It will be dark soon

As if it weren't bad enough that the days were getting shorter, daylight savings ends and instead of getting dusky-dark at 6pm, it's suddenly dusky-dark at 5pm and feels like it's time to go to bed when eating dinner. 

You said it, Torgo.  What we really need is some snow cover, so that what little light there is gets reflected.  And, maybe I could put off finishing the raking until spring.

Making trihexaflexagons

Having watched the Vi Hart hexaflexagon videos, Karyn Vogel and I have been talking about including them as a station at C.P. Smith's upcoming Math Night.  The limitation of Vi Hart's videos (for me, at least) is that they are inspirational, rather than instructive, so I needed to do some more research to figure out how we could make our own flexagons.  The problem is that while there are a lot of sites out there, most of the instructions are a little lacking.  As Karyn notes in her blog, one of the best sites for pre-made patterns is the Flexagons page of Aunt Annie's crafts, but even with the pre-made pattern, the instructions are a little lacking.

So, I'm going to give it a try:

• The following is an adaptation of Annie's basic black & white pattern. You can get a printable copy here. This removes the need to double and paste (Step 4).  

• As with Annie's site, you fold back and forth on all the solid lines.

•  It's the next step where Annie lost me.  So what you do is make a valley fold (i.e., fold towards you) along the marked line.

• Next, make a mountain fold (i.e., away from you) along the marked line.

• As part of the mountain fold, the piece that has just been mountain folded should end up on top of the piece that was valley folded. 

• It should now look like this.

• Flip the paper over (left to right or right to left).  If you plan to use paste, then put paste on the triangles that have the asterisks and fold them together.  If you plan to use tape, then cut along the marked line and tape the remaining triangle with the asterisk to the edge you just cut.

• It's now ready to flex.

Re-reading Karyn's post, I realize it's not entirely obvious exactly how to flex the flexagon.  Maybe that's another post.

Wintering the garden

I swear, I love my road bike, but this is really the last day I'm riding it this year, if only because I'm tired of taking it down off the hooks in the garage, just days after putting it up, thinking that *that* was the last nice day of the year I could do a quick errand by bike (today it was cold enough for my throat to and lungs to feel raw).

But now that the vegetables are done and ready to be pulled (with the exception of some brussels sprouts that I have hope for, and some sorrel that won't give up), I wanted winter rye and pulled out the bike to go to Gardener's Supply.  Sadly, they were all out of winter rye, but still had something that sounded like "hairy kvetch".  I'm... not familiar with that.  Turns out it's hairy vetch, which is an equally odd name, but supposedly just as good a winter ground cover as winter rye (and often used in combination).

I was going to post a picture, but there's not much to see right now except dirt.

Gettin' steamy with Henry Purcell

Oh, Henry!  Purcell's lifetime ovelaps with J.S. Bach, but his career antedates Bachs.  Bach seems so perfectly square to me that it's hard to remember that a classical composer of that era could author something so different and, yes, saucy.

 

The one taste they agree on is "Yuck"??

I have a stack of GAMES magazines from the 80's, and what's most striking is the sheer volume of deathstick and hard alcohol ads.  A lot of them are deadly dull, but this one, from the back cover of the October 1985 issue, has high quality 27-years-in-retrospect horror / amusement value, from the awful puns, to the awful clothes the guy is wearing, to the inclusion of the fur coat (because if you don't give a damn about your own body, you sure as hell won't care about some stinky weasels), to the size of the guy's hardware.

I think I'd like to see an update (not for cigarettes) with one person "into software" and another person "into hardwear".