you: it’s 6³ (six cubed), which means that number forms a perfect 6X6X6 cube.  Very handy for a condensed form of safe-keeping and transportation.  And that is exactly the shape I found it in today when I unwrapped the gift.  Let me also say I’m so proud of Panda because he has really taken my greening efforts to heart and took gift wrap from a present he received to wrap mine, made the bow himself out of old ads, and found a cute image to cut out of another ad to make my card.  Isn’t that just lovely?  The preparation was almost better than the gift.  But if you have ever played with BuckyBalls, you can understand why it was just was almost better.  Honestly, they are so great and amazingly entertaining.

In fact, they’re so loved that they’ve got a fan following with plenty of pictures to share on their own creations.  That’s what I love about products that are so simple – it leaves a lot of room for innovation and creativity!  This one also gives a great interactive lesson in magnetism and how polarity works.  By trial and error, you can quickly learn how you can make some ball fit nicely in a square grid whereas others fit much tighter in a staggered grid shape.  If you check out the pictures on the Facebook page, you can find many descriptions including “hedron” and other such nerdy terms.  What better way to fall in love with science?

Testing out their magnetism…

…still hanging strong!

By this time the connection was weaker, but just that one point of contact allowed it to support that weight for awhile!

It holds pretty well.

Uh oh, once you mess it up like this, it’s really hard to fix.

And a photo blog in the coming weeks to show some of the fun creations I sacrificed my thumbs to make!  (It can be quite difficult to pull those suckers away from each other.  They have a magnet grade of N35, which is pretty darned high… aka they have strong attraction and repulsion forces.)

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