Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:10:42 GMT
When I was a young boy, folding paper was always something I liked to do. Meanwhile it gets on my nerves, though. Something I really liked was creating Fröbel Stars. I think I created thousands of them, for example glasses filled of stars made of small gift-ribbons (which are the hardest ones because they are so small).
Anyway, to me it was natural to think about a "generalization", a cube with six sites being one-sided Fröbel Stars. In theory they can be made of about 12 ribbons (dont know the actual number anymore, but I had one minimal number), but I never got so far, I always used 24 ribbons to fold them. Anyway, I got them holding together without any glue. A cube (which actually looked more like a "Star-Ball") made of 24 ribbons.
Well, of course, instead of being glad of having such a thing (and others not having it) I gave some of those away, and just half a year later I saw a "Star-Ball" in a book about paper-folding. It is well-known that these books often collect ideas they find from anywhere, and of course, paper-folding techniques spread like myths without always passing the actual source of them, so instead of being angry because somebody "stole" my idea I was interested in seeing somebody else's instructions for building it.
And here comes the part that made me angry. In this book, there were the known instructions for Fröbel Stars, but instead of describing the steps of connecting them to a cube, they used ... glue. Glue! Its moronic! Using glue, one can make another kind of star-balls which looks a lot better.
Ok, so far the anecdote. Well, for the writer of the book, figuring out how to fold these cubes was obviously too hard. He found a simple moronic way of reproducing something he saw. The problem is that for most people the only thing that counts is what they "see". Creating a proper cube without glue can take one hour, while using glue you can get finished in about 20 minutes and have something that looks equivalent.
Its in a sense the same as you can see in for example software engineering, or engineering in general, or politics. Many people would agree that they are in no way interested in whether their GUI was made with a clumsy API or an object-oriented one, as long as it works well for them. Its the spirit of capitalism: Produce something similar at lower cost.
Strangely, often the same people claiming this will also claim that electronic music is not as "valuable" as instrumental music. But of course that is something completely different ...
Anyway, to me it was natural to think about a "generalization", a cube with six sites being one-sided Fröbel Stars. In theory they can be made of about 12 ribbons (dont know the actual number anymore, but I had one minimal number), but I never got so far, I always used 24 ribbons to fold them. Anyway, I got them holding together without any glue. A cube (which actually looked more like a "Star-Ball") made of 24 ribbons.
Well, of course, instead of being glad of having such a thing (and others not having it) I gave some of those away, and just half a year later I saw a "Star-Ball" in a book about paper-folding. It is well-known that these books often collect ideas they find from anywhere, and of course, paper-folding techniques spread like myths without always passing the actual source of them, so instead of being angry because somebody "stole" my idea I was interested in seeing somebody else's instructions for building it.
And here comes the part that made me angry. In this book, there were the known instructions for Fröbel Stars, but instead of describing the steps of connecting them to a cube, they used ... glue. Glue! Its moronic! Using glue, one can make another kind of star-balls which looks a lot better.
Ok, so far the anecdote. Well, for the writer of the book, figuring out how to fold these cubes was obviously too hard. He found a simple moronic way of reproducing something he saw. The problem is that for most people the only thing that counts is what they "see". Creating a proper cube without glue can take one hour, while using glue you can get finished in about 20 minutes and have something that looks equivalent.
Its in a sense the same as you can see in for example software engineering, or engineering in general, or politics. Many people would agree that they are in no way interested in whether their GUI was made with a clumsy API or an object-oriented one, as long as it works well for them. Its the spirit of capitalism: Produce something similar at lower cost.
Strangely, often the same people claiming this will also claim that electronic music is not as "valuable" as instrumental music. But of course that is something completely different ...
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