There you are again, at the 11th hour, wrapping that present.
Off comes the price tag, ‘snip’ goes the scissors, and you peel off a piece of tape. Except that the tape, sensing your hurry, tapers down to a point and leaves with a useless, triangular piece. So you try again, once you find the point that was left on the tape roll. And once again, you find your piece of tape narrowing, narrowing, narrowing.
The same *!@#$ phenomenon happens with wallpaper, too. You can’t just peel it off in a nice, even swath; no, it has to peel away from the wall in those deterministically infuriating triangles.
Well, for what it's worth, it’s not you, it’s physics.
Now, an MIT mathematician and his international team of colleagues officially christen that effect "The Wallpaper Problem.” More importantly, in the March 30 issue of Nature Materials, they try to explainwhy, using a model of the peeling problem that accurately predicts the angle of the triangle.
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