Tractor Math

Tractor Math

You may have seen our BASKET tractor before, in another context. We were saying BASKET meets STEAM, which we're saying here too, but we want to put the tractor to work, pulling a mower that plants Unicode seeds.

Lest you suppose Unicode is something proprietary or underground, on the contrary it's a public standard and your emoji are encoded therein. Meaning when we do tractor canvases, one could say fields as if seen from high up, from a drone's vantage point, we get to paint with a full palette, anything within the range of fonts used, which may be many.

We've used our Unicode and/or ASCII art output to show the Mandelbrot Set, to write simple messages, to write out patches of skulls for a Halloween greeting card. What I've suggested to some Facebook friends they go to Youtube and look for my Lightning Talk on Pythonic Andragogy. Quite a few of you have maybe already seen it, or were even there at the time, in Santa Clara, large meeting hall, at a Pycon.

Another Youtube I have out there, Leveraging Python, likewise gets into a lot of tractor imagery. And yet back then I had yet to drive one, a gap in my knowledge base since partially rectified.

So what's the BASKET stuff, even if my Just Use It! Mandelbrot tractor doesn't use it? 

One of our main mentors around here was into dissecting polyhedrons in terms of his own vocabulary of particular tetrahedron shaped modules, irregular, relatively sized. A & B have the same volume, T & E have the same shape, while S seems an outlier, and there you have it: BEAST. 

However a couple K-named guys, Koski especially, but also Kirby, ended up with a 7.5 volumed rhombic triacontahedron we wanted to emphasize and came to the conclusion that: 

(a) BEAST could be rendered less scary by adding a K and 

(b) the K was warranted, because the 7.5 RT, three halves times the 5.0 RT, holds hands the the 6.0 RD (rhombic dodecahedron). 

The K therefore shares the shape of the ET (so KET or TEK is a family) in being 1/120th of an RT, 60 left handed, 60 right handed.