Gridding the Sphere

While trying to dig up an awesome tectonics simulation I had found before (it was Tectonics.js, and it is even awesomer now than it had been when I saw it before, with a plausible ocean crust simulation that drives the tectonics), I came across Andy Gainey's planet generator, and he took a really cool approach to the problem of tiling a sphere in hexagons.

Basically, he found the bunch-of-hexagons-with-twelve-regularly-positioned-pentagons grid aesthetically offensive, and solved it by introducing a bunch more random irregularities, replacing a number of clusters of four hexagons with pairs of pentagons and heptagons. Basically, the twelve extra pentagons are still in there, but they disappear among all the other new irregularities, and it ends up looking really cool:

Anyway, a neat idea.