Poles are sometimes hard to spot by inexperienced noob eyes (like mine) and I was just curious if there was some cool tool or feature that might light up those flow stoppers?
For the time being, I’ll keep using the Ctrl+R to help show the no-flow.
Kelly
you will always have poles!
but some type of poles like poles are not that good
you can use the find non manifold function of there is also a script for that!
salutations
Wow, that’s cool. I did not know Blender had that. Too bad there isn’t an option for “not equal” because I thought vertices with 3 connecting edges were also considered a pole. A work around would be setting Compare to “Equal” and then Ctrl+I to invert the selection.
So is this script (which is still available) at:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/Select_nonmanifold_edges
actually able to work in 2.66 ?
After downloading the script, I tried placing it in:
C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.66\scripts\addons
but it refused to be copied no matter how many times I tried or ways that I could think of; e.g., drag and drop, copy and paste, open script in TextPad and using the Save As…
Finally, I tried Install from File… in the User Preferences, Addons tab. This at first glance seemed to work as it is listed by Blender as being installed (without any icon warnings / alerts); however, the curious thing is its file location:
C:\Users\V. Kelly Bellis\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.66\scripts\addons
In any event, it is not present while in Edit Mode from the menu Mesh, Edges submenu.
This is quite cool and works!
Thank you both for your replies.
Kelly
To modify files in the User AppData folder, Blender does not need to be run with administrator privileges. So that is probably why it was installed in that location.
As long as you don’t have more than 5 or 6 (in special cases) edges, there’s really nothing to worry about with poles. They are handled very well by the subsurf modifier these days and in some cases simply aren’t avoidable.
Thanks for the replies guys.
My question regarding pole detection really was about poly flow planning, protection and where redirected flow is good practice, its prevention. I expect that with experience will come better poly flow predictions 
Kelly
see thread on poles at top of forum in material and texture
not easy to understand but gives an idea
salutations
Is it buried in one of the two stickies at the top?
Thanks Ricky for the link.
It looks like there are good things to learn from it.
… but, YOWZERS! - 200 ongoing and continual posts over the past 6 years - not exactly how it started 
only thing i think it does not cover Bmesh Ngon
but there is a cgcookie tut on this !
salutations