In a prior message, Rob Hudson was replying to messages by Jorge Jaramillo and
Chris Lott, and stated:
"This reminds me of an article by David Shall in an old issue of the
Origamian, the Friends of the Origami Center (I think) newspaper/letter
from years ago. David attempted to classify models by difficulty and came up
with a system
to do so. It was interesting to compare that against others doing the same
thing."
Rob is recalling a table I composed that rated difficulty level of origami
models using a numerical score between 1 and 10. On that topic I long ago
abandoned that idea in favor of the method used by OrigamiUSA with a simpler,
more descriptive difficulty ratings that are based on examples of skills and
models a person should know in order to fold a model successfully. The
article I wrote is in "The Origamian," Volume 16, Issue 1, edited by Alice Gray
and published by the Origami Center of America. By the way this was the final
issue of this newspaper and was distributed around 1985 or 1986. "Origamians"
were undated. I saw somewhere recently that "The Origamian" is being digitized
and may become available in download versions through OrigamiUSA's Source.
At any rate I think the discussion Rob was participating in was on the topic of
"elegance." My opinion is that the concept is subjective: to paraphrase from
another expression, "Elegance is in the eye of the beholder."
David Shall
www.papercopia.com
