by Doctor Science
Happy New Year!
There have been a bunch of changes for me in the past couple of months, and a whole multi-car trainload are heading my way for 2014.
This picture reminds me of one I've recently gotten back into: origami. By "back into" I mean I did a lot of origami when I was a child, but haven't really done much since then. Now looking around I see that we are in the Golden Age of Origami, with new designs and new types of designs burgeoning on every continent. The Origami Resource Center is an excellent place to start, I find.
One force driving this Golden Age is YouTube. Even the most careful diagrams can be difficult to follow, and creating diagrams is extremely time-consuming. A well-done video, though, is much easier to make and easier to follow. I learned how to make an origami Star of David from this video, for instance:
Direct YouTube link
without seeing any diagrams. Though there was a point where I had to go through it basically frame-by-frame to figure out exactly what he was doing. But success! And maybe someday soon I can post some pictures, if my ventures into newness include a point-and-shoot camera that actually works.
One reason I connect Escher and origami is that the current hot topic in origami are tesselations, or apparent tessellations: folding a single sheet so that it looks like a mosaic. I'm actually more interested in what are called origami quilts, but which I think of as origami tiles. I'm just starting to play with them, and wondering about origami Penrose tiling. I'm also looking at this origami version of an Escher, and wondering if it can be made a quilt -- i.e. where the units attach or lock into each other, not just sit next to each other.
What do you expect will be new or different for you about the coming year?
It is a bookplate aka Exlibris, a graphic sign of ownership usually glued to the inside of the front cover. Escher did a number of these. They are among his lesser known works.
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I hope that I will get a job this year. It's becoming a bit frustrating especially when many companies don't even have the courtesy to automatically acknowledge that they received the application and even those that do often do not notify one when they have decided that someone else got the job. It's not my style to call once a week to ask (it would also not help if I sat on the other end of the line and got pestered, so I consider it a potentially counterproductive move).
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I did not finish my saga as I hoped but now I am working on the same story in an epic form (Nibelungen stanzas, 412 by last evening) and fear to overtake myself sooner or later.
Posted by: Hartmut | January 02, 2014 at 03:00 AM