Author: Zingblog 2

X-C

Winter continues. After several heavy snowfalls it’s been calm the last couple weeks, but still mainly bitter cold. Even now huge snowpiles linger on. Last weekend we actually had a couple days above freezing and I spent a good chunk of time outside breaking up ice to reclaim the parking spot on the street in front of our house. The parking lot at my train station is down a good dozen spots or more, between poor snow removal and people parking all over the place in response. After two or three days of parking in very sketchy spots a couple weeks back I’ve taken into going into the office earlier until spring.

Last year I didn’t go skiing at all, and this year when the conditions were best I was too busy dealing with shoveling out even think about it. When I did think about it, I was thinking I’d be lucky to get in one day before the end of the season. It’s gotten to the point where downhilling is a lot of overhead. You have to get up way too early and drive 2+ hours to get good snow, and when you’re there you spend a lot of time riding the lifts and waiting in line, just for a few runs. Although I must say a really good run can make the whole thing worth it. Still, it feels like the last few times went it was bitter cold and/or icy and not so enjoyable. With the kids in tow the cost adds up fast and they’ve grown kinda meh about it.

So this year I thought I’d get back to cross-country. I used to do x-c before I started downhilling, and over the years had some great x-c ski trips in the Adirondacks and in Yosemite. It’s much cheaper than downhill and a more relaxing vibe. I found a place called Fahnestock Winter Park. It’s not too far away, about 45 minutes up the Taconic, just a bit past Seth. By time I got a plan together Jeannie and the kids were all busy with other stuff. So I went by myself. It was just the thing I needed, a nice peaceful day in the woods. Only thing is that the conditions were icy. But now that we know it’s there we can cruise up next year any time we there’s fresh snow.

Expanded Penrose Tessellations with Robots

Believe it or not we had two more snow days this week! On Thursday I broke my snowblower clearing out 15” or wet, heavy stuff. Thursday night was had more snow and Friday it turned to rain, and then more snow for a slushy and mess. Oy! Well the weekend came and some sunshine, and a chance to get caught up on my rest. And the Olympics are on. I never really get into the summer games very much, but I do enjoy the winter games. In any event, I’m sure everyone is looking forward to spring.

My origami friends Brian and Beth are going to be getting together at a maker event next week, where they will have access to a large cutting machine. Brian asked me if I could provide a cutter-ready file of the crease pattern for one of my Penrose tessellations. When I worked on this before, folding by hand, I did the first three expansions, creation patterns with 10, 35 and 70 cells. With the prospect of the machine doing the scoring, larger tessellations become feasible. I created CP’s for the next two expansions, which come out to 105 and 175 tiles. These numbers are really interesting, because they are all multiples of 5 and 7. 2 x 5 =10, 5 x 7 =35, 2 x 5 x 7 =70, 3 x 5 x 7 =105, and 5 x 5 x 7 =175. You’d expect five, but it’s very strange how seven figures prominently as well.

As for the CPs, I was able to dispense with all the landmarks and only include creases that appear in the final model. This ought to make the folding go much faster as well as providing a cleaner appearance. In addition, I shortened all the line segments so that the intersections don’t get scored, to avoid weakening the paper. Lastly, I color coded the creases so that the facets are blue, the ridges between the are red, and the creases for collapsing the intersections are grey. This was fairly time consuming, an unexpected but fun little project. Good for waiting for the snow to melt and watching the Olympics. Having worked the CP out to 175 I think I’m done with this for a while. If you’re an origami person with access to a cutting machine and are interested in trying one of the patterns, please feel free to contact me. Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to seeing how Brian and Beth’s experiment comes out.

Cover Up

Great news! my book, Origami Animal Sculptures has gone to print. Last week was a flurry of even-more-minor corrections and finally approvals. The publisher sent my comps of the final cover including the back and the return flaps for the dust jackets. I finally got to read the endorsement blurbs from fellow origami artists John Montroll and Marc Kirschenbaum. I sent out the requests months ago. Thanks very much for your kind words, John and Marc. Also the back cover looks really great with thumbnails of the models taken from Bob’s photos.

