The Origami Artist

Martin Sullivan goes on a course to Llandudno to learn something useful and while there meets an origami artist of some renown. Well, somebody who was better at it than him, anyhow.

I'd been working for Unilever Research for a little while, about a year or so. It was decided, then, that we, the more juniors members of the Computer Science department, should go on a course. It would take us out of our academic ivory-tower and teach us something of the real world. This course was residential and based in a hotel just along the coast at Llandudno in North Wales.

Here's one I made later

Well the usual games were played. There was much role playing and market analysis, particularly of a new toilet soap and so forth. To be honest I found it particularly boring and, as a consequence I found my self folding paper birds. Doing lame origami, as I was apt to do on those days. The chap sitting next to me looked at this with interest. He was in charge of the experimental spray-drying tower and looked equally as bored. Suddenly there was a frenzy of flying fingers in front of him. A paper bird emerged, but not quite the crude thing that lay before me. He'd turned this course notes onto something exquisite. Every fold was clean, sharp and precise. Quickly more complexed shapes emerged. A frog, a fish and several more birds, one of which might have been a dinosaur. Impressed by all this, I tackled him in the bar. It turns out that he was some kind of expert in his chosen art, and of international renown. In fact he was the hands in "Blade Runner". As an extension to the original Philip K. Dick story, one of the characters uses origami to alert another in a plot device. Years later I tried to look him up on the Internet, but failed. He remains anonymous.

I though that I'd type this little anecdote up on the phone, as an experiment. This I did while waiting for children to finish rides at a very wet Tivoli in Copenhagen.

Copenhagen, 18th August 2010.

~Z~

Navigation

This is some navigation, it should appear at the side if the page is wide, and at the bottom if it is not.

Gormless Anecdotes

Martin is known for his long-winded e-mails and has decided to inflict them on the Internet like this, suitably cleaned up and formatted. There's the starting page with some explanation, and then, so far:

• Hunting the Flush Bug
• Chemi-Luminescent Vim
• Helping With an Enquiry
• Light From Under the Door
• I Write Like David Foster Wallace
• The Origami Artist
• Pattern Matching Randomness
• The Indole Chemistry of Bananas
• Volunteer Projectionist

Also of Interest

Jucy morsels from the rest of the site:

• General papers on On-line Transaction Processing (OLTP). It's still the main topic of the web-site.
• Some site news; it's a sort of infrequently updated journal for Martin too.
• Rather specific Technical Notes, Martin can still bore people in the Third-person past tense.
• Of the little hacks that he's done recently, the Unofficial Jobcentre Plus Mirror is the one thing that seems to have gained traction.
• Other ephemeral, eclectic stuff. Mostly photographs.