The Fitful Flog

Not that anyone is still interested, but I was in a minor snit earlier this week because a gentleman from midtown Porlock suggested that I had not credited work properly. After all, I hadn’t even seen the model cited, let alone tried to duplicate it: my umber was quite burnt.

Eric, no doubt taking *cough* suppressants, discreetly pointed out that the model appeared over a year ago in a photo in an entry on a little known blog that I read faithfully. (I would point to the photo, but it’s on a host with an Observer Effect™ server and the act of looking at it will actually trigger the site to go down for days on end.) I have no clear memory of having seen the photo, but then, I have no clear memory of having traded arms for hostages, either. Yet, a few years ago, a friend at the UPI morgue sent me a photo of me, descending from a jet in Tehran, right behind Bud, carrying a chocolate cake shaped like a key. What was I thinking? Anyway, my point is, my credibility on having never seen the model is questionable.

Of course, I am properly chastened. That is to say, not at all. The models share a similar look and construction technique, but it’s like comparing a Bach fugue and a folksong: both may be excellent, but they are judged by different criteria. My model results from a relatively simple method involving circular arcs. I can’t say how the other model was made, but if I were to attempt to reverse-engineer it, this wouldn’t be the method I would use. Was I inspired by this other model? I can’t deny the possibility, but I rather doubt it. It’s important to credit other people’s work, but in this case, it’s not an issue.

The important thing is get the our methods out there, so that other folders can build upon them and so that we won’t be having the same silly discussions twenty years from now.

The Smart Waterbomb Sequenced Crease Pattern

People sometimes think that I’m hostile to Republicans because I don’t know any. While it is true that in Western Massachusetts, one may so guide one’s steps that they never cross a Republican’s track, I find that this makes it difficult to get to the bus stop on time. Indeed, I know many Republicans. Several of my best friends are of that tribe. I certainly wouldn’t let my sister marry one, but that doesn’t mean I’m not broad-minded, otherwise.

This is on my mind this morning because I recently had a phone call from Lead Foot Melvin, one of my old college buddies. A Republican. He calls every few years to see if I’m rich and famous yet — so far, the answer has been no. He thinks I should be and can not understand my dilatory approach towards this goal. He tells me of his McMansion™ in Silver Springs and his third wife’s plastic surgery and his son (by his second wife) who plays football for Fair Harvard. Yada yada.

And Lead Foot Melvin’ll ask me why I don’t get Evil. Of course, he doesn’t put it that way: I think the term he uses is smart, but it’s very plain from his inflection that he means Evil. It’s not as if he doesn’t know whereof. In spite of his youthful peccadilloes (the liberating of high-powered CO₂ lasers from the Physics lab springs to mind, as does the defrauding a US Army supply depot out of fifty pounds of liquid nitrous), Lead Foot Melvin works for Justice today and never seems to be the one who has to resign in disgrace. Not that he can tell me what he does at Justice. Very hush-hush.

So, while we’re on about Sonny Boy at Fair Harvard, lobbing slow spirals over mythical distances, Lead Foot Melvin mentions the crystal egg in Risky Business.

“Do you remember that crystal egg in that movie and the gangster guy chucked it and Tom Cruise was diving over the couch and all to catch it?”

Yeah, I remember. We saw it at the Palace.

“God, that was a beautiful spiral.”

It was, too. And in slow-mo. I always liked Jonathan Demme movies….

“So, why aren’t you making stuff like that, instead of those candy-ass paper flowers and shit? People love that stuff. Crystal eggs and that. You could make a million, easy.”

Well, sure, but I don’t know anything about glassmaking.

“What do you need to know? It’s all who you know, you know? C’mon, start acting smart^EVIL, already.”

I’ll think about it.

So, this is me getting smart^EVIL by pandering to your baser instincts. No matter how you came to origami in the end, you started as an eight-year-old with a great lust to waterbomb your friends and enemies back to the Stone Age. The waterbomb is an amazing model — teachers will sometimes refer to it as a balloon, so as not to put ideas in your impressionable head, but waterbomb is the older and truer name.

Trouble with it is, you get higher up than, say, three stories and wind and updraft will begin to hork your accuracy. And once surprise is gone, well, having the moral high ground doesn’t get you anywhere.

This model uses a water chamber with obtuse corners and rounded sides to keep the center of gravity from moving around and spiral vanes to induce a rapid spin in the waterbomb as it follows its ballistic arc. Oh, a thing of beauty — it’s an egg with a helicopter on top.

Method of Construction

We use a circle and inflex an octagon. Using the edge of the paper, fold in mountain curves from the vertices of the octagon to the center:

Then, inflex another octagon, offset from the first by 60°. Valley fold straight creases from one vertex to its opposite.

That’s it — collapse the creases and it ties itself up into a neat package, ready for loading and release onto the unsuspecting. Wetness from Above!

(Marcy, my wife, walks through and points out that the fact the I spend my off-time designing a better waterbomb is why I’m not rich and famous yet. Big deal. It’s better than being Missus Lead Foot Melvin the Fourth, I bet you.)

The Smart Waterbomb Crease Pattern (deprecated)

Update: The Smart Waterbomb Sequenced Crease Pattern

Not sure if hyperboloidal is the correct term, here. The sides of the vase are curved, but only north-south, not east-west. Sort of like a bunch of intersecting sidewise cylinders.

