Update: Diagrams for this model now available. This is a Zhoubi Bowl, a result of some experimental folding I’ve been doing, loosely based on an illustration in the Zhoubi Suanjing, an ancient Chinese mathematics text. I like it, nice swoopy lines and pointy bits. This is the CP, that is, the crease pattern, but it […]
Sure, the Icosahedral Twist Box is great, but a little bland. You could soup it up with some fancy paper, maybe, or you could go with my original conception and make a World Box. The World Box is in honor of the first international exhibition on origami tessellations, July 29th through August 6th at the […]
This is ambi-epistolary – hey-ho, there’s a nonce-word for the ages! Yes, ambi-epistolary, it can be made with equal facility out of letter paper of either persuasion, A4 or American 8½ ×11″. How’s that for thinking globally? You make two pieces and one fits into the other. Or the other way around. The male becomes […]
St. Bonaventure, someplace in The Mind’s Journey to God, speaks of the problem of lost meaning. Not that I remember where. Meaning, like mass and unlike my dilettante learning, cannot be lost. What doesn’t get communicated through speech returns to the Godhead. A comforting thought. But when one doesn’t speak Japanese, one wonders what will […]
One of those four-in-the-morning ideas – what if we graft an iris closure onto a Fujimoto cube? Wow – two great tastes that taste great together. Here’s the CP and I know what you’re saying. You’re saying, “Yetch! What’s with the green lines? Blue for mountain, okay, red for valley, sure, but green?” Relax – […]
I’ve been doing some more complicated things – but I thought I probably ought to put out the simple version before getting all publicly jiggy with it. This one has an iris closure going to every second corner, a nice basket weave look. This is probably the easiest version of this model to learn, but […]
Dreidl is a Yiddish word meaning “top” or “little spinning thing.” Geflocktne means “twisted” or “interwoven.” I’m not in the least sure about the inflection – please feel free to send corrections. This one is showing nun up, meaning that you win nichts, nada, niente, nichievo, not so much. Spin again, please. At Hanukkah, it […]
— Greetings, Metafiltrationists — what’s up with that $5.00 cover charge? This post is from a while back and better instructions can be found on this post. — Greetings, Boing-Boingers. The files are linked farther down the page. There is a how-to and you can find it here. Make sure you turn the page scaling […]
This is what I was trying to do when I made the Dollars to Doughnuts! fold. Happy accidents. This is the same in construction – see the hints sheet below – and is actually rather easier to collapse, as the overlap in the middle is graspable. Threading the stamps is a bit tricky: you have […]
My days in grad school, now known to geologists as the Pleistocene, were remarkable both for their signal lack of productivity and for their relentless mortification of the flesh. In those days, I learned all about rice and beans and dal and rice and ramen noodles and whatever. I learned about Black Label pounders in […]
