» Triswirl

Triswirl

March 23, 2017 by Chris Johnson. Filed under madeup, public.

A couple of months ago I had about 200 unread items in my Feedly “save for later” queue. The size of that pile told me that my life is not my own, that 9 months of the year I will be owned completely by work, that teachers don’t get to grow their brains. It’s how funny how such a nice feature can make me feel miserable. Sure, I could have just removed them all without reading them, but then I would have missed out on investigating a fun shape!

Somewhere in the pile I found Andy Ko’s SPLASH 2016 keynote. I was following along when this backdrop appeared on his slides:

As a sucker for geometric shapes, I needed to model it in Madeup. And so I did. Just six semicircles. So elegant!

Here’s an interactive version:


  
    moveto 0, 0, 0

to semicircle sign
  yaw 5 * sign
  repeat 18
    move 1
  around
    yaw 10 * sign
  end
  yaw 5 * sign
end

repeat 3
  semicircle 1
  yaw 120
  semicircle -1
end

center path
star = extrude 0, 0, 1, 1

moveto 0, 0, -10
moveto 0, 0, 10
nsides = 20
hole = dowel

star - hole

    
    
    
  
  
    
    moveto 0, 0, 0

to semicircle sign
  yaw 5 * sign
  repeat 18
    move 1
  around
    yaw 10 * sign
  end
  yaw 5 * sign
end

repeat 3
  semicircle 1
  yaw 120
  semicircle -1
end

center path
star = extrude 0, 0, 1, 1

moveto 0, 0, -10
moveto 0, 0, 10
nsides = 20
hole = dowel

star - hole

The best news is that you can tile your bathroom floor with this shape:

Some other goods news is that my Feedly queue has been cleared out!