I’m both disgusted and infuriated with the presidential election results. I’m hoping that I can calm down, and improve my mood, by watching a blue version of my favorite Archimedean solid, spinning slowly in the darkness.
I made this with Stella 4d, which you can try for free right here.
The folks at AncestryDNA just sent me this information. I was told, while growing up, that I was part Cherokee, on my father’s side, but that is apparently not the case. My mother’s map has nothing from Africa, so I can logically deduce that my recent African ancestors are on my father’s side. Of course, if you go back even further, we’re all Africans, since that is where human beings first evolved.
This isn’t exactly a polyhedron, or even a polyhedral compound, although it does contain several polyhedra in it. There’s a red rhombic triacontahedron in the center, a blue icosidodecahedron just outside that, and a blue dodecahedron closer to the outside. There are also twelve blue-and-yellow pentagonal pyramids, as well as twenty smaller blue-and-red triangular pyramids. That may not be a complete list, although I did try to include them all. I didn’t build it with the goal of making anything in particular — I was just having fun with Zome. In other words, I was playing.
Zome is available at http://www.zometool.com, if you’d like to try playing with it, or giving it as a gift to someone who would appreciate it. The small parts could cause a choking hazard for babies or toddlers, but they will delight and amaze school-age kids, as well as older people (like me) who still enjoy play for the sake of playing, and doing math for the sake of doing math.
Just as I was about to take this picture of my latest Zome structure, Bandit the Cat slipped in through the all-blue decagonal hole where his tail is still located. He stayed in it until it had been thoroughly inspected, then slipped back out. He did this without causing the slightest bit of damage to the model.
This zonohedron has 242 faces, and is the largest convex polyhedron which can be built with only R0, B0, and Y0 Zome parts. It’s 67 cm tall. If made of all-1 struts, instead of zeroes, it is 1.08 m tall. With all size-2 struts, it is 1.75 m tall. I’ve actually built the “2” version, many times, with students. It requires a lot of support during construction, so that it does not collapse under its own weight. At one point, when teaching at Arkansas Governor’s School, we built one, and got eleven people inside it before it fell. People, unlike cats, generally enter through the multicolored dodecagonal holes.
The Zometool company (http://www.zometool.com) doesn’t make size-3 struts any more, but I still have some left from when they did. This zonohedron made of “3” struts would be 2.84 m tall, which is over nine feet. I may try to built one someday, but not today.
I’ve been making and blogging these birthday stars for well over a decade, and see no reason to stop any time soon. This one is made of four {7/3} heptagrams, shown in blue, with four {7/2} heptagrams shown in yellow. The area of intersection of these two types of star polygon is shown in green. This works to yield a 56-pointed star because (7)(4) + (7)(4) = 28 + 28 = 56.
Happy Ludwig van Beethoven’s Birthday! For those keeping track, it’s his 253rd. A good way to celebrate is to listen to one or more of his symphonies, and I’ve chosen the Ninth to post here, as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra.
Charles Schulz’s Peanuts provided my earliest education regarding Beethoven. Here are some samples of this work.
This is how today’s eclipse of the sun looked in Maumelle, Arkansas, USA, with solar viewing sunglasses held over my cell phone camera. The camera is set on maximum magnification (x10).
Next, here’s a shot of a shadow of a tree, along with another of the tree itself. Can you see the solar crescents on the street?
It’s hard to aim a cell phone camera at the sun while holding eclipse-viewing sunglasses over the lens. For some shots, I didn’t have the sunglasses positioned correctly, resulting in images like this. These shots show a whited-out sun, along with some sort of internal reflection which produced a dimmed-down mirror-image of the eclipsed sun. They appear below, with varying degrees of cropping.
Banks, the U.S. bond market, and the U.S. Post Office will all be closed on John Lennon’s birthday this year (Monday, October 9th).
This was taken near our apartment in Maumelle, Arkansas, where flocks of geese enjoy imitating red traffic lights. None of them appeared even slightly afraid of cars, nor the people in them.
I’m registering online for physical therapy for my right shoulder, and they just asked me this question. “Stupidity” is the first thing that comes to mind, but I don’t think that’s the answer they’re looking for.
RobertLovesPi.net 