Very fitful, this weblog has been, lately. The server is as flaky as a good streudel and the DNS errors are becoming downright whimsical — beaver dams, indeed. We’ll be moving our lodge, shortly, to a more eligible swamp.
While this brief interval of clarity is lent us, we shall scribble feverishly. Mélisande* has been to Geneva, this week, and has seen and done some wonderful things. We are particularly taken with the boîte-tato de Genève. Of making many tato boxes, there is no end, but we find we are nowise weary.
The above is a stackable version of the eight-sided tato box — it’s not too difficult, give it a whack. Here is a crease pattern for the flat-bottomed version (and postscript of the same). The model in the photograph is only marginally more complex and stacks up just lovely — a crease pattern (and postscript ditto).
Here’s a fine use for the Spiral Data Tato — Jenn and Paul, down Carolina way, have a group of friends who make mixes for each other at the end of the year. They chose this model to be their cover. Imagine the éclat their mix got this year, even before it was opened! Bravo, guys — fold on. (To my shame, I knew almost none of the music. Lately, all I’m listening to is Ghanaian highlife and Throwing Muses.)
And while we’re on the subject, we will seize the opportunity to mention that, thanks to the good folks at Digg, Neatorama and the teeming dozens who read this blog (gramercy, gramercy), my tutorial at Instructables got over 71,000 page views, thus garnering me a place among the finalists in the Laser Cutter Contest.
Not that it stands a chance of winning — it’s competing against solar death-rays, robotic foosball tables, phaser pistols and business cards that dial the phone for you. It’s all coolth to the nth. But that something as ephemeral as an origami model could even make the cut, we take as no small accomplishment.
Those of you who belong should go vote; those who do not should sign up. I will not be telling you to vote for the Spiral Data Tato — once you read the other entries, you will see why. No, I’m sending you there because they have a cool site, frequented by geeks with a great desire to learn new and different things. Very fertile ground for spreading the open source origami way.
I’d like to thank you all for individual perception and next year, if all goes well, we won’t have to hold these meetings in secret.
This is an idea that came from a lot of places: conversations I’ve been having with Mélisande*, an old Christmas carol I listened to one evening, a twenty-hour bus ride to Hoosierland and a passing glance at a Holiday Inn logo.
The sequenced crease pattern will tell you everything except how to collapse it — for that, we’ll use video.
(I’ll mention for those of you reading this on a feed, there’s a lovely embedded video here with sprightly music and all. Click the entry link and come see.)
Evil things have befallen my database, but we will continue to keep Twelfth Night in our hearts, whatever. It is, after all, the Feast of Misrule. Please note that there are now even more choices in the random foreign word generators to the right, including Arabic and Turkish. Hey, I can see you guys looking, got no clue if you’re getting anything from it. Pushing the Latin button reminded me: translation is the best way to read me, I lose a lot in the original.
This is one of those folds I did on the bus one morning and thought was very interesting, but then never looked at it again. It’s been kicking around the office and when I recycle the overflow, this one never quite gets into the bin, probably because it still looks vaguely interesting.
Tried to make one the other day and had to go get the original, to see what it was that I had done. Hmm — clever. Wish I had thought of that, or at least remembered having thought of it. It’s not that hard — you make a pentagon in a circle and then make some other pentagons inside it. Here’s a directional crease pattern for your folding pleasure and a postscript file, if the PDF doesn’t work for you.
And it’s the crease pattern that this blog entry is really about. If you’re a Windows or Mac user, there’s lots of choices for drawing diagrams and crease patterns, Adobe Illustrator or CorelDraw, for instance. But under linux, your choices of vector drawing programs are rather more circumscribed. It’s not that they don’t exist or aren’t any good, it’s just that they’re not easily adapted to origami purposes. I’m thinking of sodipodi and Inkscape — excellent for what they are, but they do not fold the mustard, so to speak. (“Cut the mustard,” being an English idiom that means to succeed or to meet expectations.)
I finally tried out Xara LX this week and I must say, it’s pretty darn good. This is an older Windows app that somehow got religion a while back and went open source. The porting promptly began and it’s not a finished item, certainly, but it’s got some good usability going on. Plus, it doesn’t have fifty gazillion requirements. You ever download an application and then spend the rest of the day tracking down all the weird libraries, obscure toolkits and esoteric image collections needed to make it run? Hate that. Xara LX, you make sure you have libstdc++ version 5 — and you probably already do — and untar it. Doubleclick the executable and away you go. Nice.
Can’t say I’ve got it all down yet, but the more I use it, the more I like it. All lot of learning the program is finding where the functions are hidden. Yesterday, I found I could use my mouse wheel to zoom if I held down the control key. That made life a lot easier. And you can straighten polygons by grabbing the handles on the corners and tugging. Very cool, indeed. And I can draw in inches and points (my accustomed idiom) and still print to A4 without having to jump through metric hoops.
Ah, I should speak of printing. Xara LX does not save a file to PDF. Under linux, this is very odd — linux apps speak postscript like natives and all of them seem to save to PDF. But not this one, not yet. So, you print to file, like drawing.ps, and then open a terminal and type ps2pdf drawing.ps. Works fine. Or if you haven’t had the foresight to install ps2pdf on your box, try this neat site.
Xara LX is free like free speech and free like free beer. We like both those things.
