Daily Archives: 1/19/2007

Mostly on Stuff Related to Origami and Papercraft…

I’ve mentioned it before: when you are interested in as many strange things as I am, web surfing can be dangerous to your time. Lately I’ve been going through my blogroll with two purposes in mind:

  • Delete the stuff that I don’t read anymore, or consider boring.
  • Tag the remaining links with slightly more meaningful tags in Google Reader.
  • Lastly, find more cool stuff by mining the links of blogs I already have.

Courtesy of one of the mathematics blogs (I can’t remember which one), I located The Fitful Flog, a fascinating blog which had many interesting bits of paperfolding. Not the traditional crane stuff mind you, but interesting stuff that used a combination of straight and curved folds to make things that I have known as “developable surfaces”. Don’t know what that means? It means that is has zero Gaussian curvature. That didn’t help? It means that you can flatten them onto a plain without distortion (stretching, compressing, tearing). In other words, it is the class of surfaces that you can get by folding paper.

The thing that piqued my interest was this Champagne Flute, which I folded up…

Flute, Courtesy of Fitful Flog

It’s a very simple pattern, using a series of straight and curved folds. Very neat.

I meantioned this to Tom, who reminded me that the person that probably brought the term “developable surface” into my vocabulary, Paul Haeberli (one of the many notable computer graphics people with the initials PH) had some interest in the topic, and, in fact, had recently received a patent on the topic as well as apparently developing some commercial software for the design of developable surfaces. Very cool. It reminded me of this cool paper from SIGGRAPH 2004, as well as perhaps this successor. It’s all very cool.

Isn’t it amazing where the stream of the web can carry you on a Friday?

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Addendum: Here are some more papers that could be relevent.

Addendum2: I was pondering this paper pattern, and realized I knew how it was created. To prove it to myself, I wrote a little C program that spit the model out in the form that my homebrew raytracing program could render. Voila.

Computer Model of the Flute

The NHL’s All-Star voting disaster

Let’s face it: I’m not Canadian, so I don’t really care about hockey. But still, I found the following story to be both amusing and thought provoking, and i suspect that similar situations can occur in baseball (a sport that non-Canadians enjoy) so I’ll comment briefly.

All-Star games are odd things because they take place between players who the fans select by voting. In the past, ballots were usually distributed by the league, and collected. In recent years, it has been popular to use the Internet to allow fans to vote.

So, we now have a popularity contest decided by vote, where essentially everyone can vote as often as they like, where the marginal cost in terms of times and resources is exceedingly low, and where automation of voting is a very real problem.

What could possibly go wrong?

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Addendum: Check out the entry under “Stuffing the ballot box” to see how the 1957 Major League All-Star voting worked out.