Pre-pregnant?

There's lots of interesting argument going on about whether the CDC (not the Cult of the Dead Cow) is just being sensible or indulging in Handmaid's Tale creepiness in its health guidelines for women of childbearing age (PDF), as reported in this Washington Post article that freaked a lot of people out. Amanda Marcotte thinks the creepiness is emanating from the Washington Post, not from the CDC. Lindsay Beyerstein differs, and draws a distinction between the (largely sensible) recommendations in the report and its overall tone and emphasis. samantha2074 thinks the CDC just stumbled inexpertly into a politically fraught area without realizing how sensitive the topic was, at a time of major battles over abortion, contraception and working women. I'm not sure.

The WaPo article mentions that a lot of groups were involved in preparing the report. Given their recent activism on Plan B emergency contraception prescriptions, I'm pretty sure that the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (one of the mentioned groups) isn't interested in turning American women into broodmares; quite the opposite—they know that giving women control of their reproduction is a key part of ensuring that babies are healthy and happy.

(This, incidentally, is one of the most obvious signs of the anti-abortion/anti-contraception movement's disconnect from reality: their refusal to accept that the people fighting the hardest for reproductive rights tend to be not some cabal of baby-hating abortion enthusiasts, but OB/GYNs and other perinatal care specialists who probably got into the business at least in part to help babies. But I digress.)

But Beyerstein is right that the CDC report seems to be shying away from saying anything substantive about family planning, and especially about abortion. Because, after all, if you're telling women who don't want or plan for kids to behave as if they're going to have them, you're implying that abortion, no matter how early or how extreme the case, is not an option. And the mere fact that that is so unsurprising is itself disturbing.

Origami polyhedra

Here's a page on origami polyhedron modules. The one I recently learned how to work with is the very simple Sonobe module, which my coworker Bill Barnert showed us how to produce one day at lunch (Bill had a big pile of leftover handbills for a Lions Club carnival that we used for the pieces).

With the exception of the "Epcot ball", which has plane tesselations on the large faces, the shapes on that second page are all cumulations of Platonic solids with triangular faces, where the pyramid used for the cumulation is a cube-corner. You need one module for every edge in the uncumulated polyhedron, so the little cube (which is really a cumulated tetrahedron) uses 6, the octahedron uses 12, and the icosahedron 30. The icosahedron is an interesting toy, since you can push some of the vertices inward to make it undergo startling transformations, including one form that looks like a saucer-shaped cluster of cubes.

I figured out that you can also make flat square faces by linking together four of the modules instead of three (though they pull apart easily, so shapes that use them hold together best if they've also got pyramidal faces). You can actually, I think, make cubes of at least three different sizes: that little one that is a cumulated tetrahedron, a bigger one made from 12 modules with the flat square faces, and an even bigger one from 24 modules that is a cuboctahedron with the triangular faces cumulated. (Even bigger flat-faced cubes would require square tesselations on the faces and would probably be extremely flimsy.)

You can go beyond that by using other non-Platonic polyhedra as a basis. A simple, strange-looking one I did was the gyrobifastigium, which I've known about ever since Kibo taught me that it's fun to say "gyrobifastigium". What I really want to make someday is the 60-module Sonobe version of the snub cube, which I suspect would be awesome, kind of like the aftermath of six cubes violently colliding in hyperspace.

It's also interesting to think about the minimal nontrivial shapes made from these Sonobes. You can hook two of them together to make a flat (but thick) square, and three to make a sort of tiny, squat triangular dipyramid that is the cumulation of a flat triangle (or, I suppose, really two flat triangles face to face).