By Kevin L'Heureux
Cultural institutions in San Francisco continually search for new acquisitions. Alexis Coebrings you the most important, often wondrous, sometimes bizarre, and occasionally downright vexing finds every other Friday.
If you haven't been to the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, here's another reason: Owner Michael Schiess has built a pinball machine based on the "bean machine."
Inventor Sir Francis Galton used it to demonstrates the central limit theorem. The machine has a vertical board with interleaved rows of pins, and balls are dropped from the top. They bounce left and right, and eventually, they are collected into the bins at the bottom, which demonstrates that the normal distribution is approximate to the binomial distribution.
If that last sentence was hard to fully comprehend on paper, you're not alone. Schiess uses the machine make math easier to understand, not to mention more exciting. for local school children.
You recently built a Galton Board Pinball Machine. You took inspiration from Galton, but designed it yourself. Did you have any help?
It was built by brother Christian Schiess and myself in our shop.
Read more via SFWeekly
If you haven't been to the Pacific Pinball Museum in Alameda, here's another reason: Owner Michael Schiess has built a pinball machine based on the "bean machine."
Inventor Sir Francis Galton used it to demonstrates the central limit theorem. The machine has a vertical board with interleaved rows of pins, and balls are dropped from the top. They bounce left and right, and eventually, they are collected into the bins at the bottom, which demonstrates that the normal distribution is approximate to the binomial distribution.
If that last sentence was hard to fully comprehend on paper, you're not alone. Schiess uses the machine make math easier to understand, not to mention more exciting. for local school children.
You recently built a Galton Board Pinball Machine. You took inspiration from Galton, but designed it yourself. Did you have any help?
It was built by brother Christian Schiess and myself in our shop.
Read more via SFWeekly
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