Hyperboloidal Hex Vase Crease Pattern

* * * * *

Update: A Slightly Different Version Crease Pattern

(This one has curves where the points are on the sides. More interesting visually, perhaps, and more resistant to crushing.)

Update: Three Intersecting Hyperbolic Cylinders

Not really. Maybe. Kinda sorta. I was reading this article in Science about quasi-crystals in medieval Iran and Turkey, kind of got me thinking. This is just the first thing that I folded after reading it.

It starts out with a pentagon in a circle. Remember that?

Quasi-Crystalline Tato SCP

Roman Soldier: Hey there, old timer, is this the way to Syracuse Sally’s?
Archimedes: You’re infringing on my intellectual property rights! Help, help! There’s a sinister Roman soldier infringing on my intellectual property rights!

Well, that’s not going to end well.

Clematis Box II

This one is somewhat simpler in form, but doesn’t hold together as well. I still like it.

Still, with the Easter Egg? On Valentine’s Day? I was always a little out of time. More than a little.

Yet, this day week is Ash Wednesday and learning this model will make for an excellent Lenten exercise. When you’re intent on curve folding, it is very difficult to contemplate new sins and manifold wickedness. Like invading a third foreign country to distract people from looking at why you invaded the second or noticing how poorly things are going in the first. That sort of thing.

I’m working out the bugs on this MVF diagram schema. Also stands for Mountain, Valley, Flat. And here, in this new sequenced crease pattern, we’re trying it out. This isn’t what it’s intended for, but what of that? Here, the Mountain folds are heavy black lines. The Valley folds are heavy magenta lines. The Flat lines, folds we made earlier but aren’t using right now, are hairline black. One crease leads to the next. It’s just like sudoku.

I don’t know if this makes things clearer, but it does make them prettier.

My inability to draw with depth means that once again, I add photo montages to cover the difficult bits. Conceptually, this is not a difficult fold — it’s the curved surface circle equivalent of a waterbomb. You can memorize the folding sequence pretty quickly. It’s the pons asinorum of learning the curved fold that will slow you down. Persevere. You’ll get it.

Beats the hell out of going to Babylon by bus.

Easter Egg Sequenced Crease Pattern

Eric is trying to convert me to something called the MVF diagram schema. I’ve got no clue what he’s talking about. That’s not unusual. So I googled it and discovered that it’s a top secret DoD research project — stands for Manganese Velveeta Forcefield, a conceptual weapon, something to immobilize the Haters of Freedom® with a bland, silvery fondue. Could work. One wonders how secret they wanted this to be, when the design specs are posted on Douglas Feith’s myspace page. (I am quite creeped out, I may add, to find that such an ardent neocon should be that into boy bands. Yucko.)

On the other hand, Eric may have simply wanted me to make my drawings look more like Robert Lang’s.

I’m sure I’ll convert eventually.

Frangipani Box 2 Crease Pattern

Oh yes — this version uses circle arcs instead of hyperbole. Easier to fold and makes the model sturdier.

This is just to apologize for making you ask yourself unpleasant questions.

The site was being haunted by a most unpleasant spambot. Dybbuk is the term that leaps to mind — a brainless, leechy kind of dead thing. Kept sending requests every few seconds to the comments script.The flakiness of the database was like pie crust made with real lard on a cold winter’s day. After the standard methods of laying the ghost had failed, there was nothing for it but sacrificing a chicken or installing a challenge system. And I had had chicken for lunch.

The challenge system makes you prove that you’re not a spambot before it lets you submit a comment. I hate that. Not because I have any sympathy with the nasty scripts that cruise this information boreen, but because I have so constantly to prove that I’m a human to non-humans. It’s more than a little degrading, isn’t it?

And then, it might make you wonder, am I a spambot? Many people at work think I may be, as I’m constantly bombarding them with cryptic mailings in a harsh jargonese. Dusty Scott Key, (the lesser known grandson of American poet, Francis Scott Key), wrote a short novel called, Notes from the Underground, where he ponders the issues of determinism and freedom and eventually decides that he is only free when he acts against his own self-interest. One can feel for the Underground Man. No spambot, he. Little prolix, though.

One can imagine a machine that can fold paper. One can not imagine a machine that would enjoy creating a new fold. Go ahead, try. Let us all then be mysterians, together.

Clematis Box Crease Pattern

Since our friend and resident Andy Hardy, Eric, is on some hiatal thingummy, it is incumbent on us, your humble, yet fitful narrator to take official note that origamijoel is doing something cool.

Well, he’s doing a couple cool things this year, but the one I’m referring to is his new blog and the nice tutorial he has prepared on the proper method of making a flagstone tessellation.

I’m sure I don’t need to mention how the ethic of sharing the wealth of his knowledge suffuses the piece. But I will.

There was some talk on the O-list about the puzzle purse – a very old fold, indeed. And being the wild-eyed contrarian that I am, I set about trying to make a curved surface version. I had some spectacular failures.

Then, I thought about this model and thought, “Hmm, this is more than a little similar to the puzzle purse.” Set about to diagram it and that’s a bit of a trip. But the first step is done.

It’s called Melon Rind Box because it reminds me of when I used to wash dishes in The Restaurant when I was a lad. The waitresses would stack the cantaloupe rinds on the plates, crosswise, when busing their tables.

Melon Rind Box Crease Pattern