Check out Reddit user
u/codesherpa, who not only built what may be the world record spaghetti tower constructed within the restrictions posed by Peter Skillman's tower challenge, but also went to great lengths to explain the structural engineering behind his tower, and why he believes that it's unlikely anyone will be able to build one much taller than 65 inches.
The tower challenge can be seen in
Skillman's TED talk, but the rules are pretty simple:
in eighteen minutes, teams must build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one meter of tape, one meter of string, and one marshmallow. The marshmallow needs to be on top. (codesherpa is working at a slight disadvantage because he's using yards instead of meters, so his materials are a bit restricted.)
Taking the challenge seriously, codesherpa went home and tested ten varieties of spaghetti to determine which is the sturdiest, and engineered a design that maximized the structural integrity of his limited resources. If you read through the comments, codesherpa also explains the other different designs he tried, and the difficulties of working with a cat.
What makes this such a nerdy reddit post isn't so much the spaghetti tower, although that's certainly an enjoyable part of it, but it's codesherpa's attention to detail, meticulous planning, application of engineering knowledge, and iterative testing to accomplish a completely frivolous task. It's a delight to read the initial post and the discussion between users in the comments, and I think the world is better for having people like codesherpa who are willing to share nerdy experiments like this.
