Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Hidden Ts

Here's a pattern with some mesmerising content. I continued tinkering with the arrowhead from the last entry. Aside from the calmer colours, I find this one more elegant.

At first, I focus on the the spaces in the pattern: the big spinners, the arrowheads, the reverse italic I, and the boxy capital Y. In the world of regular polygon paths, often the spaces are more interesting than the polygons. In a way, the spaces help us group polygons into chunks of the pattern. Perhaps this is part of the mesmerising aspects--your eyes end up grouping polygons in overlapping groups which can keep you busy mentally reorganising every time your eyes wanders from one space to another.

Then, I like to play with the colours. Different colourings enhance or create connections among the polygons. With this pattern, the colours help show the structure of the polygons. At the low level, there are either single green pentagons or a triplet of triangle-orange pentagon-triangle, which I'll call a wedge. Recognising this breakdown simplifies the pattern and allows for an easier understanding of the next higher level. At the middle level, we can see that three wedges surround and arrowhead and along with three green triangles make a T structure. Every part of this pattern is part of a T. At the high level, we can see how these Ts fit together to form the big spinners, the arrowheads, the reverse italic I, and the boxy capital Y. The Ts end with three green triangles: the top two corners and the bottom of the stem. It's interesting to see how each top left corner overlaps with the bottom stem of another T forming spinners. The remaining top right corners of the Ts do not overlap other Ts but come together to form the boxy Y structures.
The colouring definitely helps see the grouping and the underlying pattern. But here's a slight altering of the pattern can give an equally interesting grouping that focuses on the green triangle. Notice here, instead of a wedge, we have green and olive crowns. I still prefer the one with the spinners rather than this one.

Oops. I was going to have some sort of pun on Hidden Tease.  I guess my next entry should be something like Strip Ts.


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