Gift-wrapping without tape

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What Origami Sorcery is This?!

From 2-dimensions into the realm of the ambient third dimension, a large circular coaster can pass through a small square hole...

Can you pass a circular disk through a slightly smaller square hole? 

Instinct tells you no. But you haven’t seen this latest video from Numberphile, in which Standford University’s Tadashi Tokieda demonstrates that, by folding a sheet of paper in just the right way, a round peg really can go in a square hole. 

“I made a square hole in this sheet of paper, and a coaster, a circular coaster,” explains Tokieda in the video. “I fold the paper in a mysterious fashion, and I can pass the coaster through the hole.” 

But, as Tokieda stresses, he is not cheating at all. “I didn’t stretch, let alone tear, and yet when I fold the sheet back in a judicious way, the coaster does go through the square that is bigger than the hole. How is this possible?” 

Well thankfully for the likes of you and me, Tokieda doesn’t leave us baffled for too long, and gets down to explaining exactly how he achieved the seemingly impossible. 

“I’m willing to give away the secret for free on this occasion,” Tokieda says. “It has to do with the intrinsic, or inner dimension, of this piece of paper, which is two dimensions, and the fact that this sheet evolves, or flourishes, in the ambient three dimensional space. There is some elbow room, there is some ambient space.” 

Ahhh, well I’m glad that’s cleared up! 

Nope? Still as confused as us? Well it has to do with the fact that, while in two dimensions the hole is indeed too small for the coaster to fit through, by taking the paper into three dimensions, you are able to bring two sides of the square together, which forms a wider slit than the disk and allows it to pass through. 

“This is all possible because when we do this maneuver, you’re allowing the whole thing to come out into 3D and then come back down [into 2D],” Tokieda continues. “This fact that you can escape into the ambient third dimension and come back in... gives you this.”

Hat tip:  British Origami Society

Article in the NYTimes

The Modern Life of Origami, an Art as Old as Paper

Precision is key, whether folding a humble crane or an interlocking modular structure. So is enthusiasm.

Written by Kathleen Massara

Photographs by Ryan Jenq

“I would say the biggest rule is no cutting,” said Wendy Zeichner, the president and chief executive of OrigamiUSA. It’s “one piece of paper and no glue.”
OrigamiUSA is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating the public about the art form. The group traces its roots to the 1950s, when Lillian Oppenheimer, one of its eventual founders, began to communicate with paper folders around the world, including Akira Yoshizawa in Japan, who is often credited as the father of modern origami — they would send each other diagrams explaining how to fold different shapes from a single square sheet of paper. Decades later, OrigamiUSA has around 1700 paying members, and it keeps track of nearly 90 community origami groups in the United States.
Origami as an art reaches back thousands of years. “Origami is really almost as old as paper,” Ms. Zeichner explained — it means “to fold paper” in Japanese — and paper in sheet form is thought to have been invented in China around 105 A.D. To start making shapes like cranes and frogs, it boils down to two basic techniques: mountain folds and valley folds, which are different ways to make the edges meet. After that, you can get creative

Read more at the NYTimes

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11 levels of complexity

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Hat tip:  Gregory Miyata

Robin Glynn's Infinite Motion

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Engineering with Origami

Hat tip:  Andrew Hans

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This might have been posted here before:

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Origami Festival at Storrier-Stearns Japanese Gardens

This took place two Sundays ago:

Shafer Flying Carpet Boomerang (new version)

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Moving Cubes

Designed by Jo Nakashima (16/06/2019) Based on the "Pandora's Box" by Yami Yamauchi

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Hat tip:  Morigami

Origami softening impact forces?

Hat tip Morigami:

Scientists develop a metamaterial that can completely dissipate the force from an impact–and even turn it into a counterforce.
Scientists at the University of Washington have created a new shock absorption metamaterial that uses origami to completely absorb a hard impact and transform that crushing force into a gentle pull. The findings have potential implications in everything, from delivering packages via drones to landing spaceships.

