Game of Thrones 7-pointed star

I love this motif in the windows in King's Landing in HBO's "Game of Thrones." There are 7 "old gods" in this world which I think are the basis for the pattern of this design. Nice seven-pointed star!

Boggle

I found this nice 10-letter word playing Scramble (Boggle) on my iPhone. The board was one letter shy of making 'tessellation' (you can see the grid in the lower left).

Human Cube

Here's my Human Cube sculpture, painted. I'm quite pleased with the result. It will be exhibited this summer in the College of Fine Arts Gallery at Towson University, Baltimore MD.

If you'd like a copy of the model, it is available (unpainted) for purchase at Shapeways.com.

Lying with statistics

I've talked about how to lie with statistics in some of my university courses. It was with amusement and horror that I saw this at my kids' school. The school scored 2.3 on 5th grade national math test, compared with 2.0 for other schools in the area. This is 17% higher, not 200% higher as the graphic suggests (the base line starts at 1.85 instead of 0). Really, isn't 17% enough?

Carpet puzzle

Waiting in a meeting room at a hotel in Norway after I'd set up for a talk, I became interested in the carpet. I mean, who wouldn't? Carpets are cool. I wanted to spot the repeating unit; which section could be cut out and used as a "stamp" to make the entire pattern? It was a captivating exercise. Maybe you want to try... can you find the repeating unit in this carpet pattern?

 
Here's one solution, click on it to make it larger. I've marked the four corners of one possible repeating unit with small blue blocks. Note that the corners I found make a parallelogram, does this affect producing the carpet and laying it out? This carpet was all over and in some rather large rooms. How do manage to roll this out so the patterns on adjacent pieces match?

There are puzzles to be found everywhere!

Judge's collar tessellation

In the Storsalen in Trondheim Rådhuset (Trondheim City Hall). This piece of wall art is made from the collars that judges used to wear as part of their costume. The collars are connected by folding them naturally into y-shapes and buttoning them together to make hexagons. Excellent use of discarded costume bits.

3d moving ball surface

Here's a very cool piece of ceiling art at one of the Olympics building in Beijing. This video was taken by my friend Nils Kristian Rossing.