Last week, I had the pleasure of testing out Oru Kayak, the world's first origami kayak. It was wonderful! Anton Willis, the designer, and I met at the Berkeley Marina to put his latest iteration to the test. I had been watching Anton construct the kayak for months at TechShop and had always bugged him about taking me out for a test ride. I finally got my wish. 
He pulled the folded kayak, roughly the size of a large artist portfolio, out of his car and set it in the grass near the docks. A small crowd began to form as he unfolded the cut sheet of corrugated plastic, the same material as the political advertisement in your neighbor's front lawn. The entire build time took about ten minutes, but easily could've been halved without the peppering of questions from the onlookers. 
Before I knew it, I was paddling around the marina at a surprisingly high clip. I don't consider myself a kayak expert, but the Oru design felt fast and comfortable. You quickly forget that it's a neatly folded piece of plastic. The big question on my mind, and probably everyone else's, was: how much water would it take on? It was, after all, an origami kayak. After kayaking around the marina and near the larger waves of the San Francisco Bay, I was still completely dry without a drop of water inside the vessel. Anton told me it doesn't take on any more water than a typical kayak - spray and paddle drip. Anton expects the kayak to retail for about $500. You can sign up to receive the release date announcement on Oru's website.          By Glen Whitney for the Museum of Mathematics 
Math Mondays have so far featured a wide array of different items from which one can make a tremendous variety of geometric constructions, but there has not yet been one on hula hoops. This week and next we’ll remedy that oversight. Also, the postings so far have almost entirely shown the constructions as fait accompli, so this series will also try to give a bit of insight into the process of devising a new creation. First, why hula hoops? They’re a pretty cheap source of large, pre-made circles, generally decently symmetric and strong. So they’re a candidate for any large-scale building project that can be based on the geometry of a circle. What are some examples? Well, you can envision each circle as a great circle on a sphere, and ask: is there a way to arrange four of these so that every intersection point between great circles is equidistant from its nearest neighbors? That leads to a pleasant construction something like this: 
Assignment: can you do the same thing with six hula hoops?
For a recent event, MoMath wanted a large-scale public construction activity, so based on our success with hula hoops to date, designer Tim Nissen envisioned a gigantic pyramid of hoops — here’s the initial conception: 
Now that’s a lot of hoops, so we decided to try a Sierpinski tetrahedron instead of a solid pyramid, which is at least as mathematically cool and requires significantly less material. (It’s interesting to think about just how much less…) All good building events require a rehearsal, so a bunch of folks got together to try tying hula hoops together on a Sunday afternoon. The initial tie of four hoops into a sort of truncated tetrahedron went well, as well as combining four of these into an order-1 Sierpinski tetrahedron, as you can see from the following photo. It’s interesting to note that when you attach four solid tetrahedra at the vertices to create an order-one Sierpinski tetrahedron, the cavity remaining is a different shape (what shape?) — whereas in this construction based on circles, the central void is identical to the four units that were combined. 
We even managed to combine four of the order-1 units into an order-2 tetrahedron pretty nicely: 
Note at the next stage, the order-2 tetrahedra were too tall for us to put one atop three directly, so we planned to put this order-2 atop three order-1 tetrahedra, one at each corner, and then lift that entire structure atop three “bases”, each formed of three order-1 tetrahedra. However, we never got that far: when we fastened the order-2 tetrahedron atop the three order-1s, here’s what happened: 
Total structural collapse, leading to hula chaos! What to do?
To be continued… More:
See all of our Math Monday columns          
With a URL to die for, the recently-launched diy.org attracted some 3,000 kids in its first week and a half online, including youngsters from Asia, Europe, and South America. Using their parent's email address to register, any kid can upload digital photos of their handiwork to the site and share the URL of their page with whomever they like. Isaiah Saxon, chief creative officer of the DIY Co., the business that owns the site, said the first few thousand projects posted on it include "everything from birdhouses to bows & arrows to block forts to amazing paintings to bike jumps." Working out of a former laundromat in San Francisco's Mission district, the headquarters has three long tables made from slabs of Douglas fir on metal frames welded by chief technical officer Andrew Sliwinski, a co-founder of the hackerspace Omni Corp Detroit. The headquarters also has a makerspace for its maker-in-chief, who is identified on the site only as Shawn. The diy.org staff of 10 uses an old closet that has been transformed into a treehouse-like conference room for meetings. The "treehouse" was built by Rob Wilson, a Bay Area web wiz who lives in a treehouse that is 24 feet off the ground when he visits Trout Gulch, a homestead devoted to the DIY ethic outside Santa Cruz, California.
