30 January 2011

Porter Square snowdecahedron

You may appreciate the Porter Square snowdecahedron. This is what it sounds like, a dodecahedron made of snow. I couldn't find a isnowsahedron but I found these people rolling a giant icosahedral die down a snow-covered hill.

As for me, there's a mysterious dodecahedron-shaped lawn ornament in the backyard of the house I live in in Oakland, and we don't have snow.

26 January 2011

How to draw Voronoi diagrams

How to draw Voronoi diagrams by hand. Just to remind you, a Voronoi diagram is associated with a set of points x1, ..., xn in the plane; for each point, the cell containing it is the set of points in the plane that are closer to xi than to any other xj. I've spent a fair amount of time doodling Voronoi diagrams in boring places, so this is interesting. Apparently they also run into the problem that sometimes it's hard to tell which cells will border which other cells.

Yes, I know, it's been six months since I posted. As you can see, I'm still alive, and I made it through my first semester here at Berkeley. I live in North Oakland, closer to downtown Berkeley than to downtown Oakland, and I find myself describing where I live as "the part of Oakland that's really more Berkeley-ish". More formally, I'm in downtown Berkeley's Voronoi cell, not downtown Oakland's.

(VIa Proof Math is Beautiful.)