Fuller described the "Jitterbug" transformation as the loss of the nucleus, causing the vertices to move closer to the center and creating the icosahedral shell. But if the vertices of the icosahedron are closer to the center than the vertices of the vector equilibrium, then why does it expand? The faces move closer together, but the vector equilibrium and the dodecahedron occupy the same, minimal, amount of space, and it's the icosahedron that occupies the most space. If Bucky didn't know this, it's surprising. But he didn't have access to 3D computer software. He only had his physical models. From an isotropic perspective, the vector equilibrium does, indeed, appear to shrink during its transition into an icosahedron. Jitterbug in VE phase -- Isotropic Jitterbug in Icosahedron phase -- Isotropic But from other perspectives, it's obvious that the icosahedron phase is the point of maximum expansion. Jitterbug in VE phase -- parallel p...
It's the 50th anniversary of one of the great coming-of-age songs: "Sitting on the dock of the Bay watching my time slip away." But for me, it was Tom Traubert's Blues by Tom Waits, and the line, "No one speaks English and everything's broken, and my Stacy's are soaking wet." If I was a few years older I might have separated myself from my feelings like Bob Dylan when he asked, "How does it feel to be on your own, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?" There was also Cat Stevens: "I keep on wondering if sleep too long, will I always wake up the same, or so? And if I make it to the waterside, will I even find me a boat, or so?" There was Catcher in the Rye before popular music got serious. And there was Danny Boy before literature acknowledged that generations were coming of age in America, and we were all doing it alone. For most of us, there was no apprenticeship, no ceremony, no mentors. There was onl...
If the jitterbug were modeled as a sphere collapsing to a concave octahedron, the counterclockwise-rotating triangles would transform from a convex spherical triangle to a flat concave triangle, while the clockwise-rotating triangles would simply invert themselves, exposing the concave surface of the same spherical triangle. This may be difficult to animate in SketchUp. But that's not what happens. The spheres transform into concave VEs, the concave VEs expand to spheres (or convex VEs), and the concave octahedra simply turn themselves inside out. I'm working on an illustration of this.
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