In addition to Saxon and Sliwinski, the other co-founders of diy.org are Daren Rabenovitch, a partner of Saxon's in the digital animation company Encyclopedia Pictura, and Zach Klein, the founder of Vimeo. Klein is the CEO of the new company, which, despite its .org domain name, is a for-profit enterprise. "Our goal is to create a youth organization and not a profiteering company," Saxon stresses. "But we feel that the most sustainable way to build something that reaches a lot of people, is to do it as a business and not be limited by donations and the structure of a non-profit." The website intends to roll out some sort of premium service in the near future that will require a modest monthly subscription. Saxon says diy.org won't have advertising, nor will it be collecting or selling data on its members. 
Kids can upload pictures of their projects through the site or an app that works on later model iOS devices. After registering with the site and having mom or dad respond to an email giving permission, young makers are advised that the "bad things to share" are "your cat, your face, stuff you didn’t make." They can make up their own nickname or click on a nickname generator to create one for them. Kids also need to select an animal avatar to represent themselves online. They can be a raccoon, fox, bear, bison, hawk, salamander, sparrow, moose, bobcat, coyote, owl, or turtle. The avatars are all characters in an animated film with a DIY theme that Saxon and his Encyclopedia Pictura brethren have in development.
At the moment the only form of feedback for kids who display their projects on the site are four virtual stickers, all of which express something positive. But eventually, there will be a text-based comment system between family and kids. "What we don't want to do is expose kids to the Internet culture of snarky feedback," explains Saxon. "We don't want this to be a YouTube-type community where people are posting their hopes and dreams to the Internet and other people are shooting them down. We want to create a respectful community that encourages kids." When Saxon said diy.org primarily thinks of itself as a youth organization, I asked him if that might include the possibility of kids who like to make stuff meeting up in person. He replied: "Eventually it's logical that people will want to meet other makers in their area. We know that if we succeed on other fronts that people will want to gather. And we will be a platform to help that happen."          
And we’re back with our twenty-ninth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Makezine, our Facebook page, and Twitter. 
In response to Intern's Corner: My First Faire, Manny Laracuente says:
It is moments like the one you had that makes me more intuitive to spread more knowledge so that we can have more Christmas days like the on you had at the faire.(P.S. I too haven't gone to a faire yet but am going to Kansas City cant wait)^_^
In the piece on the Gorgeous 1940s Lathe Restoration, Fritoeata remarks: His 10EE is a LOT cleaner looking than mine!
You simply cannot beat these 10EE's for rigidity! They will pound the floor instead of chattering… they're amazing.
In response to the How-To: Lily Pad Pool Warmers piece, user Nathan (@Moriash) has a novel idea: Or to make it massively more complicated and expensive for little benefit (beyond cool points), make them hexagonal, to fill in the voids when the breeze close-packs them against one side of the pool. (What? You don't have hexagonal hula hoops at your local Toys R Us? Suppose you could make do with PVC pipes, six 60 degree elbows each.) Maybe embed strong rare earth magnets in the sides, perhaps two magnets per side, with the north side of one magnet a few inches from the left end and the south side of the other magnet a few inches from the right end. Provided you kept them all with the correct face upward, that would tend to snap them into the close packed configuration as the sides slid past each other. Probably wouldn't work so well in the curved pool, though. Very silly, and next-to-no concrete benefit to doing that, but it's fun to think about.
In the piece RobotGrrl's Heathkit Build Continues, glenn147 says: Many Years Ago, in a Land Far, Far Away. This was the First Analog Meter, that I made at Home…
In the article How to Start a Tool Lending Library, Co-Founder of the West Seattle Tool Lending Library Gene Homicki responds to commenters: dylanboyce, we found that a lot of people were less willing (scared even) to loan person to person, but are willing to donate tools, time and skills to a more formal library so they can be available for other people to use. Honestly, we get more tools than we know what to do with (ok, we know what to do with them – we sell the excess to buy more of what we need, or we donate them to other local tool libraries). rageahol, it looks like they only loan out to community groups rather than individuals (more of the "tool bank" than "tool library" model). I'd love to see more tool libraries directly in SF, and a big part of the reason we created the "starter kit" and went a little overboard on the lending library management system, was to make it a lot easier to get started.
Like these comments? Be sure to sound off in the comments! You could be in next week’s column.          | |
In this off-the-cuff video, MIT prof and MAKE pal Gregory Charvat shoots Nerf darts into the beam of an old X-band Doppler radar gun with its output hacked into a linear power supply, a preamp, and finally into Greg’s living room stereo system. The signal sounds like a cartoon sound effect! 
You may call mini marshmallows food, but we call them ammunition! Our 
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Keep a civil tongue.