For three days this week and another three next week, during this round of standardized testing, my assigned task at work, for four to five hours each day, is to guard a locked door to the testing area. I’m not allowed to bring a computer, a cell phone, or even a book, so I brought a clipboard, with ample blank paper, and a handful of freshly-sharpened pencils. As a result, this mostly-mathematical blog will be detouring into drawings for a while. These were the first two.
In yesterday’s post, I unveiled my annual birthday star for my new age, 54. Today, I’m placing that 54-pointed star on each of the thirty faces of a rhombic triacontahedron. I use a program called Stella 4d (free trial available right here) to do this, and it allows images on polyhedron-faces to either be placed inside the face, or around the face. Here’s the “inside” version:
And here is the “around each face” version:
Which one do you like better?
I turn 54 years old today, so here is a 54-pointed star to mark the occasion. The nine repetitions of the six colors of the spectrum work because (6)(9) = 54.
When Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon was released, in 1973, I was five years old. I saw the cover for a cassette tape of the album in a store, grabbed it, and wouldn’t let go. Apparently, I’ve always liked triangles.
My parents had to pay for the tape, just to get us out of there. My father tried to turn this into a little life lesson for me (“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” or some such crap). When we got home, we played it, and everyone involved had to admit that picking music based on cover art does, sometimes, actually work.
At 53, I’m old enough to have needed a typewriter to write papers, as an undergraduate, back when I was still living with my mother in Little Rock, Arkansas (USA), and attending the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, or UALR. Majoring in history, I wrote many. When I did this, I had a certain ritual about the activity, one that fell from use once I made the much-appreciated transition to using computers, instead.
First, I had to have the typewriter in the center of the living room, oriented at a 45 degree diagonal to the walls. Next, I had to be wearing a bedsheet, wrapped around one shoulder, toga-style. No other clothes were permitted. Finally, I had to have my vinyl version of Mozart’s Requiem playing, over and over, from the time I started the paper until it was completed. This would generally happen early in the morning, on the day the paper was due, procrastination being one of my defining characteristics at that age.
I’m glad I don’t have to write papers anymore, and that the typewriter era is over.
On the advice of my doctors, I will no longer be drinking ethanol. I will, however, still be using it in hand sanitizer.
(The image is from Wikipedia’s “Ethanol” article.)
Like much of America, we’ve had a lot of snow lately, with more on the way. Making the piece above helped me unwind after a very stressful drive to the store and back on snow- and ice-covered roads. The car went skidding all over the place a few times, but I did make the trip without actually running into anything. I’m not going out again until the melt arrives.
It has long been a tradition of mine to make star polygons to mark my birthdays. Since I’m 53 today, here’s a 53-pointed star.
I’m celebrating because my blog broke half-a-million hits today. Cheers!
Trump was bad enough before, but COVID-19 has brought out previously unseen levels of brainless incompetence in the man. I have high hopes that Biden will win decisively Tuesday, without a long wait before the victor is known.
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