Tag Archives: lightning

Mark Twain, on Fools and Lightning

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Lightning_over_city

Source for image, before I added the words: http://saanichfusionfc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Lightning_over_city.jpg

Source for the quote, itself: More Maxims of Mark, By Mark Twain, ed. Merle Johnson (New York: Privately printed, November 1927). See, also, this website.

I am grateful to my friend Tom, for helping me correct this Mark Twain quote, an earlier (and apparently incorrect) version of which I posted here.

Regarding the incorrect grammar in the quote: it’s Mark Twain. One does not correct the grammar of a great writer!

Lightning Bolts and Triskelions

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Lightning Bolts and Triskelions

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.

Mark Twain, on Idiots and Lightning

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Mark Twain On Idiots and Lightning

[Later edit, in October 2015: a friend of mine questions the authenticity of this quote, but did find a source for Mark Twain saying this: “The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.” He may well be correct; my friend is an expert at detecting false quotations. If anyone knows of a source for the quote in the pic above, please leave a note about it in a comment to this post.]