Entries for February 2007
Susan Orlean has been AWOL from the pages of the New Yorker for some time now, but she’s back this week with a piece on origami and Robert Lang, former physicist and an acknowledged master of the craft.
He would have liked to have folded insects, but, in those years, bugs, as well as crustaceans, were still an origami impossibility. This was because no one had yet solved the problem of how to fold paper into figures with fat bodies and skinny appendages, so that most origami figures, even television characters and heads of state, still had the same basic shape as the paper cranes of nineteenth-century Japan. Then a few people around the globe had the idea that paper folding, besides being a pleasant diversion, might also have properties that could be analyzed and codified. Some started to study paper folding mathematically; others, including Lang, began devising mathematical tools to help with designing, all of which enabled the development of increasingly complex folding techniques. In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything — medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA — that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way.
Lang’s creations are truly astounding, almost to the point of being magical, because the comparison of the finished product to a flat, uncut sheet of paper is so dissonant. Here are two views of one of Lang’s signature “bugs”, a 7” silverfish he folded in 2004. The folding pattern is followed by the completed product:
In 1987, Lang folded a 15” long cuckoo clock out of a single sheet of paper. The clock, which “made Lang a sensation in the origami world”, took him three months to design and six hours to fold. These days, he uses a computer program he wrote called TreeMaker to design his creations and a laser cutter borrowed from Squid Labs to gently score the paper for quicker & easier folding.
Squid Labs is responsible for a site called Instructables, which allows people to share step-by-step instructions for how to do just about anything, from broiled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to origami. Lang doesn’t seem to have any instructions for his designs up on Instructables, but he shares the site’s open source and collaborative spirit…crease patterns for many of his most complex creations are available on his site and TreeMaker and ReferenceFinder are free to download (with the source code released under the GPL).
(Speaking of Instructables, here’s an easy way to get started with origami. Just grab that stack of Post-It Notes sitting on your desk (the square ones, not the letterbox ones), peel the top one off, and follow these simple instructions to make a little box out of it. It’ll take you 5 minutes…here’s mine that I did this morning.)
For more on Robert Lang and origami, check out his web site (don’t miss the foldable space telescope he’s helping to build at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), an audio recording of Lang’s presentation from O’Reilly Media Open Source Conference 2005, an audio interview on The Connection, an interview with Cabinet magazine in 2005, and a more technical article by Lang on the mathematics and geometry of origami.
(As an aside, Lang’s physics background and current vocation reminded me of Richard Feynman and his interest in flexagons, which are basically geometric origami shapes that can flexed into different shapes. A colleague of Feynman’s invented the flexagon, which led to the formation of the Princeton Flexagon Committee, of which Feynman was a founding member.)
This is puzzling: former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson wrote a terrific, blistering, spot-on rant about how bad the technology coverage of Gizmodo (and by association, many of the other gadget sites) is and how stupid their readers are for lapping it up…and they printed the whole thing on their web site. “And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket.”
Forget all the other Line Rider videos you’ve seen previously. They all suck in comparison to the mastery of this one. Beautiful. (thx, this is narnia)
Cool Missile Command-like Flash game, but with some physics and gravity.
Interview with Stephen Frears about his film, The Queen. “Do you think, then, that some of the power of the monarchy derives from its privacy and secrecy, and that as it modernizes — as the people are demanding that it do — it will actually lose some of that power?”
Tyler Cowen:
Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.
Sometimes that fish on your plate isn’t what you ordered. “The alleged grouper at 17 of 24 area restaurants sampled by the investigators was actually another, less desirable species, according to a DNA analysis conducted for the state attorney general’s office and released earlier this month. Asian catfish. Emperor. Painted sweetlips. And twice, types of fish that could not be identified.”
Right now, “Unknown Precipitation” is falling from the sky in NYC:
They must have some idea what this stuff is. Maple syrup? Soylent green? Pepsi Cola?
Update: Alright, this calls for some intrepid investigative reporting. I just stuck my hand out the window of my apartment and can tell you that the mystery liquid is not hydrochloric acid. I repeat, not hydrochloric acid…I still have the full use of my hand.
Update: Feeling emboldened that my hand didn’t melt off, I stuck it out the window again and let some of this unknown liquid pool in my palm. The liquid is clear and flavorless, which rules out whiskey, transmission fluid, honey, and pig’s blood. It’s too soon to tell for sure, but I’m guessing the precipitation is some form of water.
Truehoop, a basketball blog that’s one of the best out there on any topic, has been purchased by ESPN. Congrats, Henry.
