Realistic paper snowflake design

It is that time of year when people make absolutely horrible paper cutout snowflakes in shapes that couldn't possibly exist. Sometimes even with 8-fold symmetry instead of 6.

I was tasked with creating some snowflakes for our office holiday party in a laser cutter and decided to go for real looking snowflakes instead of the fake garbage.

Luckily, someone on the internet already had this idea and published an instructables article about making 6-fold symmetry snowflakes --- including two that they painstakingly cut out to match actual photographs of real snowflakes.
https://www.instructables.com/id/How-to-Make-6-Pointed-Paper-Snowflakes/

So I took the photos of their paper snowflakes and turned them into vectors files that could be used in a laser cutter.

They turned out so well that they inspired another user of the same makerspace to use the files and create some for their own company holiday party decorations... which I found out only because I was coincidentally attending the same party!

Of course I was really glad to see the snowflakes there and so I decided to put the design files up on Thingiverse so that anyone can download them and make their own, without further ado here they are!
https://www.thingiverse.com/jlansey/collections/realistic-snowflakes

Feel free to comment if you've made some or have any suggestions.

FELINE Magazine for cats by cats

There is something special about cats (and chickens), they do not make any facial expressions. This allows us (humans) to be really good at projecting imaginary emotions onto cat photos and is one reason for their proliferation in memes. Having lived with a cat for about a year now I've learned that cats behaviors can be quite complex and inexplicable, it seems like the cat has some agenda that you just aren't privy to.

Some friends and I decided to give a voice to these cats, in a fashion magazine based on Vogue or Glamour. Naturally we have an exclusive interview with a celebrity cat "Venus the Two Faced Cat" who has 1.6 million instagram followers (and counting) and who my Mom already knew of. We also have lots of fake ads and I even pushed in a couple real ads in for Astro Ledger and Loud Bicycle, targeted at cats of course.

Anyway this magazine has been super fun to produce, and yes, we will be actually printing glossy copies 52 pages long.

Sorry this part now sounds like an ad but seriously if you want to get the magazine for yourself or a friend then check it out here and use the coupon code KAZUL for $3 off

www.felinemag.com/

Welcoming comments and questions below as usual!

Visiting world heritage rice terraces of YuanYang China 1/2

My goal for this visit to China was to see the rice terraces of Yuanyang County, Yunnan – a world heritage site. I've wanted to go ever since seeing this photo on the Bing homepage.  The photo is by Jialiang Gao, who has an impressive collection of photos on wikipedia - and an equally impressive number of uncredited photos on posters and tourist guides around the region.

Like many things in China - the scale is most impressive. Supersaturated telephoto pictures like the one above make it look like painted terraces going on for infinity - but seeing them in person in the context of the larger mountain still is quite impressive. If you can't visit yourself, please take a tour YuanYang on Google earth:

The terraces are stunningly beautiful, and part of that is knowing how much effort went into building them, all manual labor by people sometimes waist deep in mud and always using hand tools. The scale is so vast that you can barely see the people when there in person.

Up above all this - there is a little tourist villa - with a jacuzzi I could see through the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the terraces. I travelled there to see the terraces myself – but sitting in a jacuzzi watching working people pile mud for kilometers around me ... seems a bit too similar to the Monty Python sketch with Arthur and the "peasant."

To make things at least slightly better, the actual farm workers don't appear to live in poverty. They have nice houses with out-of-place looking water buffalo wandering everywhere. Lots of babies and kids lived there, tended to by the older generation - but middle aged people and young adults seemed to be completely missing. Likely off working in the cities. After thousands of years, I'm afraid this World Heritage Site will quickly become an archeological site.

One thing that was interesting - is that the colorful local dress you often see in pictures of women from Yunnan - that actually is the way they really dress - and not even just on special occasions it seems they wear super-colorful headgear non-stop, even while working in the fields.

