You could play marbles with the stakes built right in! Negative people would need to find another expression for the flip side of that coin. Helping someone pick up the spilled contents of their wallet would turn into a sport and actually be worth the profuse thanking. Premier/Monarch's effigies would be 3-dimensional and look farcically distorted (unless they had a really funny-looking head to begin with). If the coins were perforated you could carry your money as a bead necklace. The holes would variably be situated at the Premier/ Monarch's ears, eyes and nostrils for comical effect when dangling on a string, also allowing for fun smoke tricks, or rib- tickling routines involving a syringeful of ketchup.-- placid_turmoil, Apr 23 2007 Connecting_20Coins [hippo, Apr 24 2007] Even easier to lose than regular money, I'm thinking. But given that no one uses money any more, except to give to homeless people, I guess it doesn't really matter what shape it is. +-- DrCurry, Apr 23 2007 Ridiculous idea with any number of reasons to vote against it, justified with a lot of crazy excuses.
[+]-- wagster, Apr 23 2007 Might as well flavor them while you are at it.-- nuclear hobo, Apr 23 2007 And they have to be magnetized-- MaxwellBuchanan, Apr 23 2007 It would encourage the use of Rock-Paper-Scissors for decision-making rather than coin tossing. [+]-- imaginality, Apr 23 2007 And can also be used as shotgun ammo when needed!-- xipetotec, Apr 23 2007 Is that a gumball machine or a change machine?-- Sizematters, Apr 24 2007 I they're spherical then they should be worth more since they take up more space.-- BJS, Apr 24 2007 A quarter of a dollar would have an interesting shape. Kind of a pyramidal weeble.-- 2 fries shy of a happy meal, Apr 24 2007 Gives a whole new meaning to losing ones marbles.-- Cosh i Pi, Apr 24 2007 Aha! That gives me an idea, [BrauBeaton]. They could be hollow and come in half, with an overlapping joint. Then you could keep several of them - different values, presumably - inside each other, like Russian dolls.
They could either screw together, or have a lightly sprung overlap, so they clicked shut (this latter would be easiest if they were plastic).-- Cosh i Pi, Apr 24 2007 ....so they could be joined together to form the shape of a piggy bank ! No more need to be emptying coin storage jars, etc. Just take the piggy bank to the bank (assuming bank branches still exist).-- Hairy Sock, Apr 24 2007 (see link)-- hippo, Apr 24 2007 In the UK, 50p and 20p coins are a funny shape, with 7 slightly curved sides - so it has a constant width.Perhaps you could do a similar thing to make your coins easily distinguishable without large differences in size.-- Loris, Apr 24 2007 Those funny shaped UK coins are described as "equilateral curve heptagons", which is true, but misses the significant point, that they're also "equidiametric".
You could indeed have an equidiametric polyhedron - but the tetrahedron is the only (regular) one, because none of the other regular polyhedra have faces opposite vertices: all the rest have faces opposite faces, and vertices opposite vertices (analogously to polygons with even numbers of sides, which cannot be used as the basis of equidiametric curve polygons).-- Cosh i Pi, Apr 24 2007 I stayed in a hotel once where they didn't accept money. Instead you had to buy coloured plastic beads which had a male and a femal end so they could be made into a bracelet or necklace.-- marklar, Apr 24 2007 They banned marbles at my school because it promoted gambling.
It all started when some kid lost his enormous marble collection that he had worked on for months to an 8th Year in a quick lunch break game. The 8th Year kid (legitimately) wouldn't give them back, and there was crying, parents making angry phone calls, and probably a bit in the newspaper about PC going mad again.
The entire macabre debacle left me quite emotionally scarred. I therefore can not bun nor bone your idea for fear of awakening some long-since forgotten demons.-- theleopard, Apr 24 2007 Which were you, the 8th year kid or the one who lost his marble collection?-- hippo, Apr 24 2007 I was the frightened onlooker, peering over the shoulders of the excited crowd, seemingly the only child with the clairvoyant foresight to understand that this game of marbles would change everything, and that nothing would ever be the same again (at lunch times).-- theleopard, Apr 24 2007 [marklar] So what did you pay for the beads with?-- squeak, Apr 26 2007 //this game of marbles would change everything// Wow, I wish I'd been there to see that.
Momentous, thing-changing, one-way events are few and far between - and being aware of their nature as they happen is one of the most awesome feelings there is.-- zen_tom, Apr 26 2007 //you old enough to realise its even easier to lose your marbles when you get older ?//
Old enough to realise, yes, but not quite old enough yet to misplace my marbles, psychologically speaking. Although I did come close a few times at Uni.-- theleopard, Apr 26 2007 random, halfbakery