Geodesic Dome Sighting

Daniel Ellingsen of Plug In ICA worked with his organization and produced "Wildflowers of Manitoba" using TekCAD, my 3D CAD system. The exhibit features a partially-covered 2-frequency icosahedral geodesic built with steel pipe and carriage bolts. The art piece is currently on a short tour in Canada at the Montreal Biennale this May and June at the Parisian Laundry Gallery.

"Impressive creation presented at the 5th Biennial one of Montreal: a geodesic dome, created by Noam Gonick and Luis Jacob, returning to Expo 67 and the music of Harmonium." - La Presse   5/10/2007

Some Ruby 3D Math Classes

I converted some of my TekCAD 3D math legacy into Ruby and released a few classes as the eymiha_math3-0.1.0 gem on RubyForge as part of my "chunks of ruby infrastructure" project.

Included are:

Point3 - a cartesian 3D point, with lots of computational methods

Point3c - a cyclindical 3D point

Point3s - a spherical 3D point

Envelope3 - an envelope useful for generating 3D extents

Quaternion - a quaternion, math with one real and three imaginary dimensions

This code has served me well over the last decade in its C, C++, C# and Java incarnations. It's nice to have been able to rationalize it a bit in Ruby.

MetaThought

Following up Point3 with work on Vector3 has made me think that I'd really like to do this all in N dimensions. It'd certainly be neat to be able to operate upon, transform and visualize higher dimensional structures, and see what that means in multi-dimensional information spaces when they're given a geometric interpretation. Being able to pivot and cluster in a higher information dimension might lead to some interesting perspectives.

Hmmm.

Oh well, while it's all certainly generalizable, for now I'm going to keep moving along the 3D path. I do have some work to get done in the near term, and the 3D will be a precursor to the bigger ND picture.

So much code, so little time.

Ruby 3D Point

I need to do some 3D structure analysis for a contract. While I already have a substantial amount of Java code that I could use, I've decided to build up some capabilities for the work in Ruby.

The first object I put together for this is Point3, a cartesian 3D point, and a basis for most of the work to follow. (Test cases are in tc_point.rb) Instances of the class can be created from coordinates or other Point3s, and can be aded, subtracted, multiplied, divided, negated, tested for equality and printed.

More to come...