ENCOURAGES IMAGINATIVE PLAY: 10 great accessories for imaginative play. Put Bing to bed or help him run a bath, lets use Brenda the Blender to bake a cake!

Westwood bing looks very different because it was built by machines. All features of the Westwood works were very different to everything that had come before. Built to fuel Britain’s war machine the designers of Westwood works took full advantage of the technical advances that had taken place since the previous new oil works almost forty years before. This new technology extended to the disposal of the spent shale from the efficient new retorts. This finely graded waste was transported along a conveyor belt to a central bunker from where the spent shale was fed to a large carriage on rails. This was hauled to the top of the bing where the carriage was discharged by gravity. To build this space, start with a box divided into two chambers by a horizontal rectangle, where by a ‘rectangle’ we mean not just the four edges of a rectangle but also its interior. Access to the two chambers from outside the box is provided by two vertical tunnels. The upper tunnel is made by punching out a square from the top of the box and another square directly below it from the middle horizontal rectangle, then inserting four vertical rectangles, the walls of the tunnel. This tunnel allows entry to the lower chamber from outside the box. the lower tunnel is formed in similar fashion, providing entry to the upper chamber. Finally, two vertical rectangles are inserted to form ‘support walls’ for the two tunnels. The resulting space X thus consists of three horizontal pieces homeomorphic to annuli plus all the vertical rectangles that form the walls of the two chambers. This allowed a huge saving of labour, and created a very different shape of mound to the traditional shale bing. Perhaps because the shale was broken to a smaller size and more bound oil was extracted during retorting process, the Westwood bing supports vegetation more readily and have greened much faster than other shale bings. The house with two rooms is sometimes called Bing’s house after R. H. Bing, the mathematician who first described the space. But like many math students, I first encountered it in Allen Hatcher’s algebraic topology book. He gives us the following picture and definition of the space. Contractible” is topological shorthand for “like a point” or, not to put too fine a point on it, “boring.” A space is contractible if it you can smush it down to a point without tearing the space or gluing any parts of it together.For example, a solid ball is contractible because even though it is three- rather than zero-dimensional like a point, it can be shrunk down all the way to a point without tearing or collapsing any of its interesting features. Hence, for some topological purposes, it’s close enough to being a point that we might as well assume it is.ACCESSORIES AND 2 FIGURINES: Includes 9 accessories and 2 Figurines including articulated Bing and Flop!

You know how instead of doing a handshake, you could grab each other’s wrists? And your thumbs almost but don’t quite reach your fingers? Bing’s glove for two hands would fit snugly. Scientific American is part of Springer Nature, which owns or has commercial relations with thousands of scientific publications (many of them can be found at www.springernature.com/us). Scientific American maintains a strict policy of editorial independence in reporting developments in science to our readers. We have therefore encouraged every provider to open their ‘online windows and doors’ to help you make an informed choice. The profile score is a measure of how much information has been provided. Since 1995, Westwood Bing (a.k.a the five sisters) has actually been a scheduled monument and is now protected for posterity. They’ve become a symbol of West Lothian, and a memorial to the shale oil industry, yet the famous five-leafed bing is an oddity, a one of a kind.We think it’s important you have detailed, comprehensive information so that you can decide which care providers to shortlist. Bing House Playset features popular CBeebies characters – Flop and Bing! Just like the house you see on the hit TV show. Beautifully made from tough, colourful plastic. Includes two posable figures and nine accessories. Here is where I could tell you how I saw that the space was contractible, but I’m not going to do that. I think the best way to see it is to make it out of clay or any pliable material you have on hand. Hatcher’s diagram and description give a good recipe, and I know from personal experience that undergraduates and even postdocs like me can follow the instructions well enough to create a convincing house with two rooms, although I must admit our roof was leaky.