Chocoholic

At work there is someone in another department who keeps a jar of candy for anyone to dip into, bless 'er.  Yesterday I took a Hershey's Miniature Krackel bar from it, and after enjoying its crisp, crackly puffed-rice-and-chocolate goodness I made an origami crane out of the foil wrapper.  It turned out well and I decided to photograph it.  Only then did it occur to me that it would have been a nice idea to have the Krackel crane sitting on a Krackel bar pedestal.  So I went back to get another Krackel mini bar from the jar, and wouldn't you know it, I had just eaten the last one.  I did not want to wait for however many days until she refilled the jar, feeling antsy the whole time, so I decided to make do with a Dark Chocolate mini bar.  On the way back I ran into someone and we started yakking -- and before I knew it, I had unthinkingly unwrapped and eaten half the bar.  I really did not want to eat another one, so I just used the half that was left.

Cranes

Some time ago I put away the origami cranes in a carton.  Then recently I took them back out.  My plan is to have them glued to a stiff board and placed in a custom-made plexiglass frame for permanent display, just like a painting, and I wanted to get an idea of the dimensions of such a frame.

Good thing I did too, because it turned out I had laughably underestimated the size of the frame that would be required if I were to house all 1000 cranes together in a single frame, as I had optimistically planned.

 
That simply would not be practical unless one had the indoor display capacity of a gallery, as I found out once I began laying them out in a rectangular format.

That's just 200 -- one-fifth of the total, and it already takes up an area measuring approximately 43 inches by 32 inches.  To my mind that probably approaches the practical limit of manageability for ordinary plexiglass frames.  I could be wrong, but I would want to err (well)on the side of caution.

Maybe 250 per would be all right, or even 333?  But then I would have to do some fast juggling in order to divide them into 3 identically and pleasingly proportioned rectangles somehow, without any being left over.  Could the middle one have some special feature in the center that would allow for unequal distribution among the three, à la 'Avidya' below?  Maybe :).  This is something I will have to work on.

Last Crane Update

What 101 miniature paper cranes look like, in differential states of order and randomness.

In a high-entropy state:

In a low-entropy state:

With the addition of this batch I think I've passed the target number of 1000, but of course I have to do a head count.  At this point you would be justified in wondering, Why didn't Sam keep a running tally as he was making them?  Because organization is an entropy-lowering activity, and Sam's mind is an inherently high-entropy system.

Paper Crane Project Update

Panel 13!  I haven't counted them, but taking the previous panel of 69 as about average, I figure I should be somewhere in the upper 800's now.  We're on the way!

More On Invisibility

My preferred method of achieving invisibility, camouflage, has already been discussed.  So this post is about the other, "classic" (or "obvious") method -- Trasnsparency, as illustrated here by the Stealth Crane.

The two above photos reminded me of a short story by Jack London, titled "The Shadow And The Flash".  It's about two rival geniuses who are in competition to develop a method of making objects invisible.  One tackles the problem head-on, by choosing transparency as his objective.  The other goes the less obvious route, by trying to make objects 'perfectly black' (that is, absorbing all light);  I suppose this can be considered an idealized form of invisibility-through-camouflage.

Eventually they both succeed in reaching their objectives and render themselves invisible, each in his respective manner, but they also run up against ineradicable flaws in their methods;  when the transparent man moves, the continuously changing refraction of light causes his body to send forth flashes of rainbow-colored light, alerting others to his presence;  the perfectly dark man, of course, cannot hide his shadow (London glosses over the other obvious problem -- that, even in the shade where his shadow would not be detectable, objects behind the perfectly dark man would be obscured and give away his silhouette).  As for what happened to these men, I shall not spoil it for you -- you should read the story.

With a little assist from a disruptive background, the invisibility effect is greatly enhanced.  The translucent crane in the below photo is not so easily noticed as the colorful paper cranes, despite its size.  I suppose this could be considered a combination of transparency/stealth and camouflage, for the best of both worlds.

 

 

Origami Paper

WHERE CRANES/STORKS COME FROM