Embracing Chaos

Last night I had a great time at a local O’Reilly event building a bridge out of popsicle sticks with a few good friends. The rules were pretty simple: you get 1,000 popsicle sticks and some hot glue guns to build a bridge that spans a 15″ gap in 30 minutes. Then we try to break them by standing on them. At first blush, very similar to a contest my junior high science teacher used to do, and that happen all over the place. But there are a number of subtleties in the execution of the competition that greatly effected…

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