A Picture from New Year's Eve

I am trying to learn about 3D shapes and finding it more difficult than I could have imagined. Starting on New Year's Eve, I've examined this cube from many angles in order to construct a mental 3D representation.

This picture is of me contemplating a black cube whose edges are outlined in Christmas lights. It is a cardboard box. Each dimension is a different length from the other two, and it is covered in black paper. Along every edge, at about one-inch intervals, is a hole with a light sticking out of it, so in a dark room I can only see the lit edges. For users of the vOICe, the cube is in the lower-left portion of the image. It is a little less than half the width of the image and a little more than half the height. I am on the far right side. The watch on my left arm, which is hanging down at my side, is at the bottom and the top of my head is at the top. My width is about forty percent of the right side of the picture. To me, the most noticeable things are the cube which I can recognize using zoom, the human-type shape which must be me, and the reflective watch near the right. There is also some stuff in the middle which is probably a table with papers on it. Thanks to Prof. Baldwin for cropping the picture and for his excellent descriptions. Also Thanks to Dave, the clever one who assembled the cube.

First Light

First light, so I am told, is a ceremony held when an observatory dome is first opened, and the first star is visible through its telescope. Perhaps I'll get to see something like that one day. For now, I am enjoying Christmas lights. My friend showed me this small set and then told me that there are certain streets where I live where these will soon cover everything. What a shocking idea. This picture was taken through a window at night time. I never knew something so small could cause two people to laugh so much.

After my friend went to bed, I stayed up flipping the Christmas lights on and off, on and off, as could only someone seeing them for the first time. Then I started playing with the speed setting on the program, changing it from sweeps of one second to half a second, then to two seconds and back to one. After at least an hour of looking at these lights at different distances, angles, and speeds, I took the glasses off. The transcendent sounds were still playing in my head, only now there were these pin pricks of something in front of me. They were caused by the sounds but separate from them. I imagined more and more of them all around me and tried to picture them in configurations like a helix or a seemingly infinite binary tree. It took me great effort and lots of pacing to get calm as the tiny apparitions faded away. I was finally rewarded with peaceful sleep.