My Multi Configuration Coffee Table Design

MulTable

This project is made from Curly Maple. Finished with Colonial Maple stain and matte PolyAcrylic. It is composed from just four parts.  A top, 2 leg panels, and a beam. Depending on how the parts are assembled the top can be one of three height. More variations possible with a T-shaped slot so the beam can slide in standing up or on it's side. A toy ramp configuration is optional. 

Ramp for Toy Cars and Trucks

I came up with this design many years back.   I've made several of them for family and friends.  This post is about making one for my ex wife who has a niece with a young son who visits often. She wants it for the ramp option specifically.  

A Lower Height when Beam is Angled

She chose curly hard maple for the table. Probably the hardest wood to process cleanly. This wood has given me grief trying to run it through my drum sander. 

The basic design can be seen here:  Multable The beam was the simplest part to make. Two strips glued together, joined flat on one side, planed uniformly thick, edges rounded over. The ends are defined with an arc.

Beam Down

The base panels are two sections glued side by side, then trimmed 14" inches wide.  The top was three sections glued side by side and trimmed 16" wide. 

Directional Emphasis

As there are no mechanical connections between the parts, the top is just resting on the sides and can be bumped or tilted from an uneven load.  To pick it up you essentially need to remove the top then move the sides and beam.  

Easy to make if you have a method to cut the holes in the sides.   Early versions  I made the holes in a few step.  Drilled through at the corners, rough cut with a jig saw. Then the edges cut smooth on my router table with precise setups of the fence and stop blocks. On this version I used my CNC to cut the holes out precisely.  Just slightly wider than the beam. The hole edges were rounded over with a 3/8" radius roundover bit in my Milwaukee trim router. 

This project is a good example of 4D furniture. It can change in configuration over time. 

Leave a message if you have questions of comments.  

4D

Using AI to Build What You Imagined.

Creativity can be expressed in many ways.  One of my early creative efforts was to write computer programs using QuickBasic on IBM PC clones running Microsoft's DOS. To me writing and running executable code is much like designing and then making a piece of furniture. You start with an idea, then work through the steps to build that idea. 

One thing that Google's Chrome browser AI can do is write HTML code that does what you describe to it. To test run this capability I took the programming notes I'd created for an old QuickBasic program and copied them to the AI.  It took 1/2 hour or so to have a working but buggy version of that old program. The AI could spot the bugs when I described them to it, and provide updated code with the fix. Another hour total of quick sessions had all the bugs fixed and some new features added. 

PTutor Screen Capture

This is PTutor.  It is an HTML version of a Perspective drawing Tutorial program I wrote in QuickBasic back in 1987 when I was in graduate school.  It ran under DOS on IBM PC clones on a 640 x 480 resolution CRT monitor.   You can download the HTML version at THIS LINK .Double clicking on the HTML file will open it in a browser window. Drag the red handles of the site lines around to see the object from different viewpoint.  Let go of the mouse button and the drawing will re-center with your new view straight ahead.  

I've been working with Chrome's AI to build a web browser version of a more useful 3D Perspective drawing CAD program I also wrote in QuickBasic back in 1988 or so to serve the students in the IAPD program at K-State.   The challenge right now is that as the program code grows it is harder to handle the size and takes more time.  It was simple to use, with only 3 basic elements to use.  One was vertical rectangles.  One is single lines, and the last is Blocks that can be any previous file.  A press of "P" on the keyboard would draw a perspective view of anything you had drawn. "T" switches to the Top view, and "S" switches to the Side view. Their is a site line that starts at a station point and ends at your focus point  In Top or Side view we can drag the ends of this line around to change what you see then "P" is pressed for a perspective view.  You can zoom in or out of the perspective view, and pan it over. You can delete individual lines in the perspective view to remove any that should be hidden and clutter the drawing.  The features aren't hard to describe, but they take considerable code to make happen in a browser window. The AI isn't capable of compact efficient code. It is too verbose and that makes the file size larger than the Chrome text window can hold. 

So one success and one failure.  Directly related to the limits of what Google's Chrome AI can do. Small ideas Yes.  Complex and more useful ideas are a Maybe. Perhaps I'll try again after that AI has evolved some more. 

4D

Tim and His Stop Watch. A Lesson in time distortion.

 A 4D Physics Tale for Young Minds.

Tim is a clever young lad who has a 20 minute walk (1 mile) to school every school day.  Tim's mother gave him a nice durable stop watch to help him make sure he made it to school on time every day. One tick each second. If he left the house at 7:40, and walked steadily along the way it was a nice easy stroll and he was always in his seat by 8:00am. 1200 ticks.  12 blocks.  100 ticks per block. Two steps per tick.  So 7:40am was always when he left.   