According to one of the research authors—UW associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics Jinkyu Yang—”if you were wearing a football helmet made of this material and something hit the helmet, you’d never feel that hit on your head.” In fact, by the time the impact energy reaches you, he says, it has been transformed from a crushing push to a light pull.
When you see it in action, it looks like magic. The idea of using a shape that can transform pushing forces into pulling forces is impossibly counterintuitive—something the researchers admit themselves.
The secret is the metamaterial’s geometry. “Metamaterials are like Lego,” Yang said in a press release. “You can make all types of structures by repeating a single type of building block, or unit cell as we call it. Depending on how you design your unit cell, you can create a material with unique mechanical properties that are unprecedented in nature.”
The UW research—published today in the journal Science Advances—got inspiration from origami to create 20 of these flexible unit cells, using a laser-cutting plotter to create physical models of a geometric shape they developed using computer simulations.
Then they put together the segments in a long truss. Each of the segments in the metamaterial then acts as a “folding crease,” which has the capability of softening an impact as it travels through the truss. In fact, as the shock advances through each segment, the segment before it bounces part of the energy back, pulling the next segment until the chain eventually dissipates the push force generating a soft draw instead.
Scientists then tested their initial computer models with the physical model by applying a compression force, recording the behavior using six GoPro cameras filming in slow-motion. And indeed, it worked exactly as the simulation predicted, turning compression forces into pull forces.
The way the unit cells fold is crucial, according to research coauthor Yasuhiro Miyazawa, who is completing an aeronautics and astronautics doctorate at the University of Washington: “[The origami] unit cell softens the force it feels when someone pushes on it, and it accentuates the tension that follows as the cell returns to its normal shape.”
The applications are countless: “Impact is a problem we encounter on a daily basis, and our system provides a completely new approach to reducing its effects,” Yang said.

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POP Meeting: Birds and things that fly

There was a good sized turnout today, with quite a number of first-timers.

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Origamist "Burglar"?

Origamists make for even nice burglars:

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) — Whoever broke into a Massachusetts man’s home last week didn’t take a thing. They did, however, leave the house spotless. 

Nate Roman tells The Boston Globe that when he returned to his Marlborough home from work May 15, he could tell a stranger had been there.
Nothing was missing, but the 44-year-old Roman noticed the beds were made, the rugs vacuumed and the toilets scrubbed. They even crafted origami roses on the toilet paper rolls. 

He called the experience “weird and creepy” and contacted police.
Sgt. Daniel Campbell says that the department hasn’t heard of similar episodes and that there are no suspects. 

Roman says he may have left his back door unlocked. He thinks perhaps a housekeeping service went to his home by mistake.

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Ange Ecija Blanco's Self-Closing Box

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One of my favorite containers.  I am glad it's more freely out there in public.  Angel shared this, but a bit more obscure as I think it was only accessible if you visited his FB.

When I had the die made to stamp the crease pattern onto cardstock to make his model easier for beginners to fold, I had asked him for permission to do so.

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Some sights and sounds from the Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival

My exhibit display:

The Origins of the Chinese Fortune Cookie Started with a Japanese-American

I've seen Brian Kito do his mochi & manju stage demonstration for over a decade, each year at the Monterey Park Cherry Blossom Festival; but usually I'm too busy at my own tables to pay close attention.

This year I was happy to be able to take a break and watch and film his demo. I was shocked to learn about the murky origins of the Chinese fortune cookie; and how that in all likelihood, it's a Japanese-American invention.

Sorry about the audio quality, but listen to Brian explain how the origin has been traced back to his grandfather.

http://www.fugetsu-do.com/history.htm

From Wikipedia:

Seiichi Kito, the founder of Fugetsu-do of Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, also claims to have invented the cookie.[8] Kito claims to have gotten the idea of putting a message in a cookie from Omikuji (fortune slip) which are sold at temples and shrines in Japan. According to his story, he sold his cookies to Chinese restaurants where they were greeted with much enthusiasm in both the Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. Thus Kito's main claim is that he is responsible for the cookie being so strongly associated with Chinese restaurants.[citation needed]
Up to around World War II, fortune cookies were known as "fortune tea cakes"—likely reflecting their origins in Japanese tea cakes.[2]
Fortune cookies moved from being a confection dominated by Japanese-Americans to one dominated by Chinese-Americans sometime around World War II. One theory for why this occurred is because of the Japanese American internment during World War II, which forcibly put over 100,000 Japanese-Americans in internment camps, including those who had produced fortune cookies. This gave an opportunity for Chinese manufacturers.

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