Chronicle Of The Ball

The ball was started sometime shortly before Halloween of 1996. Of course (it is made of candy wrappers, after all), it grew quite a bit (to ~20mm in diameter) then. Unfortunately, I didn't start actually recording its progress until January of 1997, but here goes.

If you are looking for the awards, they have been moved to their own page so as not to pollute this one.

June 18, 1999

Whew! The ball has had a growth spurt. It is now over 3 pounds.

As some of you may have noticed, I had removed my email address from this site because I was getting too much spam. I have restored the ability for ball fans to contact me by dusting off an old CGI program that I wrote years ago.

I also added a really annoying bit of javascript to the site.

September 24, 1998

I bring bad news. A contributor to the ball has passed away. Rachel Thoresen was killed in an auto accident. Her brother, Matthew, sent me the following poem, and I gladly reproduce it here, hoping that this citation may help her friends and family in their time of grief.
If you lean in close enough, open your heart wide enough, and smile bright enough, you will see her.
She's the embrace of good friends.
She's the smile of a young child.
She's the love that brings together family and friends.
She's the whisper "I love you" that comes from the depth of your soul.
She's the unconditional love we give.
She's the sun, so bright it will light up the cloudy days and fill the sad hole in our hearts with good. So...
Live with abandon.
Walk to the edge.
Make a new friend.
Play hard.
Challenge yourself.
Appreciate your friends.
Remind those you love, that you do.
Live life as if this is
all
there
is.

-mathew thoresen

September 23, 1998

You might have noticed that not a lot has been happening lately. The "foil guy" has been very busy lately. The ball is not dead, it's just restin'.

August 6, 1998

My employer decided to cut head count by 50%. I was one of the unlucky ones. That means that the address to which to send foil will be in limbo for awhile until I come out to my new employer as the keeper of the ball.

July 27, 1998

The ball is not immune to the scourge of crime, it seems. The home of the keeper of the ball was burglarized, and, among other things, the power/serial adapter and serial cable for the ball's camera were stolen. I am still working on adding a bunch of foil to the ball, and it was not in my home during the event.

July 11, 1998

A number of friends in the Research Triangle of North Carolina heard a rerun of the This American Life show mentioning the ball.

July 1, 1998

Once again, there has been a hiatus as I once again have moved. I am (as is the ball) now in my new place, and I have long ago found the box that the ball was packed in. I am currently working on another batch of foil sent in by Chuck Perkins. It has recently been difficult to find time to work on the ball, but I do when I can. Not to worry, the ball has not fallen into neglect.

January 3, 1998

The largest single piece of foil to be incorporated into the ball is the foil from our xmas ham. It was 59.5cm x 93cm and weighed 59g. (23.4" x 36.6", 2.1 oz) It was a rather heavy gauge foil, and it was painted gold. I put it in the top rack of the dishwasher to get all of the grease off of it, and the gold paint (ink, whatever) melted off; which is too bad, because it would made for a nice golden ball.

October 16, 1997

We're coming up on the birthday of the ball. Since the exact date is unknown, I will simply declare it to be Halloween. Since Halloween foil is now available, The ball has donned a costume for the occasion.

September 8, 1997

The ball now has a camera. After a long period during which it was not feasible to produce images the ball, a digital camera has been contributed. The ball has grown quite a bit since its last photo, and it has even grown some since the last ray traced "Image Unavailable" data point in the growth chart.

August 16, 1997

This site has received a facelift. It mostly looks the same, but most pages now end in a slash instead of .html. Additionally, there is now a navigation bar at the bottom of all HTML pages. I have inserted redirects into the server, so bookmarked references to the old URLs of individual pages should still work.

August 9, 1997

As you might already have noticed, the ball now has its own email address. I had set one up at Friendly E-mail, but the last time I checked, they haven't yet recovered from the dirty work of a hacker, so I moved it to BigFoot.

August 7, 1997

I've just added a whole bunch of foil to the ball. At 17.25oz (518g) in weight, and 78.5mm in diameter (9.7" in circumference), it has passed both the 1lb and 500g marks, and is now slightly larger than a baseball. Lest anyone get any ideas about batting it around, it is over 3 1/4 times as heavy as a regulation ball.

July 31, 1997

Things move slowly when one has no equipment and no budget. Since I left my last job (well, actually, they told me that they couldn't afford to pay me anymore, but they'd be glad to have me stay on despite that little detail), I no longer have access to the postal scale and the bed scanner there. I have procured a proper balance and I am working on getting something to take digital photographs with.

