simont | (no subject)

When I was about ten, I remember having a very hazy idea of what I would eventually end up doing when I was grown-up and didn't live with my parents any more.

I hadn't quite twigged that the majority of my time would be taken up by a regular job; and also I wasn't so much into programming at the time (since I'd sort of taken a two-year break from the whole idea to play computer games instead). One of the things I had just discovered, on the other hand, was the fun of building polyhedra and other models and objects using cardboard and glue.

I vividly remember wondering, in an incoherent sort of way, what I'd be doing around the year 2000. The best idea I could think of was that I'd be doing roughly what I was doing right then, which was sitting at home making cardboard models of things; only since I'd have grown up and left home, I wouldn't have a family around to wave them at once I'd finished and say ‘ooh, isn't it pretty?’. I remember the sudden chill as I realised that having a house to myself and lots of spare time actually didn't sound nearly as fun as it should have been.

I'd completely forgotten this rather depressing childhood vision of my future; but as a result of my recent venture into automated polyhedron construction, I actually have recently made two polyhedra using cardboard and glue, and this suddenly jogged my memory. I thought back then that I'd spend my adulthood wandering aimlessly around a house too big for me, trying not to feel lonely at the lack of a bickering family to share it with, and resorting to increasingly arcane hobby activities in a desperate effort to stave off boredom.

Good job it turned out to be almost completely wrong, really. Instead of that, I have so much stuff I either want or have to do that it's a constant struggle to find any peace and quiet; I know I prefer living alone to having a bunch of housemates and wouldn't have it any other way any more; and I may not have a family, but when I create something useful or pretty I'm decidedly not short of people to wave it at and impress.

Suddenly I want to go back in time and show my ten-year-old self a vision of this lot, to reassure him that it wouldn't end up being nearly that bad. This is unusual, since normally when I think of my ten-year-old self what I mostly want to do is go back and thump him.

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Suddenly I want to go back in time and show my ten-year-old self a vision of this lot, to reassure him that it wouldn't end up being nearly that bad.

This is a thought I have a lot. When I was a child, my thoughts of what my future might be like were almost unremittingly hopeless - like you I imagined that the future would be much like the present, only without any family to help. I looked forward to escaping school, but doubted that I would ever have the self-confidence to go to university or get a job. I assumed I would never have any friends or form any social relationships. In my lighter moments, I aspired to be a hermit surviving on nuts and berries in the Chiltern Hills :-)

So I want to be able to speak to my younger self and say it won't be nearly that bad! (And perhaps, explain that a hunter-gatherer lifestyle would not really be viable in 21st century Oxfordshire :-)

At that age I wanted to be a concert pianist when I grew up. I wanted to write books, too.

I think if I went back and told my 10-year-old self that being a grown-up would involve spending at least 7 hours a day sitting in front of computers moving meaningless bits of data around so that other grown-ups in suits could make money ... well, I think the best I could hope for would be that she wouldn't understand.

I'm putting this entry in my memories because it's so incredibly you :)

I don't recall my ten-year-old self having many ambitions at all; right up to the age of eighteen people would ask me what I wanted to do and I'd cheerfully say "I haven't got a clue". I didin't really think about it much, I just got on with the whole being ten and having too many My Little Ponies bit. Which means that really, the present is remarkably like the past for me - except without the being ten..

I think at ten I would have been more concerned with wishing there were less unpleasantly adult stresses in my life, like having a split family, than with worrying that things would still be the same way in the future; I know I always wanted to get away from home because I instinctively understood that it meant independence and the ability to see who I wanted when I wanted, not get my ear bent about how appalling the people I'd just spent the weekend with were (which was what I got from my mum every time I mentioned my natural father). My mum's emotional limitations did a lot to teach me the value of independence, really.

When I was ten I generally wanted Out, and thought I would one day be perfectly alright, and one day a wonderful person would come along who would find the 'happy' switch in my head and fix my whole life. [My mother was a die-hard pro-marriage Tory at this point, so I didn't really get a lot of exposure to any other future when I was a kid. She is now a die-less-hard anti-marriage Tory.] I also thought life would be so much more interesting when I didn't have to sit around pretending I liked television and dolls and not shouting at people who said "you're too young to understand science".

The only thing that's different to what I thought, is that now I know there is no such thing as a brain-mechanic who will magically fix me and make me alright, and that most of the people who allow me to spend time with them will also be broken. I know too now that the only person who can fix me is myself, and other people can only help and not make me more broken. I have found out that other people can help a great deal more than I thought I would ever let them.

Blimey. Do excuse me, I think I was slipped a few drops of talking serum in my tea this morning.

which polyhedra? I have a plan that involves coloured plexiglass and some machine to cut it with wherein I will eventually create all regular and semiregular polyhedra and their most pretty compounds. In colours so that you can easily see the connections between them.

I make Escher shapes just from the pictures.

I am a maths teacher because I thought I would get to play with shapes more often (and it's not true).

I am completely obsessed ;-)

*grin* Polyhedra rock :-)

Recently I've been making irregular ones; see my polyhedra web page for more detail than you wanted to know...

I hvae just skimmed (literally - no words went in except Buckminsterfullerene). The ones near the top are interestingly irregular, the ones at the bottom look familiar and I WANT THAT DRAWING SOFTWARE!!

*cough* sorry.

It's all there to be downloaded, for your comfort and convenience :-) Not much of a user interface, though, I grant you.

Actually I think the bit I'm most proud of is the code which takes an arbitrary polyhedron description and produces a correctly formed net with all the tabs in the right places and everything, without requiring any intelligent input about the layout. That was hard.

really? i would have thought that you could just tell the computer to effectivly do what you were saying about cutting it out and sticking it together with the faces in the places there numbers are. Shows what I know (to me that sounds like an easy thing to make a computer do, because I know how to do it). Also, the tabs just go on every other outer edge, until you get into the very beautiful, often spiky, and impossible to construct world of non-convex polyhedra.

The tabs almost go on every other edge, but not quite; the special case is that you want there to be at least one face with no tabs on at all, because that makes life easier on the very last face you stick down. So instead of that reasonably simple policy, I had to actually keep track of which edges of the net were going to end up coming together when it was folded back up, and use a general mechanism to ensure that exactly one of each such pair of edges acquired a tab.

The really hard bit, though, was deciding on the shapes of the tabs. For a start you need to know the shape of the face the tab will stick on to (no point making it an almost-rectangular trapezium if it's going to stick on to an equilateral triangle), and then you need to shorten the tab if it threatens to collide with other faces in the laid-out net, and finally you need to arrange that no two tabs themselves collide with each other. At first I thought that was going to be an AI-complete problem, but as it turned out there are ways to do it...

ah, yes when making it on paper it's easy to just faff with them to get the most sensible shape and size. However, in my personal experience it makes for more stable hedrons to have the last face with some tabs on - it also makes it easier to stick because you can poke them down and they hold it in place without you having to sit there holding it in place ;). Of course, I've been using construction paper, and not card. That might make a difference.

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