clive thompson has a neat post on the mathematics of wobbly tables.
he writes about andre martin, a CERN physicist, who would assume that the legs of the table are all the same length and that the problem, therefore was the floor being uneven. therefore, he could just rotate the table until he found an orientation in which the table was flat. always worked for him.
i can't see it working in restaurants, really, because they have square tables and short aisles. but the next time i get a wobbly table in a coffee shop i'm going to try spinning it.
