Mr. Furniture

Greetings,

Yes, well, there's this foreign teacher from Malaria upstairs we call Mr. Furniture because he loves banging chairs, scrapping metal along the tile floors and screaming into his phone at weird hours. Now we love weird so it's all good.

This guy talks like he has marbles in his mouth and we wonder how his business students can even begin to understand him, let alone comprehend his dialect. Anyway, the other day we were with another teacher, an American lawyer leaving forever because her 80-year old mother is really sick. Her family is more important than this job.

So, we happened to meet Mr. Furniture and every single one of his questions to her was about the BIG M - money.

"How much are you selling your motor-bike for?"
"How much did you pay for it?"
"How much are you asking for your satellite dish?"
"What did it cost you?"
"What else are you selling?"

Did he ever think to ask her about her mother? You must be kidding, not with his myopic narrow minded attitude. Heartless.

Then she whispered to him, "Can you sell my mother some extra time?"

Peace.

Marching glasses

Greetings,

Ah, the gentle hum of long empty happy hallways receiving voices, footstep falls as students traverse new beginnings. Spring term is alive and well.

We teach writing to Sophmore English majors this go around. They had a tough time last term with a new teacher who, sadly, was not sensitive to their needs and treated them badly. They said they didn't really learn anything about writing. They requested a replacement and our name is Consistent.

It's a gentle smooth transition allowing them to see and comphrend this is a new beginning. The past, we said, is the past and life gives us these challenges and we move forward. We focus on teamwork, dynamic writing groups, trust, dignity and respect.

It is an elective course; no text, tests or roll. This allows them the freedom to accept the personal responsibility to show up, do the work and write. It's about passion and process.

We arrived with a beautiful red rose to brighten a bland white room with color and scent. Add water.

Peace.

Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings

Greetings,

We discovered a story in "Science Magazine" about Medieval Islamic architecture. An image from Casablanca, Morocco floats here with the article and link. It's entirely possible humans married Art and Science to create living breathing perfect transformational girih polygon patterns. Penrose.

Peace.

Decagonal and Quasi-Crystalline Tilings in Medieval Islamic Architecture
by Peter J. Lu(1) and Paul J. Steinhardt(2)

The conventional view holds that girih (geometric star-and-polygon, or strapwork) patterns in medieval Islamic architecture were conceived by their designers as a network of zigzagging lines, where the lines were drafted directly with a straightedge and a compass.

We show that by 1200 C.E. a conceptual breakthrough occurred in which girih patterns were reconceived as tessellations of a special set of equilateral polygons ("girih tiles") decorated with lines. These tiles enabled the creation of increasingly complex periodic girih patterns, and by the 15th century, the tessellation approach was combined with self-similar transformations to construct nearly perfect quasi-crystalline Penrose patterns, five centuries before their discovery in the West.

1 Department of Physics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
2 Department of Physics and Princeton Center for Theoretical Physics, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA.

Science Magazine