Snowfall in Blue

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.

A Lesson Involving the Social Use of Color

colors

RobertLovesPi’s social-interaction lesson of the day: different colors of fabric can actually mean something else, besides simply reflecting different wavelengths of light, and these meanings can shift quickly. (I already knew this could happen once per day, but was only just taught that this is also possible for n = 2, allowing me to extrapolate that, for the general case, n > -1, presumably with an upper limit set by the individual’s speed at changing clothes.)

As far as I can tell, n = 0 on weekends and legal holidays, in most cases, and n = 1 on most workdays (but not today, when the needed reflection-wavelength shifts from ~475 nm to ~550 nm after I leave the city of Sherwood, Arkansas, bound for a spot approximately 20 km South of there, in Little Rock, which is still in the same county).

Apparently my key to understanding this stuff is finding a way to analyze it mathematically. Also, posting such “new” discoveries to my blog increases the odds of me remembering them. However, unlike my last such finding (it involved chocolate chips not being a sandwich topping at Subway), I did NOT figure these things out “all by myself.” In fact, without help from two very important people, I doubt I ever would have figured them out at all!

Blue-on-Blue Dodecahedron

dodecah3

This uses enlarged spheres centered on the dodecahedron’s vertices, overlapping so that they obscure the edges. Also, the faces are rendered invisible. I created it using Stella 4d, available at http://www.software3d.com/Stella.php.