There was a small neighborhood grocery store between his house and the school. A distraction. Two minutes (120 ticks) from home. Some days he would pause there to spend a nickel or dime if he had either.  That usually took 3 minutes (180 ticks) of the trip.  What Tim realized was that he had already spent 5 minutes (300 ticks), but still had 18 minutes (1080 ticks) of walking to get to school. He knew if he ran he could stretch those 15 minutes (900 ticks) to cover 18 minutes (1080 ticks) of walking distance in just 15 minutes.  The store distraction slowed down his ticks per distance travelled to a stop. Running stretched his ticks to cover more distance per tick. But Tim was panting and sweating when he got to school. Running required more work than walking would have needed. 

Another day Tim wanted to get to school early so he could have time to finish his homework before class started.  His homework was in his classroom desk. He realized that if he could run the whole way he could get 20 minutes (1200 ticks) worth of distance with just 15 minutes (900 ticks) and have 5 minutes (300 ticks) to work on his homework.  He did make it to school with 5 spare minutes, but again he spent more energy to get there.  Tim learned that he would need some eggs and bacon and toast and juice for breakfast on those running days.  On walking days a bowl of cereal with milk was enough.  Speeding up requires more energy. 

Tim's Grandmother lives 1091 miles away.  Tim had a dream about using his 1200 ticks to visit her.  His dream said it was easy, just 1,309,200 ticks of his stopwatch to walk there.  363 hours and 40 minutes.  But eating enough breakfast to get there in 1200 ticks may be impossible. Great Great Grandpa Albert would have agreed.  

Deconstructing Einstein: The Case for an Empty Space and an Elastic Time. GelaTime.

I had an "aha" moment today 10/14/2026.  The space part of "spacetime" seemed unnecessary for gravity calculations. Time however is an "everywhere" volume.  It alone can be displaced by large masses like the Earth.  Space is just the gaps between masses.  We obviously can't see time, space, or gravity. Yet of those three we can see the effects on time around a rocky mass, and deduce the gravity acceleration from time, radius and density of the rocky mass. Space isn't needed to contribute to the classic equations. Time is.  

Time has a "jello" like consistency. It is clear and resilient. The historical mistake, originally sparked by mathematician Hermann Minkowski and later adopted by Einstein, was naming this fundamental volume of time as "spacetime." By welding the two together, physics lost the true mechanics of the cosmos. Space is simply the container for time. Otherwise empty.  I hereby declare GelaTime as the new spacetime. 

Distance is not a static dimension stretching between masses; it is simply a measurement of how long it takes to cross the temporal landscape. Consequently, the universe is not being stretched out by an expanding vacuum of space. It is expanding simply because cosmic time continues to pass, accumulating a greater volume of ticks. The useful thing to know about planets and moons is not their XYZ location, but the time it takes to get from here to there. 

This brings us to a phenomenon mainstream physics completely misinterprets: gravitational lensing. It is not a magical gravitational pull dragging on massless photons, nor is light blindly following the warped geometric gridlines of an empty room. It is simpler than that. When light enters a block of glass at an angle, it hits a thicker medium, changes speed, and bends. We call this refraction.

The exact same mechanical process happens in deep space. When light passes near a massive planet, it enters a zone of thick, dense GelaTime. As the light wave slows down in this denser temporal medium, it refracts. What we observe through our telescopes isn't curved space—it is the literal, physical refraction of light traveling through a gradient of thick time.

Mainstream physics has a massive headache called the "singularity paradox." Because standard relativity treats space as a flexible, compressible fabric, their math forces them to squeeze an entire collapsed star into an infinitely small point of space. This creates an impossible mathematical infinity—infinite density and infinite gravity—which means their equations completely break down.

GelaTime fixes this trap instantly.

If space is simply an empty void, you cannot squeeze it. A black hole (poorly named) is not an object being crushed into an infinitely tiny spatial dot. Space is simply where the black hole isn't.

Instead, the collapsing matter of the dead star stops shrinking the exact millisecond it hits the threshold required to freeze the flow of time around it. A tipping point. Because time hits an absolute standstill, all internal movement, aging, and further compression stop completely. You never reach an "infinite density" because the universal clock running the collapse has hit zero. The black hole is a closed, rigid boundary of frozen time, not a point of infinite space. Immense black holes are only a fraction of degree above absolute zero.  Heat is the jiggling of atoms.  To jiggle you need time.  Stop time and heat should stop. In learned this after I concluded black holes should be cold from the math of time alone.  Finding it to be a true observation confirmed the math was right.  

