making stuff…

There is interest at work in using maptiler. The maptiler folks thoughtfully provided an example Svelte implementation:

Many of the things we play around involve geometric symmetry. There are several types. This post is about an unusual symmetry. But first, a quick recap of some more well-known symmetries…

My animations to date have been written entirely with p5. I’ve dabbled with d3 and SVG, but haven’t invested much time. With increased interest in visualizations at work, I’ve decided to dig into both technologies, starting with SVG.

Most things that we observe vary. We don’t pay attention to things that don’t change. When we measure those variables, we often use statistics like average or median to summarize. But those statistics don’t describe the variability of the distribution. Standard deviation works well if the distribution is a bell curve, aka normally distributed. But many things we observe are not normally distributed. Yet we want a concise summary. One way to summarize is using quantiles, which involves dividing our observations into more-or-less equal size buckets of non-overlapping ranges of values. Common examples of quantiles are quartiles, with four buckets, and deciles, with ten buckets.

a work in progress, but read on if you’re curious where this is going…

At Cherry Arbor Design, my wife and I create a lot of tilings. Some allow periodic tilings. Others are aperiodic, and can’t repeat like wallpaper. Part of the appeal of aperiodic tiles is that on first encounter, it is remarkably difficult to tesselate without hitting a dead end, making them a kind of puzzle. We’ve made aperiodic Penrose tiles, Fractal Penrose tiles, the Golden B, and Ammann-Beenker tiles.

Barry Cipra introduced us to another deceptively simple idea that gives rise to challenging questions.

Some of my other posts use the notion of a card. Initially, I was content to just use a square with a nunber in it. A friend pointed out that cards are taller than they are wide. So the improved card looked like this.

We learn pretty early about clock arithmetic. Instead of counting evenly spaced points on a line, we count evenly spaced points on a circle. It’s convenient, since a circle can fit on a piece of paper, but lines are just sooo long. But arithmetic on a circle can also be much more interesting.

From an early exercise with p5…