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Geometric Sculpture using modular origami. I’ve always liked the way modular origami can create these interesting polyhedras

The whole piece is made of 12 individual units. I have it photographed next to my 13inch Macbook for size comparison. 

            For my geometric sculpture, I was inspired by the origami that we had done in class.  As I was growing up, I would always be doing origami in class because I loved all the three dimensional things that could be made from a seemingly one-dimensional sheet of paper.  I had my grandfather to thank for introducing me to this craft when I was younger as it became one of my favorite past times when I was bored.  In some ways, it is also very therapeutic to me.  To some, it may seem like very tedious, especially in the case of creating modular origami, because it requires the same process of folds over and over again, depending on how many units it takes to get to the finished product, in my case, twelve.  There are also about twenty-eight folds per unit.  The original designer of this ball is Tomoko Fuse, however, his original design consists of a total of 30 units.  Because the piece of paper that I used is a twelve-inch by twelve-inch square, it became too heavy to hold together without collapsing on itself, so I made my own variation using twelve units.  Assembly was a bit difficult, garnering a few paper cuts along the way, but the results were surprisingly successful octahedral, seeing as how I had made my own modifications.  To be able to take a flat sheet of paper and manipulate it in such a way that it turns into a three dimensional object is the beauty of origami. 

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Yay for self-similar cookies!

For my fractal project I decided to make fractal cookies. I thought maybe I could use the same process as in class just with dough. Luckily for me someone else had thought of this so I followed there recipe with a few adjustments. Here’s a link: http://www.evilmadscientist.com/2008/sierpinski-cookies/It was harder then I thought it would be to control the dough. The process was similar to how we drew them with repeating the same process over and over. I think you can see in the second iteration how it’s self similar to the first one but in the third iteration it got a little blurry so it’s hard to see the self similarity.  I think now having done it once if I were to try it again it would be a little easier and they would come out a little better. When first reading the instructions I didn’t totally understand how it made the final ‘fractal”. But now after doing it it makes sense and I understand it. Working with my hands and getting to see the self similarity as it was created helped me understand the principals of fractals more clearly. 

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Boston Friday Night Show Listings! [READ]

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Nikki Graziano

Found Functions

“Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics… and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music… Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.” - Paul Lockhart

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In Mindstorms (Papert, 1980), I asked (choosing one out of a vast number of possible examples) why the quadratic equation of the parabola is included in the mathematical knowledge every educated citizen is expected to know. Saying that it is ���good math” is not enough reason: The curriculum includes only a minute sliver of the total body of good mathematics. The real reason is that it matches the technology of pencil and paper: It is easy for a student to draw the curve on squared paper and for a teacher to verify that the assignment has been done correctly.

Why School Reform Is Impossible (via thesprouts)

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Ug. This really sucks and all of our hearts go out to you!

So. It’s been a while since I’ve written you all, folks. As far as I know, this will be the last update letter I will write you.

I guess this is it, for now. There’s no chance I can go to Smith College, as the administration has returned my application without reading it not once—but two times...

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What a great idea and an interesting sound!

Audio Fractal #1

Instead of making a visual fractal, I attempted to make an audio fractal. However, a visual was also subsequently created, by the purple note snippets in garage band, of a curve approaching zero.

I’m not sure if this can truly be defined as a fractal, but the idea was to take a measure of four singular notes and continually double the speed at which they are played. Each step adds a self-similar measure that is twice as fast as it was in the previous step.

In theory, if this process were infinitely repeated, the notes would approach one continuos sound. Also, just as a zoomed in section of a visual fractal looks similar to the whole, any section taken from the infinite piece of sound and slowed down (without changing the pitch) would sound the same as the whole.

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Children, of course, come into the world as very powerful, highly competent learners, and the learning they do in the first few years of life is actually awesome. A child exploring the immediate world does that pretty thoroughly in an experiential, self-directed way. But when you see something in your immediate world that really represents something very far away — a picture of an elephant, for example — you wonder how elephants eat. You can’t answer that by direct exploration. So you have to gradually shift over from experiential learning to verbal learning — from independent learning to dependence on other people, culminating in school, where you’re totally dependent, and somebody is deciding what you learn. So that shift is an unfortunate reflection of the technological level that society has been at up to now. And I see the major role of technology in the learning of young children as making that shift less abrupt, because it is a very traumatic shift. It’s not a good way of preserving the kid’s natural strengths as a learner.

Children, of course, come into the world as very… - alec resnick (via thesprouts)

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Robotically fabricated carbon and glass fibre pavilion by ICD + ITKE via Designboom

architecture students at the institute for computational design (ICD) and the institute of building structures and structural design (ITKE) at the university of stuttgart have completed a research pavilion that is robotically fabricated from carbon and glass fibre composites. the development of the structure focused on the material and morphological principles of arthropods’ exoskeletons as a source of exploration for new construction compounds in architecture.

the assembly of the shelter was performed on-site by a 6-axis robot coupled with an external sevenths axis. as part of the process the materials were saturated with resin, run through a bath of the synthetic polymer directly prior to their placement by the robot. after the completion of the filament winding process and subsequent tempering of the fibre-resin blend, the temporary steel frame could be disassembled and removed. the automatically fabricated, but locally differentiated structure resulted in an extremely thin shell of just 4mm thickness.

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