Cubes (and a couple of snub disphenoids)

The other day, my good friend M. gave me a present, just for being me. And as if that wasn’t fantastic enough, it was even something I liked! Well, something I adore to death would be more precise. Here it is:

Neocube

It’s called a Neocube. What you’re looking at is 216 small, individual but devilishly magnetic balls that have here been arranged to form a cube. Getting it to look like that is quite a feat, since the balls just do their own thing most of the time, but after some practice it gets much easier. Here’s a funky video of some other stuff this sucker can do:

And it seems like more people are quick on the uptake: here is the neocube, pictured with other cube presents I have received in the past year:

What are my friends trying to tell me? Here they are again, after Phil and I had created art out of them with the addition of a tuning fork:

Art

Ah, the life of a freelance translator. And of course, this wouldn’t be a Brentusfirmus post on geometry without the appearance of a snub disphenoid or two. And on the train on the way back from Berlin last Monday, I discovered that 216 balls is exactly enough to make two of them. Here they are, nestled quietly on a copy of Eugene Onegin in Dutch:

And one more picture of the neocube, this time incognito beside an exquisite deep-fried Dutch bitterbal:

Dodecahedron (and snub is back)

Hi y’all. Last week at work I made a dodecahedron out of my magnetic sticks and ball-bearings. Here it is:

Actually, only the blue sticks form a dodecahedron. I had to use all the red, green and yellow ones to stabilise it since it’s made of pentagons, and pentagons aren’t naturally very stable. The thing kept collapsing.

And yes, that’s a snub disphenoid in the background.

Random quote:

Me: “Where are all the good-looking guys?”
M.: “Grooming.”
- In the pub last Saturday night

Snub Disphenoid

Yesterday at work I made a snub disphenoid out of ball-bearings and magnetic sticks. Here it is:
The snub disphenoid is one of the 92 Johnson solids, which is a group of polyhedra whose faces are all regular polygons (equilateral triangles, squares, pentagons, hexagons etc.), but that aren’t Platonic or Archimedean solids, prisms or antiprisms. Most of them are constructed by “cutting and pasting” bits of other more regular polyhedra together, but not this guy. He’s an elementary Johnson solid. He’s an individual. You can’t fool him.

I think he’s cool.

Random quote of the day:

“I love my job, I love my job, I love my job…”
Emily, from The Devil Wears Prada