Steven Johnson has written up some thoughts on the Nintendo Wii. His fifth point is especially interesting and I can’t help quoting almost the entire thing:
Wii Sports trades the onscreen complexity of goals and objectives and puzzles for the physical, haptic complexity of bodily movement. Since the days of Pong, games have been simplifying the intricacies of movement into unified codes of button pressing and joystick manipulation. What strikes you immediately playing Wii Sports — and particularly Tennis — is this feeling of fluidity, the feeling that subtle, organic shifts in your body’s motion will lead to different results onscreen. My wife has a crosscourt slam she hits at the net that for the life of me I haven’t been able to figure out; I have a topspin return of soft serves that I’ve half-perfected that’s unhittable. We both got to those techniques through our own athletic experimentation with various gestures, and I’m not sure I could even fully explain what I’m doing with my killer topspin shot. In a traditional game, I’d know exactly what I was doing: hitting the B button, say, while holding down the right trigger. Instead, my expertise with the shot has evolved through the physical trial-and-error of swinging the controller, experimenting with different gestures and timings. And that’s ultimately what’s so amazing about the device. Games for years have borrowed the structures and rules — as well as the imagery — of athletic competition, but the Wii adds something genuinely new to the mix, something we’d ignored so long we stopped noticing that it was missing: athleticism itself.
He’s not exactly right — for example, drifting in Mario Kart is difficult to do until you develop a “touch” for it and is not easy to explain to others — but the Wii does take it to a new level.
“A six-year Greek study found that those who took a 30-minute siesta at least three times a week had a 37% lower risk of heart-related death.” Among working men, the risk was reduced by 64%. Naps all around!
Anthony Bourdain critiques Food Network and some its stars on Michael Ruhlman’s blog. “SANDRA LEE: Pure evil. This frightening Hell Spawn of Kathie Lee and Betty Crocker seems on a mission to kill her fans, one meal at a time. She Must Be Stopped. Her death-dealing can-opening ways will cut a swath of destruction through the world if not contained. I would likely be arrested if I suggested on television that any children watching should promptly go to a wooded area with a gun and harm themselves.” Blogging may well be Bourdain’s natural medium…it suits his vitriolic style.
“Love bombing is the deliberate show of affection or friendship by an individual or a group of people toward another individual. Critics have asserted that this action may be motivated in part by the desire to recruit or otherwise influence.”
One of my favorite actresses is Cate Blanchett, but I don’t know much about her. A profile of Blanchett from last week’s New Yorker (not online) filled in the blanks nicely:
What Blanchett hides from her directors and her audience she also hides from herself. “I do like to preserve the mystique of the thing, for myself as much as anyone else,” she has said. Over the years, she has repeatedly dodged autobiographical questions by claiming, “I’ve sort of forgotten my childhood.” These ellipses in conversation help Blanchett to trick herself out of self-consciousness. “I’m not interested in the character I am in myself,” she told James Lipton on the television series “Inside the Actors Studio.” “Any connection I have to my characters will be subliminal and subconscious.”
Her approach to acting sounds similar to the idea of relaxed concentration in sports, like the practicing of free throw shooting until you can do it automatically without having to focus on shooting and can instead just focus on being focused while shooting. The author of Blanchett’s profile, John Lahr, wrote a piece on stage fright for the magazine a few months ago that deals with the same theme. British actor and comedian Stephen Fry describes how he seized up after reading a review of a performance in the Financial Times:
The impact of the review was, Fry says, “phenomenal.” He describes the sense of acute self-consciousness and loss of confidence that followed as “stage dread,” a sort of “paradigm shift.” He says, “It’s not ‘Look at me - I’m flying.’ It’s ‘Look at me - I might fall.’ It would be like playing a game of chess where you’re constantly regretting the moves you’ve already played rather than looking at the ones you’re going to play.” Fry could not mobilize his defenses; unable to shore himself up, he took himself away.
To me, the battle with the self is one of the most interesting aspects of watching performance, whether it’s sports, ballet, live music, movies, or someone giving a talk at a conference.
Reagrding the 70-hour unabridged War and Peace audiobook I posted about back in December, the Washington Post has a short profile of the audiobook’s reader, Neville Jason. “But if the world has ever been ready for nearly three straight days of recorded Tolstoy it’s ready now. A few years ago, publishers had to beg retailers to stock audiobooks longer than three CDs. Now, that’s considered an ear snack. Unabridged is king. And abridged isn’t just on the wane. It’s basically stigmatized.” (thx, mr. d)
Regarding last week’s post about LED lightbulbs, Matt Haughey bought a variety pack of LED bulbs, tried them out, and says “save your money”. “The color is definitely blue and the light is dim. There’s no way on earth these bulbs are worth running out and spending $30+ per bulb on.”
Count me among those that scoffed when I heard a movie was being made of the Miami Vice TV series. The lesson: don’t doubt Michael Mann. Not to mention Vice’s director of photography, Dion Beebe. The movie was gorgeous and had the most distinct and tight sense of style I’ve seen in quite some time. Wish I’d seen it on the big screen.
Denis Darzacq’s photos of dancers, caught in mid-flight. (thx, david)
Nina Berman won a prize in the 2007 World Press Photo contest for this heartbreaking photo of a badly wounded Iraqi war veteran and his childhood sweetheart on their wedding day. Their story is here. “One arm was a stump and his remaining hand had only two fingers. Later, his big toe was grafted on in place of a thumb. One eye was blind and milky, as if melted, and his ears had been burnt away. The top of his skull had been removed and inserted by doctors into the fatty tissue inside his torso to keep it viable and moist for future use.” (thx, ayush)
Update: Here are some more of the couple’s wedding photos and more photos of Iraqi vets from Berman here and here.
