The Platonic solids, rated

Dec 11, 2015 16:32

Platonic solids are always presented in order of number of faces, which seems terribly unfair - it’s the mathematical equivalent of going in alphabetical order of surname - so I randomly permuted them to give the order here. Which isn’t addressing millennia of discrimination, of course, but doing them in reverse order seemed wrong too ( Read more... )

maths, tell-the-audience, whimsy

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babysimon December 13 2015, 10:58:52 UTC
drdoug December 13 2015, 11:48:47 UTC
Got to love the teapotahedron.

(For those who didn't waste their youth on poor-quality ray-tracers, the joke is sort-of explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot)

One online community I was a key part of went for 'teapot' as the Bowdlerism of choice. I'm pretty sure it was Jorvick, which ran on the central VAX/VMS and the replacement Unix computing facilities at the University of York in the late 80s/early 90s. After playing cat-and-mouse with the authorities for years we brokered an official tolerance policy, part of which was that we were required to remove 'offensive' content. Which in practice mostly meant replacing any rude words with 'teapot'. It was a bit of a teapotting teapot. We'd have much rather have told those teapots to stick that teapottery right up their teapot, but we were teapotted because we had no teapotting alternative. As a result, I still think of 'teapot' as pretty sweary.

Which makes the sixth solid here extra incongruous and amusing - a sort of visual equivalent of singing "God save our gracious fucking Queen".

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babysimon December 13 2015, 12:29:33 UTC
Gosh, you actually had something more intelligent to say than I did on the subject. Thanks for sharing!

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