Live, learn, leave
Here’s some new origami models I folded between the last CoCon and CFC6. I’ve been working at these for a while, so it feels good to have some attained some completion. Each of these is folded from a single pentagonal sheet of paper.
Level 3 Penfractal Tessellation
Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome with Embedded Penfractal Tessellation
Dimpled Dodecahedron Dome, Plain
Level 2 Penfractal Tessellation
Vertex-Centered Dodecahedron
Starman (Pentagon Human Figure Base)
Here’s a link to the slides for my presentation for CFC6: https://zingman.com/origami/cfc6/fivefoldgeometry.pdf
Since I have some new models I folded at the conference I plan up to update it before OUSA. Meanwhile, enjoy!
Where were we? Ah yes, Thursday morning, the start of the CFC6 conference. Breakfast in the conference room at 7:30. Ilan has a background as an officer in the Israeli army and likes things to start early and stay on schedule. Not exactly my general vibe, but no big problem either. Bacon and eggs and all kinds of good stuff, lots more time to mingle.
The conference itself was a series of panels, presentations and discussions around various origami topics. One of the things I like about CFC is that it’s an international conference and a good fraction of the attendees were from Europe. It was four days long, so already things that happened on different days run together in my mind. I must say the level of the presentations was very high, and the topics very cool. Brandon Wong in particular demoed some base CP-generating software he’s working on.
The panels were interesting and covered topics like origami art and science, book publishing, exhibiting in galleries, teaching, leveraging social media, and ways to broaden the origami community. I’m looking to do more of all these things, but the TLDR is there’s no magic shortcuts, and all of it is alot of hard work.
I gave a presentation on folding with fivefold symmetry. It gave some background information and theory, showed a few ways to fold a pentagon from a square, and then dove into a bunch of my own models in various categories including flowers, mandala tilings, fractal/recursive tilings, Penrose tilings, domes and bowls, several of my single-sheet polyhedra, and models that combined more than one these ideas. I ended with some new work in representational figures, namely a human figure base and experiments with masks and faces.
In the evening the first night, I wound up playing pool with Brian Webb. Neither of us had played in a long time, but Brian used to be a professional pool shark back in the day, and I wasn’t as rusty as I expected, so it was alot of fun. He gave me a bunch of pointers along the way for bank shots, spin, and that kind of thing, and I actually learned a few things. Last game we played was all bank shots, and we discussed each shot before taking it. In the end the hotel wanted to close the game room because it was late. I sunk the final shot, so now I get to brag that I beat Brian at pool. Friday night the whole convention went out to a group dinner at a place that had indoor bocce, so I played a bunch a bocce games. Brian bought me a beer since that was our bet from the night before. I’d never really played bocce but it was alot of fun. Playing pool the night before was a good warm up.
Saturday morning there was an origami exhibit. It was only one day because the hotel was using the other conference rooms for other events such as weddings. It was a small exhibition but totally amazing because it was thirty or so of the world’s top folders. David Brill ran a session in which he called upon every exhibitor to explain one or more of their models. This was really interesting for me, especially to hear the newer folders or those whose wore I was less familiar with. Also interesting to hear how people develop their ideas, and how everyone has to work thru design and technical challenges, gets stuck and tends to put things down and come back to them later with fresh insight.
The Buffalo Sabres were in the NHL playoffs the whole time, in the quarter finals against the Montreal Canadiens. We watched three games while were out there, two of them at the hotel bar. Saturday night was game six, and the Sabres came from behind to win big and bring the series to t 3-3 tie, forcing game seven back in Buffalo. Unfortunately, they lost that game in overtime, but it was an extremely well-played series. And, the Sabres went from being in dead last place in December, to a long winning streak culminating in their first playoff run in seventeen years. Lots of fun. Hockey was my main sport growing up, and although I haven’t followed hockey in many years, Michelle got into it after the Olympics and I started bandwagoning when it looked like the Sabres were going to make the playoffs. Lots of fun. Here’s looking forward to next season, eh!
Meanwhile, no one in the conference thought to look for us at the bar that night, but when the game was over I found where people were doing late-night folding and hung out there a while. Some people were actually wet-folding in the hotel pool!
