The ignorant blame everything on the sitting president, and they even give them the credit for things they have not done. The current president takes years to effect economic conditions, and the overall tone of government changes slowly also...   more »

The good folks over at Adobe are always thinking up new ways to make our lives as designers easier. They have just released a software product called Adobe Acrobat 3D, that converts 3D designs created in major CAD apps (Adobe provides a list of 29 supported CAD applications) to Adobe PDF. Probably the biggest benefit of this functionality is the ability to share CAD designs with those who do not have the expensive CAD applications without the need of specialty viewers. Users can capture their 3D designs from apps like 3D Studio Max, Maya, and Inventor in one easy step to create new PDF files.

Pretty sweet!

Adrian Ocneanu, professor of mathematics at Penn State, designed a stainless-steel sculpture that's not only an aesthetically interesting work of art, but a mental portal to the fourth dimension used as a teaching tool.

"In the three-dimensional world, there are five regular solids -- tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, and icosahedron -- whose faces are composed of triangles, squares or pentagons. In four dimensions, there are six regular solids, which can be built based on the symmetries of the three-dimensional solids. Unfortunately, humans cannot process information in four dimensions directly because we don't see the universe that way. Although mathematicians can work with a fourth dimension abstractly by adding a fourth coordinate to the three that we use to describe a point in space, a fourth spatial dimension is difficult to visualize. For that, models are needed." -Penn State, Daily Science News

The sculpture is titled "Octacube" and it's on public display in the lobby of the Mathematics Department at the Pennsylvania State University campus. It measures 6 x 6 x 6 ft and weighs 1200 lbs.

Want to read more about the fourth dimension?
Hyperspace Structures - The Hypercube
The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space
The Fourth Dimension
Signifying Nothing: The Fourth Dimension in Modernist Art and Literature