OK now for just a bit of detail on how to get there in case you want to see it in person for yourself. First fly to Kunming (one of the biggest cities you've never heard of - with a metro area population of over 6 million).

Then take a train to Jianshui, a nice little historic village (population 490,000). From there - the rice terraces are only a 3 hour drive away. There are tourist busses, but I shared a cab for a total price of about $80 for the day, which included gas for the trip - and stopping whenever we wanted to get out and take pictures. (email me to get the contact info of the local driver who was awesome).

Even the local Baidu maps was directing us down roads that were too narrow to drive down, but Google maps definitely cannot be trusted at all navigating the more remote areas since it doesn't even have roads in the right locations.

Some particularly scenic places were actually in just about the right google maps locations here and here.

And here are a few more photos that I took along the way. Notice the water buffalo in this one:

Stay tuned since the next post is going to be all about the engineering of these things!

Back in China

I'm back in China! Look here for more lessons on signage - and a probably giant post about rice terraces. This photo is actually part of a photo sphere - which you can probably see live on your phone with this link:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/XQM8VGA1hvHgYGEr9

Powdered sugar lightening pattern

I found this cool pattern on the side of a plastic takeout container, the pattern is made from powdered sugar.



It looks reminiscent of Lichtenberg Figures from lightening strike burns, but not exactly. Any ideas how it could have formed ... perhaps something to do with static electricity?

Star naming on blockchain with Astro Ledger

I'm very excited to release a totally new project letting you name a star on blockchain built with the decentralized application platform Ethereum. It was built with the help of a small team, primarily Aleeza and Tony, but please check out the full Astro Ledger team.

The idea came to me as I was listening to blockchain podcasts driving back from the Falcon Heavy launch - and glanced out the window to see some stars. The podcast happened to be extremely boring ... so I just turned it off and imagined a future where the news coverage of an awesome exoplanet discoveries - includes the name of the star system it was found in, not just the boring ID number.

The FAQ page has lots of info about how to name a star but the key idea is that there is a card for each star, and if you own the card then you get to name the star. The ownership of the cards is handled by a smart contract and it is fully decentralized so that the names are as secure as the Ethereum cryptocurrency is.

The revenue from the star card auctions will go to Astro Ledger grants and the flow of all the cryptocurrency is completely transparent. We expect people to apply for grants in a similar style to the way the Awesome Foundation works, and actually we won an awesome foundation grant to build Astro Ledger:
www.awesomefoundation.org/en/projects/103076-blockchain-star-names-to-find-shark-aliens

This is the link to my personal "deck" or collection of star cards and screenshot where you can see some of the names I've chosen for stars. Shannon, is named after one of my heroes Claude Shannon.

This is a screenshot of what the auctions look like:

I really like this project because it incorporates a lot of elements that I really love, specifically: outer space, neat art, and a bit of edgy controversy that makes for an excellent topic of discussion!

https://www.astroledger.org

I can talk/chat/comment about this all day so please feel free to communicate!

Schengen temporary visa stay time calculator

Americans are only allowed to stay in Schengen Europe for 90 days out of the previous 180 days. Below is a link to a spreadsheet you can copy and use to track how much time you have left to stay - and the date you must leave by.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RacWAQPgHV1SnaVnejF_5-omCSZBrd37cVmV1v8P7Gs

Input the dates that you enter and leave Shengen

The results are listed below.

Comments and feedback welcome!

*No warranties with this spreadsheet sorry!

Trip to Falcon Heavy

Back in 2011 Aryeh and I drove down to Cape Canaveral to watch the very last space shuttle launch. (Read, all, about it on the blog).

This year I'm attempting to watch the first launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket (see static fire below).

Along the way I've stopped at Savannah Georgia - where an art student was collecting vaguely constrained notes from random people - that will then be turned into art. I wrote this slightly overdramatic bit with some questionable facts and terrible handwriting. I'm writing about the overview effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect if I ever hear back about what art they turn it into - I will be posting about it here!