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I'll start with the end in mind. More about the octet truss here, and here.

And it is really thin as well:

Which makes for a nice, light-weight roof, and cuts down on bulk materials. Best of all, there was zero (arithmetic) math involved here. Take a rectangle, draw in a diagonal, then mirror that rectangle and you see the squished face of the octahedron emerge.

Do that enough times to have a chain of seven triangles. Decorate as you please. I happen to like op art.

Give your assistant something to do.🙄

Cut out the strips. Try to be neat. Give your assistant a treat. The following gallery shows folding and gluing. You have been warned.

The next gallery is about folding in the missing tetrahedron for your octet truss construction. It involves even more folding in, and you have this been warned.

Of course, it doesn’t take too much thought to imagine using different aspect ratios of your initial rectangles to produce octa faces of whatever height requirements you have. Instead of just a roof, you could have a column for holding the roof up. That will be for a future entry, however, and there will be more folding it in.

Just Fold It In.

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This missive is about the creative process, about how sometimes you start with an idea, and it is terrible, or clunky, but has heart, and so you stick with it and it becomes more of itself, and therefor beautiful.

In this case, it’s about shapes, because this is me, so of course it is.

I am working with a shape I have named “boxohedron” because the twisted triangular antiprism known as Wunderlich’s (or Schoenhardt’s) octahedron is harder to say, takes longer to type, and Schoenhardt has a problematic past.1

I also feel it should probably be called the Karlis Johansons’ Octahedron in official literature, since he, as an artist, put a model of it on display a full seven years before Schoenhardt put it in a maths journal, but what do i know?

I find this particular shape fascinating because it is basically three struts turbining around a common center in compression with nine connecting wires keeping the whole thing together in tension allowing a very minimal material use for filling space. In short, a great lego-brick form geodesic domes.

That said, they are a might tricky in the strut-cable tension technique, requiring a rather high amount of precision to keep crisp edges. Sooooooooo why not make it out of paper, I ask myself. To which i could only reply: “But of course!” thereby scaring the cat and lessening our supply of cardstock.

Wooooooooo here we go. First, you print off a design you think will be gudd.

Then you congratulate yourself for it all coming together but realize it is a bit smol and clunky and uses a lot of glue and is not expandable and really didn’t like being folded up so tight.

So you iterate. Revise. Step back, re-organize, try to get a handle on the feeling of the piece. It’s struts need to be longer, thinner, crisper. Clean lines, yes. There needs to be, no, there must be color.

And then, blammo, all of the sudden you have three gradient-spectrumed wings of the boxohedron in the wild, and it’s kind of staring at you whilst spinning at the same time, wondering what you’re going to do next.

Six iterations isn’t bad. A semi-recently famous novel about a boy in a wizard school had fifteen revisions, and it was really just a riff on star wars, so whatever.

Yes, note the ominous theme in the video…muahahahah

But until next time…https://demonstrations.wolfram.com/TwistedAntiprism/ How this will all come together will be for another post, stay tuned.

PS: This is a fun interactive widget.

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…sigh.

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I try to keep the shape models I design within the limits of what a spreadsheet can process, there's a wee bit of trig involved with them and when you're mapping straight edges onto curved surfaces, decimal points become important.

Discovery is important, as well. As the page above attests by its big fat NOPE, there would be an ugly gap where panels would never even try to meet, even with hefty amounts of union labor.

The second iteration is more promising, but it, too, had surprises in store.

Namely the trajectory of the edges around that inner triangle wouldn’t be meeting the actual face of the triangle because of that aforementioned straight lines on curved surfaces thingysitchuamation. The solution, hopefully, is to design a little lip on that inner edge. Always a tense moment—just because you have calculated some sums around a triangle, doesn't mean that triangle can actually exist in the physical world. Fortunately it looks like this one does.

