This is quite interesting, though I bridle at some of the statements in the article. I think folding curved lines on paper has received a little attention. here and there, and “the harmless hobby of peace-seeking aesthetes?”
Aes-thetes, indeed. Get over here, grubstreet, and I’ll show you how we play.
Je crois que j’aimerai
Retourner à Blue Bayou
Où les gens sont bons
Où le ciel est chaud
A Blue Bayou
– Orbison, Melson & Marnay
A nine-pointed puff star from a regular nonagon of surplus map paper.
An unimproved CP. Son of a gun, have big fun.
I was thinking, this past week, of how I used to go visit my buddy, Jackson and his family in Maine, back when I was in college. They lived in this crazy old saltbox on the Damariscotta peninsula that their family had occupied — not continuously — for 250 years.
Jackson’s family was haunted. The ghosts they had were peculiar to their family and it took me a long time to get used to it. Family members who had died would continue to come to functions and holiday dinners for years after their deaths and they’d keep coming for as long as a living member of the family could remember them. Not always — Great Aunt Sadie had died of an apoplexy during the Panic of 1857 and she and I talked for an hour during my first visit. I thought her a bit deaf, but it never occurred to me that there was anything else amiss.
They were unusually corporeal for ghosts, I thought. You never saw them arrive. You’d walk into the kitchen and one of them would be making tea and then you’d find another in the parlor, knitting or doing crosswords. (I still have somewhere a pair of socks Great Aunt Sadie finished that first time I visited. I don’t wear them, something about the yarn, very itchy.)
The thing was, their speaking was stilted. They couldn’t generate new speech. Everything they said was a repetition of what they had said in life, or, more precisely, what the living members remembered them having said in life. The ghosts would say whatever was closest within their repertoire to what would be an appropriate contribution to the conversation and the living would say, oh, yes, of course, as though the ghosts were crazy or retarded or maybe just a little senile.
This struck me most forcefully during a visit in 1983 or 1984. It was three in the morning and I was sitting in their vast, flagstoned kitchen, drinking a glass of seltzer. Bad dream. Jackson’s Dad came in and poured himself a glass and started yacking about this and that and I was thinking him an impossibly tedious old jackass when it struck me that he was repeating everything he’d said to me the last time I’d been there. And then I remembered Jackson leaving town to go to his funeral the year before.
Jackson’s Dad was frustrated — he was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t following. He kept saying the same things, over and over, stressing one word or another. I was in my early twenties and wasn’t very good at picking up on tonal or facial cues. Never did get it.
I guess this was on my mind this week because we just went to a CD release party for one of our favorite groups, the Young@Heart Chorus. Every time we see them, there are one or two new faces and one or two fewer of the old faces. Sort of like Spinal Tap.
Young@Heart is one of Northampton’s lesser known treasures. Well, lesser known around here — they’ve been beloved in Europe for years. They just made a documentary that won two Golden Rose awards at the Rose d’Or Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. I recommend it highly. (I’m in the balcony during the concert portion, stage right. You can’t see me, but I’m there.)
The Chorus is made up of older folks, 70 years old and up. They sing rock and roll songs and they do it with gusto. Gusto and bravura. First time I saw them, I thought it was some elaborate trick to get seniors to raise their elbows above their ears. (For abstruse medical reasons, seniors must always be raising their elbows above their ears.) But that’s not it. Well, not all of it. And it’s not that they love rock and roll — most of them dislike it very much — it’s that they like having something important to do.
At the party, we learned that Lillian Hall, the 93-year-old singer of the Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go, had passed on. She’ll be missed.
But the show goes on. Visit the YouTubes.
The Ramones’ I Wanna Be Sedated
Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive / Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive
Talking Heads’ Road to Nowhere
Right, right. Origami content. By all means. A model I’ve been trying to fold since I made the five-pointed one, back in the early 90s. Everything about it is more complicated. Requires absurd amounts of accuracy.
The Seven Pointed Puff Star (unimproved) Crease Pattern.
I’ll tell you a medieval secret — I know a lot of them — the reason that medieval builders, artists and poets were so superstitious about the number seven is that it was so difficult for them to deal with it. Try doing long division (iron division, we called it then) with seven in Roman numerals. So very unpleasant, we only did it during Lent. Try dividing things with seven on a pocket calculator. Even when expressed in the ho-hum, prosaic Arabic numerals, the beauty of the repeating decimals will give you the mystical willies, tell you what.
It’s an odd number, seven is.
If you draw a heptagon (or better, fold one) and connect every second corner, you’ll get a lovely heptagram. If you connect every third corner, you get a different, but no less lovely heptagram.
