Arthur: > More Klein - > > """ > It has long been the custom in the schools as well as the university, > first to study the plane and them, entirely separated from it, the > geometry of space. On this account space perception, which we possess > originally, is stunted. In contrast to this the 'fusionists' wish to treat
> the plane and space together, in order not to restrict our thinking > artificially to two dimensions. > """ > > Bucky and Klein seem to be on the same page, here. > Indeed, thanks for the ammo (WMI-style). Could I bother you to decorate that with more bibliographic tags (including page number), so I can use it elsewhere as a formal citation? Resonates with my "Beyond Flatland" meme, i.e. lets start with full blown spatial geometry, as that's the world in which we live our everyday lives. The plane (especially the infinitely extended infinitely thin one) is a relative abstraction, a kind of ancient geek (greek) metaphysics. That being said, it's fun to have a 2D Python vector class for painting flatly in POV-Ray or VPython, with the camera aiming directly at the XY canvas, offset from the origin by some -Z (in POV-ray, -Z is towards the viewer). My approach (I think pretty standard) is to keep the vectors innocent of POV-Ray, VRML or any output description. Instead, have a "writer" class that takes vectors as args, and writes accordingly (e.g. in VRML2). Best for the user is if the various writers share a lot of the same API, i.e. for an edge in space, you want 2 vectors (the endpoints), and for a polygon, you want the vertices going around in a list. Euler's V,F,E cover the basics. In my rbf.py, I made entire polyhedra subject to operator overloading, i.e. if you go icosa * 2, it doubles in size (edgewise = an 8-folding in volume). Or add a vector to it, and it translates. I called it rbf.py after Fuller and, true to form, set the CCP tetrahedron to volume 1 (makes for some nice numbers in the others). BTW, I submitted a proposal to OSCON aimed at making Fuller-FOSS links more explicit, with a focus on Elastic Interval Geometry (Java big), Python in the classroom (ala some of my experiments, various listservs), and a more general push to open source global geospatial data (GIS), with reference to Fuller's map (e.g. URL: http://themutemap.3d.openmute.org/modules/news/ ). However, based on feedback to date, I'm not especially hopeful this'll fly. People may not be ready for it. Oh well, there's always 2006. I haven't given up though. Kirby PS: got an email from Tim this morning -- you may recall his blog for Fr Bob, based on Pyblosxom with a lot of added features he wrote (including basing it in Apache's mod_python) -- and these days he's getting into Twisted, writing new IM infrastructure based on XML-RPC. An 8th grader you may recall. Pretty impressive. _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
