About Hexnet.org

Last updated: 2010.0831.2143

Contents

Introduction

Wedgely greetings, plebeian. If you are like some people, you may be wondering something to the effect of, "What's the deal with this site?" What indeed. Well, TODAY IS YOUR LUCKY DAY, for here is an ENTIRE PAGE OF CONTENT dedicated to addressing that very issue.

But first, some interesting facts about Hexnet:

  • Legally a church in Massachusetts. Think about it.
  • For reasons I don't entirely understand, alt.religion.hexnet is an actual Usenet group—or was, before Usenet was shut down by The Man.

Anyway, the story of Hexnet is meandering and sordid. The following is a needlessly long summary of it:

A short history of my hexagonal thinking

I am not exactly sure why I picked up on this hexagon thing, but it was in November of 1994, at school, and I was banned for two days from the Barn (don't even worry about it). I was discussing truncated icosahedra with several friends. Hexagons suddenly seemed remarkably interesting. At the time I can only assume it must've seemed like a transient fascination. And it was, actually. Sort of. I had a hexagon-related website under the auspices of Hexnet.org for a couple years, and then I completely lost interest in it. Or rather I came to find the whole thing philosophically and ontologically disagreeable. So I turned it into a religion that had nothing to do with hexagons at all (I was a very strange child). And in time I came to find that fairly disagreeable as well.

AND LO, MANY YEARS PASSED.

Then, back in the spring of aught six I guess, I was temporarily on Paxil for some reason, which put me in a really weird and not entirely unpleasant mental space for awhile, and I was welding scrap metal in a friend's barn (different barn from the one mentioned above, but in fact one of the same friends involved in the original icosahedral discussion) one pointless Saturday morning and for some reason I made a hexagon. And suddenly it all made sense again: "Hexagons—of course!" If I could explain simply what I meant by this, I probably wouldn't have needed to make this website. Or maybe I would've just made it better, I don't know. At any rate, the hexagon thing slowly re-emerged in my consciousness. I had very mixed feelings about my earlier hexagonal phase though, and for some time I was sort of in the closet on the whole thing—a hexagonal closet, if you will. But then in the fall of aught seven, I guess, I ran across a Facebook group called Hexagons Are Better Than Squares without an admin, so I took it upon myself to take over administration of the group and make it a focal point for my new hexagonal movement, and since then I've been completely out in the open regarding my hexagonal proclivities. As with most Facebook groups though, that never really went anywhere. It did ultimately lead to a far more successful Hexagons page, but that's about it.

So now, several years later still, I have again taken up the hexagonal cause in full force. And as I am not really doing anything else with my time, I have decided it would be worthwhile to propound upon the virtues of hexagons here on the internet again, at least for a while. The internet—and indeed the world—is a different place than it was the last time I had a hexagon-themed Hexnet.org site up and running. People are more connected than they used to be. People with weird ideas are in regular contact with lots of other people with weird ideas. So it seems like a good time to come forward with weird ideas.

The greater hexagon

Now a point of confusion I think that sometimes arises here is what exactly I mean by "hexagon." I am fond of proper hexagons—regular hexagons, defining a convex hull of six equally-spaced vertices at 60 degrees from each other—but when I speak of "hexagons" in the most general sense here, I am really speaking of six-sided plane symmetry in general I guess, and the various geometries and topologies pertinent to that. Hexagons, things that look like hexagons, hexagonally-packed circles, et cetera. Specifically in the context of Euclidean geometry, what I guess I am particularly interested in, among other things, is the interplay between circles, triangles, and regular hexagons.

So, in the broader spectrum of mathematical concepts and structures, when I speak of "hexagons" I am often referring not only to proper hexagons but also to six-sided symmetry groups and such in general, and other things that look like hexagons, can be logically mapped in some way to hexagons, or are in some way relevant to hexagons, six-sidedness, or indeed sixness itself. I am casting a pretty wide net here. The point is that, for me at least, proper regular hexagons per se often serve as more of a schematic idealization of an underlying mathematical principle than anything else, so try not to read too much into them. I don't know if that makes sense. It makes sense to me.