The ball now weighs 11.75oz. Now that I can properly take before and after measurements, I have a batch of foil that I can add to the ball.

June 19, 1997

I've received the first donation of foil at my new work address. This donation was inspired by an NPR broadcast which mentioned the ball.

It was on a show called This American Life, apparently somebody called in and spent several minutes talking about this site, even reading text directly from it. There are RealAudio recordings of it. I have not been able to listen to it yet due to hardware constraints (no sound card), but I am told that this is the one.

Last weekend, my partner and I attended a costume party. I'm not really one for costumes, but it was a weird enough bunch (that's a good thing) that we went as the Priestess of the ball (her) and the Guardian of the ball (me). Of course, the ball starred as the crucial feature of both costumes, resplendent in its silvery coat of gum wrapper foil.

My coworkers keep asking me to bring the ball back into work. One of these days, I'll remember to do so.

June 1, 1997

It's been awhile since much has happened with the ball. This is due to the fact that I have recently changed jobs. Things are settling down now, and I have come out to my coworkers as the keeper of the ball. I have already gotten a donation of foil from one of my coworkers.

The ball has grown somewhat since last checkin, but I need to purchase a scale and a ruler since I no longer have such instruments available to me at work.

May 2, 1997

Today, I sent the ball with my partner to her place of work. It was covered in gum wrappers and weighed over 10 ounces. It was a big hit with most of the people who she showed it to, including some people who have contributed to its growth. Of course, there were some people who were introduced to the ball couldn't fathom why it should be interesting. I have found that reactions the ball fall into the 2 extremes.

April 15, 1997

In the last two days, some colleagues and I have gotten lunch at "restaurants" which package some of their food items in foil wrappers. These wrappers are backed with paper which is bound to the foil in a loose pattern with some sort of glue. That glue seems to be water soluble since it is very difficult to remove the paper when it is dry, but easy when it is wet. The resulting foil is about the thickness of kiss wrappers, but it has about thirty to forty times the surface area. The foil from three people eating at a certain establishment is, therefore, roughly equivalent to that from two bags of kisses.

April 8, 1997

I have added a feature to the math page. As you might have noticed by looking at some of the mugshots of the ball, some wrappers do not completely cover the front surface. The math page now includes indications of how much of The ball would be visible past the ends of the wrapper if one were applied in one piece. For an example, the ball is now 58.8mm in diameter and weighs 8oz. In addition, there is an indication of how many wrappers it would take to cover the ball once with an arbitrarily chosen percentage of overlap.

April 3, 1997

The ball has reached the 1/2 pound mark. Of course, this has no significance to those who grok metric measurements of mass (226.8g), but I am admittedly a victim of the American mindset which squashed the adoption of the metric system in the '70s in spite of its obvious superiority. I would be recording the mass of the ball in grams instead of its weight in ounces, except that the only scale that I have access to is a postal scale, and the United States Postal Service appears only to comprehend ounces.

Growth since last check-in has been due to various candy wrappers, including some which were contributed through the mail. In addition, the tin from a tiny pie, the lid from an apple juice container, and some foil from wrapping some food item (I don't recall what it was) have added to the bulk of the ball. I attempted to add the aluminum shutter from a dead diskette, but it was just plain too thick. The aforementioned items work just fine, though. A local drug store has Easter candy marked down to half price, so I got a bag each of kisses, hugs and peanut butter cups.

March 25, 1997

I haven't bought much candy lately, but I have received some donations. Also, a friend and I had fajitas for lunch last week and the tortillas came wrapped in squares of foil, approximately 30 cm on a side. Guess where I ate last night. The wrappers were more difficult to peel than Andes mints, but the resultant foil is similar.

Among the donations are the foil wrappers from chocolate coins. This foil is thicker than most foil wrappers. It can easily be flattened, but the thickness makes it impossible to put on the ball without big, thick creases. Of course, I found a way around that. I tear the disks into strips about 1cm wide. I then place them about the ball, holding them on with strips of pattie wrapper.

March 6, 1997

I received my second bit of feedback about the ball site today! Fortunately, it was complimentary. 8) The writer even said that he is starting his own ball and suggested the use of Trident gum packages.

The candy run of a few days ago has resulted in growth of the ball. It is now up to 6oz, a 50% growth since I began recording its progress.

It seems that I am getting bigger as fast as than the ball is. 8( I need some help acquiring raw materials.

