It’s a Beautiful World We Live in
We notice that our friends over at Power Word Fold got bOING-bOING‘d, today. Good for them. We hope that their server is tuned and that they’re using WP-cache. Otherwise, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
We grew up along the banks of the Housatonic (not the Miskatonic) and never quite got the H.P. Lovecraft thing. We are not immune to the charms of the dark fantastic, not by any means: ask us about J. Sheridan LeFanu some time and we’ll talk. But who could resist this charming rendition of Cthulhu?
It is also through Power Fold Word that we learn of Taketoshi Nojima’s article — and we are intrigued no end. It’s a like a great big mathematical explanation of Fujimoto and Shen that we don’t understand in the least. Not until we see the groovy pictures at the end of the article. Oh, yeah. We can dig it.
But that isn’t why we asked you here today.
How exceedingly bummed we get, reading the propertarian tripe on the O-list, time to time, well, it passeth understanding like a hotrod Lincoln. Somebody, somewhere, might be enjoying a piece of paper without making the proper obeisances. Faugh.
But here, on this lovely blog, way down at the bottom of the right hand column, we see the logo of the Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike CC license. Yes, open origami.
Rock on, origamiwolf. We’re big fans. Next time we’re in the Lion City, we’re so doing lunch. (One can get curry without the shrimp paste, right?)
amen, brother.
July 28th, 2007 at 9:59 pmYep – there’s quite a few restaurants here that do some fantastic vegetarian curries. 🙂
July 29th, 2007 at 5:00 amActually, I’m not all that impressed with Nojima’s work. I mean, (1) he’s exploring a lot of folds that were previously done by Fujimoto, Fuse, Palmer, Barreto, Shafer and others, but he doesn’t attribute or cite their work at all. For an academic, that’s bad — you should always cite your sources AND do a thorough literature search to see if anyone else has done anything similar. Since Nojima refers to these things as “origami” he should be searching the origami literature. And (2) the math he’s doing is formulated on special cases of Kawasaki’s Theorem as well as some other results for rigid folding by Huffman and Lang. Again, he doesn’t reference this prior work. Poo. I haven’t digested his articles enough to tell whether or not he’s adding enough of his own spin on things to make it fantastic. Otherwise he’s doing a little math, making some cool-as-heck folds, and saying, “Isn’t this cool?!” using academic language. Whoop-de-do.
July 31st, 2007 at 7:26 pmI admit, I skipped over the biblio, assuming it was speaking of math articles I hadn’t read. Don’t see anything from Origami³, which is surprising.
However, a thorough literature search would be problematic, I would think, since some of the literature is out-of-print and some of it, out-of-sight. For a long time, all I knew of Fujimoto was what other people said about him. Once I actually saw a one of his books, I was rather the less impressed with those who came after him.
Citation is important in academic work. However, care must be taken, in my opinion: an undue reverence for citation outside the academic world can deceive the unwary into thinking that discovery equals ownership.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:17 am