The master at the far end of the table is in complete control, never wavering from his spot, making his opponent fight for every return of the ball until he exhausts himself.
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The smart way to play ping pong
Insane ping pong ball trick shots
In the first part of this video, the guys at the sports/comedy YouTube Channel Dude Perfect launch a ping pong ball through a Rube Goldberg-like contraption that fills a room. Once it's made its way through, then they show off their mad trick shots using ping pong balls. The video's vibe is bro-ish but the tricks are impressive!
This is their fourth in a series of (gone-incredibly-viral) "ping pong trick shot" videos. Here are the other three:
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Watch the US premiere of this concerto for orchestra and ping pong
To celebrate the Chinese Lunar New Year. the New York Philharmonic played Ricochet, Andy Akiho's concerto for ping pong. Read the rest
How ping pong balls are made
A fine example of factory porn: The International Table Tennis Federation paid a visit to Double Happiness, manufacturers of balls and other ping pong products.
Bowling with ping pong balls
What happens when boys completely obsessed with table tennis are given a video budget? The ping-pong bowling is least among their many achievements: "One ball, one mind!" Read the rest
This Pongo Portable Set lets you play ping pong on any table in the house
First off, this is not a review of ping pong. We already know that ping pong is great. It doesn’t matter if you like to overhand smash like Kramer, or you have a nuanced brush style like Ma Long. It doesn’t matter if you’re barely able to reach the table or you have the reach of an orangutan. Ping pong is the low impact tennis for the indoor kids. The only problem has been that you need a table, and where are you going to store this table? If you’re living in a downtown apartment you probably have space for one table, or you eat off a kitchen island, or you need to go to the local starbucks to see one of these tables people talk about. But now you don’t need a table to play table tennis. All you need is the Pongo Portable ping pong net and paddles from Umbra. Now any table becomes ripe for some tennis.
A regulation ping pong table takes up a good nine feet by five feet. Most likely even if you fold that table in half and store it away somewhere that’s still taking up a large enough footprint for something that you use occasionally. Unless you might also start eating dinner off it, that’s just too much square footage to give up. But this kit lets you turn any flat surface into a ping pong table, irrespective of regulations. A kitchen island or peninsula? Now it's a ping pong table. Read the rest
Watch an astronaut play liquid ping pong in space
NASA astronaut Scott Kelly demonstrates ping pong with a sphere of water on the International Space Station. From NASA:
The paddles are polycarbonate laser etched so that the surfaces are actually arrays of 300 micrometer posts (0.3mm). The surfaces were then spray coated with a Teflon coat. The combined effects of surface roughness and non-wettability produce a super-hydrophobic surface capable of preventing water adhesion in dynamic processes. The larger the drop, the less force it takes to break it up. The smaller the drop, the harder you can hit it. Scott is demonstrating about a 4 mL drop (over 100 times larger than a rain drop).
Vintage ping pong snapshots
Magnum photographer Alec Soth and writers Pico Iyer and Geoff Dyer, all Ping Pong fans, compiled a neat little book of vernacular photos related to ping pong. Read the rest
