paper folding and supposed impossibility

[jrtom]

Apparently it's been received wisdom for a while that you can't fold paper in half more than eight times, regardless of the paper's size or shape. It seems that, a while back, a high school student not only managed to do it anyway, but provide a mathematical proof of the amount of paper required (based on certain assumptions about how paper folding works, but they seem a reasonable approximation, anyway).

http://pomonahistorical.org/12times.htm

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~ari/paper-folding.html

This second link actually includes a proof, which is reasonably easy to follow.