Search Results for: dodecahedra

SMAs in SMA (SMA-ll stellated dodecahedra in San Miguel de Allende)

Thursday, 5 May 2022 by Bruce Rawles

¡Feliz Cinco de Mayo! Last week, my wife Nancy and I enjoyed a long-overdue, much-needed getaway/vacation and chose San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, a place we’d heard great things about for decades from numerous sources. We very much enjoyed our immersion into the culture, cuisine, and art that this historic city is known for. In addition to world-class dining, lots of “heart decor” and so much more, I was amazed at how many 3D geometric stars were present in this lovely city, both in numerous shops and even in permanent street art! Since artsy stars, wings, and hearts are here in abundance, there are plenty of stellated polyhedra, but the predominant variety seemed to be one of my favorite shapes, the small stellated dodecahedron (one of the four Kepler–Poinsot polyhedra) which I’ve featured in numerous places on this website. I mentioned (in my broken Spanish, resurrected from high school classes a half-century ago) to a few of the shopkeepers that a foldup version that would fit in a tourist’s suitcase might afford more sales, since shipping these lovely fabrications is probably a bit expensive.

If you want to make your own (I suggest trying in cardboard first) here’s a foldup pattern from page 219 of Sacred Geometry Design Sourcebook; you’ll want to make 6 copies of this page. Join the two edges labeled 1 and also join the two edges labeled 2. If you fold together just one copy of this page, you’ll get a double pentagonal pyramid, which is another interesting shape. However, if you fold up the 2 pentagonal pyramid halves, crease the middle shared edge, and fold the other direction, you’ll have 1/6 of what you need to make this classic shape. MC Escher fans will probably recall this classic image.

Small Stellated Dodecahedron fold-up pattern from page 219 of Sacred Geometry Design Sourcebook - Universal Dimensional Patterns by Bruce Rawles — Small Stellated Dodecahedron fold-up pattern from page 219 of Sacred Geometry Design Sourcebook – Universal Dimensional Patterns by Bruce Rawles

I’ve included an assortment of photos from this trip below, including a few other familiar geometries you’ll probably recognize; enjoy! For many more photos of our San Miguel de Allende, Mexico trip this past week, visit my personal Facebook page.

Small Stellated Dodecahedra hanging from the ceiling of the gazebo in the centro park adjacent to the Parrochia church, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — Small Stellated Dodecahedra hanging from the ceiling of the gazebo in the Centro park adjacent to the Parrochia church, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

cluster of brass Small Stellated Dodecahedra; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Small Stellated Dodecahedra and many other colorful artsy decorative items in another street vendor shop; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Small Stellated Dodecahedron -hanging in a restaurant interior courtyard; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

street vendor photo: metal small stellated dodecahedra and other art objects; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

metal stellated polyhedra decorating trees in an interior courtyard; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — metal stellated polyhedra (one of many polyhedra) decorating trees in an interior courtyard; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

metal stellated polyhedra; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

interior of a metal stellated polyhedron; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Small Stellated Dodecahedra and other geometric lamps; street vendor lamp shop; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

large metal small stellated dodecahedron on street corner 1 block south of Parrochia church; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — daytime photo of a large metal small stellated dodecahedron on the street corner one block south of Parrochia church, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico …

… the same large metal small stellated dodecahedron casting light on the street corner at night; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

courtyard art: large stellated cube; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

reflecting sphere art in hotel lobby; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — reflecting sphere art in a hotel lobby; San Miguel de Allende, Mexico

Other examples of small stellated dodecahedra from this website:

sculpture by Gregory Hoag of I-Connect (formerly Metaforms).

zometool stellated dodecahedron — zometool construction (the outer blue shape is a small stellated dodecahedron)

New Frontiers of the Gold Country - logo

Quantum Sierpinski Fractals and Dodecahedral Bubbles

Sunday, 24 February 2019 by Bruce Rawles

A couple of fun geometry videos:

Fun video with 1.58 dimensional tiny fractals: Scientists Trapped Electrons In a Quantum Fractal

A video with a particularly nice dodecahedral bubble …
including a bubble resembling a Reuleaux Tetrahedron.

… and a nearby beach bubble photo taken by my wife, Nancy.

Dodecahedra Origami Luminaria

Monday, 2 May 2011 by Bruce Rawles

After seeing these at a friend’s home recently, I did a google search and found a couple of nice tutorials (Dodecahedron Star Lantern Tutorial from Mom’s Crafty Space and another from WholesomePlayTime.com) for making these Dodecahedron (Pentagram) Star Lanterns; these could also be made using the Dodecahedron foldup pattern, although this design with the 5 folded over triangles on each pentagonal face highlights the inscribed pentagram (5-pointed star) on each face in an artistic way. This is a great kid’s construction project featuring sacred geometry.