And so we move on to LibreCAD. I realize, of course, there’s a wee amount of liminal hypocrisy on my above missive about the embrace of silicon. But I stand by my words; everything I’m doing here could be boiled down to operations using an abacus, compass, protractor, pen, and paper. Don’t get me wrong, it would be a pain in the pa-toot, but I would know every step along the way, in a manner that I wound not if this was getting churned out of a data center.

triangles…triangles…more triangles…

and now to print out a test case and see how we’re doing. Nothing like making a physical model to keep you humble. Humble and connected. The physicality of hearing the scissors slice the paper, the necessity of keeping that paper in tension, the delicacy of folding cardstock just so…

snipsnipgluestickgluestickcodeofHammurabi…

And we are done! About eight hours labor because of waiting for glue to dry. There's still some alterations i want to make for connecting hardware, but i really like the rectangular openings…perfect for windows or solar panels or maybe, if we're getting crazy, doors.

A spherical version might make a nice suncatcher or birdhouse. Hmmmm….

This is a four-frequency octahedral symmetry we are working with, so if that frequency was increased, so too would the number of openings, and would be smaller in size for the same volume.

I dunno, what do YOU think?

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Astronomy Photos of the Day has been frozen since October 1st and that just really grinds my gears, because talk about low barrier to entry edeavors. It’s a picture, of something related to astronomy, posted on a site that looks like it could be at home in 1998, and it doesn’t have enough money to post a new picture (and index all the required hyperlinks) because APOD is a nasa.gov site. Things like this make me feel like this:

for all the good that it will do me to rant and rave. I’m pretty good at doing both things, sometimes even in a humorous way, but lately I haven’t been feeling it. There’s this feeling I have that we’re on the cusp of massive amounts of bugs crawling out of the woodworks, so to speak, in the manner of any number of horror films.1 That stuff is supposed to stay in the theatre, and some lunatic has let It out for a frolic.

So, shapes. I’m currently exploring a dual shell, octahedron-based, geodesic dome, where the frequency of the inside face is one less the frequency of the outside face. What this means, essentially, is that for twelve of the same, specially-designed octahedrons, you can enclose space dome-style.

Inside, the Star of Inanna. Sits nice and flat:

Top-down, nice symmetry for lining up with compass points:

Side profile lends itself to easy-leaning loafers, distributed wind loads, solar gain, et al. The apex being concave would make a nice water collection basin, earth-ship style.

Plenty of visual interest on the inside without making one feel you’re in a beehive:

Incorporating the “thickness” of the shell from using octahedrons allows for plenty of dead air space, useful for insulation. That will become more apparent when the structure get’s skinned.

What I especially like about this technique is the volume is developed from a flat sheet, simply folding creases and fastening a”glue tab” makes an octahedron “missing” two faces. No mucking about with hubs and struts. Those faces are your inner and outer windows, respectively. Likely it is thicker than it needs to be; I find thicker shapes to be easier to work with paper-wise. If this was a larger structure made, say, out of sheet metal, those triangles could be much thinner. This has the added advantage of allowing a roll of sheet metal to be stamped out quickly and efficiently on a assembly line, should one so desire (and have access to that kind of capital outlay, of course).

With that bottom ring of eight triangles, it might be useful to elevate the dome upon triangular columns, perhaps four to fit with the theme, and provide a little more volume to work with. This would pair nicely with the earlier examined notion of “any-size” octet trusses. Likely for a a human-sized build the frequencies would need to be increased to 4 inner, 5 outer, simply to keep the size of the triangles down. This would increase the complexity somewhat, but not so far for it to be rocket science. I would like to test this 2-3 with a thinner shell, but will need to make the model substantially bigger so that my blessed glue stick can actually be of some use. These tab connections get a little precarious in a ship-in-a-bottle kind of way. This isn’t a bad test-run, though.

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This is usually when I turn to the hallowed halls of recreational geometry, shapes just be shapin’, diggit? There’s a kind of Zen-like quality that appeals to me in their study.

