The Fitful Flog

“Oh, bright chimerical!” So began a very bad piece of verse, back when we wrote such things. Thankfully, the haze of age has obscured the rest of it. We imagine it was about some young lady or Anarchy or Idleness. It’s easier to believe passionately in such abstractions when one is young.

Nowadays, we trade the warmth of youthful passion for the colder, subtler pleasures of offhanded obsession.

This is a simple-looking box with nice lines. Holds together well. But it’s a chimera. In its ideal proportion, it supposes a grid that is based on a polygon inscribed inside the circle. That shouldn’t present a difficulty, but it does. Everything else I do has polygons outside the circle. The answer is like Poe’s Purloined Letter — it’s in plain sight, but I can’t see it.

This would make an excellent point-of-sale container. Coffee beans, loose tea, Chinese take-out, whatever. Pressed out of paperboard, oh yeah.

I ain’t letting no grid make a monkey out of me.

Curved Tetra Box Crease Pattern

Rex by origami joel

That is, “An honest heart is a kingdom in itself.” Seneca — who used to walk around, saying stuff like that at random.

Hey, mask fans — Joel Cooper has blogged about your last chance (conceivably) to score an original Cooper of your own. Going once, twice…

Stellated Curved Tetrahedron Colored Crease Pattern

Some people there may be who haven’t folded this yet and still want to. The clues we left were not the easiest to follow.

Here is a colored crease pattern: black for mountain, magenta for valley, gray ghost lines for folds that were there, but don’t figure into the finished model.

There’s a photo set on Flickr to help you along. This isn’t step-by-step, mind you. These are just some hints on the hard parts, like how to get the pyramid in the vesica piscis and how to get the top half to wrap around the bottom.

Peppermint Drop Bowl Crease Pattern

Just because the crease pattern reminds me of a peppermint drop — you know, the kind with the red-and-white spiral?

It is, of course, a Sam Taeguk dish with six lobes.

Gothic Surface No. 9 Crease Pattern

When I was a tech support geek, the kid who sat next to me used to wear a t-shirt that said, “I’m So Gothic I Don’t Have a Shadow.” Which was pretty close to true. He was a skinny little guy and he liked to sit under his desk. Sometimes, I’d turn around to ask a question and all I’d see was the headphone cord crossing the desk. Meanwhile, I’d hear his voice, going on and on about pulling DUN and rebooting and other dreary things.

Me, I always found the adoption of the term, “Gothic,” by the young, pasty and disaffected slightly risible. (It is to riz.) To my mind, the rise of the Gothic style punched great big holes in those heavy church walls and covered them with vast, intricate windows. The amount of light in a Gothic cathedral is not to be compared to that in a Romanesque cathedral. Certainly, it would be no hangout for these charming little vampires.

You know who invented Gothic architecture? No, no one really does. There are some names here and there, but it was a delightfully ad hoc kind of process. One can imagine Mickey Rooney in a cowl, brightly exclaiming, “C’mon, gang — let’s put up a cathedral! My dad has a stone and Polly’s dad has a nice chisel we could use.” And it kind of went from there. I’ve been reading The Engineering of Medieval Cathedrals, put together by Lynn T. Courtenay, and parts of it read that way. The methods they developed make the Renaissance look like an afterthought. I particularly admire what they did with circle arcs. They weren’t using origami methods, but they could have.

The above photo is a shout-out to Jakob Steiner and his Roman surface. When I make it, it comes out with nice pointy bits which resonate well with the Low Gothic sensibilities I grew up with.

The origami parts:

• It involves dividing the circle into ninths, pie-wise. There’s no elegant way to do that (yet), so I divide by three and then do an overlap thing to get ninths.
• The photo is a mock-up. The crease pattern is from a different approach, one where the corner is in the middle.
• It looks like three circle arcs — it’s actually six.
• Four circles should yield a Gothic surface.

Wow! I’m sure this will be mentioned everywhere today, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t jump in early: the amazing Joel Cooper is putting up a couple of his masks on eBay. The above is the Green Man — sort of makes you want to run riot through the woods, singing John Barleycorn Must Die with a bunch of whacky maenads. Maybe that’s just me.

No less impressive is the gentle humanity of the little glassine mask. I’d get over there and put in a bid before all those collectors discover it.

Yeah, there’s a contest over at Instructables.com and I’ve never been much for contests, but this one has a really cool prize — an SD card with Wi-Fi built in. Got to say, that caught my eye.

If you’ve already folded one of these, you could certainly give this a go-by. Nothing new here. Well, a few things. You can print out an A4 version now and the art work is all SVG, courtesy of David Bellott.

It’s an interesting interface for making tutorials. Don’t know if I’d want to use it all the time, but I like the ability to get the word out to people outside of the traditional origami community. (Some of who, I am convinced, check for precedence and provenance before folding their socks on laundry day.)

Here’s the tutorial. And the files for this are over here.

Update: Didn’t win the cool SD chip, but I did come in fourth and/or seventh, so they dashed me a branded t-shirt, which in America is right next door to glory. They’re okay. I foresee other forays into their squidy interface.

Not married to the name — if you have a better one, we’ll rename this.

Scalloped Bowl Crease Pattern.

That is to say, everyday goblet.

I would say chalice, but up north, across the border, the words for altar furniture are unmentionable to ears polite.

Quotidian Graal Crease Pattern

My wife says, Can you drink beer out of it?

I think a bit and say, Yes, it’s genus zero.

And she says, Genesee-O? That thing will hold Genesee?

(Genesee being a regional beer from upstate New York. Something you drink in College because it’s cheap. But goats — goats with jobs, that is — won’t drink Genesee.)

Update: Dividing the Circle into Fifths

So, like twenty-five years ago, I’m standing at a highway exit in Sacramento, middle of the night, trying really hard to hitch a ride to Berkeley, where I have a floor to crash on and nothing is happening, hour after hour. I still had residual shakes from a very bad ride over Mt. Shasta with an AWOL Marine, his 15-year-old paramour and a six-pack of Miller pounders. Fear, you dig — the Marine drank the beer. Plus, it’s getting cold.

And this guy picks me up — he’s going to SF. After three or four minutes, I notice he’s shaking rather worse than I am. He asks me to roll him a jay and I do. (In California at that time, this was not an unusual request and I smoked shag — Three Castles — back then, so I was not inexpert at it. Did I mention that I was wearing an onion on my belt?) He tokes a bit and seems more at ease. He’d been up five days, he says, big job. Snorted way too much speed.

Trucker? I ask.

No, he’s a pipefitter. Nuclear submarine. Big rush job.

Guess that’s why those sailors get hazard-pay, I say.

But he was already nodding out by this point and we had to stop for coffee. A lot of coffee.

This story, which will entirely defeat machine translation — sorry, guys — has nothing to do with this model.

Please note the little circles I put on the left side of the CP. It will show you where to put the edge of the circle to make the nice curve fold. Intersections on a hex grid. Like sands through an hourglass, so are the days of our lives….

Half-Egg Crease Pattern