Wonder of the Day: Domino

A domino is a flat, thumb-sized, rectangular piece that has either a blank face or one to six pips (or dots) on it. A full set of dominoes has 28 pieces. A domino is used to play various games, where the aim is to knock over all of the pieces before your opponent. You can also arrange them in a line or angular pattern. The word “domino” has many other meanings, including a figure in fiction or nonfiction, as well as a term for a person who controls an entire group or situation.

Domino is also a name of the mutant character created by Bill Mantlo and Doug Moench in 1970. A powerful and unpredictable mutant, Dom is a member of the mutant mercenary team called the Six Pack, led by Cable. She’s often called the “Dark Lady of X-Force,” but she once fought Donald Pierce and his partner, Milo Thurman, to stop them from downloading Thurman’s mind into a computer. During that battle, Dom was shot and almost killed, but survived the attack.

After that, she went on to fight the mercenary group the Red Hoods, which included Black Widow, and then joined X-Force as a replacement for Kwannon. She quickly became a major player in the group, and helped found the mutant resistance organization Dark Wolverine. She had a volatile encounter with Cable at his new safe-house in Hell’s Kitchen, and later was attacked by the assassin Blockade, who was trying to vengefully wipe her memory. Dom was saved by Jesse Aaronson, who disrupted the machinery around her and disabled the neural blocker.

Today’s Wonder of the Day was inspired by Juan.

Whenever you see people playing with dominoes, you might notice that the ones they’re setting up seem to topple over rather easily. That’s because of the power of the domino effect. Physicist Lorne Whitehead demonstrated this phenomenon in a 1983 video. He arranged 13 dominoes in a row, then set them all on their sides to demonstrate the chain reaction. As each domino falls, much of its potential energy converts to kinetic energy, which then gets transferred to the next domino and causes it to fall as well. The same principle applies to real life. In fact, it’s been shown that the more things you have lined up in a row, the easier it is for one of them to knock over everything else.