I’m a great admirer of MC Escher. There are numerous possible practical applications of his idea of single-shape tesselations.
The simplest and most obvious is to create a cookie cutter. Not only does this eliminate waste, but if you make one tray of dark and and one of light chocolate brownie, then you can combine tiles from each to create a pleasing (and highly calorific) pattern. Yum.
More on applications of Escher-like patterns later…
I actually made this a while ago (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3248) and now found out I wasn’t the only one who came up with it 🙂
Cool. I’ve been trying to think of a way to make a fractal cookie cutter…one for which every cut consists of multiple versions of the same shape at different scales. Still thinking about that one.
And to add to your patent discussion, this clearly shows that openness is the best protection. By blogging your idea, Google knows that you came up with it first and so will the rest of the world.
Your idea can be commercially protected by applying the appropriate CC license but that would be a bit hard to defend in the case of a particularly shaped cookie cutter 🙂
I have a number of great strategies for exploiting ideas without conventional legal protection -since I can’t afford that in most cases (I teach these via http://www.scotskills.com). The cookie cutter might still be protectable within certain countries as a registered design. In the UK this is actually pretty cheap but protects only the shape. Trying to police infringements via the UK courts is a waste of time and money (unless you are accusing a big corporate and you have tonnes of low-cost legal support -in which case an out of court settlement might be achievable. Frankly though, life’s too short to play these puerile games when invention itself is so emotionally rewarding).
Actually, now I think about it, I seem to remember that the Escher estate pursues a lot of people in defence of their rights. Is it 70 years since Escher died?
Wow…this is interesting…http://www.notcot.org/post/52977/