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Virtual Toy Chest's Ramagon Building System Archive |
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Although the 80s was the decade of action figures, it also was a time of great building toys, such as Construx. Sadly most of these did not have the success that K'NEX enjoyed during the 90s, or the more recent resurgence of Lego. However, they are none the less amazing toys. Ramagon was first released in the late 1970s by Highland Industries. However, it had its biggest success during the 1980s when it was distributed by Discovery Toys. It was later sold by Ramagon Toys. Ramagon adopted the aesthetic of the space age. This differentiated it from Lego, which during the early 80s, was firmly terrestrial. The Ramagon logo was a birdseye view of the octagonal connector piece. It looks very much like the Dharma Initative logo from Lost. The rest of the pieces also share the classic aesthetic. Like K'NEX, Ragamon allows you to build large sturctures with ease, and with relatively few parts. Ragamon is well suited to creating geodesic shapes. It has Lego compatible panels that allow you to create hybrid structures. |
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Pyramid
Moon Base
Sand Crawler
Hilbert Curve
(the red bars are for structural support only)
Around the turn of the 20th century, Giuseppe Peano, an Italian mathematitian, proved the existence of a curve that could fill every point in a space. This is a truly remarkable discovery. It shows that a line, a one dimensional object, can be mapped continuously onto a two dimensional object. This led to the reformulation of the concept of dimension. The Hilbert Curve also fills every point in a space. It is named after its creator, German mathematician David Hilbert, who was the first to provide a graphical representation of such a curve.