If you are into origami, then perhaps you have been to the Origami bulletin board at: www.thekhans.me.uk/phpBB2. Someone posted a question/commentary about Google Book Search on Nov 30th. This lead to a number of interesting replies, and the inevitable “being able to search through a few pages means complete theft!” reply. If people really feel that way, I understand- if you’re an author there’s no problem with you just having your book removed. But to give those responses without thinking about the actual benefits of such a system is a mistake, in my opinion. Anyway, here’s my reply, which I am posting here because I think it deserves repeating: I don’t buy into the “this promotes theft” thing at all, especially with regards to origami. Let’s face the obvious here- origami is a niche segment, which isn’t commanding high numbers for book sales. This is fine, and to be expected for anything that is farther down the long tail; I wouldn’t expect books on making wooden duck models or building model train landscapes to be …

Floor nb 3, treated unryu paper, backlit Originally uploaded by Melisande*. mélisande does some more delicious work here, in some white unryu paper. it’s a great swirly pattern with both large hexagonal and triangular geometries, as well as tons of smaller ones (including rhombic!) the tiny little line in the middle is the wire that holds things in place- she has a fantastic X-ray viewing machine, which works wonderfully (as you can see) for displaying and photographing tessellations. Time to visit the doctor, I think…

Jane’s hexagonal squashed-triangle-twist fold, close up, backlit Originally uploaded by Ori-gomi. I used Jane’s 3d star fold as the center of this, and then just fiddled with some other things around it. this piece of unryu did not have much MC on it, so the fine triangular squashes didn’t work terribly well- otherwise I probably would have made more of these nifty star collapses. I don’t think I can stress enough how much I like the design of this solution to the “how do I bring together 6 double pleats” problem; it’s elegant, clean, and efficient. total size of this paper is about 10cm x 20cm; I still think the unryu paper has promise for detailed folding, I just need to work out the kinks in the hardening process. Progress is being made, though, and that’s the important part. (description text blatantly cut-n-pasted from my flickr post.)

another excellent folded materials lamp

interesting new origami photo blog