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March 23, 2006

Thursday octo-blogging


Octopus, originally uploaded by sipmab.

Flickr Find.

This origami octopus is one of the coolest things I've seen on Flickr lately.

The octopus is old school orgami. It is made from one folded sheet of paper with no cutting allowed.

Check out the expressive detail in the folds around his eyes.

Posted by Lindsay Beyerstein at 11:02:56 AM

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Comments

It appears that you atheists have set up tentacled beings as your gods. How sad. At least my God can fly!

Posted by: John | March 23, 2006 at 12:03 PM

Wow. But I don't understand--if you can't cut the paper, how do you get eight tentacles? there are only four edges to the paper, right? Or was this made up out of a custom-designed paper? Or is this one of those MENSA spatial inversion tests, and I'm just not clever?

In any case, wow.

Posted by: dan | March 23, 2006 at 12:20 PM

Here's a simplified version of an origami octopus http://spinflipper.com/origami/diagrams/doc-ock.pdf>pdf

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | March 23, 2006 at 12:30 PM

The design is really ingenious and not intuitively obvious by any means.

You probably have to start with a sheet of paper the size of an intersection to pull it off.

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | March 23, 2006 at 12:36 PM

An origami Dr. Octopus!!!

!!!!

Posted by: Eli | March 23, 2006 at 12:55 PM

It's amazing what some people can do with their hands and a piece of paper.

Posted by: Godstar | March 23, 2006 at 05:12 PM

Dan: technically there's no limit to the number of appendages/points you can get from a single square. You can have multiple points along one edge, and multiple points coming from the middle of the paper. Look at this sea urchin for an extreme example:
http://design.origami.free.fr/Sirgo/invertebre%20marins/erizo/erizo.htm>Link
Sipmab's octopus is beautifully shaped, by the way.

Oh here, I've just had a look at those Dr Ock diagrams. I've a few sheets of tissue foil that've been lying around for ages; I'm tempted to give that one a go...

Posted by: Thiomor | March 23, 2006 at 05:18 PM

If you do an origami Doc Oc, please post a picture.

Posted by: Lindsay Beyerstein | March 23, 2006 at 05:39 PM

That's not an octopus! That's Cthulhu!

Posted by: C.S.Strowbridge | March 24, 2006 at 08:39 AM

I've got the diagrams for a similar octopus somewhere, but I'm not quite up to the demands of folding it. I've got a nice origami turtle that I made, though - maybe I should marry it!

Posted by: Tamakazura | March 25, 2006 at 12:30 AM

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