In geometric group theory, Rips complexes provide a natural construction to give higher structure to a Cayley graph. In topological data analysis, Rips complexes are used to reconstruct a sufficiently nice space from a sample. I will show different but related applications of Rips complexes and similar constructions to Borsuk-Ulam results, understanding Gromov-Hausdorff distances, and roots of zero-mean real-valued maps.