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Magnets and Geometry

A bunch of us are in the middle of a short fad of fascination with magnets. I recently purchased about a thousand gold-plated spherical 6mm N35 neodymium-iron-boron magnets from Edwin Science . These are strong enough that swallowing two of them would probably require surgery . But I am not dumb enough to eat them, being far more interested in building things out of them, and thus I give you some photos of the nifty things I did when I got them, and some tips on how to assemble them. I regret not having the artistic skills or patience to illustrate all of the information I want to share here, but hopefully those interested can follow along. The first building block is a loop of magnets, with the poles aligned circumferentially (that is, a string of aligned magnets joined end to end). In the photos below, anywhere you see two parallel rows of magnets arranged in a square configuration, that indicates the adjacent rows are aligned in opposite directions, and almost always part of...