Tax tips for graphic designers and visual artists. “If seeing the visual art of others is vital to your own creativity, keeps you abreast of current design trends, or clues you in to the latest fashion, then consider the costs [of going to the movies or renting DVDs] a tax deduction.” (thx, shane)
Complaints choirs…that is, groups of people who sing their dissatisfaction in front of live audiences. “In Helsinki the most favourite topics were ring tones of mobile phones, people who smell in public transport and the fact that Finland always looses to Sweden in competitions: in Icehockey and in Eurovision.” (thx, nancy)
Is California going to split from the United States? CA governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently stated: “We have the economic strength, we have the population and the technological force of a nation-state.” Juan Enriquez extensively covers the potential fracture of the US in his book, The Untied States of America (@ Amazon).
Steve Jobs’ thoughts on music and DRM. Sounds like he’d rather that music sold via the iTMS didn’t have DRM built in.
Word is that Firefox 3 will support offline web apps. The WebOS comes a bit closer to reality.
Finalists for the 2007 version of the annual competition held by Design Within Reach to design the best chair out of a champagne cork. Check out the finalists from 2004 and the winner from 2006. (DWR’s site has a bit of a permalink problem, so I can’t find contest results from previous years.)
The NY Times covers Mad River Glen, a quirky ski area in Vermont that has the only operating single-seat chair lift in the country, doesn’t allow snowboarders, and doesn’t groom (that often) or make (that much) snow. “Occasionally, snowboarders will hike to the top from a nearby road and ride down. If they tackle the tough terrain with crisp, accomplished turns, the Mad River Glen regulars will loudly applaud at the bottom. If the boarders aren’t very good, the abuse is just as loud. People will come out hooting and hollering from the lodge.” I’ve skiied there a few times; here’s some photos of the mountain and some videos I took. (thx, tien)
Teaser trailer for Oceans 13. Looks like #13 is Andy Garcia.
Ah, an oldie but a goodie: Mullets Galore. They decode the confusing world of hockey hair and break it down into 99 helpful classifications like “cameromullet” and “Loch Ness mullet”.
I came across this striking photo by Margaret Bourke-White the other day:
It’s a photo of a bread line during the Louisville Flood in 1937. The 1937 flood was one of the worst floods ever to occur in the Ohio River Valley:
In January of 1937, rains began to fall throughout the Ohio River Valley, eventually triggering what is known today as the “Great Flood of 1937”. Overall, total precipitation for January was four times its normal amount in the areas surrounding the river. […] The Weather Bureau reported that total flood damage for the entire state of Kentucky was 250 million dollars, which was an incredible sum in 1937. Another flood of this magnitude would not be seen in the Ohio River Valley until 60 years later.
A diary from Mama Bondurant provides a glimpse into what the flood was like:
January 22—-This is another terrible day. The water is still rising and we hear distress cries everywhere. I have tired all day to get West Point, but it is still under water. Jim came home for a little while but went back to Camp Knox to assist in placing flood sufferers from West Point. It is so bad outside. Rain has turned to sleet. Electricity is gone. No lights or radio.
Working as a photographer for Life magazine, Bourke-White also took this iconic photo of Gandhi and his spinning wheel.
Authors who write naked. Literally naked, not literature that could be described as naked.
Manhattan, the greenest of cities? Not so fast says Tyler Cowen: “Praising Manhattan is a bit like looking only at the roof of a car and concluding it doesn’t burn much gas. […] Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable.”
Philippe Chancel’s photos of North Korea. “No country, no regime, past or present, has ever conceived such an environment of ubiquitous propaganda, not even those who instigated or experienced the marxist-leninists revolutions of the last century. Not even Nazi Germany.” (via conscientious)
Rebecca Mead’s new book on the state of weddings in America is available for preorder on Amazon. Mead writes for the New Yorker; the book is out in May. “Mead takes us into a world populated by Bridezillas, ministers-for-hire, videographers, and heirloom manufacturers, exposing the forces behind the consumerist mindset of the American bride and the entrepreneurial zeal of the wedding industry that both serves and exploits her. “
Some information on Errol Morris’ newest project, a film about Abu Ghraib:
Morris introduced us to his latest project about the Abu Ghraib, and the iconic images created from the prisoner torture. It’s his hypothesis that it’s a handful of those photos from that we’ll remember a hundred years from now about the Iraq War. He explained that this project began with the mystery of two photos by Roger Fenton described by Susan Sontag in her book, Regarding the Pain of Others. During the Crimean War, Fenton took photos of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Two are of the same road, one with cannonballs littering the road, one with the cannonballs in the ravine. The Mystery being which photo was taken first, which was staged?
This is an interesting topic for Morris considering he pioneered the use of “expressionistic reenactments” in documentary filmmaking with The Thin Blue Line.
Update: The film is called “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure”.
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