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?
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.
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.
This is real, and our car is one of the ones being recalled. We have a phone call in to the nearest Hyundai dealership, and are waiting for a phone call with instructions from them. They’ll fix this potentially dangerous problem involving brake lights for free. All you need to do is adjust the Google search terms to match your Hyundai car, and then add information about your location, so that the search engine can return the specifics you need to find the Hyundai dealership nearest you, in order to keep your family safe.
We’re in a global pandemic, without competent national leadership, and American society is tearing itself apart. However, at least you get to see this cute picture my wife took of Hexagon the Cat hiding in a blanket, right?
“Error Code M7353-5101” apparently means “We stopped playing Star Trek for you because your cat is sitting on the keyboard.” Hexagon strikes again!
No other cats are allowed to touch Hexagon’s cat castle, and that’s all there is to it.
I’m spending this odd, COVID-19-dominated Holy Saturday inside, watching Jesus Christ Superstar. This was actually one of my primary information-sources regarding Christianity before it occurred to me to read the New Testament for myself, in my early twenties. If you’d like to watch it with me, here’s a link to the 1973 film-version, as a YouTube playlist.
RobertLovesPi.net 