The green grass on the California flag is looking a bit disingenuous these days, as we’re in the middle of the worst drought in our history. Plus it’s likely this year will be one of the most intense fire seasons ever.
With this in mind, I made the Drought Flag of California:
I’ve been fiddling with repeating patterns again, (something I did back when the Internet and I were both young).
I duplicated the pattern on the wall of Paige’s bedroom in the television show The Americans. The show is filled with weird late 1970s and early ’80s design.
Oddly enough, it was easy to find information about the kitchen pattern in The Americans, which is a contemporary design supposedly called “Drama Boheme” by Graham & Brown, although I couldn’t find it on Graham & Brown’s website.
And I wrote a tiny little background-testing tool, repeatrix, where you can drag-and-drop any image or URL and get a zoomable preview of it as a background pattern.
But the real thing I want to share is the pattern below. It was designed by my aunt, Elizabeth Delphey, in the late 1970’s, for a designer named Jeanne Gantz. Gantz didn’t want this particular color scheme, but the printer had already printed thousands of sheets of wrapping paper in this pattern, so everyone in our family ended up with more wrapping paper than we knew what to do with. All of us instantly recognize it, as it showed up on birthday presents and under the Christmas tree for years. There’s even still a little bit left, so I scanned it, cleaned it up, and present it here to live forever on the internet:
The Mathematician’s Dice are now for sale to the general public!
The Kickstarter project to get these dice to market was an amazing experience. I plan to write the whole thing up and post it here soon.
A while ago I designed the Mathematician’s Dice (on Shapeways), dice with i, 0, 1, φ, e and π on them. Now I’ve launched a Kickstarter project to get a run mass produced! Check it out, and donate or pass it on to friends:
Check out this series of animated reconstructions of M. C. Escher’s Print Gallery. Move over, Hasselhoffian recursion.
On Black Friday, artist Michele Pred “shop-dropped” prints of her artwork at Ikea. The prints are barcodes, which, when scanned, read “You are what you buy.” Ikea ends up with unexplained extra cash on their books, and a bunch of unsuspecting people have art hanging on their walls that’s both making fun of consumer culture, and worth a whole lot more than they think.
This is dope:
Perhaps a down economy is precisely the right time for an overdue idea like Dollar ReDe$ign Project. The designs range from silly to serious, from niche, like Nate Castiglione’s A Giant Leap for Mankind to equitable, like, Jeff Harris’s Cocktail Anyone? (including The Gipper and Mt. Whitney), to Michael Tyznik’s pretty, practical, and plausible designs.
Lately I’ve been playing with rapid prototyping, also known as three-dimensional printing. It’s a (relatively) new fabrication method that allows creation of shapes that would be impossible to create by moulding. It allows for creation of things like interlinked rings, objects trapped inside other objects, or complex voids.
Shapeways, a Netherlands-based website, offers high-quality, relatively cheap rapid prototyping, and a place to host your own selection of models. As a website, Shapeways is no RedBubble — the interface and marketplace tools leave much to be desired. The ratings and sorting can be gamed, it’s trivial to figure out the markup on another user’s model from its price, there’s no way to replace a published model with an improved one, and the site has encoding and markup issues. But what’s a few flaws when you own the category?
The free version of Google SketchUp has been satisfactory for rendering thus far, and its user interface is leaps and bounds ahead of the bizarre interface of Blender. I’m sure Blender has a superior feature set, but what good is power when you can’t figure out how to use it? Meshlab and AccuTrans3d have both come in handy for checking surfaces and converting between formats.
On to the models! Click on the pictures to see more views of each.
Trapped Outside is a model of Boy’s Surface with a sphere trapped in the space cut out by the one-sided surface. Boy’s Surface an immersion of the projective plane, which means it is a Möbius strip with a disk glued to its edge. It is a non-orientable surface with no edges and no pinch points.
Trapped Outside was fairly easy to create using Google SketchUp. It’s just a few circles extruded along each other here and there.
The Hollow Knotted Gear, inspired by Oskar van Deventer‘s Knotted Gear, consists of two interlinked knots; a trefoil knot (in green) and its dual, a 3,2 torus knot. The green trefoil forms a rectangular cross section and a triangular hole. The blue knot forms a triangular cross section and a rectangular hole. The two knots gear perfectly together, and can move around each other, but only if they are both moved simultaneously.
After many failed attempts at getting various applications to render this complex extrusion properly, I wrote a small Python program to calculate the surface for me and output VRML. Then, after much more trial and error, I used AccuTrans3d via Wine to convert the VRML surface to a DAE file for uploading to Shapeways, and to a 3DS file for examining in Google Sketchup (and to take screenshots).
There are a few more of my designs on Shapeways right now, and even more rattling around in my head just waiting to be prototyped.
