Origami: Spike Dome

Spike Dome

Spike Dome, designed by Aurélien Vermont

Today’s model is a tessellation that I folded at the Geometric Origami Convention in 2024.  That means we folded it within an hour and a half, not counting precreasing.  Very nice design, and potentially adjustable.  In principle, you could make spikes with any number of points, and have them spiderweb across the paper as you please.  For example, Aurélien has a model with the big dipper.

Personally, I look at these spikes, and I want to make them spiral!  Not sure if it’s possible within the design.

Risky heroics: Examples

Previously, I discussed the trope of heroes risking it all, and why I think it’s a bad moral value.  Now I want to discuss some case studies. I feel a bit embarrassed to talk about my examples, because arguably, if we want to talk about risky heroics we should be talking about popular movies. But I don’t watch those, and am unwilling to put up with one for a blog post. So instead you’re getting a couple obscure moments that happened to come to mind.

1. Yasna’s choice

The Invincible is a game based on Stanislaw Lem’s sci-fi novel of the same name, although it contains an original story that merely echoes the original novel. It follows Yasna, a scientist who is stranded on the planet Regis III, where she witnesses a series of strange events. (I think it is a decent game, if you like narrative walking sims like Firewatch, but I’m not here to offer a review.)

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Risky heroics

It’s fair to say that the Scouts are obsessed with the mythology of the heroic rescue. When I was a teenager, they would regularly circulate stories of scouts rescuing people with medical emergencies, or who fell in the water.

It is also fair to say that this obsession with heroics is shared by our culture at large. Most of our stories–not just the superhero stories–are about people taking huge risks to save everyone.

However, I think there’s a major difference between the true heroic narratives as told by Scouts vs those told in fiction. In fiction, a huge risk means nothing because the outcome is decided by the author, not by probability. In the real world, encouraging scouts to take huge risks is basically asking for tragedy.

The scouting way is not to take huge risks, it’s to be prepared. In particular, scouts take lots of emergency response training. Something the training will say over and over again: don’t put yourself in danger trying to save someone else. For example, the Lifesaving Merit Badge emphasizes avoiding direct contact with a drowning person, because they can pull you into the water. Above all else, avoid creating a situation where now two people need rescue. First, call for help, then try safe methods of rescue.

For all my negative experiences with Scouts (not getting into it), I think the emphasis on emergency preparedness and safe heroics is laudable. In contrast, I do not think our culture’s emphasis on risky heroics is very laudable at all. This is a perpetual source of moral dissonance for me.

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Pour one out for the CFPB

Working in the finance industry has given me a great deal of appreciation for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Created in response to the 2008 recession, it protects consumers from unfair, deceptive, and abusive practices by financial institutions.

Recently, the Trump administration ordered the CFPB to halt all work, and cease its own funding. It’s a disaster, but more low key and less visible than all the other disasters. So, in mourning the CFPB, I’d like to review what it actually did.

The general case for the CFPB

The finance industry is fairly opaque to the average consumer. This creates an information asymmetry, where consumers can’t tell if a financial institution is being fair and honest. So, if consumers can’t even see when an institution is being fair and honest, it’s a competitive disadvantage to even bother.

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Link Roundup: February 2025

Content note: I don’t have any links about the Trump administration today.

AIs Regurgitate Training Data | Reprobate Spreadsheet – Last month I wrote about the claim that AI “regurgitates training data”, and some people claim that this virtually never happens, or else they claim that it’s the only possible thing that happens.  And I keep saying, you don’t know either way!  It’s a question that can only be answered through empirical research.  And what the empirical research says, is that models do it sometimes–and that’s bad enough.  HJ discusses some of the research here.

But I have a bit of a critique.  HJ describes a study that asked an LLM to predict number sequences, such as currency exchange rates.  The predictions had lower root mean square error when predicting sequences in the training data.  The researchers call this “memorization”, and HJ calls it “regurgitation”, but I call it a textbook description of “overfitting”.  Clearly the models are retaining excessive unwanted information from their training sets, but calling it “memorization” creates a false impression that it’s verbatim quoting, which it’s not.

This is Arousal | No Pun Included (video, 20 min) – A board game critic traces a popular claim: the most fun part of a board game is opening the box, and then they read the rulebook where fun goes to die.  It’s based on a small study of families playing Hasbro, which measured physiological arousal rather than fun.  It’s not a strong study, but you know, it’s just a grad student’s proof of concept, it’s fine, been there.  It’s just wildly inappropriate to generalize into a nugget of conventional wisdom.  This video is a great example of science popularization done well in an unusual domain.

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Origami: Four linked Triangles

Four linked triangles

Four Linked Triangles, designed by me

This is an original design that I made in 2019.  The instructions are lost to time.  I usually at least have some messy digital sketches, but I got nothing here.

Well, I recall a bit from memory.  This is one of those designs that follows a fairly braindead design pattern: throw lots of pieces of paper at it.  Each triangle?  Six separate sheets of paper.  I’m sure part of the reason I didn’t preserve instructions is that I was not so impressed with the design.  If I gave it another shot, I’m sure I could do better than that.

How did I think of linking four triangles?  Well, that’s nothing new.  There’s a very famous origami model called Four Intersecting Triangles by Tung Ken Lam.  (That model only uses three sheets per triangle.)  So, I just have a hole in each triangle.  It’s neat to assemble, because when you only have three linked triangles, they lie flat, and have a valknut topology.  Once you put in the fourth triangle, it is forced into a 3D configuration.

I later took this design, and made a 10 intersecting triangle version.  That design… was not terrific.  Maybe I’ll show it at some point.

It’s the economy

When playing the blame game for the 2024 presidential election, a lot of people point towards social issues. Not to dispute the importance of white identity politics, but polling suggests that the largest concern among voters was the economy, so let’s at least give that issue the time of day.

The funny thing about the economy is that it tends to lag behind economic policy, or just do its own thing based on external factors. During elections, people blame current economic conditions on the current president, even though those economic conditions might have little to do with the president’s actions, or could even be blamed on the previous president. The nightmare scenario is people blaming Biden for the consequences Trump’s bad policies, and then later crediting Trump for the consequences of Biden’s good policies.

This is why it might help to understand what good or bad economic policy looks like. In general, this is hard. But Trump makes it easy, with his very obviously bad economic proposals.

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