March 4, 1997

After a dry spell, a friend and I made a run to the drug store where I got a bag of peanut butter cups, a bag of peppermint patties in easter pastel pink, blue, and silver colors, and a bag of Palmer Easter mix. The battery in the postal scale at work is running down, so it's a challenge to get a reading before it displays "LO". I did manage to get the reading of 5.8oz, however. Also, as you might notice from the growth chart, there is now a tenths digit for diameter measurements. That is from taking one or more circumference measurements and dividing by pi. It isn't exactly scientific, but neither is holding the ball up against a ruler and eyeballing.

February 12, 1997

My life-partner has been collecting foil at work so I had quite a haul of kiss wrappers to add to the ball. It has gained half of an ounce this week! At this size, it is difficult to keep small wrappers on it long enough to put a glue coat on. That hasn't stopped me, though. 8)

February 10, 1997

Whoa! I've found at least part of why my density computations are so far off! I've been consistently measuring 1 cm too large. With this correction, the ball has "shrunk" from 60mm to 50mm. Now, the density comes out to ~1.95, which is much closer to 2.7. It is still somewhat less than expected, but not as abysmally as before. I corrected it in the chronicle and in the growth chart.

The ball has gained a few tenths of an ounce since its last weighing, but is hasn't increased in size. That is because I whacked it with a hammer this weekend to further harden the surface and to try to round it up a bit. It is still not perfectly round and the diameter varies by a millimeter or so, depending on where you measure, but it is still pretty good.

Oh yeah; and my sweetie procured some new wrappers this weekend. She bought a bag of kisses and the wrappers are making their way into her basket.

February 6, 1997

There was yet another run to the drug store today. At checkout, it was noted that I was not buying anything covered in foil, so I grabbed a chocolate covered cherry.

February 3, 1997

Last weekend, my life-partner and I partook of Klondike bars. Of course, they generate foil-covered wrappers. They are a bit odd. The foil can be peeled from the rather heavy paper backing, but it is quite a challenge as the adhesive is strong and the foil is very thin and wrinkled. What's more is that the resulting foil doesn't have very much usable adhesive on the back. Using large pieces, and not being too terribly aggressive about smoothing it out, they do stick on for the most part. Of course, I have a scan of the result. The wrapper is held closed with a substance which is reminicent of rubber-cement. That must be rubbed off of the surface so as to keep contamination of the purity of the ball to a minimum.

January 27, 1997

I accompanied a colleague on a pattie-run this morning. While there, I picked up a bag of peanut butter cups. Also, since Easter is approaching (it's only 2 months away), a display of Cadbury creme eggs caught my eye. Yeah, I blew $0.50 so I could make the ball red, green, and blue.

I happened to notice something. The peanut butter cups are manufactured by H. B. Reese Candy Co., which is a division of Hershey Foods Corporation; the same people who make York peppermint patties. Even the Cadbury creme egg was made for Hershey Chocolate U.S.A. under license from Cadbury Ltd. I have yet to find foil wrapped candy that is not involved with Hershey. Not that I've been looking terribly hard, mind you. It's just that so far, I'm 4 for 4 (patties, cups, egg, kisses).

January 23, 1997

The ball hasn't grown much since last check-in due to a lack of raw materials. There have been offerings of foil from a candy bar and a few peppermint patties, but I think I'll wait until I have more to slap on at one time.

We've gotten an electronic postage scale in the office. It reads one more digit of precision, so we now have a weight of 3.9oz. I have done the math to compute the density of the ball. Curiously, it is much lower than that of solid aluminum. I have a hard time believing that the ball is less than half aluminum by mass, so I invite you to let me know if there are any errors in my computations. I expected that the density would be less than that of solid aluminum because of the small amount of air between layers of foil, the adhesive, coatings/inks, and small quantities of chocolate, grease, and other leftovers from the food items that the wrappers were originally used to package. I wouldn't have been too surprised by a 5 or even 10 percent difference, but I find the actual results obtained a little difficult to believe.

Since peppermint patties provide, so far, the best material for a "glue coat", I wondered if, perhaps, the manufacturer might contribute roll-ends of the foil to the ball. Of course, the up side for them would be positive PR. Unfortunately, they have a strict policy about listening to ideas from outside of their company, so I can't even bounce the idea off of them. Of course, the companies that actually produce aluminum foil are probably not an option, since they would probably just melt their scraps down to make more product. I refuse to go out and buy a roll of foil just to put it onto the ball. Besides, using household aluminum foil tends to put the ball out of round.

January 16, 1997

The ball has respectable heft now. It weighs about 4oz according to our postage scale, and it is slightly larger than a golf ball at a diameter of 48mm (1.89").
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