Awesome orbital simulations in Java, including an answer to “everyone’s favorite question about Klemperer Rosettes. Is Larry Niven’s Puppeteer solar system stable?”

The newest contributor to my hit-count is a link from Andrea and Friedrich Lohmueller, whose image galleries are worth the visit.

Pretty things: hyperbolic planar tesselations by Don Hatch. Presented in the conformal Poincaré disc mapping, which is the most common; it’s analogous to stereographic projection of a sphere. Another favorite mapping is the half-plane, which has no analogue that I can think of.

But I’ve never seen a conformal ‘Mercator’ mapping, preserving one line. Instead of a circle, the infinite hyperbolic plane would become an infintely long but finitely wide strip; Escher’s Circle Limit, transformed through such a projection, would make a nifty frieze (or runner rug).

Sadly I’ve yet to find enough information (clear enough for my lazy mind) on doing stuff in hyperbolic space.

I caught myself staring at a stranger’s cleavage, and averted my eyes, because nice boys don’t stare. Then it occurred to me that, as the shirt around the breasts in question was emblazoned HUSTLER, she probably didn’t mind. But by then she had turned away.
(Let’s see what searches this entry brings!)

I’ve begun to learn to use Ken Brakke’s Surface Evolver. Haven’t yet found whether it has the one feature that would make it ideal for my exploration of nonspherical ‘dome’ forms: ability to constrain the edges to equal length.

The documentation says non-orientable surfaces are allowed, but so far Evolver has not allowed me to make a Klein bottle.