Jack on.
"On the way out of a Big Five on Friday I saw a toy in a bubble pack called Astrojax on sale for $7.99. It looked cool, so I bought one for my kid. The thing now lives in his pocket. All this weekend at the Live Oak Festival, he walked around, making all kinds of fun moves happen with an apparatus that is, by first acquaintence, nothing more than three balls on a strong ‹ but is, in fact, much more.
After a little experimentation, the kid had the balls dancing in the air... orbiting in bounces and loops, alone or together, in countless complex patterns.
According to this page here,
Astrojax was invented by the American physicist Larry Shaw. While still at graduate school Shaw discovered the basic principle of Astrojax while playing with hex nuts and dental floss in a physics lab.
Intrigued by the complex patterns this simple arrangement created, he started to develop the idea. What first looked quite simple was actually very hard to solve mathematically. It took almost two years and hundreds of prototypes before Shaw decided on a model and had the principle patented."
[via The Doc Searls Weblog]