Earlier today, I went to reach into my briefcase and hit the back of the chair it was sitting on with my hand, driving a splinter of veneer half an inch (hmm, 13mm) under the fingernail of my left middle finger. Oh, the wanton vulgarity that followed — for a couple minutes, I was channeling the ghost of Sam Kinison. This is, of course, an example of argumentum ad misericordiam, the appeal to pity. Now, you will be feeling so much empathy for my sad plight, you will not notice how slight my content may be.
This is the model with a battery-power tealight under it, flickering away in a lovely fashion. You’ll no doubt wish to fold one right away. Here’s a crease pattern (and an image file, if my pdf isn’t working for you.) If you’re puzzled by the construction method, it’s very nearly the same as the Easter Egg that appeared here earlier.
If you make one of these out of a circle twice the circumference of your head, you will have a very styling hat. If you have a twin, you can march in a Roman procession as Castor and Pollux, who always wore egg shell hats to honor their parents, Leda and the Swan.
While we’re here, we’re going to give a shout out to one of the readership who’s been doing some exceeding cool stuff. How is it that my readers are always so much cooler and so much more happening than I am? This is, of course, argumentum ad personam of the flattery kind. (What? Like I’m above such things?)
These are Persimmon Boxes, so named because of a paper by Naoko Takeda which discusses, among other things, self-locking kaki folds. Kaki, you see, is Japanese for persimmon. A good read, that. I’ve been experimenting with these kaki folds this week and decided I had been using them for a while now, but it’s good to have a name to hang on them.
This model is fun — it’s sturdy and has an interesting interior space. You hold it up to the light and it suggests a hyperbolic cube, but this is a chimera. I mean, it’s developable and all. The long axes on the sides are straight lines — these lines suggest a tensegrity icosa, but that’s best ignored for the time being. What’s really going on here is the intersection of three hyperbolic cylinders.
This would make a good container. One of these days, I’m going to buy me some of that white food-grade paperboard and go to town. You build a better Chinese take-out container and the world will beat a path to your door. But the world will have forgotten the hot mustard and will still want a tip, even though the fried dumplings will be all sweaty and stone-cold. This is where you will tell the world to get off.
The “manhole bag,” another of Ms. Tsukioka’s inventions, is a purse that can hide your valuables by unfolding to look like a round sewer cover. These ideas might strike foreigners as far-fetched,” Ms. Tsukioka said, “but in Japan, they can become reality.”
An interesting article, but it doesn’t mention that the Talking Heads were doing urban camouflage years ago. That’s the trouble with urban camouflage — no one can see you doing it.
Balanced on the blades of my shoulders, with my kneecaps seeking to level with my ears, it occurred to me that in spite of my years and gray beard, I remain highly suggestible.
In my youth, I was sought out by missionaries, magicians and pathological liars because I was such a manifest mark. My credulity knew no bounds. People had merely to say, “I think you should do this,” and I was out the door, doing that and telling people all about it. I said, “Wow…” a lot in those days. A pitiful thing.
Lately, I’ve been going to yoghurt practice twice a week. I don’t go because of job stress: job stress is the only thing that holds civilization together, in my opinion. If I didn’t have job stress to keep me steady, my shoes would be off in a flash and I’d be out moonstomping with the coyotes and the hoot owls. No, I go to practice because if I don’t, my tendons turn into beef jerky and I begin to move like the Tin Man of Oz after a spring rain.
Heidi, my yoghurt teacher, has the Inflection. She says, press down on the palms of your hands and lift your legs off of the ground….and I will do this and tie myself into imponderable knots. Remarkable gift. I don’t think I credit anything she says about physiology or spirituality, but this seems to have no bearing on my willingness to do whatever she says. I’m very glad she’s not in politics. (Though we’d probably be much better off if she were.)
Suggestibility is very important in little a art. One needs to be able to connect the dots and put the little l line where it belongs. Of course, the argument needs to be properly framed. Tom Hull recently said something about how we who follow the path of curve folding tend to rely on tools and/or templates (too true) and then gives an interesting example of how one can estimate a circle, using a cone. Being highly suggestible, I’ve done something similar here with a simple masu. Using the octagon you get from a frog base, you make a crease that shows where the big R radius of the inner square is. You then use that mark to visualize a little box and make a circle arc going from one bottom corner to the other, touching the top of the box at its midpoint. As you go around the masu, making these curves, the sides of the masu become cylindrical. The more accurate your circle arcs become, the more manifest the cylinder. Masu with Groin Vault Crease Pattern Try it out.
And if you’re still looking for fun, you might try this one, which has a pendentive dome for a bottom and squinch edges. Pendentive Masu Crease Pattern (Pendentive is Latin for hangy-down-thing and squinch is just fun to say.) Same principle and it will support many times its own weight in beer. I got the idea from Heidi explaining about alternatively compressing and stretching the lower spine. You have to think about something when you have your kneecaps by your ears for two minutes. It’s not like you can sing to pass the time.
This is from a BBC 3 show, called The Real Hustle — never heard of it. I’m sure this was mentioned on the listservs and discussion groups, but I often miss such things. Maybe you did, too.
And, I wanted to know how this embedded youtube thing worked, for my own nefarious purposes.
It is to be noted, the villain here always uses public domain models. A most scrupulous gonif, no?