Music Site Update: Elixr

Back from xmas break. Had a brief trip upstate to visit family and friends. Heavy weather driving both ways. Great to see everyone and glad the everyone is doing well. My dad got eye surgery and for the first time in my life doesn’t need to wear glasses anymore. Discovered the Hamburg Brew Pub.

The new year is off to a cold and snowy start. Last night we had a foot of snow, canceling my band practice. Both the kids had no school today, extending our xmas break. Took a good hour and change to shovel out, even with Lizzy’s help. Luckily the snowblower started right up after not being used for almost a year.

I’ve been updating the music section of my web site at zingman.com/music. I’ve added a link for The Relix, and added links to the new tracks on the Buzzy Third page, Is It Safe to Go Outside? and Black Swan, which prettty much bring me up to an album side. I changed the working title of the third Buzzy Tonic record to Elixr. It’s an anagram of Relix and also a play on the whole Buzzy Tonic theme.

I also came up with a logo, which makes a much better place holder for the eventual album cover than what I had before. This particular task has been on my todo list for a whole year; indeed made a sketch last xmas vacation. Constructing something like this in the computer is extremely tedious for me, so instead I drew it by hand and traced over in sharpie to get the right combination of precision and looseness. This is a technique I used a lot in college when I was studying design and architecture. Then I scanned it and played around with filters in photoshop until I caem up with something I liked. It’s been a long time since I used photoshop this way. I was able to achieve a rich look buy building up lots of layers of effects with varying transparency, a lot you’d build up layers using paint.

Even though I like how it turned out the colors don’t particularly match what I had going on the BZ3 page. Like I said it’s a placeholder for the eventual album cover, so I’ll continue to play with it. Meanwhile enjoy!

Stumped

Well it finally happened. The electric company came and cut down our sick elm tree the week before Xmas. First time they came around the left the main trunk standing with the major limbs. Next time they came they cut all that down but left a ten-foot high stump and a huge jumble of logs all over the front yard. Apparently the trunk is so massive they need a special machine – basically a combi crane and saw – to hold it while they cut it down. Supposedly they’re coming back this week to finish the job and haul away the wood. Meanwhile our yard is a mess, but in an interesting way. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone. If anyone wants some wood for free, come and get it.

Relix Rewind

Rewinding a bit, The Relix played two shows the week before Thanksgiving. Both went well and some great moments, but revealed some things we need to work on. For the first show, we had some feedback issues with Lee’s hollowbody and pedalboard interacting with the PA, and some issues with the vocals not being loud enough. Lee’s gonna start bringing his rig to rehearsal rather than use the house setup until he has some better control of his sound. Also we’re gonna do a vocal-only practice soon and set up our PA and see if we can make sound killer or if we should replace it with a newer board with better reverbs. The other issue is we need to figure out how to draw a bigger crowd. The Thanksgiving Eve show was kinda disappointing because we all knew it’s a good bar night, but the weather – freezing rain mixed with snow – kept people away. Still it was a good show on a musical level and a fun time.

Here’s a video montage of the show at Victor’s.

And here’s some pictures, mainly of gig at Seaside.

After Thanksgiving half the band was sick and one guy fell off a ladder putting up Christmas decorations. I’ve been fighting a cold and sore throat on and off. Not enough to knock me out but enough to make my singing kinda croaky. This week we finally got together for a rehearsal. We spent about half the session tightening up endings and transitions, and the rest of the time on new material. We ran down six songs, all of which feel like keepers: Domino by Van Morrison and Touch Me by the Doors were both suggestions of mine. Domino is just a great feelgood song and gives us another horn-oriented 60’s tune while getting away from the Motown thing. Touch Me has some really weird changes when you try to work ‘em out, and one of the all-time classic sax solos. The others were Are You Gonna Be My Girl by Jet, a bit of change of direction for us, and Runaround by Blues Traveler, which has a great harp part for Paul, and Devil With the Blue Dress/Good Golly Miss Molly, which is right in our core zone.

