Reading--
Fourfield: Computers, Art, & the 4th Dimension-- Tony Robbin
Sentences of the week--
1. "This sphere has a quasicrystal interior of lightweight metal and is covered by stretched canvas. It can support a full-grown artist."
2. "Computers, housing-- such things were too important to be the exclusive province of 'Them.' Discover and employ the secrets of geometry for yourself, to empower the people."
3. "Magic is only a technology that we do not understand."
I've given up on Alchemist's Door. It's not bad, but it just hasn't caught my attention enough for me to keep picking it up again. I don't know why, but terrible books are easier for me to get through than mediocre ones.
All these are taken from Fourfield. It's a wonderful little book that attempts to provide a connection between math and art. The first quote is a caption for a picture that I'll have to scan and post here eventually. It shows the author sitting on the described sphere with this delightfully smug expression, as if he's saying, "Yeah, I'm sitting on quasicrystals. What are you going to do about it?" The second is describing the philosophy of Steve Baer, who dropped out of college when doing so was a statement of self-reliance. He built structures that used dodecahedral joints, which were astounding because it was different from not only what scientists at the time were doing, but nature as well. However, with the discovery of quasicrystals, we now know that such figures could possibly be found in nature. The third quote is something that, as a writer of fantasy and science fiction, I think about all too often. When designing stories that shouldn't have any science at all, I find myself trying to explain fantastical things that most writers simply brush off as "magic; don't ask." It just caught me off-guard and made me smile a bit when I found it elsewhere.
Pages this week: 111
Pages this semester: 407
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