Want To Have Some Fun?

In my original blog project, I spent an entire year doing a daily new activity. Today I revisited the concept of New Things when I learned How to Draw a Circle and Its Centre Without Lifting Your Pencil, thanks to WikiHow.

This afternoon my throat started to feel scratchy--was it the beginnings of the flu, allergies, or something else? I decided to stay at home and take care of myself tonight in hopes of running away from any germs that might be trying to find me. A bit of mindless Web surfing led to my discovery.

The challenge is to draw the figure on the right on a piece of paper without lifting the pencil. How do you do it?

• Draw a large dot in the middle of the paper.

• Keeping the pencil on the paper, fold over the top edge of the paper until it touches the pencil. Don't crease the paper.

• Move the pencil up onto the flap of folded paper (you're now working on the back side). The line you make will be drawn on the flap; the longer the line is, the larger your circle will be.
  

• Draw a quarter circle, which will bring your pencil back to the edge of the folded-over paper. Draw right down off the edge and back onto the front side of the paper.

• Unfold the paper. You're now on the correct side of the paper, ready to draw the circle around the dot.
  

This trick works with many types of geometric figures. I tried it with a square, a rectangle, and a star. I'm not very artistically inclined, so I stopped there.