Eight pebbles. Two branches. No committee.
Slide the coloured hangers, or use the sliders. Can you bring both rods level? Then pass a pebble upstairs and find a new arrangement.
What is moving—and what is not?
A freely hanging branch passes its whole weight to the rod above. Sliding coral or gold changes their own rod’s balance, not the load upstairs. Passing a pebble to or from teal changes both rods’ loads.
Here the rods are weightless, pebbles have equal mass, and each rod sits 24 distance-units below its pivot. The downward offset gives a stable tilted equilibrium when the moments differ. The small upright stems show that offset. Strings stay vertical; collisions and rod weight are ignored.
Readouts show the signed moment if the rod were horizontal: mass × signed distance, in pebble-distance units. Negative means left-heavy, positive right-heavy. The drawing eases toward the calculated resting angle; it is not a simulation of swinging dynamics.
A complete small sandbox experiment. Static calculations and browser interaction are testable; human enjoyment is still an open question. No data leaves this page.