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I have mentioned elsewhere in the ‘stack that I find it really intriguing that radiolaria can exhibit wild, geodesic sphere-like enclosures, all without the benefit of having to study math in school or even knowing what a decimal point is. I mean, maybe they do and we just lack proper tools to communicate with them, but sure seems like they're just making shapes without blueprints, and while there is a common argument that because of a geodesic sphere is using the least amount of energy per unit volume, they're just kind of naturally following the shape of spacetime, that I kind of wonder if there isn't maybe just a little more to it than that, as we can get a might presumptive of our significance in the scheme of things.

Regardless, it gets me to thinking, can someone, a mere user of available technology as simple as, say, a pen and a ruler, paper and glue-stick, produce triangulated truss structures without resorting to busting out the dusty graphing calculator and invoking the trigonometric gods?1

Turns out, yes, you can.

It turns out if you draw a square, and then you draw the same square right next to it forming a rectangle, and then from the bottom left corner of the first square you draw a diagonal up to the top right of that square, can you draw another diagonal down to the bottom right of the second square, and you wind up with a kind of flattened triangle.

For the interested, the “glue” triangle needs to be glued into place over the number 1 triangle, with mountain folds along the purple lines.

If you do it a bunch of times and then you add a little bit of a lip at the top and bottom what you have is six triangles, three with their apex pointing up at the top of the paper and three pointing down, plus the 7th which you use is a glue tab. Fold those triangles around and you’ve just made a flattened octahedron.

You could connect them together by gluing in tetrahedrons to have a true octahedron tetrahedron truss, or you could just use circles at each of the vertexes, glue those on which I haven't shown here, but once I find where my hole punch is I will get to that later.

You can, of course, find many examples of architectural truss pavilions on the Internet, but good luck trying to design them yourself without having access to parametric equations and CAD software that can handle 3D computations. This is all fine if you live in a rich country, and you yourself are rich and I mean that in every sense— this is Way beyond middle class because after you get through the zoning and the architects and the builders and and and…. you're looking at a lot of money getting dropped on something after that may or may not be temporary, and that's not really my style.

I mean the thrust here being that this took a ridiculously small amount of time to accomplish and required no printer for exactness. I just needed something that I could draw a square with repeatedly and even the fact that it's square doesn't exactly matter. it just makes pleasing triangles better. This also means that if you have access to a straight edge and a stylus the only thing limiting you for making architectural trusses is the availability of sheet metal and relevant tooling.

I don't have a lot of that on hand, but I do have office copy paper and a purple glue stick and the resulting lil’ dudes are surprisingly strong for such flimsy (and inexpensive) material.

Of course, they do not form a spherical enclosure like the radiolaria, however I have some ideas on that for a future missive. However, for baseline terrestrial uses, one could easily make a flat-roofed building, stacking octahedrons for support columns and having a honeycomb affair for your roof and/or second, third, and fourth floors.

Having the thickness allows for dead airspace to provide insulation and optical effects. Assuming the open faces on either side are covered with something of reasonable thickness, say polycarbonate, and one can think of some delightful uses of different color tints to play around with light.

But one could also just use aircraft fabric that's starched up with tightening dope and have a rather pleasing tent effect in the Sun, enclosing a volume of space for a very small amount of material and having the side benefit of the familiarity of walls which domes seem to give some people a real problem, what with not needing them outside of privacy concerns.

I'll be treating this as a kind of fidget spinner and will have future posts where I make some more developed models, all, of course, with paper and glue stick, but it seems to be my working aesthetic right now. Enough of these put together would make a rather interesting octahedral pyramid that has some real sci-fi qualities to it.

In terms of the aesthetics, one can picture nomad camps having to disassemble their little post-apocalyptic hut and making the long journey to a watering hole that is a little less radioactive or some such. Or we extrapolate farther and instead of making the octahedrons out of sheet metal, we make them out of aerogel, using special type of mushroom glue to hold them together and then we just tow our homes behind us as they float in the sun, diffracting the light just so and making us think of better days.

