The pool table that levels itself in rough seas
A pool table on a cruise ship is gyroscopically controlled so that it moves with the waves and the balls don't slide at all.
(Credit:
Screenshot: Chris Matyszczyk/CNET)
Some things don't make sense. At least to one's eyes.
So when I saw the YouTube video I've embedded, I wondered whether it could possibly be real. Yet this purports to be a pool table on a cruise ship in rough water.
The poster claims that this pool table was a cruise ship called "Radiance of the Seas" on its way back from New Zealand last December.
I went to the Royal Caribbean site to check whether this might be true. And, indeed, there I found the boast that this is the first self-leveling pool table at sea.
It is, apparently, controlled by a gyroscope and what fascinates my own eyes are the way the balls don't move at all, even as the table sways like a large uncle at a wedding.
Moreover, not being one who goes on cruises (for fear of sickness, claustrophobia, and an excess of strange people), I am amazed how the pool players also seemed stable in the midst of these rough seas.
Still, perhaps they'd had a few drinks, so any sense of level becomes a relative--and fairly emotional--concept.