Fractal and Geometric Animations

Friday, 25 October 2024 by Bruce Rawles

Here are some interesting geometric animations… Lots more to explore!

A few example animations found using sacred geometry as a search term on Giphy:

Fractal (Octahedra) Polyhedra with Sierpiński triangle faces via GIPHY

A Flower of Life variation with animated rainbow colors via GIPHY

Fractal (Dodecahedra) Polyhedra with pentagon faces via GIPHY

A couple of example animations found using polyhedra as a search term on Giphy:

A Rhombic Triacontahedron appears when the animated mesh reaches its finest resolution; here’s a fold-up pattern for the Rhombic Triacontahedron (a.k.a. Kepler’s Solid). Here’s the animation via GIPHY.

Each edge of the triangular faces of this lovely icosahedron is subdivided 4 times. Here’s the animation via GIPHY.

… and a few example animations found using fractal as a search term on Giphy:

Fractal gears via GIPHY

Fractal dogs/ears via GIPHY

Koch snowflake via GIPHY

Whirling squares (golden ratio spiral) animation

Thanks to fellow geometer Dave Van Dyke for pointing these out to me.

Plato’s Spirit, Carl Sagan’s Blue Dot, Contact, symbols and sources

Saturday, 27 July 2024 by Bruce Rawles

"Pale Blue Dot" Voyager 1 photo of earth (NASA/JPL-Caltech) — “Pale Blue Dot” Voyager 1 photo of Earth (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

“The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun.”

*A year or so ago, a friend reminded me of this inspiring prose “The Pale Blue Dot” by Carl Sagan (copied below) inspired by the NASA image above… and the ever-increasing importance of finding and supporting the interests we ALL share on this tiny planetary sphere we call home:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Recalling a cameo role played by a dodecahedron – a symbol for “Ether” (or Spirit) according to Plato – in a major motion picture, I recently re-watched (and enjoyed from a very different perspective) a movie I hadn’t seen in decades, Contact, written by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, starring Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. The two stars seemed to search for meaning via science and religion respectively. It would appear that neither can find what they are searching for in isolation, just as we miss the “big picture” when we exclude other grander perspectives, putting our tiny lives in context. The very touching scene (toward the end of the movie when her dodecahedral “craft” fulfills its mission of transcending our understanding of space and time) where Foster’s character is reunited with her father in perhaps “another dimension” suggests that only our limiting perspectives and beliefs needlessly constrain us.

I recall attending a lecture in San Francisco, California in the 1970s by Dr. Ramamurti S. Mishra who compared science to a blind man and religion to a lame man; they are far more effective when they teamed up by the lame man metaphorically riding on the blind man’s shoulders. We’re all – it would seem – like individuals trying to make sense of our isolated perspectives like the proverbial “Blind men and an elephant.”

The movie also featured cameo appearances (in terms of locations) by the (now defunct) Arecibo Observatory Radio Telescope – a sizable geometric structure! – and the Very Large Array (VLA) Radio Telescope (a two-hour drive from Albuquerque, 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico which my wife & I visited a couple of decades ago) consisting of movable large radio telescope dishes on railroad tracks, allowing the virtual aperture to be adjusted (or something like that; my recall of the science is a bit rusty.) Both of these facilities employ lots of geometric engineering!

What prompted watching the Contact movie again (via a YouTube sidebar suggestion) was this brilliant video clip by Sagan (from his Cosmos series) that related 2D to 3D to 4th-dimensional polytopes – “flatland” squares to cubes t0 HyperCube tesseracts – and inspired my pencil metaphor decades later.

Plato (who studied and reported Socrates) suggested that symbols are not the source they represent. So if geometric symbols (such as spheres, dodecahedra, and the like) merely represent the eternal ideas that outlast and transcend the specific ephemeral instances of the forms that point to the concepts, principles, laws, and ideas they represent, it would behoove us to keep looking for the reality behind and beyond the forms that are limited by the particular spaces and times they appear to inhabit. Mind envelops matter; the Source contains – but is not limited by – symbols, which are mere shadows of what they represent, as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave would suggest. The content of the mental universe is more profound than any examples in form could possibly convey.

If you scroll down on any page of this website, you will notice a symbolic hand with a forefinger pointing up; this image was cropped from Plato’s representation in “The School of Athens.” Read more about this in a post from earlier this year.