What Interest Me This Week

Origami

I accidentally remembered it's something I was interested and slight good at it as a kid.

There was no avenue to pursue it at the time. Signing up for classes were overkill. Books suck. Origami is the kinda art that needs tactile transmission, diagrams are poor substitutes.

That's only possible with the current iteration of YouTube. And I ended up with this.

Say what you want about how social media corrupts. Farmed the right way it's a treasure.

It didn't take me long to move from mere mimicry to examining the principles behind them. Folding papers is one thing, but someone came up with designs for them first. These people can't possibly be geniuses, otherwise there won't be that many designs. So that means there must be some framework/rules behind every design.

Turn out there is, and it's very mathematical. After gaining some surface understanding, I gather that origami is very an engineering discipline, more than how making software is.

So much that half way through mimicking folding via videos, I was wondering if mistakes can be corrected on the fly. Largely speaking, no. There was a two moment is making the cat above where I almost made mistakes that ruined the whole piece altogether. But maybe that takes an advanced hand to salvage anything it origami, I dunno.

Another thing about origami. It's atomic attribute is far away from my usual form of makes: words. In fact origami has more in common with Lego the way literature has in common with software.

The outcome of origami is clear and unambigious. You don't get to fool yourself about whether you're good at it. With languages though that happens all the time.

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