Waiting in the car for a ferry the other day, I found I had two long nails and a little magnet for some reason, and came up with this balanced configuration:
At first I thought it was funny that there was less than 1 nail to the left of the balance point, and more than one to the right, but then I recalled this old lever formula:
Can we figure out how far down the nail the balancing point is? Call it x, and let’s say each nail has a length of 1 and mass of 1…
