The weather continues to get colder and darker and stormier. One it gets below forty-five degrees of so, biking gets more difficult, especially if it’s windy. So now I’m down to biking every other day or so, and when I go I gotta bundle up. A week ago I did my longest ride of the season, indeed my longest ride in quite a few years. over twenty-eight miles in just a little over two hours. I’m hoping I’ll get another long ride or two in before winter arrives, but if that’s my longest this year I’m satisfied. The days are short and it’s dark alot, so next time I’ll go for speed to see how far I can go in ninety minutes.
Last Friday Jeannie and I went to see Branford Marsalis playing with his quartet at SUNY Purchase. They have a very nice concert hall there, although lots of little things about it are weird, including the entrance to the venue being in a tunnel, and the lack of a center aisle of doors in back means the entrance to the hall from the lobby is a little made of side hallways. Anyway the show was great. Branford is one of my favorite sax players around today. The piano player was Joey Calderazzo, who is amazing, and so were the rhythm section. The mainly band played an interoperation of the Keith Jarret album Belonging and to to some really great places.
Saturday we went up to Boston for the OrigaMIT convention. The special guest was my friend John Montroll, who had never attended an OrigaMIT convention before, so that was a fun surprise. I also met his sister and nephew, who is a professor of mathematics and computer science. John gave a talk on his approach to origami design, which was very cool. His style of delivery is pretty breezy and laid back, so if you’re not paying attention you’ll miss how deep what alot of what he has to say is.
I folded several new models for my exhibit. I taught my Platypus, so I did a new rendition of that out of purple tissue foil; it came out very nice. I also had a new version of my Lizard and Turtle, both folded out a sheet of beautiful hand-painted paper I bought in Venice, Italy when we were there a few years back. The other model I’ve been working on is a Dimpled Dodecahedron. I came up with a layout folded from a decagon that has polar symmetry. Back in July at the OUSA convention John helped me refine the layout to make the 3-D folding phase more tractable. It turns out to be a very difficult model to fold because as it accumulates layers inside that zigzag in strange ways and tend to push the model open like a budding flower. So most of the work I’ve been doing has been to manage the layers and make them organized and flat to mitigate that tendency. I got thru most of the southern hemisphere and am up to the lock at the south pole, where three tabs are supposed to go together in a pinwheel. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite have the worked out in time for the convention. I’m sort of in the Zeno’s paradox phase: every time I try, I get half the remaining distance to the finish line.