Golden Rectangle Icosahedron
A little while ago I came across this… If you take 3 golden-mean rectangles, intersecting on three different planes, you wind up with a perfect icosahedron… a 20 sided Platonic Solid. Cool.. So I made one. So there you go. The ratios of the sides of each rectangle is exactly the same as the ratios between the adjacent joints of your fingers, and the height to the length of the hypotenuse of the great pyramid at Giza and the design of Stradivarius violins. It never fails to amaze me how interlinked seemingly disparate objects are.
Ultra-Fast Laser Cutter
Fairly tangential connection to The Golden Mean with this one… other than the resulting artwork (by Andy Gikling) being based on a Fibonacci Spiral… … which is cool, but the laser-cutter used is utterly incredible. Check this out: (via) The Golden Mean Calipers I make are made from laser-cut stainless steel… all of the cases made from laser-cut wood… it would take my machine several hours to do something like this. I’m incredibly impressed.
The Lewis Chessmen
I think these are the coolest chess-people ever invented: Vikings. About 900 years old, discovered (some say by a cow) in a remote Scottish isle, about 200 year ago. Documentary here: The Lewis Chessmen – seemingly originating from Trondheim, Norway in the 12th Century. 93 of them – which would tend to suggest they belonged to someone trading them… or delivering a commission, rather than being someone’s personal gaming-set. 93 is quite a lot for chess, even in 12th Century Norway. Still – my best friend at school had a repro set of these chess pieces back in the day. These little people have been a presence in my life for a long long time. So anyway: Which I think looks pretty convincing. Ordinarily you can take “examples of the golden mean in art that feature the human body” with a massive grain of salt with regards “was it consciously…
Artichoke Zoetrope
Which is a new thing from John Edmark, who makes amazing 3D printed Zoetropey devices. For which he has kindly made an instructables page. I’ve been following his stuff for a while now – was hoping he’d try the zoetrope thing with a pinecone or a sunflower or something – but if you’ve got an artichoke, the solution to every problem looks like an artichoke. 137.5º is the golden angle… which I haven’t really looked into a whole lot. This is the angle-spacing between petals etc… I seem to remember reading somewhere that this angle in sunflowers minimises the elastic tension between the seeds… I think in plants, it also maximises the amount of light hitting the plant as a whole. Phyllotaxis. It’s quite interesting how the solutions to really complex computational problems can precipitate naturally out of really simple mathematics. Simplicity is its own reward… especially if you don’t…
The Golden Ratio and Eyebrows
Another day, another tectonic shift, coming from the most unexpected of directions. Paulina Gaitan – who is one of my favourite actresses on the planet… largely because of her role in Sin Nombre, which is great. I have thing for South/Central American movies. What she does is so beautifully understated it makes her hollywood peers look kindof silly. Anyway – I digress. So many Microblading Technicians are buying my calipers now, that I’m needing to hire help… which means subtly changing the design, so they can be made by people who haven’t had years of practice polishing and riveting. It isn’t as easy as it looks. This seems to be being driven by a guy named Branko Babić, to whom I owe heart-felt thanks – for putting Phi on the map in a way that I simply don’t have the resources (or social-clout) to do. I’d known for a while…