Sunday, November 20, 2022

Repeating Patterns

Geometric pattern consisting of groups of three pentagons arranged into a hexagonal array.
It's that pause during the year before it seems like everything happens all at once.  Thanksgiving will hit, I'll need to figure out some sort of holiday craft gift, start production, and mail out items soon.  And set up a Winter Solstice Lights Spiral.  While trying to write, going to work, and other everyday tasks.  Somewhere in all of this we want to send out holiday cards, too.  

We've made some fairly creative holiday cards in the past; I think "Smokey Knew He Could Save Christmas" was my favorite.  A few years ago, there was an abortive attempt to have us riding the notes in a music score for "Jingle Bells," but Mark thought it was "too gay," and we've devolved to generic portraits.   Perhaps this year's card will be "Merry and Tired."  


The other day I finished "wiggling tiles," as I liked to put it, and came up with a tile pattern using pentagons.  

Groups of three pentagons arranged into a hexagonal array.
I was pleased with the effect, but I had a suspicion that I'd done something similar.  Sure enough, as I was going through my photo collection to try to find pictures for a family 2023 calendar, I ran across a design I'd done last spring that was virtually identical.

And looking more closely, this is essentially a variation of interlocking circles within a hexagonal array, which I did a variation of last November.  I suppose there's only so many ways one can have repeating infinite tiles using pentagons, and it involves arranging them around hexagons.  


Sawtoothed circles arranged in a hexagonal array so that the teeth form snowflakes, hexagons, and six-pointed stars.
I'm trying to decide if Twitter imploding is a good thing or a bad thing.  

On one hand, I have some contacts with writers, Math Art Folks, archeology, Pagan, and folklore specialists that I would hate to lose; on the other hand, having one less social media site to visit might not be a bad thing—Ursula Le Guin famously did not have a Twitter account.  On the first hand, it's kind of fun to see what other folks are doing, especially when I remember to use curated lists; on the other hand, virtual friends are virtual, and none of my family are on Twitter.  And then there's the whole DoomScrolling thing.

I might post more directly to this blog and less directly to other social media sites in an attempt to simplify my life and also to exercise my ability to focus on something longer than 256 characters, which feels like it has atrophied in the last two and a half years.   We'll see how well that works; Twitter (and Instagram) make it easy to fire off a quick post.  The same quick post with Blogger takes a little more effort (fire up a computer, upload photos, write text, import photos...) mostly because there appears to be no mobile app for Blogger.  

I'm sure there's a metaphor in there, somewhere.



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