Thursday, January 18, 2007

Tiling and Spacefilling

Based on a draft at Math Forum, which Dave L. Renfro appears to have enjoyed, I ventured to cross-post a buffed up version of my Tiling and Spacefilling to some bigger league circuits, namely sci.math and comp.lang.python.

Whereas sci.math is quite frenetic, I expect I'll pick up some new readers through comp.lang.python, a Python Nation resource, and also a part of Usenet (see: NNTP protocol).

Meanwhile, over on edu-sig, we're investigating the challenge of mentoring. A teacher usually only finds a few if any mentees at any given time in her or his career, and "few" is a good thing in this case, as it's the opposite of herding through in large numbers, a more assembly line approach to automating education.

It's not either/or of course. As students, we appreciate the caring one-on-one relationships, but understand the need for impersonal simulators, testing centers, obstacle courses.

Like in real life, educational experiences run the gamut, from warm and intimate to icy cold, although any school that's too anonymous and unfriendly will garner a lukewarm response at best, which cuts in to recruitment (a lot of student protests in the 1960s stemmed from being treated "like a number" (computer databases were still quite new)).

Back to Tiling and Spacefilling, you'll see that I'm keen to tie in a religious dimension, by bridging through sacred geometry to the various traditions, ongoing, moribund, and completely forgotten (at least for the time being). Mesopotamians especially have a lot to talk about, given how many sacred geometry traditions claim roots in that area.