That being said, hexagons of any sort can be very interesting too, in that they generally fall into the category of "sixness" as mentioned above. For example, Pascal's Theorem, or if you will the Hexagrammum Mysticum (they don't name theorems like they used to in my opinion), is all very fascinating and hexagonal and doesn't necessarily involve regular hexagons.

Beyond the hexagon

I should add that I have many other interests besides hexagons. But other people seem to be dealing with them better than I feel I could. I have a lot of, I guess, philosophical and metaphysical conjectures about things, that are I think are quite interesting. Many of them will be evident here from time to time. I also have a lot of political views, which although strongly held are probably neither interesting nor relevant to anyone else, at least not outside of an actual political context. And there are more intelligent and well-spoken people than I who are addressing what I think needs to be addressed in regard to these issues. But nobody—nobody anywhere—seems to have taken up this hexagon issue. It is a niche I feel I am peculiarly suited to fill. So that is what I am doing. Since, however, this site is intended to serve as the central hub of my internet existence going forward, I shall maintain a personal blog as an outlet for opinions and thoughts and whatnot that don't directly fall under the purview of the site's Hexblog. In the same vein, please feel free to utilize the appropriate areas of the Forum as well for non-hexagonal discussions, as long as they are interesting and at least somewhat tangentially pertinent to something.

A short history of Hexnet.org

The term "Hexnet" was first coined—by me anyway—in the February of 1995. It was going to be a BBS. That was back when such things existed. The BBS never materialized, largely I think because it was at the precise moment when the whole BBS scene collapsed. I held on to the name for some reason though. I think because it was short, memorable, and you don't have to spell it out for people—one thing I have always avoided doing, and don't understand why more web entrepreneur-types haven't avoided as well, is coming up with made-up names that are not intuitively simple to spell. I have never had to spell out "Hexnet" for any native English-speaker. It is self-evident how to spell it. I think that is very useful in terms of branding and such, especially with so much information spread by literal word-of-mouth these days.

The first iteration of this site, or something resembling it, was launched in the summer of 1995. The site was styled "Hexnet," I think, but it was actually before I registered the hexnet.org domain name. Anyway, the whole shtick was that I sold "hexagons," right, but like it was couched in this very over-the-top and nonsensical corporate lingo, so it was fairly obvious that I didn't actually sell hexagons, and that it was just some sort of elaborate joke. Which it was, to an extent. But I was serious about the hexagon part of it. In retrospect it is evident that I was a bit too tongue-in-cheek about the whole thing, as I often am. I presented my ideas in a fairly sarcastic, self-deprecating way, and whatever nucleus of substance I was trying to convey was apparently lost in the process. It was a noble effort though, and one that I still look back on with some pride. You can still find references and links to it if you google around a bit (please don't).

Anyway, towards the end of that site's existence, circa late '96, when the internet really started filling up with normals for the first time, I started being contacted by people with a genuine interest in hexagonal geometry. But by then my interest was waning, and I am sorry to say that, to my great regret, I more or less just started ignoring any hexagon-related communication that came my way, leading eventually to the abolition of the entire hexagonal enterprise. I had grown bored with it.

So then, as I mentioned earlier, I turned Hexnet into a religion. The less said about this the better. Without going into too much detail here—I may write something about it at some point—I basically turned into an iconoclastic monistic idealism thing (feel free to look that up). And I do mean "iconoclastic" in the proper sense. Consciously, I viewed myself as having an attachment to hexagons that was not appropriate to their relative importance in the structure of the universe. In reality, again, I probably just grew bored with it. I had never really applied myself mathematically to teasing out interesting details about hexagons, and thus it had always remained a fairly superficial fascination to me. In retrospect, my views in these days lacked nuance or subtlety. It would take me a further ten years to really integrate the whole hexagonal thing into my broader ontological worldview, which was itself only starting to take shape around this time.

