oschene's cloud - the cloud is just other people's computers

Engineers found that the hinge that keeps a ketchup cap open also explains how curved, folded shells can hold multiple stable shapes, a discovery that led them to build a robot that shifts shape and motion using magnets alone, no motors required.

Science for All

These are photos of the four wordboards Ruth Sienkiewicz-Mercer (1950-1998) used to communicate with her family, friends, staff and the general public. A...

Infinity v01n04 (1956 08)

This is a model from a square, created by Shuzo Fujimoto or Kazuo Haga, Maybe. I like it very much. The provenance is pretty interesting. Jane Rosemarin wrote about it here and here. I followed the link in Jane's article to the diagrams in the Chinese translation of Haga's book, but I was taken aback by the offsetting of the landmark by 2mm. This is not a distance an American can know natively. I can do the math in my head (American children used to spend an inordinate amount of time learning such conversions), but the answer doesn't mean much to me. Bunch of shapeless decimals. It's like the German music note, H. I know that's the equivalent of B♮, but B♭ sounds like this and B♮ sounds like that and German H makes no sound in my head at all. They say Beethoven couldn't even hear the ninth symphony. Anyway, to fold the model, I would have to approximate an approximation and I always wish to avoid such guessing when I can. So I adapted a compass and straight edge construction to a square and added about a dozen extra steps to get a folding sequence without approximations. Not that I recommend it. It makes a perfectly simple model needlessly complicated and the human eye cannot tell the difference between a model folded with this method and one folded with offset landmark. Tom Hull told me that even when you fold really carefully, you still get an error factor of about 2% and I believe him -- all origami is approximation. This is solely a method for the mind's eye. Diagrams.