For over a hundred years, physics has been trapped in a geometric maze of Einstein and Minkowski’s design, tolerating impossible infinities because the foundational definition of "spacetime" was slightly off. But the universe isn't a geometry problem. Space is empty. Time is everything. By seeing time as an elastic, "jello" like medium, we eliminate the need for infinite points in space and magic pulls on massless light. Light refracts through thick time, planets create local temporal drag, and black holes are just places where the universal clock has hit a localized zero. It is time to let go of the rubber sheets of curved space. The fabric of reality is much more elegant, much more mechanical, and entirely made of GelaTime.

And if time is the gelatin, it has a baseline pressure that is raised when many large masses intrude into it. Light is distance/time, and it's top speed may be limited simple by the density of time.  As the universe expands, and galaxies spread out radially, the pressure of time reduces.  It thins out.  Light speed may have been slower when the universe was more compact.  It may be faster out where the universe is already thinning out.  This solves the Hubble paradox, where very old galaxies look too mature. It also solves the expansion riddle of dark energy. Dense pressure seeking lower pressure. 

I asked Google's Chrome AI how it would solve the unsolved problems with spacetime.  It's answer was "It might be a misunderstanding of spacetime.".  

Exactly!

Note Taking. One Secret to Getting Good Grades in College Classes.

The value of Note Taking

I taught furniture design to college students for 45 years. I oversaw the use of three small CNCs that I had optimized for making furniture parts and cutting joinery details to connect the parts. Every semester I let the students know that if they wanted me to cut anything on the CNCs for them they should submit a 2D .DXF file, laid out where they wanted it cut in an included outline of the board it would be cut from. The home point where the (0,0) X axis and Y axis should be at the bottom left corner of the board outline.  When I started receiving files it was rare that the students had followed those instructions. When I did get a file laid out as I had requested  I asked the student how she got it right when the rest of the class hadn't.  She replied  "I took notes". This is just one of the many times I could correlate that instructions were followed because the student had written down the instructions I had given.  Students that didn't take notes would send me files that when opened I had to zoom way out to find. I'd see a spec in a corner that was their vectors. I'd have to select them all and move them to the center area where home (0,0) lived. Many times they would forget to add the perimeter of the board. 

That reveals a flawed assumption by students that they can remember details of a lecture exactly just listening to them. The very act of writing down the details helps you focus and  remember it later.  The notes are just insurance that you have the information to refer to when the time comes. 

My advice to college administrators is that this should be on a credit card sized handout to all freshmen students on the very first day of classes. 

"Take Notes!"  

Add a fresh new notebook and pencil along with the card.   No excuses left. 

4D

One Person, One Slice of Cosmic Time, and One Blue World.

To understand very complex phenomenon it helps to isolate one fraction, and see just how it works.  That leaves the complex as just extrapolation of the simple realizations.   

This is about time, aging, and gravity and how they are derived when a blue world shows up. SpaceTime is a 3D volume, aging.   To simplify that complexity we can look at one 2D slice of time, and the cosmic aging rate it has.  

One 2D slice.  One Occupant.

Our 1D occupant, residing in that slice, is aging at 1 second of aging for every 1 second of cosmic time. 1:1.  

One Blue World.  Earth Perhaps? 

When a blue world decides to reside in that slice it centers itself there.  But now our occupant has been offset above the cosmic slice. The radius of the blue world above, where it ages faster.  It is now aging a tiny fraction faster that 1.  Perhaps 1.0000007 to 1.0 of cosmic time. 0.0000007 of potential time unused. The occupant, to get back to the cosmic slice, has to try and push the blue ball down at least 1/2 it's diameter to reach the slice. The inertia of the blue ball is too large to overcome.  Where it's center is now is where the occupant wants to be.  That push against the blue ball is gravity.  Persistent downward push. Somewhat pointless. 

Now extrapolate.  Every dust mote, rain drop, dead leaf, person or beast, is trying to get back to their cosmic aging slice. Ninety degrees down from wherever they are on the blue world. That try is gravity. All slices of cosmic time meet at the center of the blue world. 

The argument and the mistake.  Classic assumptions envision digging down into the blue world would prove no point on a slice of cosmic time can be there. The mistake is that we aren't aiming for the center.  We are trying to move the world out of our way to get down to where it's center was.  

There is one other way to change Aging time against Cosmic time. You can float free in space and be 1:1 with aging.   But speed up across cosmic time and your aging ticks cover more time with each tick.  Aging slows down as you go faster. Passing time with aging unused. 

Any direction, away from our 1D position

Cosmic time is a fixed value.  Aging is what varies depending on where you are (on a blue world or not) and/or how fast you are translating within the slice.   

Please leave a comment if there is anything unclear about this very simple analogy. 

4D
 

 

Time is Gravity. Part 2: The Math.

The Math of Time as Gravity.