I'd seen Sear's Houses mentioned elswhere and had always assumed that you just got the plans. But looking around after seeing these images it would appear that you got a kit.
Is that correct ?, did these houses come ikea style in a big 'box' ?

Try this with your children solo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

I use it with my students, makes them think about how much notice they take of the world around

reminded me of this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmzN1p5q2sY

Thanks for all of the updates, this is really getting there. I have noticed that the result (v6) does depend on the order in which the points are drawn (for closed shapes at least) - this might explain some of the inside out results people are getting.
Quick example, the numbers show the order in which the upper shape points were added

Spotted this while looking at GE pics of Beale AFB (supposed HQ of Aurora ac) - seems someone has a sense of humour.

mmm yes maybe thsi might make an interesting wall texture for one of your projects

Great script, i've been waiting for something like this for ages. Couple of odd bugs with circles (v1.4)

1. seems to miss out a segment when doing a blend
   

2. if you create the second circle with a move copy, you often get something like this
   

I saw this site featured on a BBC TV program (Click) and thought some would like it
http://www.moillusions.com/
Lots of things you'bve seen before but some new and interesting bits and pieces
I rediscovered the dragon illusion which I've always loved

http://www.moillusions.com/2006/03/dragon-illusion.html

and did wonder how it would work in sketchup - a quick google and guess what it is there already
http://sketchup.google.com/3dwarehouse/details?mid=b3924ec0a74aa3ef77093ba1fdc02e95

and it works great

Don't know if eitehr of these are of use

style

thin.style

Try clicking on 'zoom extents' after loading it, you may find your model has been loaded far away from the origin or that it has been loaded at a very small scale - I've had both with autocad files

After a colleague complain that their new 8G usb stick was 'too small'
I put together this image, blatently stolen from the 'how big is a billion' idea.
All the sizes are very approximate but it does give the idea. Next time you use your ipod, just think that not so long ago you would have needed a small truck to carry around all of the data it holds.

Thanks, I thought it would be something like that.
I thought it looked more like one of those open top buses - paint it red; add some fake wheels - very English heritage

I've been to a number of meetings and conferences of late and have come across lots of internal freestanding structures like this - information points, ticket offices, bars etc.

All of them are well designed, as is yours, but I can't help feeling that almost all are very generic in style and don't seem to attempt to reflect the visual cues in their surroundings. I'm not suggesting for one moment that you make one of those awful pastiche structures that you see far to often. Just that, in some way, it would be interesting if you could see that this structure was designed for this place, not just anybar, anyplace, anytown.

As a layman maybe I'm missing something though

There's a couple of good introductory videos on youtube which cover the basics well
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LcLPPz0fWM

looking at this, I wondered how difficult it would be to create a script that 'blended' between two diffrent faces at either end of a line.

I think you probably want one of these tools

http://sketchuptips.blogspot.com/2007/08/plugin-unfoldrb.htmlor
http://waybe.weebly.com/

Gnomon

And our special guest from area 51 is....

Not the lathe tool you were after, but if you want a reasonably quick way to find the centre point of a circular group.
Draw two chords at right angles to each other (using the magenta inference) across the 'circular' group. The line joining the ends of the chords is a diameter i.e. its mid point is the centre

Just a heads up really
Tour at
http://earth.google.com/tour.html

Historic imagery with timeline
Ocean layer - cities beneath the sea anyone
and finally a record tour mode for the free version
Oh yes and Google Mars