If you fold the first heptagram and than fold the other heptagram inside it, well, you’ll get this model. Spooky, hunh?
7-Pointed Star Bowl Crease Pattern
Almost certainly a variation of an existing fold.
Something Tom Hull said recently reminded me of an article I keep meaning to plug.
I went to a guest lecture this spring in the math department of the College I work at. This was rather out of character, given my invincible ignorance of anything above the level of word problems concerning red and black jellybeans. Howsobeit, I did attend and was delighted to find I understood everything the prof said, beginning to end. And I also realized that some of what he was describing was what I was doing with the reasoning behind the Smart Waterbomb.
Out upon it: I recommend this article about Mamikon A. Mnatsakanian highly.
It’s calculus for the calculus-impaired.
So, I’m sitting on the bus the other day and this woman, about my age, stands up to get her bags down and I see the label on the back of her trousers, CALLIPYGE. My Greek vocabulary has maybe 200, 300 words, almost all philosophical or theological terms and I don’t truly understand half of them, but this one I knew right off. Kallipygos is “having beautiful buttocks” or, if you prefer, “having virtuous buttocks.” And I thought to myself, “Gad, madam, we’ve come to a very awkward age indeed, when our asses require subtitles.” But one can not say these things aloud and anyhow, one has no business to be reading other people’s trousers, however virtuous their contents.
This will probably be of limited interest. This is a file that shows how to find the grid for the Curved Tetra Box (crease pattern) and the Chimera Bowl (crease pattern):
Chimera Grid Sequenced Crease Pattern
I think it has a lot of possibilities.
We notice that our friends over at Power Word Fold got bOING-bOING‘d, today. Good for them. We hope that their server is tuned and that they’re using WP-cache. Otherwise, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
We grew up along the banks of the Housatonic (not the Miskatonic) and never quite got the H.P. Lovecraft thing. We are not immune to the charms of the dark fantastic, not by any means: ask us about J. Sheridan LeFanu some time and we’ll talk. But who could resist this charming rendition of Cthulhu?
It is also through Power Fold Word that we learn of Taketoshi Nojima’s article — and we are intrigued no end. It’s a like a great big mathematical explanation of Fujimoto and Shen that we don’t understand in the least. Not until we see the groovy pictures at the end of the article. Oh, yeah. We can dig it.
But that isn’t why we asked you here today.
How exceedingly bummed we get, reading the propertarian tripe on the O-list, time to time, well, it passeth understanding like a hotrod Lincoln. Somebody, somewhere, might be enjoying a piece of paper without making the proper obeisances. Faugh.
But here, on this lovely blog, way down at the bottom of the right hand column, we see the logo of the Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike CC license. Yes, open origami.
Rock on, origamiwolf. We’re big fans. Next time we’re in the Lion City, we’re so doing lunch. (One can get curry without the shrimp paste, right?)
We had some email from Marc Vigo this week, which pleased us mightily. Marc is a professor at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and studies some fascinating stuff that is beyond our abilities to describe: modeling and computational geometry and so on. Very cool. He and his friends in the AEP Barcelona are preparing for an exhibition this coming November and these are some of his models for it:
You can see a green “Stellated Curved Tetrahedron”, a grey variation of the same model (with cones instead of pyramids), a blue “Champagne Flute”, a dark brown J. Moseley’s “Bud”, a white “Triangular Twisted Prism”, a beige “Conical Rings”, and a light brown “Eccentricity”. Last three are my own creations, but as since they are so simple, I think that someone must have already folded something similar before me.
Some beautiful stuff here. I am particularly taken with the gray variation. I immediately folded a couple of these — the model appears to substitute small circles for the hexagons in the Stellated Curved Tetrahedron — and the results are delightful. And I think the two halves fit together better, too.
Marc’s representational work is not too shabby, either. His CPs and diagrams are very readable and I plan on studying them for pointers. And, we note with no small degree of satisfaction, Marc releases his work under a CC Attribution Noncommercial Share-Alike license. Yes, open origami. Big thumbs up, Marc.
Of course, I would expect no less from Catalonia, the home of the anarcho-syndicalism I admired so much in my college days. This was before I grew old and cynical — humans are not worthy of anarchy, I know that now. But with mental work and spiritual discipline, we will still be able to share origami. This much, I hope for.
Here we are, in the heart of Gotham, and it’s wicked noisy. But everyone we know is here, sharing techniques, models and not a few jokes.
These instructions aren’t very good, but you’re welcome to try them. I’m teaching this at the Convention tomorrow.
