The golden mean/rectangle

[jbsegal]

So, my previous entry was more-or-less (depending on whether I was correct or not) a snark on people who get incorrect tattoos. See, for example, Hanzi SmatterWhile waiting in the security line at Thurgood Marshall BWI Airport (Yay, GOOD people to name airports after...), I saw the pictured tattoo on the guy in front of me. I knew it was supposed

Comments

[infinitehotel]

I was in the Qing Dao having dinner one night when a young woman came running in from the tattoo parlor down the street to beg the waitress to write out the characters for "Peace Truth Beauty Love". She was pretty insistent about it.

I left a larger than usual tip with the hope that the waitress had given her the characters for "Annoying Twit, Didn't Even Order Soup" :)

[jbsegal]

Yup. Maybe... especially with the 2nd rectangle at odd angles to the 1st.
Or maybe not. :)

[jered]

Unfortunate tattoos can be hot...

[jbsegal]

{blink}
Um. Sure. Why?

[jered]

I can't exactly explain. I think it's that nice tattoos can be hot, and dumb guys (but not obnoxiously so) can be hot, so there's the confluence of the two factors. Not that I would want to be involved with someone like that for an appreciable period of time, lest some of the stupid rub off...

[frobzwiththingz]

to be completely pedantic, the choice to draw the golden spiral through the rectangle dividing points as in the wikipedia example is completely arbitrary. You could choose *any* constant K, 0 <= K <= 1, and then mark points on the rectangle sides as you spiral out, such that if you scaled the rectangle edge down to unit size, your point would be at point K. (ie, K = .35, mark points on each rectangle edge at the 35% point

[frobzwiththingz]

The most common construction chooses K to be phi
before someone even more pedantic calls me on it, that should read "1/phi" (or "(1 - 1/phi)").

[jbsegal]

Arbitrary, but it's the classic/canonical representation. That said: Perhaps. I'm dubious as to the intent, but I'll accept your math over mine any day. :)

[tcb]

as one who has three items of kanji on my body, I for one did lots of research on them before getting them. that said, there have been those who have placed me in the "inappropriate use" category, and therefore you can't please everyone all the time.

I'd like to hope that I make conscious informed choices about bodymod, and I realize that not all folks do.

[jbsegal]

Inappropriate in "You don't have the right to wear kanji", or "you got it wrong", or something else? The 1st, well, fuck 'em. The 2nd, I know you have reasonable documentation to back up your interpretations, as opposed to picking something random out of a flash book.
(There's a great recent entry in Hanzi Smatter about someone who intentionally got "Fish Ball Soup" and one who got "This is a tattoo")

Yes, I'm 2nd-guessing intention here. I'm ok with that. :)