Re: OT hypercube (was: Con-other)

I think the harder thing is not so much imagining the shape on a macro
scale, but trying to piece together in your brain how to map "edges" of
cubes to "faces" of tesseracts.
I've always been fascinated by talk of dimensions, at least since primary
school (when I was, say, 9) when my teacher offhandedly mentioned them. I've
only been able just once to visualise what objects in the 4th dimension
looked like, however. As I grew older I started getting sceptical about the
whole concept of dimensions, because, my reasoning went, no matter how small
you make a point, it still occupies volume. The only question is whether it
is measurable from a human perspective. Similarly a line is just a really
emaciated cylinder etc. etc. It also happened to tie in with my
anti-anthropocentrist phase, which also involved writing essays (never sent
out, of course) about how human society/science/economies is/are
self-serving and exclusionary.

But I digress. Then again, is that a common phase?? Or am I just weird?

That brings to mind, though, how do you guys translate "-ism/-ist/-istic" in
its various senses in your conlangs? I tried using "lios", an attrited (?)
form of "legos" (thought), but it doesn't seem adequate.

Eugene

On Sat, May 31, 2008 at 5:23 AM, John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
wrote:

> On Fri, 30 May 2008 15:07:50 -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
> >In neither case does it matter if the object is solid or hollow.  But
> >if it's not transparent then the drawing degenerates to a square.
> >Which isn't that exciting. :)
>
> Not necessarily… This is, again, the difference between a direct 2D
> projection - which could also be a hexagon or an octagon, but indeed flat -
> and a 2D picture of a 3D projection; which could be eg. a rhombic
> dodecahedron. You can construct one of those from four skew'd,
> 3D-Penrose-tile-like pieces. This is the projection equivalent to a cube,
> viewed corner-on, looking like a hexagon made from three rhombuses (yeah,
> I'm not even going to try fancy-pluralize that right).
>
> …These rhombic parallelepipeds aren't the actual 3D Penrose tiles however;
> those will produce a rhombic triacontahedron (aka d30) insted. Supposedly,
> such a construction is a 3D projection of a penteract, but as said, my
> visualization skills don't go that far. Still, compare with the
> tesseract-in-octagon construction I described in my previous post; subtract
> edges that cross one another, and you'll be left with an octagon
> constructed
> from squares and rhombuses. Intuition would say that this is an analogical
> case.
>
> John Vertical
>

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