Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

About the Blog

Why a blog?

Since 2013, I've written this blog as a casual project to get certain things out of my system, and, hopefully, get good ideas out into the world. Writing in public helps me to think, and when I need to focus on thinking, I turn to writing. For the past several years the supermajority of my written output has been internal to my employers and proprietary, but the things that aren't, I try to post here.

Why Icosian Reflections?

The icosians are the quaternions that are even permutations of:

  • (±1, 0, 0, 0),
  • (±1/2, ±1/2, ±1/2, ±1/2),
  • or (0, ±1/2, ±1/2φ, ±φ/2),

which form the vertices of a 600-cell of unit radius. Reflection symmetries of the icosians generate the binary icosahedral group.

Projection diagram of the 600-cell.

I trust the implications of the name are obvious.

Technical

Reflections is built on Ghost self-hosted at Digital Ocean and styled with a custom theme, Faultry, designed by me for exclusive use. Faultry 0.2.0 (current) uses the fonts Equity and Concourse by Matthew Butterick, and owes a creative debt to the design principles outlined in Butterick's Practical Typography. Early versions of Faultry drew inspiration from Sheet by Brian O'Keefe.

Commenting is supported by Muut disabled. Math typography is supported by MathJax. Icons are mostly Font Awesome. Typography uses simple_typography.js, by Andy Farrell. Parallax scrolling uses skrollr.js, by Alexander Prinzhorn. Responsive grids are built with Pure.css. Background generation uses d3.js.

Until February 28, 2022, the blog was titled My Faults My Own.

From July 2013 until May 2014, Faults was hosted by Google's Blogspot, but that site has since been decommissioned and retired.

Please report interface issues to me.

Occasionally, things will go temporarily out of whack because I'm messing around with styling or markup on some part of the site. I try to do this away from high-traffic times, but if you hit a "Bad Gateway", sorry. If the site is down for >3 hours, something is probably badly wrong, and I'd really appreciate it if you let me know.

Content is © 2013--2024 Ross Rheingans-Yoo. Code, styling, and site design is © 2014--2022 Ross Rheingans-Yoo or other contributors. No license for use of any content or technical material is implied, though fair use excerpts and quotations are of course welcome. Please source quotations by hyperlink to individual pages.

The title image is a "Black Marble" composite created by Robert Simmon from Suomi NPP VIIRS data, used by permission from NASA's Earth Observatory. The stars are dynamically generated per-page, code © 2015-2016 me.

The title image and other site assets, including fonts, may not necessarily be licensed for re-use. Check all relevant licenses before re-using any assets served from this site.

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