So, I had this domain name all registered and shit, and I didn't care about hexagons, so I just turned it into a completely different thing. With like animated GIF flames and weird Pagan clip-art and shit. It was quite a spectacle. Around the same time, as mentioned earlier, I organized Hexnet as an officially-incorporated church in Massachusetts. As far as I know it is still on the books, since religious non-profits are not required to file annual reports and thus do not expire due to lack of activity. Again, the less said about this the better. But eventually the whole religion thing fizzled out too. I guess I just slowly realized that I was making a complete jackass of myself in a very public way, and that I'd probably be better served by shutting the hell up, since at that point it was becoming clear that everything posted on the internet would probably be preserved in some form or another until the end of human civilization—which could conceivably be pretty far off yet. So, after a few years of pointlessness I won't recount in too much further detail here, Hexnet.org went offline in late 1999, early 2000 sometime. I forget exactly when. I allowed the domain to lapse, someone else came in and squatted on it for some years (and apparently had some website about horses or something, if my present 404 logs are to be believed). Eventually I had no web presence at all. The early novelty of "having your own website" had worn off by then, and I found myself with little of interest to say. The first stirrings of "Web 2.0" were beginning to be seen in those days, with Livejournal and crap, and I contented myself with a more subdued web presence confined to these emerging channels of standardized, organized content.

I made several halfassed attempts to start websites in the ensuing years, almost all based on early CMSes. These projects all ultimately collapsed under the weight of my own unimaginable laziness. But lo, in recent years I have returned to the hexagonal arts, as I've described, and the whole history of my paradigmatic thinking is coming into clearer and clearer focus—I've come to understand the intellectual mistakes I made in handling this hexagon issue when I was younger, and why it took so long to integrate it into my larger understanding of reality. It is very complicated, and this is not the place to go into it. The important thing is that, for the first time in many years, I felt I had the motivation and the energy to complete a hexagon-related site, in one form or another. A new hexagonal era was dawning.

Interestingly, the immediate cause of this site's creation was my fairly serious plan, in early 2010, to run for Congress in the 7th Massachusetts district. I very nearly did this, and ultimately pulled back due only to my complete phobia of anything resembling fame, but in the process of planning my campaign I realized I would need a fairly functional website, and it inspired me to investigate the current state of affairs vis-a-vis web design. After coming to the conclusion that everything else sucked, I decided to make a site with Drupal. Realizing that I really did not have enough enthusiasm for a political campaign to motivate me to properly learn Drupal, I decided to make a "practice" site about something I cared about more—hexagons. And then, as I said, I decided not to run for Congress. But this still seemed like the thing to do. And now, many months of intermittent work later, it is somewhat presentable.

The hexnet.org domain came available a few years ago, and I bought it up on impulse, thinking it might be useful someday. I tried for awhile to come up with a more operative domain name for this project ("hexagon."-something, "hexagons."-something, et cetera), but all the good ones were of course taken long ago. Again, I feel "Hexnet" has a certain ring to it, and my historical connections to it make it particularly interesting to me. But I do, ultimately, have many reservations about returning to the hexnet.org identity. There is a lot of crap out there with "hexnet" and my name on it—crap I have, for the most part, tried to distance myself from over the years. But it is what it is, and I now feel more or less compelled to embrace it enthusiastically as part of my cringe-inducing heritage. Suffice to say though, for the most part I wholly disclaim and disassociate myself with any of the flawed and ultimately rather pointless material I have published in the past under this name. I have come to understand that "Hexnet" is for me something like what "Dymaxion" was for Bucky Fuller—a fairly arbitrary name that will probably be attached to various hobbies and projects for the rest of my life. Try not to read too much into it. (Though at this point I am not willing to completely renounce the idea of turning it into a religion again at some point—that would be pretty cool.)

A few words about site layout

It was originally my intention not to use hexagons at all in this site's layout, as it was my view that to do so would have been retarded. Common sense tells us that displaying and organizing linear alphabetic text on a two-dimensional rectangular surface should, by all rights, be done with rectangles. And there is an important point in that: I do not advocate any sort of irrational promulgation of hexagons for purposes to which they are not suited. Indeed, the entire crux of my position here is that hexagons are not only interesting in and of themselves, but are well-suited and well-adapted for a variety of practical, specific purposes. Website layout is not one of them at this time.