Listening to several days of origami-oriented talks meant there was lots of time to quietly fold. I explored several ideas from my prezzy, where I thought I could use a better example for the picture on the slide. First one I folded was a new level-2 pentagon fractal just for practice. I gave this to Beth as thank-you at the end of the conference. Next was a new variation, embedding the inner subdivision in a semi-sunken dodecahedron pattern. This one had six big faces, half the full form, so I made this one into a dome. Very cool and effective. I’m going refold it out of different paper for the OUSA convention in July. I had thought that this might make a good study to refine my long-fallow flowerball idea, but it’s good as is.
The last one was a level-3 recursive pentagon fractal. Madonna Yoder gave me a 12″ sheet of skytone paper, so I told her if it worked I’d dedicate the model to her. I figured if I was going thru all the effort, I might as well make it count. The figure is basically a pentagon divided into six smaller pentagons, and each of those divided into six smaller ones, and each of those divided into six smaller ones still! It took me basically a whole day to do the prefolding, and another half day to collapse it. Fortunately, it worked on the first try, and it came out awesome!
The trip home Sunday night was uneventful, except that we came back home into a heat wave. I had to put in the air conditioners first thing Monday morning.
Now I feel all charged up again to do origami, and there’s a bunch of new ideas I want to work on before the convention. I’ve also dusted off my web site and started looking at a long overdue update and redesign.
I just got back from a trip with Jeannie to the Midwest, specifically Michigan, Ohio and Indiana. The trip was centered on an origami event, CFC6 (Conference for Creators, Number 6), hosted by my good friend Beth in Ann Arbor Michigan. We’d never been to that part of the country before, so we figured we’d do a few days touristing before the conference began.
Our flight left NYC Monday morning and landed in Detroit shortly before noon. From there we had time for one daytime activity, and chose the National Museum of the Great Lakes in Toledo, Ohio. The main attraction here was a decommissioned lake freighter. As the big freighters go she was bigger than most, I think they said 800 feet long. You could go up to the bridge and down into the hold and engine room. Pretty neat. The rest of museum was housed in a regular building and featured exhibits about the history, ecology, climate, and economy of the great lakes region, with a lot about the evolution boats and ships, from indigenous people and the arrival of French fur trappers up thru the present day. The museum was situated in a larger park that was nice to walk around.
The evening we drove out to Auburn, Indiana. The main attraction there was the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Automobile Museum. I’ve been a longtime fan of Duesenberg, Cord and Auburn automobiles since I was a kid into building model cars, and this place has been on my bucket list for a long time. And it did not disappoint. For those who don’t know, these were some of the coolest classic cars ever, each with their own unique character. Duesenbergs in particular were the ultimate luxury car, big as a modern extra large SUV or monster pickup truck, but with a giant racecar engine and amazing styling and coachwork. They typically had aluminum bodies. (Each body was custom built on an engine/chassis platform.) Today they’re considered priceless, rolling works of art, with only a few hundred in existence. Twenty or so are in the museum, all meticulously restored. The ultimate Doozy is the SJ, with a supercharged engine and distinctive external exhaust pipes. The Auburn was the Duesenberg’s smaller cousin, smaller, lighter and slightly more affordable, but still with a focus on luxury and performance. They are famous for their boattail roadsters. Cord was its own thing, very advanced and a little weird for the day, being the the world’s first successful mass-manufactured front-wheel drive car, with its distinctive coffin nose and touches such as disappearing headlights. Sadly, Auburn Cord Duesenberg went out of business during the great depression. Amazing to think that these cars are all ninety years old or more, many of them over a hundred.
The museum was in the former company showroom and headquarters, and had a good selection of all of these cars, plus other historical autos including a Cadillac V-16, and a Lincoln and Chrysler from the same era, as well as a fleet of earlier models going back the the beginning of the 1900’s and the origin of automobiles. They also had some rare prototypes, some engines and few historical airplanes, and exhibits on E. L. Cord, the automotive design studio, and the history of the factory and the company, and the rise and fall of the automobile industry in Indiana.
Next door was the former manufacturing plant, which is now a classic car museum with alot of muscle cars from the 60’s, a handful of different kinds of racecars, and a broad spectrum of mainly American historical cars from the entire twentieth century. A couple 1960’s Mustangs like my own.
