Personal Blogs

What do you call a group of policeman standing in the middle of a field?

Copse.

You've probably met the Zen kōan of "clapping with one hand". Well, nalbinding is knitting with one needle. It is far older than knitting and examples from 6500 BCE have been found in a Judean cave. Wikipedia is full of information about the craft [1].

Nalbinding is also known from the Viking era, and the tradition is strong today in Scandinavia. Here's an attractive example fro the late 19^th century. [2]

The word means "needle binding", and the common root of "nal" and "needle" may perhaps be related to ancient Greek νήθειν = "spin". This connection is appealing but I couldn't find any strong evidence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A5lebinding

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1_par_vantar_n%C3%A5lbundna_av_vitt_ullgarn_med_dubbelvikt_krage_-_Nordiska_museet_-_NM.0005802B.jpg

I live in a very modest house. It doesn’t like talking about itself.

a woman who helps you cross a river?

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Bridget

Here’s a riddle I heard in the local Co-op.

What coat is best put on wet?

Eunoia is a warm feeling a speaker has towards their audience. See https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/eunoia

It's interesting because it's the shortest English word that contains all 5 vowels. If there were a shorter it would have to be an anagram of 'aeiou' and there isn't one as far as I know.

A disused vacuum cleaner gathering dust.

This is something I found on Quora 

Above we see three regular polygons, the equilateral triangle, square and regular pentagon. Each has a side length of 2 units. Associated with any regular polygon are two circles: its incircle, which touches its sides, and its circumcircle, which passes through its vertices.

Surprisingly, the area between these two circles, shaded pink in the figures above, always has an area of π/4 square units, however many sides the regular polygon has. How do we know this?

Here we see two consecutive vertices of the polygon, painy=ts A and B, with M being the midpoint of AB and O the common centre of the incentre and the circumcentre.

The side length is 1, so MB is ½, and because AB is tangent to the incentre and OM a radius of the circle angle OMB is a right angle. Let the radiiusof the circumcentre be R and that of the incircle r, so OB = R and OM = r.

Then using Pythagoras in the irght-angled triangle OMB we have

OM² + (½)² = OM², so r² + ¼ = R², or R² - r² = ¼.

But now considering the ares of the two circles we have

Area of circumcircle - Area incircle = πR² - πr² = π/4.

Notice we haven't used the number of sides anywhere in this! So the area is always π/4 irrespective of the number of sides, as claimed.

I always wrongly suppose Pine Martens, animals related to weasels and stoats, are exclusively carnivorous  , like their cousins. But it seems now that they also eat fruit and other stuff and are particularly partial to raspberry jam sandwiches. 

A friend spotter this seal on the beach at Aldeburgh. I can’t embed the video on this page but here’s a link to a YouTube playloop:

https://youtube.com/shorts/DNM5P53iUfw?si=NUuBLHTgLb_ABzQk