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In 1989 while working on exhibits for Boston Science Museum,
I was playing with some glass mirror tiles.
You can just buy these at hardware stores.
There's the camera. Ooo, "breaking the 4th wall!"
but uh...
I came up with a couple of cool things you can do,
like the Exploratorium science museum has their "Gravity Mirror,"
where you have a huge mirrored wall you stand halfway between.
Well, you can really screw around
with your face using mirrors.
But I wanted something more serious
and i found you could have
three mirrors, or four,
but three is simpler...
three mirrors standing on a table, like this,
and you would get a sphere if they were tilted out slightly.
So... I built this thing
that made a sphere.
This is like a prototype
for an exhibit that you'd stand inside of,
and it would make a planet with variable size.
There's the light.
And if you put this thing against
a wooden table
you'd get nice-looking wooden sphere.
See this is basically a three-sided kaleidoscope.
So rather than making an infinite plane of triangles,
it makes a geodesic dome.
Gonna mount the camera better here...
Nice clean wooden sphere.
And if I move it a little, off the edge,
it starts making, like a
geodesic dome.
But what's that?
Maybe it's...
sort of biological,
if I stuff my fingers in there too.
Well that was only the beginning
Because we don't even need the wooden sphere.
Just fingers!
fingers. Fingers!
It gets very biological.
How biological?
You have no idea.
Yes you do!
Eyeball...
Oh Boy!
And of course
this is a perversion of
nice pristine geometry
and was immediately dubbed ...THE DISGUSTO-SCOPE.
These things are very easy to make.
You don't even need the glass cutter cutting up
twelve-inch mirror tile.
because
If you go to a glass store,
you can buy scraps of Plexiglas (acrylic) mirror.
Also "Tap plastics(tm)" stores
will have mirror scraps in their bin,
and that cuts up just with any kind of saw.
Here's a little plastic one.
Disgustoscope.
And here's a tiny one
made from 1/32 inch.
Now the lighting (you can see with this one,)
the lighting works great outdoors,
but indoors these things sort of shield themselves, so
you can use them as great outdoor toys
but indoors you have to find the just the right direction
for overhead lights so it's actually worthwhile
rigging them with some kind of light.
These i'd put little
$1 LED battery assemblies from the "Dollar store,"
so they have their own spotlight.
more information and plastic cutting dimensions are available on the
SCIENCE HOBBYIST website http://amasci.com/amateur/dscope.html