32 Straws Thingys! Aaah!

[This is post #26 in a mini-blog-post series for NaBloPoMo 2015. Jump to the first, previous, or next post.]

There’s one more modification we can make that changes the arrangement of straws without significantly affecting the overall composition: swap the roles of long and short ends! We’ve been sliding the short ends into the long ones to make the seam rest nicely along the flexy bits, but we should at least consider the opposite. In fact, my very first Straws Thingy made this choice instead, because I thought it nicely complemented the (less symmetric) 4-color color scheme.

alternate-color-pattern

But you know what this means: Each of yesterday’s 16 Straws Thingys can be reversed in this way, resulting in a whopping total of 32 alternative, distinguishable-but-just-barely Straws Thingys! And with 5 independent binary choices to make, we’ve built ourselves a lovely, colorful 5-dimensional hypercube of Straws Thingys.

32-variants

Or maybe just an amorphous pile. Whatever you prefer.

32-variant-pile

Anyway, I’m sorry to say that this is the last day of exponential growth / straw Tribble invasion. But never fear—there are a few posts yet to come before we wrap up the series!

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