a friend of mine heard a radio commercial one day where a starburst candy was reffered to as a cube. my friend is a mathmatician (some sort of theoretical math) and goes crazy anytime someone claims a starburst is a cube. she holds firm that a cube MUST have 6 even sides, that all faces must be the same size.
can anyone help me out here and give me proof one way or the other? i’m convinced that a “rectangular solid” (as she calls them) CAN be a cube (technically at least)
can anyone help me find a definative answer? i enjoy bringing it up at work just because it instantly sends her into screaming fits about rectangular solids and equal faces, but i’d love to be able to show her facts.
From that definition, and realizing that geometry is the section of math that I truly cannot handle, it would seem to me that a Starburst is a rectangular solid but not a cube. It has 6 rectangular sides but they are not all of equal size. So like all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares, all cubes are rectangular solids, but not all rectangular solids are cubes.
These caramels are much closer to cubes than Starbust are.
If she wants to be a geometrical purist, she’s technically right.
However, by that standard, nothing is a cube except the purely imaginary geometrical construct of a solid with eight perfect right-angled corners and six identical square faces. Since there will always imperfections in a manufactured object, at best we can build a model of a cube with an arbitrary degree of accuracy.
So tell her the starburst is a cube model with looser tolerances. That’ll teach her.
[sub]I doubt it’ll teach her - the human ability to cling to anal retentive horsepucky is eternal[/sub]
I’ve got to agree with **Colophon ** here. A Starburst (Sorry, they’re still **Starburst ** around here!) is roughly 1"X1"x.33", right? (I’m going by memory here, so be gentle with me.) The “height” is nowhere near equal to the width and depth, it’s about one third of it.
Caramels are definitely closer to cubes, and intended to be cubes, so I’ll accept the “no perfect cube, but use the name anyway, Plato!” defense.
6 sided dice are cubes (even if not mathmatically perfect) same goes for bullion cubes, but a starburst isn’t even close. Another term is a (right) rectangular parallelpiped(ron)
Really? Mine are all cubes. My son uses them to build pyramids and stuff for school projects. They’re regular enough to make a step-pyramid. Just don’t try to paint it with a water-based paint. :smack:
In mineralogy, a Starburst would be in the tetragonal system (three axes all at right angles to each other, two axes the same length and indistinguishable from each other and the third axis either longer or shorter than the other two); a cube would be in the isometric system (three axes all at right angles to each other, all three axes the same length and indistiguishable from each other). The systems have different symmetry when rotated about the axes.
I’m rich, I tell ya! I was workin’ my claim up near Dry Gulch, and I hit a bonanza! Prettiest lode of Starburst you ever did see! Nearly 70% lime, too!
And it’s the real thing - all tetragons. Not like that cubic Fool’s Starburst Old Joe brought in.
Um . . . You said “you’re right, he’s wrong”, and then just contradicted yourself. If a cube’s six sides are squares (which they are), then a Starburst isn’t a cube (since some of its sides are rectangles but not squares). So the original poster is wrong, and his friend (who’s a she, not a he) is right.
Anyway, the friend is right regardless. A Starburst isn’t a cube, since its sides aren’t square. It isn’t even an imperfectly made cube, since it’s obvious that the manufacturers of Starburst weren’t trying to make a cube.
Calling a Starburst a cube is exactly as ridiculous as calling a dollar bill a square, as Turek pointed out above.
Just in case anyone took that as more of a Great Debates kind of comment, I should mention that I’m only kidding (as indicated by the winking smiley). I personally have no objection to God rounding irrational numbers to integers, if He so chooses.
