Appearances
With the advent first of computer generated short films, and then of full length feature films, it has become something of an in-joke to hide a Utah teapot somewhere in one of the film's scenes. For example, in the movie Toy Story the Utah teapot appears in a short tea-party scene. The Utah teapot sometimes appears in the "Pipes" screensaver shipped with Microsoft Windows, but only in versions prior to Windows XP, and has been included in the "polyhedra" Xscreensaver hack since 2008. The teapot also appears in The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror VI" in which Homer discovers the "third dimension". It also appears in Pixar's Monsters, Inc. on the table in Boo's bedroom.
One famous ray-traced image (by Jim Arvo and Dave Kirk, from their 1987 SIGGRAPH paper "Fast Ray Tracing by Ray Classification") shows six stone columns, five of which are surmounted by the platonic solids (tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron). The sixth column supports a teapot. The image is titled "The Six Platonic Solids" – which has led some people to call the teapot a "Teapotahedron". This image appeared on the covers of several books and journals. Jim Blinn (in one of his "Project MATHEMATICS!" videos) proves an amusing (but trivial) version of the Pythagorean theorem: Construct a (2D) teapot on each side of a right triangle and the area of the teapot on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the areas of the teapots on the other two sides.
The teapot also makes an appearance in the Technology Test level of the Serious Engine, where it's used to demonstrate many of the engine characteristics.
In addition, the teapot is a spawnable object in the astronomical physics simulator Universe Sandbox, more-or-less to scale with the other entities in the program. Its presence may be a reference to Bertrand Russell's "cosmic teapot" analogy.
Read more about this topic: Utah Teapot
Famous quotes containing the word appearances:
“We often think ourselves inconsistent creatures, when we are the furthest from it, and all the variety of shapes and contradictory appearances we put on, are in truth but so many different attempts to gratify the same governing appetite.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“It is doubtless wise, when a reform is introduced, to try to persuade the British public that it is not a reform at all; but appearances must be kept up to some extent at least.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Truth has scarce done so much good in the world as the false appearances of it have done hurt.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)