Pickin’ and a-Grinnin’

After the last gig, the focus of the band is on learning more tunes and booking more gigs. On the learning more tunes front, we’ve been tossing around lots of ideas, and it’s been fun. Everyone has songs and bands they love, and songs and groups they hate, or at least don’t want to play for one reason or another. And then there’s the question of what makes a great song vs. what’s a good song to do in a bar vs. what’s a good fit for us. Last practice we learned Long Train Running and China Grove by the Doobie Brothers. These were both suggestions from Mike our bass player. Everyone dug these songs and they came together fast, and we pretty much nailed it. Also looked at I Can’t Help Myself and Devil with the Blue Dress. I got a couple songs on the slate, including Touch Me by The Doors, which I picked party for the sax and drum thing at the end, and Domino by Van Morrison (who it turns out is some kind of distant cousin of Jim Morrison). But I didn’t get any support for any Steely and the Dans, so I’m gonna have to keep campaigning on that front.

Meanwhile, I put together an edit of highlights from our list show to try and help us get more gigs. Enjoy!

Third Annual OrigaMIT Convention

This weekend I attended the 3rd annual OrigaMIT convention at the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had such a good time last year that this year Jeannie decided to come up with me. It was a great hang. I exhibited some models, taught two classes, and hung out with a lot of origami friends including Jason, Brian, Erik Gherde, Sipo, Ben, Mark, Anne, and others. My exhibit this year was smaller, with mostly new stuff: my Stellated Dodecahedron, Great Dodecahedron, and Penfractal Dodecahedron, my Penrose Tiles I-III, my Dog Timber and Cat Sophie, and to round things out my Moose, Armidillo and Cuttlefish from the book.

In the morning my class was Timber and Sophie. I was pretty impressed with the level of folders. They got thru both models in an hour. At OUSA in June they took an hour for each model. I guess maybe teaching it the second time I’m getting better at communicating the nuances effectively.

At lunchtime Jeannie and took a walk along the Charles river. There was a big rowing race going on, which was pretty cool, and towards the end a whole flurry of sailboats got out on the water.

After lunch I attended a lecture by Erik Demaine on the work of David Huffman. Huffman is more widely known for his work in computer science, having invented the encoding algorithm that’s at the heart of modern media codecs like jpg and mp3. But he was a pioneering origami guy as well, particularly with curved folding and tessellations. Erik is in the process of putting together a book about Huffman and his origami, and had slides of a lot of cool works I’d never seen before.

My second class was my Penrose Tessellations. I was expecting only a few people since the model is pretty advanced and rather esoteric, but the class was full and included a good handful of kids. Good thing I brought extra CP’s and paper. Kathy Stevick donated some pre-cut pentagon paper, which was a big time saver. Even so, teaching this class was harder than I expected. Most people aren’t used to folding in pentagonal geometry, so I had explain everything in more detail. Plus there was a lot of precreasing. The class was in fact for a system for folding tessellations of any number of cells. I had them start out making a 10-cell model out of small paper, and then start in on the 30-cell out of large paper. I figured the 10-cell would take about half the class, but it took more like 90 minutes. Still everyone hung in there and most folded a successful model. Those who were interested got enough to get going on the 30-cell one.

That evening there was a giant folding competition in the main room, and Jason asked me to participate, and Jeannie was my partner. We folded a giant version of Timber out a five- or six-foot square of white paper. I was concerned it might not stand up cuz the giant paper tends to be floppy, but somehow it worked. When it was done I called it a Dire Wolf. It was the crowd favorite, and Jeannie and I won first place. I got a copy of the proceedings of 5OSME and Jeannie got an OrigaMIT shirt.

Later that night Ben demoed his KNK Zing cutter. It’s basically the same thing a craft robo, but apparently better, cuz it can take wider stock and it has better software. It was pretty cool seeing one in action, and see how scoring the paper can save a lot of time and help with the folding. I’ve been thinking of getting one, although I delayed the purchase in favor of amps on other music gear. If I do, it’s good to know this is a good piece of gear.

As we left MIT we saw the lights of Fenway Park across the Charles. It was the last game of the pennant race. We got back to our hotel room just in time to catch the replay of a grand slam that turned the tide of the game in Boston’s favor and led the Red Sox to victory. On the drive home Sunday morning it was a perfect fall day for watching the foliage change color. The leaves were peaking red, yellow, crimson and orange. It seems like every few miles we’d round a curve and the view was just breathtaking.