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] SCIENCE HOBBYIST: Ideas, additions SCIENCE HOBBYIST | AWARDS | GOOD STUFF | NEW STUFF | SEARCH SCIENCE HOBBYIST: new articles & updates New stuff, scroll down. Also try: Files listed by popularity Site Map RECOMMENDED CDROM: "The Amateur Scientist," from Scientific American magazine. All 810 columns by C.L.Stong, Jearle Walker, Shawn Carlson. ~1000 amateur projects, pp2100. $28 Mar/2026 MOVIE I'D ENTIRELY MISSED A crackpot inventor takes his novel device and moves his family to El Salvadore, to avoid the coming American civil war. Then he tries to convince the natives to adopt a high-tech lifestyle, and he builds his device in the jungle (two stories tall. Spoiler, it blows up.) Harrison Ford, River Phoenix, "The Mosquito Coast" 1996 2hr https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODpG7iN0BCk also The Trailer [ad] Oct/2018 ANTIGRAVITY DEVICE Everyone needs to be building a flying-saucer engine in their garage. Here's mine. Well, this is only the power supply, not the actual device (in our corporate startup, remains proprietary.) The intense fields from the resonant torus act as the driver for the main device not shown. (But did it work? Dunno. Brief activation did attract multiple UFO events. I guess it broadcasts a "signature.") Feb 2026 ROMAN DODECAHEDRON an engineer's speculations Every detail is functional. The little spheres have a purpose, as do the scribed circles, the variety of hole-sizes, the tiny holes versus the cm-wide holes. But of course it might eventually have been harnessed for other than its original function. Beat your glove-weavers into fidget-spinners. FIGURING IT OUT. Looking at the infamous dodecahedron. Hmm, this could be a challenge for my unconscious savant-skills at "idea-having." I saw the dodecahedron long ago, and guessed ...a tool for mass production. Ah, it must be for making huge numbers of arrow-shafts. I can almost see a Roman slave running wooden shafts through the device ...even spears. But the experts guessed and dismissed the same idea early on, rejected because the inner edges are round and polished. It can't shave wood. Also, the tool is mysteriously only found in cold climates, upper Gaul, northern Roman towns and garrisons, but never down south in actual Rome. Yet they'd need arrows and spears everywhere, not just up north, so that's a big downvote. (I then abandoned it all, ...then returned a couple of times. Nope, nuthin' occurs. The superpowers fail.) I just came back now (watching the Fran Feb 21 entry on the Dodecahedron,) and find a huge pile of concepts in my head waiting for me. Explains the scribed rings, and the little spheres, and the non-Rome distribution, and also the tiny-holes icosahedron version. Boom, done! (heh.) To start, ignore the dodecahedron. Instead, the secret key is the tiny-holes icosahedron. I can almost see someone running freshly-waxed string through those tiny holes. They're making candlewicks. Simply dipping the yarn instead, that's producing candles full of bubbles, which sputter and flare, and won't have a uniform coating. So, the device is like a wire-pulling die, except for yarn, probably for candlewicks. The icosahedron could be for mass-producing good, bubble-free candlewicks, and might be a secret method for making non-sputtering candles. (Experts say that these cannot be tools, since there is no wear. WEAR? On bronze? From candle wax? I'd predict none. But maybe the interior of the tiny-holes device will have some microscopic scoring, if the yarn for the wick had traces of abrasive dirt. Go look for micro-scratches.) And, if we put down the device while still wet with wax, the flat face makes a mess on the table, as well as promptly gluing itself to the surface. The little spheres are an obvious fix to prevent this. Wet wax-dripping tools need tiny legs. Heh, put six metal spheres on the bottom rim of all our coffee cups, to end the curse of ring stains on wooden tabletops. Invented by ancient Rome! MORE: get inside their heads, and go live like a Roman. Light bulbs and air conditioners don't exist. What would life be like if our "light bulbs" only lasted one night? How many lightbulb shops would then exist? Wouldn't lightbulbs be an enormous part of daily life? However, down south in the city of Rome we use oil lamps. Room-temp is above 70F, so candles (meaning hogfat or sheep-grease tallow) will just slump and melt, turning into oil. All oil-lamps all the time. It's a tool. A quite expensive tool for mass production of some common product. The little spheres are legs, so the flat face doesn't glue itself down when the wet liquid hardens. (We should find traces of the hardened liquid.) The rings provide air-gaps on the surface around the hole, so the stripped coating lifts off, rather than sliding along and adhering to the flat face, causing unwanted buildup. (We don't want the workers constantly stopping in order to manually scrape off that buildup. With rings-and-slots, it easily flakes off.) The tiny holes are like orifice-plates ...