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Ping-Pong ball avalanche
Boing Boing readers will have seen this link to a Japanese research group studying the physics of avalanches by dropping hundreds of thousands of ping-pong balls down the landing zone of a ski jump. They have a bunch of images on their web site as well as about a gigabyte of video. Most of the video is from camera angles that are more of scientific than aesthetic interest, but a few a just wonderful. In my opinion probably the best video, if you just want to enjoy the spectacle, is this one of 320,000 balls. All the videos have a computer-generated blue line marking the front of the avalanche.
This is a fantastic example of the ability of science to occasionally justify experiments that would be just wonderful to perform purely for fun.
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