Created using software you can try at http://www.software3d.com/stella.php.
Later edit: I found this same polyhedron on another website, one that has been online longer than my blog, so I now for, for certain, that this was not an original discovery of my own. At http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/~csk/projects/symmetrohedra/, it is named the “alternate bowtie dodecahedron” by Craig Kaplan and George W. Hart.
The 122 Faces are:
Created with Stella 4d, avaialable at http://www.software3d.com/stella.php.
Since earth’s oceans will be boiled away by the sun’s increasing luminosity, as I mentioned in my last post, we’ll eventually need to find other oceans elsewhere — or learn to do without water, which seems even less likely.
The news today is running a story about a subsurface ocean under Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. Here, in an obviously-photoshopped picture from one of those news stories, it’s shown in an impossible location, next to the U.K., for the purposes of size comparison. In addition to this moon, subsurface water is expected to exist on Titan, another moon of Saturn, as well as three of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter: Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede.
The Jovian system doesn’t get closer than 4.2 AUs from earth, and Saturn’s moons are further out still — but at least our descendants do have other places to go, once our oceans become too hot to stay liquid. They’re expected to be boiled away, by the sun’s increasing luminosity, in ~1.5 billion years.
A lot of people are complacent about the long-term fate of the earth because they know the sun won’t turn into a red giant for >4 billion years. However, we don’t have even half that long to find another place to live. The sun’s luminosity is increasing — so quickly that the oceans will boil away ONLY ~1.5 billion years from now.
Let’s get going with extraterrestrial colonization, people!
~~~
[Note: I didn’t create this image, but simply found it with a Google image-search.]
The yellow “triskelions” here are twenty in number, and are made of three irregular pentagons each. The red “lightning bolts” between them are thirty in number, and are made with two irregular quadrilaterals each.
I stumbled across this polyhedron by accident, while playing with different polyhedral transformations possible using Stella 4d: Polyhedron Navigator. You may try this software yourself at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php as a free trial download, before deciding whether to purchase the fully-functioning version.
Finally: the last installment!
If you’re also a Wikipedean, and want some of these userboxen for yourself, feel free to copy them from my userpage. To help you find it: my username on Wikipedea is RobertAustin at the time of this posting, but should change to RobertLovesPi in just a few days.
And, yes, there are even more….
Collecting userboxen on Wikipedia is fun, but almost no one (except other Wikipedians) ever sees such collections. Since you can learn a lot about a given Wikipedian by their collection of userboxen, my blog seems like a good place to re-post my collection. It’s being done in pieces, simply to maintain legibility.
RobertLovesPi.net 