Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/11/11/ping-pong-balls-reportedly-float-on-xbox-series-xs-vent.html
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“drying genital hair”
Billy Mays here! Are you sick and tired of the eternal embarrassment of damp pubes?
black-and-white footage of people clumsily hiding damp crotches plays in the background
Well have I got the device for you!
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A neat pic but this is really an illustration of drag not the Bernoulli principle. Take some sandpaper and rough up the ball and it will float lower.
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I mean, there’s drag involved in anything, but the Bernoulli principle is why it remains levitating on the column of fast-moving air. The nearly-still ambient air around it is at a higher pressure than the fast-moving column, so it pushes the ball back onto the low-pressure/high-speed air when it starts to drift off.
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Will this mess up Pong?
It appears the ball float may be a pipe dream - it would only happen under extreme duress causing the fans to kick in full bore. Which is good to know they aren’t always doing that because efficiency.
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i’m inclined to disbelieve stuff like this. But there’s no question it could be made to work that way, and on reflection Microsoft missed a trick by not having a floating Xbox logo sphere which doubles as the indicator light / ring of death.
(It would be lit indirectly by an LED underneath)
(And they could charge $3.95 for replacement spheres)
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Note: faked as though a fire inside. No Xboxes were hurt in the filming of this. 
The static pressure within the moving column of air and the ambient atmospheric pressure are the same. The dynamic pressure around the equator of the ball, outside of the boundary layer, is also the same. Small perturbations of the ball normal to the flow of air affect the boundary layer. On the side towards the motion of the ball there is an increase in the boundary layer and on the opposite side the boundary layer decreases. This results in a change of the net drag force that will return the ball toward the original position. This is similar to why a spinning baseball or golf ball curves in flight.
With a good airflow, you can tilt it quite a bit off vertical, and the ball will still stay in the stream.
I don’t dry genital hair. I just store it in mason jars.
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Do you sell on etsy? asking for a friend…
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The future is now.
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