Origami documentary

The trailer for "Between the Folds", an overview of ambitious work being done in origami. The trailer is pretty spiffy, the whole hour-long piece can be streamed at Netflix.

There's sculptural origami (including paper-making), math of origami, anarchist origami, an ambitious teaching program, abstract, and kinetic origami, practical applications (airbags, protein folding, biology).....

One of the talks below mentions that the DVD has additional material.

A little further discussion in four parts

paper-making, the limits of what people call origami),

lacquer, tools, folding found objects, the origami community, hand-folded origami in space,

silly hats, something intriguing I didn't understand about self-correcting meshes, folding silk (complex pleating/network folds are easier in silk because fabric distorts (stretches?), how the movie happened-- the director thought about making a short piece about math and origami, and found the subject spreading out to more people and art and science),

contact info, conventions, close-ups of origami and some details about cloth folding.

Sheep a good bit smarter than previously thought

Or, people more ignorant than they've previously noticed.

So Avanzo and Morton put seven female sheep through a series of increasingly tricky challenges. In one test the sheep walked into a pen that contained two buckets, one blue and the other yellow, with some food in the blue one. Over the course of a few trials they learned what was going on and always went to the blue bucket.

When the researchers put the food in the yellow bucket instead, the sheep changed their behaviour accordingly. They also mastered a subtler game in which the food was still in one of the buckets but the clue to its location was the colour of a cone placed nearby, not the colour of the bucket itself.

They don't seem to have tried one of those tests to see how much sheep are influenced by social pressure.

Bonus link: Three Bags Full, a mystery about sheep investigating who killed their shepherd.

Entertaining flash website

The flash frippery is really good-- better than the stuff in the galleries. May be a little slow-loading. Has non-realistic insects.

There's probably someone out there making worthwhile use of the blink tag.

Link thanks to 888mph.