The Shadows

of some of the random geometric sculptures around my house are startlingly pretty and geometric themselves.

The sculptures that have been shadowed are a tensegrity sculpture of (roughly) a truncated icosahedron made out of Tensegritoy, a Frabjous sculpture designed by George Hart, and a Star Cage (6 interlocking stars) designed by Akio Hizume.

Magnetic balls

are a ridiculously fun (and sadly expensive) desk toy. I’ve been challenging myself to make as many of the Archimedean and Platonic solids of unit side length as possible.

So far I have made 6/13 Archimedean solids* and 4/5 Platonic solids**. Can you make any of the ones that I haven’t figured out yet?

* the rhombicosidodecahedron, rhombicuboctahedron, truncated octahedron, cuboctahedron, truncated cuboctahedron, and truncated icosidodecahedron

** all but the dodecahedron

Novel decorative knots

are particularly enjoyable to tie. There is something really enjoyable about making a design on paper or in my head come to life. The pan-chang-esque knot with the hexagonal grid is one of my favorites as I really like that grid pattern and was surprised that nobody seems to have ever used it in a large-scale knot. I’m also fond of the turk’s head-ish knot with unusual the “3 in 5” braid pattern.