Stanford University organized a contest with a simple task: take rubber bands and "add value" to them. Entrants were to send in a video of what they did with the bands.
As reported today by Lee Gomes in The Wall Street Journal, some of the ideas resembled things already done (e.g., wear rubber bands as bracelets to promote awareness of particular diseases). Others were inventive. At lease one struck Mr. Gomes (and me also) as brilliant. It was the entry of Michael Fischer, a computer science senior at Stanford, who built a series of small pendulums connected by rubber bands and then used it to demonstrate a property of the special theory of relativity. You can watch the video of Mr. Fischer's demonstration here and you can see the other videos here. But as Mr. Gomes cautions: "Unfortunately, you need to know what [Mr. Fischer] is talking about before you can understand what he is saying."