Be that as it may, you will note that I have, in fact, created a fairly—though not completely over the top—hexagonal theme for Hexnet.org. The reason I ultimately did this was because I felt it was the only way to fully convey my enthusiasm for the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of the hexagonal gestalt. It is, among other things, a very visual, aesthetic point I am trying to convey here, and to do so without the proper measure of immersive conviction, I believe, would be fairly halfassed. Please be assured, however, that I am and have always been wholly committed to the principles of proper web design, and I have tried very hard to prevent my hexagonal theming from interfering with content presentation or navigation anywhere on this site. There is no Flash here (except for my videos, which don't even work that well, and will be converted to HTML5 video come the future), no splash screen (unless you count the home page, which is fully functional and navigable), nor any mystery-buttons without names, et cetera. It will not display worth crap in Internet Explorer < 7, but if you are using IE 6 then frankly you are lost to me anyway. If this site is loading slowly (and I would very much like to know if it is—please contact me), I assure you it is because of my hosting provider and database speeds, not because of the images, et cetera. All images used in the page layout of this site total less than 200 kB combined.

There is interesting potential for more practical incorporation of hexagonal geometries if we ever move to three-dimensional displays for everyday media output, since of course three-dimensional space can easily be projected onto the three symmetry axes of hexagonal space (a cube viewed corner-on looks like a hexagon, et cetera). But at present, of course, this is not a relevant consideration. Overall, I have endeavored to incorporate hexagons on this site only where they are appropriate and/or amusing, or where it was just as easy to use hexagons as it was to use any other geometry. Bear in mind, however, that HTML and CSS fundamentally work with rectangular fields, and no amount of superficial hexagonality will change that.

Conversely, I would very much like to convert all code-generated numerical values on this site to dozenal at some point. I may write a Drupal module to accomplish this. That is some time off though. If anyone reading this has any thoughts on how this might be done, or an interest in doing so, it would certainly be a very constructive contribution to both the Drupal and dozenal communities. I certainly understand PHP and Drupal well enough to have a sense of how one might go about writing such a module, but I have neither the free time nor the programming competence to take it up at this time. Until then I will probably keep using decimal notation for most numerical purpooses on this site.

The structure of this site

This site is, ultimately, dedicated to both hexagons and hexagon-related ideas. I have decided that a major subfocus of the site will be dozenalism, or the advocacy of a base twelve number system. I have had an interest in dozenalism for many years, going back to my earliest hexagon days. I tried to develop a base six positional notation system, and quickly realized that base twelve made a lot more sense. There are obviously geometrical and mathematical areas of overlap between these ideas, but since it is at least theoretically possible that this site could become some sort of hub for dozenal activity, I feel the need to point out that dozenalism per se is something that makes so much sense, on so many different levels, that it really stands on its own as a system worth advocating for without requiring one to buy into any of my fairly eccentric ideas regarding hexagons. If you have come to this site via some sort of dozenal link or search or what have you, please be assured that you can probably enjoy the dozenal content provided here without, in fact, subscribing to any sort of hexagonalist system of thought.

This site is divided up into, I guess, four major content spheres, in addition to numerous pages and such accessible from the various menus:

The "Links" page is not really content per se, but since there is so much pertinent information out there about hexagons that can't appropriately be hosted here, I consider it to be one of the more important collections of information I am providing. Anyway, please consider contributing to the forum—I am hoping it will become some sort of thriving community for the exchange of hexagonal ideas. If you are new to either hexagons (as, like, a concept), or dozenalism, please consider reading these two brief articles I have been putting together, which can be found in the library:

There are a number of very interesting articles in the Library about dozenalism as well, which are well worth reading if you have any interest in the subject.

It is a cliché, but this site is very much a work in progress. I have for the most part written all of its "original content" in the early months of 2010, and I felt that there was no particular reason to delay the launch of the site until I wrote more. Certainly I anticipate the bulk of the day-to-day (or at least week-to-week) content of this site coming through my Hexblog, which will document my thinking about hexagons as time goes by, and note interesting items of hexagonal import in the news. If you have any content you feel would be appropriate to this site, please read our call for contributions or contact me.

Please note that, in content paragraph form at least, I have generally tried to use underlined links for external pages, and non-underlined links for Hexnet.org pages. (For anyone writing content for this site, in the forum or elsewhere, external links should be class="ex".) "Special" links, lists of links, or links in the main menus are not generally styled like this.

Thank you for your time, for visiting my strange little site, and for reading the bulk of this rather long-winded introduction for some reason. And thank you for choosing hexagons. Please enjoy the rest of your time at Hexnet.org, and your continuing existence.

– Graham, May 2010. (11B6;) FTVW.

[P]