After developing the QuadCraft Project Jupyter Notebook, I turned my attention back to the Esteban-Struppi collaboration.
Esteban is someone I met on the Metaphysics group on Facebook, where I unsuccessfully tried to drum up interest in 1.06066 (the Synergetics Constant) and the role this number plays in bridging the C.P. Snow two-cultures chasm. The kids on Metaphysics tended not to remember such a chasm and had little patience for my STEM-looking esoterica.
Esteban, on the other hand, turned out to share my obsession with geometric visualizations and we stayed in touch. Even if he was suspicious of Synergetics, he was fun to try explaining things to. He was engaged. I started sharing snippets of our Facebook dialog to the more publicly archived Synergeo.
I compared these two ways of packing, center-out and apex-out, in a new Jupyter Notebook entitled Building the CCP: Apex-Outward vs Center-Outward Packing.
Struppi is an established Synergetics shaman with a strong focus on specific hands-on crafts, useful for making lasting educational toys, a continuing source of insights.
I enrolled in one of his workshops, long distance, after he caught my most recent video. I'd learned from our Telegram conversations that he'd kept up the dialog of Esteban and together they'd been going down a certain rabbit hole and wouldn't I like to go down it too?
I went down it to some extent, turning back around where the color coding got too intricate for my Python framework to follow, even if I was able to follow along conceptually, minus the coding component. Struppi uses wooden balls, string, and drinking straws, not Python and a raytracer.
What I got out of the session was how one might prefer, when making animated GIFs, to pack from an apex ball to form a growing tetrahedron, with layers having successive triangular numbers of balls.
Not only that, if one orients a quadrays caltrop (basis of a specific coordinate system) within the context of a tiny human observer standing on planet Earth, then that "apex" might not be defined by the vertical quadray (or call it the radio tower) but the radio station itself, the Blue ball in the foreground.
Think of blue, yellow and red balls resting on the earth. Maybe imagine the sky and clouds as white and blue ice in arctic conditions.
Below, the packing starts in the Blue position on the BRYG tetrapod (caltrop), and marches rightward, aligning with Red, Yellow and Green in a 1st layer.
