Sisyphus table in action...

Sisyphus table in action...  And a couple more photos.  The video at right shows the Sisyphus doing an “erase”; it's nearly finished.  The photos below show a few more patterns.

I've had a few questions asked about the table...  The patterns it makes are preprogrammed.  The device comes with a couple dozen patterns, and there is a community where people can share others.  It runs continuously, day and night, though the company says they have plans for a scheduler.  You can control the speed of the ball, and I have it running slowly to minimize the noise (which is nearly zero when slow).  You can make your own patterns simply by creating an SVG file with a single path.  Lots of graphics tools let you make SVG files, but what's most interesting to me is that it's easy to create them in software – they're just specially formatted XML files, which is an especially easy file format to create in a program...