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We’re starting small, with a tensegrity icosahedron. A good starter shape. A shape to get your bearings with.

If you’re in the hankering for shape-making, stop on by the site and check it out!

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Wackiness abounding all over the place from weather to the White House, not that ‘wacky’ is the best word for it, but whatchyagonnado2.

Hobbies, of course, I mean hobbies. A little structure amidst the chaos. Ignore footnote 2.

Here at the Hill Institute for Geometric Heuristics, we concern a fair portion of waking hours with the construction of force fields made from paper and glue.

Fans of the show will recall the first iteration of the laminar tensegrity icosidodecahedron viciously destroyed by a rampaging battlecat. We’ve made a series of design modifications to the connecting tab philosophy that are yielding exceptional results.

Those five-fold symmetries just really got that thing.

Just gotta love that shadow play.

The design team is also hard at work exploring design variants, such as this six-frequency kaleidoscopic icosahedral beehive.

Minus any geodesic bees. The Institute does have ethical considerations to uh…consider.

This has the advantage of flat-pack construction techniques.

Got a few more iterations of stuff and things under consideration, as per usual. Tensegri-Ball mk2 will likely get mounted in the stairwell but still needs completion from dome to sphere. KalaidoBeeDome needs filled out as well. I feel it’s the most likely candidate for potential future housing adaptations because of the relative simplicity of construction and double-thick walls being good for insulation. It synergizes with three- and nine-frequency variants as well, allowing for some interesting combinatory possibilities. Ah, behind the mountains, there are mountains, thank gawd.

And where was the feared and terrible battlecat during all of this flurry of design and construction?

She’ll never tell.

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-we've been decorating pretend caves ever since.

Anybody that talks to me for any length of time will eventually run into my obsession with geodesic design and popularized by Bucky Fuller, the PT Barnum of design ephemerization.

I dunno what it is, exactly, that grabs hold of my attention so fastidiously, but I have some ideas; it’s not like there aren't plenty of houses on the planet, it’s rather the distribution of who gets to live in the houses thats the problem. But there is something in finding the bare minimum of what it takes to enclose a volume of space that seems antithetical to hand-wavium notions of psychopathic corporations dictating who can and cannot live in a space.

Finding that bare minimum enclosure is, in a way, like really good writing; there's EXACTLY enough material to tell the story as it must be told and that's it; any less and the story falls apart, any more and it sinks in the mud. That’s the emotional satisfaction to be had, and there’s the sheer intellectual challenge as well. Size is no physical issue, you just keep subdividing triangles as much as you can afford to do so in order to keep component size and weight to a minimum.

One of the common objections against geodesics is that they leak, which is kind of obnoxious...I'm typing this on my phone1 in a multi-million dollar government facility and I'm looking at ceiling tile that clearly has brown-blotchy water stains from roof leakage, so let the eye rolls commence. Making things water-tight is hard work, just ask a boat captain how often they must do maintenance on their craft.

We landlubbers don't treat housing as boats however; instead we treat them psychologically as caves because Uncle Grog and Aunt Og were comfortable that way, and back when the horizon dictated the extent to which someone might live their life, that might be ok. Things are different now, and there are a whole lotta landlubbers about.

With its origins in mathematics, geodesics don’t care about what they’re made of, that’s up to the engineer to figure out. What the geodesic wants is for all of its prescribed vectors to arrive on time at the right vertices, a vast network of quantum fuzz agreeing again and again to push this way and that way just so. Whether the geodesic is made of plastic or wood or metal or some other variety of atomic forcefield is irrelevant; the emergent shape’s the thing2. Compare and contrast that with the modern idea of ‘house’, there are no bare minimums calculated but rather a catalog of techniques that have been developed over time that mostly work for a complex contraption that weighs a whole helluva lot, costs a whole helluva lot, and that’s not including the price of the lot all this a lot is sitting on, nor the environmental considerations of the materials used and the ethical considerations of property law which costs a lot to study and practice in.