I will say my one big disappointment for the trip was that my other bucket-list item, the National Brass and Woodwind Museum and the Conn-Selmer factory in Elkhart, Indiana, closed sometime in 2025, even as we were beginning to plan our trip, so we never got to see that. Ah well.
Both days we had dinner at a bar nearby the museum we were visiting. I must say the general vibe of the tri-state region was exactly the opposite of exotic to me, rather it was very friendly warm and even felt familiar. The landscapes, the people, the history and context, all that. It felt alot upstate and western New York, and southern Ontario when you get out west toward London. I guess that’s what they mean by the Great Lakes Region.
Tuesday evening it was off to Ann Arbor. The convention didn’t officially start until Thursday, but there were activities slated for Wednesday. The convention was at a hotel called Webers, which was a very cool and funky hotel with a sort of art deco jazz age vibe. We watched the Sabres vs the Canadiens at the cozy, wood-paneled bar while the likes of Cannonball Adderley and Red Garland played on the PA.
Wednesday we met a bunch of our origami friends at breakfast, including Ilan and Nicolas, who run CFC and organized the conference. A short while later, a bunch of convened in the lobby and were joined by our host Beth for the main activity, a day trip into Detroit and the Detroit Institute of Art. Enough of us had a car that everyone got a ride, a pattern that continued throughout the week.
The Detroit Art Institute is a very cool museum. Its most famous and impressive work is the Detroit Industry mural by Diego Rivera, which fills all four walls of a giant hall and depicts the whole life-cycle of auto manufacturing in a complicated series of panels that merge realism, storytelling, symbolism and mythology in a way that sums up what we’ve seen so far in the Great Lakes Region perfectly. There were several other galleries including American modernists, and some Mid-Eastern and Asian collections that range from ancient Rome to the present day. Apparently there was also a furniture and industrial design collection that I missed. Ah well. It’s always good inspiration when a bunch of artists go to an art museum together.
We all got lunch, and then went to a place called Michigan Central Station, a former train station that was abandoned fell into disrepair in the later twentieth century. The city did not have enough money to demolish it and became a symbol of Detroit’s decline and misfortune. Over the last decade or so, it has been beautifully restored and is now a public attraction and event space, with the the building above the main concourse being an office tower, and overall a symbol of Detroit’s resurgence and renewal. Alot impressive stonework, particularly because you rarely see stone architecture looking new and clean.
Finally, that evening we had a barbecue at Beth’s house. It was a slightly larger group as more conference attendees came into town. It was unseasonably cool but I helped Beth build a fire in a firepit in her backyard. Beth has a very nice design studio in a building in her backyard that used to be a garage, including a large table for folding. Makes me want to rethink my own studio setup. Anyway, it was great to hang out and catch up with my origami friends in a relaxed setting. Although there’s some overlap with the OUSA regular crowd, there’s a bunch of Midwesterners I rarely see.
Okay, halfway thru the trip. The conference is set to begin Thursday morning. I’m exhausted already.
Yeah it’s true, I got laid off from my day job as lead engineer at [company’s] Innovation Lab last month, as part of a massive company-wide restructuring. Or, putting it another way, I got replaced by an AI bot. You see, [company] has been losing money for a while now, its core value proposition of well-researched and authoritative product comparison information being attacked and eroded by AI internet chatbots that, while perhaps not as accurate or nuanced, tend to be cheaper and more convenient. So, the Innovation Lab is no more. They got rid of a bunch of us including Ben our VP and visionary leader, while the rest got reassigned into other business units in the organization. Ah well, it was a good run while it lasted. We built some excellent products in the space of consumer privacy protection, advocacy, and digital rights, including the Permission Slip app and the Data Right’s Protocol. I was the tech lead for both projects, and they rank high as proud achievements in a career that has included many fun and cool accomplishments in software R&D and product development. And I learned alot about alot of things in my time there too. Sadly [company’s] commitment to continuing working in that space had diminished prior to the restructuring, so the writing was on the wall. Meanwhile, the other main thread of the lab’s work, focused on AI chatbots of our own, had pretty much graduated from R&D and folded into the main digital group. I have no idea what has become of the remaining R&D initiatives.
