Thus spake "Origami on behalf of Bernie Cosell"
<[email protected] on behalf of [email protected]>
on 2/18/17, 6:19 PM:
I really enjoyed the nova episode, but I was disappointed by two things:
1) no mention of Jeremy shafer
2) no mention of Chris palmer
Yes, one of the limitations of video (versus a paper) is that they can’t really
adequately give the full background for concepts, like the role of Jeremy and
Chris in the evolution of the flasher (and the coinage of the name, which is
now fairly widespread). It would be great to see its evolution, not just from
Jeremy and Chris’s work, but from the spiral patterns of Huffman (whose work
inspired J&C’s), and earlier flasher-like designs by Scheel (1975), Lanford
(1961), and Huso (1960). A nice summary of the concept, with references, is in
this 1992 paper by Guest and Pellegrino (PDF at the link):
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=INEXTENSIONAL+WRAPPING+OF+FLAT+MEMBRANES&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=
Flashers are pretty cool and useful for rotationally symmetric deployables.
Most use the basic structure with zero or one level of additional reverse
folds. I wonder if there are applications of some of the wilder patterns Jeremy
has devised for, e.g., hats, multi-directional rotation, etc. That would be
cool to see in space!
Robert