All of which gets in the way of people actually getting housed. As climate change increases the likelihood of climate refugees, shelters of brick and mortar and two by fours will likely become untenable, for the simple fact that refugees don’t typically have colossal amounts of money lying around. What if a shelter, a home, could fit in your back pants pocket like a beloved paperback, its shelter, its story, unfolding from pages of some smart material to fill space as is needed, on demand, in the nick of time?

It might just be a helluva thing.

Let it be made from smart carbon, to sequester that stuff out of the atmosphere, let it harvest and filter water, and have communion with its nearest biome to filter out what needs recycled. Let it be popularized by sexy Hollywood-types so everyone wants one, and then let everyone discover for themselves just how much space there is on a big beautiful Earth that isn’t hemmed up by all the stuff and tedium which makes no life support.

On Wednesday, July 16, 1969, humanity proved it solved any housing crisis it might ever have when it put humans on the Moon for a jaunty hump day extravaganza, and those three out of three point six billion (at the time…what a year!) who went on the trip were returned home (home!) safely. There's no place on Earth (on the surface out to a certain altitude and conversely in to a certain depth) that a habitat can’t be set up to allow human thriving to occur. It’s all just a matter of resource allocation and the perception of what is and is not important.

Somewhere in all that mess lurks the possibility for stories of the near future to come to life, little doppler radar echoes of the oncoming storm blinking red. Let me get my butterfly net out. Let its mesh be fine enough to preserve coherence. Let it be catch and release, with just the right vectors, at just the right time.

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Well. Almost worked. I hadn’t ever considered the remote possibility of a CAT 5 storm1 coming in for a landing.

See, wool keeps you warm because it traps air and at the same time doesn’t absorb water too quickly. A tensegrity dome could do the same thing, given a tight enough weave with a high enough frequency of subdivision. You could apply such a dome to already-placed structures and improve their insulation factors considerably2. So, after seeing if the connection was going to work out, I printed off a few more diamonds and glued them together and voila, pop-up dome. This little craft project took about two hours. I was feeling pretty pumped about it, and started to stage settings to get some really good pics. And perhaps, that was what drew The Terror my way. Hubris, thine name is STEVE.

One can only laugh to prevent one from crying the purest of tears. To be fair, this paper dome was taking on the scale-equivalent of a fifty-foot Godzilla monster, and didn’t do too bad for being paper and glue. I take that as a testament to inherent advantages of going to the trouble of balancing tension and compression.

The CAT 5 was over sooner than expected. The debris left behind, well, actually it didn’t turn out to be that bad. Save for the bits where it was chewed on, I was able to get the structure up and running again with minimal fixing.

We all learned that Juniper Smallberries is too fat3 for a dome of that size. I’ve promised her a slightly larger one for next time she comes calling. I think she digs the dome-energy, and that’s fine by me.

But still.

≽^•⩊•^≼

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Being a fan of what I call recreational geometry (and what the famdamlee calls Steve and his Shapes), I was naturally drawn to Snelson's work as there is really nothing else like it. Freeform semi-abstractions of islands of compression in seas of tension, not to mention they're great big things that will overwhelm the senses at first blush—they seem delicate like crystal but are incredibly strong and firm…discrete pneumatic constructions synthesized from dream…

Another fellow by the name of Anthony Pugh caught on to the heady tensegrity action and used it as a way of exploring mathematical geometry. Most regular polyhedra can be modeled tensegrity-style, such as the most basic, the three-strutted tensegrity octahedron.

Pictured here is your humble narrator's first attempt from some time ago:

Tensegrities are tricky construction-wise. On small models, you can use rubber bands for tendons and produce satisfying results, but the bigger you get, the more gravity will cause the model to blob and sag. In fact, this blobbiness is a factor in linking tensegrities to biological structures.

