Menger Sponge | Hacker News Reader

Menger Sponge

en.wikipedia.org

27 pointsHooke12 comments

Get Mandelbulber[1] and take a flight[2]. Enjoy!

[1] https://github.com/buddhi1980/mandelbulber2

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUGt5Mql-i8

Thanks for sharing! When I was much young I used to wait minutes for fractals to render (at very modest resolutions) using some primitive software. Looking for something that can take advantage of modern hardware has been on my to-do list for a while. Between this and Marble Marcher CE[1] (another HN find), the itch has been scratched.

[1] https://github.com/WAUthethird/Marble-Marcher-Community-Edit...

This was recently used for the architecture of the eponymous DEVS division in this highly recommended mini-series - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8134186/

We used one of those in the bath, they suck, keep sucking up a whole bathtub full of water

If you're the kind to need a low-attention project to keep your hands busy, you can use business cards (or I used index cards, quartered) to make models of this pretty easily, and they're remarkably durable. No tools needed at all, it's just one pattern repeated as many times as you feel like. The base square unit also makes a decent 6-sided die of whatever size you want.

Other forms of modular origami can also be fun, e.g. five intersecting tetrahedra is similarly just one common paper pattern: http://mars.wne.edu/~thull/fit.html

Oh man, this takes me back to an old job where we all would order business cards, which came in 500 or 1000 card boxes, yet none of us ever had a need to hand them out (I maybe gave out 10, mostly to friends & family).

We built so many boxes, and you could connect then together -- it became almost like Lego. At one point we used an empty cubicle as a museum for the creations we made, probably a thousand business cards wasted on cubes!

Or: you can even use post-its.

From the article: https://www.flickr.com/photos/rougeux/sets/72157621702780335...

While both cheap and very reasonably sized in the end... tbh I don't think I'd do this one personally. Assembling cubes smaller than a fingertip is substantially more difficult than something even slightly larger. The "fold each square in half" step does give you at least one sharp edge on every piece though, which helps a bit.

That gallery is great though, thanks for the link!

I have built an M1 sponge from business cards and I cannot fathom the thought of one person doing an M3 in miniature.

128 byte MS-DOS [1] and 512 byte Javascript [2] version

[1] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53871

[2] http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=54036

This reminds me of the MIT dorm “Simmons hall” https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Simmons_Hall,_MIT,_C...

https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/prims/blob/master/sponge....

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