This is Nathan Austin, after a long night of working on a tessellation. We’re sure many of our readers know this feeling. Nathan is a film director, an occasional poet (that is, he writes nonce verse, not poems every so often), and an alumnus of the College where I work. We met a couple years […]
[audio:DB.mp3|titles=I’m Afraid of Americans|artists=David Bowie] So, I was on the bus the other day, cheerfully folding away and rocking out to an old Bowie/Eno song and got to thinking about culture. The song was ostensibly about culture, you see — Bowie says: It’s not as truly hostile about Americans as say “Born in the U.S.A.”: […]
Though the most credulous of men, I have trouble believing many things. For instance, I don’t believe an Airbus A320 can float. Just took one from Madrid to Milan and I don’t really believe they can fly, either. It’s morning on Inauguration Day and I don’t believe those cynical criminals will actually step down on […]
Our friend and unindicted co-conspirator, origamijoel, said that to me recently and it sounded immensely wise. Joel is a soft-spoken man with an air of affable gravitas and he often says things that strike me as being immensely wise. It’s just his way. When we were sitting on the concrete on 27th Street this past […]
Well, rather a left-handed apology, as the injury to him is largely imaginary and thoroughly unintentional, but an apology, nevertheless. This is a tato box: by which I mean, an origami box with radial symmetry and a closure the resembles that of a tato, a traditional Japanese purse. In the past year, I think I’ve […]
An idea I had, early one morning — a trompe-l’œil tato box, very impure. A magician, perhaps, could work up some patter for collapsing the box, but it would be far beyond my talents. Whist is an old game — I learnt when I was in school — all I remember is that the rules […]
We haven’t finished this yet, but we still wanted to tell you about it. It’s Kazuo Haga’s new book, Origamics: Mathematical Explorations Through Paper Folding (ISBN-13: 978-9812834898). We’re no math head — anything above the most primitive forms of trig causes us anxiety and vague spiritual discomfort. That isn’t because we don’t enjoy the underlying […]
Yesterday, I was at the Smith College Museum of Art, a lovely collection in a building of shocking hideosity, and they had a newish painting that caught my eye — it used a palimpsest technique that a friend of mine once used to good effect. One of the layers was a sketch of the Vitruvian […]
This is a video response to the Spiral Data Tato from whiteandfluffy701d, which has been on YouTube for a few months and somehow went right by me. A very nice production. (And, I should mention, detailed directions for this model can be had at Instructables.) Also well worth noting is this, which I believe to […]
[audio:Sam_Cooke-Change.mp3|titles=A Change is Gonna Come|artists=Sam Cooke] There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long But now I think I’m able to carry on It’s been a long, a long time coming But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will This is a song that was released in 1964, shortly […]