During my misspent university days I sent out of the blue one of those new-fangled email thingees (to demonstrate my age) to Snelson asking just how big a tensegrity sculpture could get. I was delighted to receive a reply the very next day: "as big as you want...the compression struts could be the size of crane booms."

Stupendous! Sadly, when I went to the university's IT department they wouldn't give me the email server, and instead kindly suggested I print out the email on paper of all things...a sign of management doctrines to come. Somewhere in a folder in my safe-ish archives, that email is indeed printed out, you never know what will be valuable to you later. The exchange with Snelson provided some valuable bias-reinforcement for me: most physical-world problems are only impeded by political legallypiggily flimflummory poopaganda.

I was touched that a busy creative took valuable time out of his day to send some words to a snot-nosed kid (srsly, that basement lab had some sort of mold in the air) who didn't know jack about anything yet. I have a feeling that such momentary lapses of reason are what drives personal advancement though.

For my Kansas City peeps, we are in luck as we have a very fine specimen of Snelson’s work for our contemplative pleasure: Triple Crown.

By far the simplest tensegrity construction that fills volume is the tensegrity octahedron. It is also called a tensegrity 3-prism1, though it should really be called a tensegrity 3-twisted prism. Notice how the ‘top’ triangle twists away from the ‘bottom’.

That twist is what provides the prism its tensional integrity. It just so happens that the vertices of the the 3-prism coincide with those of the regular octahedron. This will be an important point for a later flapjack dispatch. You have been warned.

And hey, if you’re willing to substitute tendons for struts, you can make a TO PDQ with straws and pipe cleaners at home! Annnnnnnd you don’t even have to use any math!

I N S T R U C T I O N S

F O L L O W

The above is what it might look like when you finish.

Materials Needed:

• Pack of soda straws

• Pack of pipe cleaners

• Scissors

• Modicum of patience, especially for the last bit.

Step one:

Take three if the straws and set them aside. these will be your central turbine-ing compression-al struts.

Step Two:

Take two of those compressional struts and form a cross or x with your fingers as shown in the figure below. you'll want to get this as even as possible, touching middle to middle of each of the straws, as if you're connecting the diagonals of a perfect square.

Step Three:

Now take another regular straw and outline a triangle on your cross or x you'll notice it is significantly shorter than your compressional struts you going to want to mark that distance because that is going to become your tensional members. You will need nine of these.

Step Four:

You should now have 3 long compression struts and 9 shorter tension struts.

Next up is the pipe cleaners. You'll want to twist six sets of crosses, with the arms of the crosses about half as long as the long straws. Keeping them longish like this lets construction to not require glue.

Step Five:

Make two triangles out of short struts and pipe cleaners. These are going to be the "top" and "bottom" of the TO, with the long struts turbine-ing in the center like a triangular hour glass.

Step Six:

The three remaining short struts turbine around the outside of the TO. Congratulations! You did it.

Of course, there’s also the whole thing about the impossible tensegrity um. table? Chair? And that’s neat and all, really emphasizes the kind of magic! how’s that work feelings, but kind of a one trick pony to what Snelson accomplished.

This post has a kind of overarching quality to it, it's not just something I'm interested in. Whether or not that becomes apparent will remain to be seen.

With that last Shadow picture above, the alarm bells went off in the Substack control room that this post was 'too long' for email and for that I do apologize. By email they do mean Gmail and I am familiar with Gmail's pesky 10 MB limit. Likely if I had gone to the trouble of downsizing all the images it would have worked out better... but when you're pressed for time, sometimes having to go through all that extraneous stuff falls by the wayside.

Currently in my Venn diagram of writing with the circles being fiction, nonfiction, and memoirs, somewhere in that muddle is some kind of truth that part of me wants to convey, but I'm looking at it through a rear view mirror while pedaling a unicycle backwards and balancing several stacks of meringue pies. A kazoo is likely also involved.