But there’s no point in sitting around feeling bitter about it, although they do try hard to make you feel as bad as possible when they give you the boot, suddenly cut off from your friends and colleagues and your own work that you’ve put so much into over many years. For my part, I had a lucky bounce in that I’ve been able to increase my level of commitment to The Global Jukebox, and it’s a good time for it too. We’re building towards a major release later this year and there’s tons of work to do, and it’s a fun project. Last week I listened to over a hundred and fifty pop songs to review the Cantometric codings done by a team of consultants. Kind of amazing how vast and diverse the last hundred years of recorded music is, and how many great songs are out there.
Other than that, my plan for now is to relax and enjoy the summer, and not worry until the fall about whether I want to look for another full-time job or just continue doing consulting. My sense is that now is not a good time to try and jump back in, since all the big tech companies are sacking their workers by the thousands and replacing them with AI. Eventually this will blow over like every previous cyclic downturn. What really matters to me is to find a cool and exciting project to work on that is worth my time and effort.
Anyway, it’s a good time of year to have some time off. As mentioned before, I’ve been doing alot of biking. I’m averaging about sixty miles a week now, and plan to for the rest of the summer. This past weekend Jeannie and I finally got out to the Empire State trail. I did sixteen miles in an hour and twelve minutes. Not too bad, but a little slower than my best times last year. I’ve also increased the level of weight in my weightlifting workout, up to 202 pounds on bench press, and 120 on curls and the other dumbbell exercises. 200/120 was the goal I set for myself a long time ago to hit before I turn sixty. I’ll be fifty-eight this year, so from here on out it’s gravy. Oh, and I’ve lost ten pounds since the winter too.
There’s tons to do outside this time of year, and I’ve been spending time every day working on the yard. Project patio is nearly done. It involves spending time outside and lifting heavy things, so double fun. My patio is made of flagstones laid on a bed of sand and compacted gravel, and over time the stones tend to settle and shift. Five years ago during the pandemic I enlarged the patio, so this year I’m straightening up the new area. This involves lifting up the stones one by one with a crowbar, putting in some new sand under them, putting the back and filling in the gaps between the stones with more sand. The new area all done and I just have one more spot near the stairs to go. I might need to go out and buy more sand before I can finish.
In music, my jazz group Spacecats has a gig coming up in late June. We would have liked to make it sooner, but different members of the groups have scheduling conflicts, so we’re off-and-on for rehearsals for the next few weeks. We’re also trying to schedule our long-awaited recording session. Meanwhile we’re continuing to learn new songs and have fun.
My recording project Spellbound is progressing as well. I’ve been working in the 18-minute epic that fills most of side two, which I’m calling The Sailor’s Saga because I don’t remember what title we gave it back in the day. I’m tracking the first three sections, leaving the big instrumental fourth movement to the end, because I’m going to rewrite it pretty dramatically, whereas the first three parts follow the original demo fairly faithfully. Back in the winter I started with a click track and basic piano part. To this I’ve now added a pretty much full (midi) drum part, and electric bass. The first section is fast and grooving, the second is slow and atmospheric, and the third features a carefully crafted slow build in the rhythm section over a long, repeated chord progression.
Now I’m up to the first of the guitar tracks, basic rhythm guitar. The jaunty first section went down pretty easily, although I had to practice the part a few times to get it together. There’s no part in the section section, so now I’m up to the third section. It starts out doing arpeggios on the eighth notes, which is surprisingly hard for me. I’ve been practicing every day, and consistently improving, but I imagine it’ll be a few more days at least before I’ll be able to get a good take.
Finally, we have an origami event coming next week. It’s CFC, the Conference for Creators, and this year it’s in Ann Arbor Michigan, hosted by Beth Johnson. I’ve never been to that part of the country before, so Jeannie and I are going out a few days before the start to tour around the upper midwest. Also, I’m scheduled to give a seminar on Folding with Fivefold Geometry, so I need to get my presentation together. And, I want to have a new model for my exhibit, a perfected version of my Pentagon Human Figure that I came up with at CoCon in Chicago in March. More on all this as it, uh, unfolds.