I had the great pleasure of finally meeting Ralf Konrad at the 2006 CDO convention in Verbania, Italy. (Actually, going to meet him was the main reason I went there in the first place!) He posted a great write up of the convention on his site- in German- which I can’t read, and the babelfish isn’t so great at translating. Much thanks to Peter (Syngola on flickr) for translating it to English for us monolinguistic Americanos! Read the English version on Ralf Konrad’s website. Thanks Ralf! I hope to see you again soon! Ralf Konrad, myself, and Mélisande at the CDO convention, 2006

I saw this amazing sliceform torus on YouTube, thanks to a link from Jorge Jaramillo (commented on this great set of sliceforms by Joan Michaels Paque.) I shouldn’t be browsing around Flickr, as I’m on a self-imposed Flickr hiatus, but Sunday’s a day of rest, so I treated myself to a few minutes of browsing 🙂 The coolest part of the video is the way the model folds flat and pops back into 3D! The creator of this fantastic sliceform says this, on the YouTube commentary: This torus has been made as a Sliceform. It is a paper model made from two sets of slices of the torus. It folds flat because the intersection of each set of slices acts as a hinge. The slices are cut so that one set includes the Villarceau circles. For more on Sliceforms do a web search with Google. See www.tarquinbooks.com for books of models to cut out and ways to explore the mathematics of surfaces using Sliceforms. Check it out, it’s worth a look. Lots of great people …

Stop whatever it is you’re doing and go check out these tessellations! http://community.livejournal.com/ru_pop_up/32317.html On the Russian LiveJournal Origamic Architecture group, which includes previous OT fave tekuila as a member… Oh, how much I wish that I remembered more Russian! Time to dig out my dictionaries and brush up, because this LJ group seems to be full of some amazing things! UPDATE: Alex from the O-list helps out, and says: They are all university assignments, some made to original CPs and some to anonymous CPs found in the college. I don’t know what college, but the Chair is of Communicative Design, according to comments. This makes me wonder what kind of classes they are teaching? I would love to take classes like that, for sure…

Ken’ichi wrote me the other day, asking about the Knappa Klöver lamp from IKEA: Do you know the lamp sold in Ikea called Knappa Klöver? I am more interested in the floor lamp version. I have attached a pic of this lamp, and I was wondering if you know how one comes about in making it? So I sat down and thought about it a bit, and came up with a solution. Here’s my reply: I haven’t seen this lamp in IKEA- I try to avoid going to the local IKEA and wandering through the lamp area, because I want to buy them all… but looking at the picture, I can make some guesses at how it is made. If you look at the attached image, I traced over some of the shapes on the lamp: the basic structure is an icosahedron (nice info here: http://www.miracerros.com/artwork/g_sphere_layout.htm) So, since the basic structure is an icosahedron, that means that each vertex of the icosahedron has five lines meeting together. This means the lamp is made up completely …