The twelve purple faces of this faceted dodecahedron show up on Stella 4d‘s control interface as {10/4} star decagons, which would make them each have five pairs of two coincident vertices. I’m informally naming this special decagon-that-looks-like-a-pentagram (or “star pentagon,” if you prefer) the “antipentagram,” for reasons which I hope are clear.
Stella 4d, the program I use to make most of my polyhedral images, may be tried for free at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
Created using Stella 4d, available here.
We’re under a tornado watch here, for approximately the thousandth time in my life. Seeing a “tornado watch” alert is about as rare here as seeing a Walmart.
Do wake me up if there’s a tornado warning, though, please.
I put these two polyhedra together using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. If you’d like to try this program yourself, for free, this website is the one to visit: http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.
If you’re old enough, you remember this iconic image, from June 4, 1989 — twenty-six years ago today.
If you don’t know what happened 26 years ago in Tiananmen Square, here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article describing the vicious crackdown there, on peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Beijing, China, on June 4, 1989: twenty-six years ago today. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989
I was in college, as an undergraduate. So were many of the protesters. I watched the tanks roll in and murder them on live TV. This man, through an a amazing display of courage, held off a row of tanks alone, and unarmed, and delayed those tanks’ arrival at the massacre — but he couldn’t block every street to Tiananmen Square, and the Red Army was free to attack from any direction. This tense, but quiet, scene was not all I saw and heard those dark June days. When Deng Xiaoping gave the order, the Red Army came in, and took the college kids out. And thus, for decades, the hopeful light of freedom has dimmed almost to nothingness. People in college right now in China are quite likely not to even know about what happened in 1989. That’s forbidden information, so it isn’t freely shared, and much time has passed.
Think about that, please: “forbidden information.” The group that can hide the past can do anything they want in secret, and no one will ever know. That’s the position in which recline the decadent neo-“Communists” now in control of China. There, “to be rich is glorious,” as Deng rewrote Mao (who had rewritten Marx), and they fully intend to stretch the current period out for as long as they can.
China never gets in a hurry. Get things done, yes, but not on anyone else’s schedule.
Beijing still denies there was a large massacre in 1989, and still punishes anyone there who dares to discuss the topic, publicly, in any way that doesn’t “properly” defer to the regime. If you are ever in communication with anyone inside China, it’s important to avoid this topic — for the safety of that person, as well as his or her family.
I used a program called Stella 4d to make this; it is available here.
Source of quote: Guardians Team-Up #6.
Source of image: http://avengersalliance.wikia.com/wiki/Gamora/Gallery
I went to a Montessori school for a year and a half: third grade, and the first half of the fourth. I then re-entered public school. That was a shock.
I wouldn’t trade that year and a half for anything. That was when I started learning algebra, for example.
The problem, of course, is that most families can’t afford the tuition at such schools. I have an idea, then: why not make public schools more like Montessori schools?
I didn’t have anything to do with the creation of the video below. I merely wrote this introduction to it. Enjoy. Questions are welcome.
These are facetings of the snub cube (above) and snub dodecahedron (below). I made both using Stella 4d, software you can try for yourself right here.
Created with Stella 4d, available here.
RobertLovesPi.net 