Check out the new E8

The exhibit is open now, until the end of February.

Go here:

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Butler%20College%20IT/198/75/1001

Wizzy’s Wonderful Weird Word of the Day

wyrd — truly a weird word

noun
	1	Wyrd, Weird
				Fate personified; one of the three Weird Sister

Success with the new E8 Polytope!

Photo of Theoretical Physicist Garrett Lisi, demonstrating that Second Life can be used for serious Real Life exhibits of abstract geometric/mathematical objects.

Photo by Garrett Lisi (from below) demonstrates the successful construction of a new projection of the E8 Polytope, with a 3D construct on the left, a 2D construct in the middle, and a view up and through a 3D construct of the vertices only on the right.

Sneak Preview of the New E8 Projection!

Still needs some work.

Wizzy’s Wonderful Weird Word of the Day

cull — I’m using the word today to describe what I’m doing with the new E8 “Vertex Pairs”

Main Entry:

¹cull

Pronunciation:

\ˈkəl\

Function:

transitive verb

Etymology:

Middle English, from Anglo-French culier, coillir, from Latin colligere to bind together — more at collect

Date:

13th century

1: to select from a group : choose <culled the best passages from the poet’s work>2: to reduce or control the size of (as a herd) by removal (as by hunting) of especially weaker animals ; also : to hunt or kill (animals) as a means of population control

— cull·er noun

Wizzy’s Weird Word of the Day

nuff

sometimes used with the weird phrase – “nuff said.”

New Work on the 8-dimensional level!

The latest thing I’ve been obsessing on is a new “rotation” of the E8 Polytope that I built back in September.  The physicist, Garrett Lisi, provided me with the data for a different rotation of the 8-dimensional object.  As a result, the 3-dimensional shadow of that object will have different properties from our previous project.

The 2-dimensional shadow of this new object looks like this:

This object is made up of about 1,000 prims.

The corresponding 3-dimensional object is very intricate and is taking some time to program.  But when it is complete, we will have ventured into some unexplored territory.

Building A Portal @ Caerleon Isle until 1/30

Georg Janick asked me to exhibit some of my latest work on one fourth of the sim at Caerleon Isle.  I like being challenged to do these shows because it inspires me to build or create something new.  In this case I spent about a week building a transparent dome around the structure of a 4-dimensional “120 Cell.”  The 120 Cell is equivalent to our own 3-dimensional dodecahedron.  It looks like a geodesic dome, but rather than being made up of triangles, it is made up of pentagons.  Pentagonal struts are structurally strong, but in this case there are two layers (or “shells”) so the structure is especially strong.

The dome itself was very tedious to build and ended up being about 1000 prims.

The exhibit is entitled “Portals” because I seem to be obsessed with the idea of building a portal to higher dimensions, in this case the fourth dimension.  Inside the dome, rotating around the center you will find some pulsating patterns of glowing particles.

Someone commented that the design would make a “kickass” club.  hehe.

Other examples of some of my geometric creations are on hand here at Caerleon.  I am particularly fond of this thing that I call my “Super Duper Star”:

This one is quite intricate and precise.  The Golden Ratio is encoded throughout its structure.

A free Open Source version of the basic rezzer script used to build these structures is available, so find it if you can!