If you have gone to the trouble of creating your own little soda straw and pipe cleaner tensegrity octahedron prismatic structure, you will have gained tactile information about how the model feels like a contained explosion. All geometric tensegrities feel that way. The model will fight you right at the end because you are balancing tension with compression to form a self-sustaining whole. The structure will keep its shape regardless if it's orientation in spacetime.

Good stories, the best stories, are just like that.

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But, hey, I'm a writer and I'd like to focus on the possibility of using the labyrinth as writing tool.

I will be _normalizing the three circuit a bit, namely putting it on a graph and using that most hideous of tools--the spreadsheet, to do so.

It turns out that if you take a three circuit labyrinth and normalize it so that the walls are of one grid height and width, you get a labyrinth with thirty-nine steps, from outside to the center. Thirty-nine is, in and of itself, an interesting number, and I've posted some tidbits about that at the bottom of this article. I’m just using the Great Goog’s Sheets, so this is all free, by-the-by.

So, let’s number those steps. For this exercise I'm starting at the center because that's where the answer is. Your mileage may vary, but now the fun begins because we get to start looking for patterns.

Well and good. Now let’s look at some patterns.

Immediately we notice that even and odd numbers form a checkerboard.

We can highlight the prime numbers as well. I found this one particularly interesting, look at that long stretch of primes starting at 37…and we’re going with the mathematical convention that 1 isn’t a prime. There’s all sorts of stuff in the Great Goog about that, if you’re interested.

So now, what words to use to fill in? Presumably, you’re going to use your own words while doing your own explanations, but I find it fun to analyze works that are already Out There. As it so happened, turning to chapter 37 of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first three sentences just happen to have 39 words, extraordinarily convenient, thank you, Ray.

You can immediately start having fun by just reading from left-to-right using the middle line:

                        page of seven struck clock the fell

Which you can further play with:

                       Page of Seven struck
                       Clock the Fell

So that’s pretty cool, now you have an inspirational tool for your own writing. Who is Page of Seven? Why did they strike Clock the Fell? Is everyone OK?

Going back to the chess board, we could do a Knight’s Tour, starting at the entrance/exit “turning”.

     turning the echoes of
     of echoes the seven
     seven struck clock town
     town of an autumn

And so on. I love the rhythmic lilt that kind of builds and sways there. Now how about the prime number bits?

A Dark Chime Echoes Seven? Oh, man, I’m lovin’ that. Ray was just a got-dam master. I’m grateful to be in a universe where I can read his books and play around with them. There’s subconscious subtext bubbling up. Dark clock town chime in. A seven echoes library….

This all could be seen as further explorations of the cut up method of Brion Gysin, popularized by him and Bill Burroughs, a sort of looking for shapes in clouds of words. I find having a rigorous methodology to be useful when examining results, however, and the "seed" of labyrinth construction grows volumetrically, allowing larger word groupings to be studied. I'm going to keep on exploring this, starting with a 7- circuit labyrinth (and 11, and 15…and so on…), Real Soon.

Promise!

The idea for this article sprung up from a Writing Workshop KC prompt. Experience the magic of WWKC here.

___

The number thirty-nine properties of interest to this guy:

• 39 is the sum of consecutive prime numbers (3+5+7+11+13).

• 39 also is the sum of the first three powers of 3 (3^1 + 3^2 + 3^3)

• The curse of 39, also referred to as triakontenneaphobia, is the fear of the number 39.

• Triskaidekaphobia is fear or avoidance of the number 13.

• So... 3 x 13 = 39 ... a whole lotta fear.

• 39 is the atomic number of yttrium, a rare-earth element.

• The 39 Steps is a pretty good book, and not a half-bad Hitchcock film.

• The 39th Parallel happens to cross just south of KC...39th street hey-o!

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