Miximal Metaphors

“Each of Robyn’s three Honey-era Later performances featured a moment. Towards the end of ‘Missing U’, she finally stared down the camera, having avoided eye contact for fear of emotional collapse, while during ‘Honey’ she did away with the mic stand to make room for supple dance moves. With ‘Every Heartbeat’, meanwhile, peaked when she punctured the highwire emotional blood-letting with a cheeky wink.” — “The 100 greatest BBC music performances – ranked!”, The Guardian, 6×22


Post-Performative Post-Scriptum…

If you think it’s easy to mix so many metaphors in so few words, all I can say is: Try it for yourself!

Green Seen


When you stare at the cross for at least 30 seconds, you see three illusions:

• A gap running around the circle of lilac discs;
• A green disc running around the circle of lilac discs in place of the gap; and
• The green disc running around on the grey background, with the lilac discs having disappeared in sequence. — Lilac Chaser, Wikipedia


Elsewhere Other-Accessible…

Troxler’s fading at Wikipedia

Trim Pickings

Here is an equilateral triangle divided into nine smaller equilateral triangles:

Rep-9 equilateral triangle


The triangle is a rep-tile — it’s tiled with repeating copies of itself. In this case, it’s a rep-9 triangle. Each of the nine smaller triangles can obviously be divided in their turn:

Rep-81 equilateral triangle


Rep-729 equilateral triangle


Rep-729 equilateral triangle again


Rep-6561 equilateral triangle


Rep-9 triangle repeatedly subdividing (animated)


How try trimming the original rep-9 triangle, picking one of the trimmings, and repeating in finer detail. If you choose six triangles in this pattern, you can create a symmetrical braided fractal:

Triangular fractal stage 1


Triangular fractal #2


Triangular fractal #3


Triangular fractal #3 (cleaning up)


Triangular fractal #3 (cleaning up more)


Triangular fractal #4


Triangular fractal #5


Triangular fractal #6


Triangular fractal (animated)


But this fractal using a three-triangle trim-picking isn’t symmetrical:

Trim-picking #1


Trim-picking #2


Trim-picking #3


Trim-picking #4


Trim-picking #5


To make it symmetric, you have to delay the trim, using the full rep-9 trim for the first stage:

Delayed trim-picking #1


Delayed trim-picking #2


Delayed trim-picking #3


Delayed trim-picking #4


Delayed trim-picking #5


Delayed trim-picking #6 (with first two stages as rep-9)


Delayed trim-picking (animated)


Here are some more delayed trim-pickings used to created symmetrical patterns:







Bored Bard

Pol. How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter: yet he knew me not at first; he said I was a Fishmonger: he is farre gone, farre gone: and truly in my youth, I suffred much extreamity for loue: very neere this. Ile speake to him againe. What do you read my Lord?

Ham. Words, words, words. — Hamlet (c. 1600), Act 2, Scene 2

Polykoch (Kontinued)

In “Polykoch!”, I looked at variants on the famous Koch snowflake, which is created by erecting new triangles on the sides of an equilaternal triangle, like this:

Koch snowflake #1


Koch snowflake #2


Koch snowflake #3


Koch snowflake #4


Koch snowflake #5


Koch snowflake #6


Koch snowflake #7


Koch snowflake (animated)


One variant is simple: the new triangles move inward rather than outward:

Inverted Koch snowflake #1


Inverted Koch snowflake #2


Inverted Koch snowflake #3


Inverted Koch snowflake #4


Inverted Koch snowflake #5


Inverted Koch snowflake #6


Inverted Koch snowflake #7


Inverted Koch snowflake (animated)


Or you can alternate between moving the new triangles inward and outward. When they always move outward and have sides 1/5 the length of the sides of the original triangle, the snowflake looks like this:


When they move inward, then always outward, the snowflake looks like this:


And so on:




Now here’s a Koch square with its new squares moving inward:

Inverted Koch square #1


Inverted Koch square #2


Inverted Koch square #3


Inverted Koch square #4


Inverted Koch square #5


Inverted Koch square #6


Inverted Koch square (animated)


And here’s a pentagon with squares moving inwards on its sides:

Pentagon with squares #1


Pentagon with squares #2


Pentagon with squares #3


Pentagon with squares #4


Pentagon with squares #5


Pentagon with squares #6


Pentagon with squares (animated)


And finally, an octagon with hexagons on its sides. First the hexagons move outward, then inward, then outward, then inward, then outward:

Octagon with hexagons #1


Octagon with hexagons #2


Octagon with hexagons #3


Octagon with hexagons #4


Octagon with hexagons #5


Octagon with hexagons (animated)


Polykoch!

This is how you form the famous Koch snowflake, in which at each stage you erect a new triangle on the middle of each line whose sides are 1/3 the length of the line:

Koch snowflake #1


Koch snowflake #2


Koch snowflake #3


Koch snowflake #4


Koch snowflake #5


Koch snowflake #6


Koch snowflake #7


Koch snowflake (animated)


Here’s a variant of the Koch snowflake, with new mid-triangles whose sides are 1/2 the length of the lines:

Koch snowflake (1/2 side) #1


Koch snowflake (1/2 side) #2


Stage #3


Stage #4


Stage #5


Stage #6


Stage #7


Stage #8


Koch snowflake (1/2 side) (animated)


But why stop at triangles? This is a Koch square, in which at each stage you erect a new 1/3 square on the middle of each line:

Koch square #1


Koch square #2


Koch square #3


Koch square #4


Koch square #5


Koch square #6


Koch square (animated)


And a Koch pentagon, in which at each stage you erect a pentagon on the middle of each line whose sides are 1 – (1/φ^2 * 2) = 0·236067977… the length of the line (I used 55/144 as an approximation of 1/φ^2):

Koch pentagon (side 55/144) #1


Koch pentagon #2


Koch pentagon #3


Koch pentagon #4


Koch pentagon #5


Koch pentagon #6


Koch pentagon (animated)


In this close-up, you can see how precisely the sprouting pentagons kiss at each stage:

Koch pentagon (close-up) #1


Koch pentagon (close-up) #2


Koch pentagon (close-up) #3


Koch pentagon (close-up) #4


Koch pentagon (close-up) #5


Koch pentagon (close-up) #6


Koch pentagon (close-up) (animated)


Hamble On

HAMBLEDON (n.)

The sound of a single-engined aircraft flying by, heard whilst lying in a summer field in England, which somehow concentrates the silence and sense of space and timelessness and leaves one with a profound feeling of something or other. — The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983)


Elsewhere Other-Accessible

The Meaning of Liff — full text
The Meaning of Liff — at Wikipedia

Alt-Writer

“I’ve found a place halfway up the churchyard, near enough to the church to be aware of, in a spiritual sense, matins on Sunday morning, but also to be within reach of, in a temporal way, orgies on Saturday nights in The Woolpack. And alternating between the temporal and the spiritual is the way I wish to spend what eternity is left to me.” — Laurie Lee, Down in the Valley: A Writer’s Landscape (2019)