Kudos for not using the same clickbait title The Guardian did. Journalistic integrity is dead.
The method was apparently a brute force attack, so the title is accurate.
Something can be accurate and still be misleading.
Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
61–70 of 131 posts
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the original title is clearly clickbait – meant to be misinterpreted as something other than what the article is about. Here is what a real pun in a newspaper headline looks like: http://threepanelsoul.com/2010/03/22/on-astronomy-minors/
It's a pun PUN: Attack on the pentagon results in discovery of new mathematical tile CB: Breaking News: Pentagon attack
Yeah, it's a pun. So what? The title being a pun doesn't make it any less misleading. Puns and clickbait are not mutually exclusive.
My real gripe is that there's a time and place for everything and a newspaper ought to know and respect that line. You don't mislead someone skimming your headlines into thinking the pentagon has been attacked for the sake of a joke. I like clever headlines as much as the next guy, and I understand that for the sake of a joke you might leave some ambiguity in the air and mislead your reader slightly, but this goes far past that.
I think his editor should have caught this.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#63Besides tiling your bathroom is there any use case for this? Or is this pure for fun and gaining knowledge? Edit: The article is talking about building structures but isn't a triangle the most rigid form? And triangles are already used in building.
Should it be discounted if it were done for pure fun?
Of course not. I'm just curious about the possibilities.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#64Kudos for not using the same clickbait title The Guardian did. Journalistic integrity is dead.
It's a pun, not clickbait. This is not the death of "journalistic integrity".
You put 'journalistic integrity' in quotes.
FWIW, SPJ uses this exact term in their ethics code. I'm not trying to be pretentious.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#65What's the point group for the first tiling on that webpage? It's a periodic tiling (unlike a Penrose tiling, which is only quasiperiodic), so the crystallographic restriction for two dimensions says the rotation subgroup of the point group must be one of C_2, C_3, C_4 (not C_5!) or C_6: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/CrystallographyRestriction.html I can't tell by eye-balling it what the symmetry is for the first one,…
From the table on the wikipedia page, it looks like it's p1
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#66Kudos for not using the same clickbait title The Guardian did. Journalistic integrity is dead.
For the record, I submitted the article with the original article title, as I always attempt to do. (Some articles have more than one "original" title. In doubtful cases, I read the source code of an article, to distinguish top-level headings from sharing titles from HTML titles, and choose the title that I think is most informative for a Hacker News readership.) In this case, I submitted the title from The Guardian…
I just read your HN bio. You're a very interesting guy! I'm an undergraduate student and one of my favorite conversation starters when I meet new friends majoring in STEM-fields is how they would change primary and secondary math education. Because we're just 18-22 year olds, the concepts that we struggled with and the methods we liked are still fresh in our mind... Though as each year goes by and I learn more advanced maths I find myself going back on how I felt before.
I hope that this bickering over his choice of a title and whether or not it's a pun doesn't rub you the wrong way. I think it's a great article otherwise and it's an incredibly interesting problem that made me think. Thank you for posting it!
For what it's worth, I don't really fault the author for coming up with this title. Ultimately the responsibility falls on his editor and I think his editor should have stopped it. Others are free to disagree with me (and by the downvotes, I'd say most are.)
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#67For those interested in the subject here is an interesting video about using penrose tiling for street tiling in Helsinki, Finland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxlEojkVJ0c
There's a lovely building at North Greenwich which is Penrose'd. http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2011/02/26/penrose-tiling/ http://www.bdonline.co.uk/foa%E2%80%99s-peninsula-patterns-f...
I'd never heard that Penrose sued Kleenex. Not his finest hour.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#68we can shape building blocks like those, now
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's because there are only 17 wallpaper groups ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group ). Any _repeating_ pattern must match one of them (non-repeating patterns by definition do not)
Can you NOT link to mobile version? Mobile phones switch to mobile automatically, desktop version does not.
The mobile version is very readable on a desktop browser, and it's probably easier for you to edit the URL on your PC than for the poster to edit it using their phone.
Re: Discovery of a new irregular pentagon that can cover the plane
#70"That same year an unlikely mathematical pioneer entered the fray: Marjorie Rice, a San Diego housewife in her 50s, who had read about James’ discovery in Scientific American. An amateur mathematician, Rice developed her own notation and method and over the next few years discovered another four types of pentagon that tile the plane. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Rice
that's awesome. Outsider math and outsider art deserve as much respect as "outsider" programming ( startups / garage hackers ) garner. Creating semi-closed communities of insiders, united by what are essentially arcane handshakes, and dismissive of value emerging outside of themselves, is really just both a narrow-mindedness that doesn't behoove innovation and also an admission of an unnecessary insecurity about the…
You seem to be arguing against a strawman. What math communities are closed communities of insiders? While it's true that many parts of math are fairly inaccessible to the beginner, that is more due to them relying on foundations built up on huge amounts of detail that you need to internalize before they all make sense, rather than any kind of "arcane handshakes" or "dismissive" attitudes.
Where are you getting that the math establishment is some kind of "frightened fascist state"? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
It's definitely neat that someone with no formal training outside of high school was able to come up with novel solutions to this problem. But I don't see the "fascist" community that you are arguing against trying to exclude anyone.