Personal Blogs
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky.

A friend captured this view from the top of Cat Bells at 09:27 this morning.
A rainbow in the sky.
A friend captured this view from the top of Cat Bells at 09:27 this morning.
Disaster’s bound to strike
Sooner or
A pelican goes into a bar and says, Can I pay for last night? The barman looks at him and says, You’ve got a massive bill.
A bad hangover leaves you confused the next day but a worse one lasts until the daze after tomorrow.
Seated in a chair, raise your right foot from the ground and start moving it in a clockwise circle. While continuing to move your right foot, extend your right for finger and draw a figure 6 in the air. What happens?
See here for a YouTube video about this surprising effect.
It appears on lots of web sites, often under the title 'How smart is your right foot?' but I hadn't come across it before.
I’m reading a book about blotting paper. Very absorbing.
I’ve just bought 12 baby polyanthus plants via Amazon. When they flower they will be an assortment of 6 colours and I’m assuming there will be 2 plants of each colour. But at the moment they all look pretty much the same.
I’m planning to give 4 plants to a friend. Given we will be picking the 4 at random…
What is the probability that my friend will receive 4 plants all different colours?
It’s very beautiful and resembles frost crystals, or perhaps some kind of mineral formation (although I suppose ice is a mineral, thinking about it). But what you see here is a fungus, the ‘urchin earthfan). My brother took the photograph.
There’s a good article about this fungus here
https://www.first-nature.com/fungi/thelephora-penicillata.php
What colour leaves you in the dark? Light blew.
Tonight when I paid my bar bill I held the card reader to my right nostril, and my Apple Watch to the left. Everything went through. So I literally paid through the nose.
New TV series about falconry. Britain’s got talons.
What colour leaves you abandoned on a desert island?
Maroon.
"By their very nature bureaucracies have no conscience, no memory, and no mind."
I've been trying to remember this quote. I found it striking when first told it but I'd partly forgotten it so it's taken a while to track down. It’s by the American anthropologist Edward T. Hall, although I still can’t find where he wrote or said it
Am I right or am I wrong?
You can only fight it for so long.
Eventually you can betcha,
The System will getcha.
You can only fight it for so long.
Eventually you can betcha,
The System will getcha.
I read today in the New Scientist about “Miracle Berries”, seen below. Eat one and for twenty minutes or so sour things will taste sweet. Isn’t that remarkable?
A link to the NS article is below, and there is also information on Wikipedia.
Naturally I want to grow some and the seeds are on their way.
https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/30202824/SEI_120900398.jpg?width=800
The origin is Old Norse hus-thing, “house meeting”, and referred to an assembly of the people in the household of a noble man or woman. Over time its meaning has come to mean a platform for politicians to make speeches from.
The thing element just meant assembly and survives today in the name of the Icelandic supreme parliament, the Alþingi.
Old English also had folk-moot, “folk meeting”. Here moot is the same as in the phrase “a moot point” = a point to be discussed and also found in moot hall. Folkmoot survives but mainly in historical contexts.
A delegation of villagers sought an audience with the abbot.
Reverend sir, they asked; when is the best time to plant a tree?
Ten years ago, replied the abbot.
Or sooner if possible.
Suppose someone is going to read out to you the numbers 1-100 in random order, but they will miss one out. When they have finished you will be asked which number was missed.
You have no means of recording the numbers as they are read, and although you are quite good at mental arithmetic you only have an average memory and remembering the entire list of numbers as they were read out is beyond you.
What is the best way to identify the missing number?
You have no means of recording the numbers as they are read, and although you are quite good at mental arithmetic you only have an average memory and remembering the entire list of numbers as they were read out is beyond you.
What is the best way to identify the missing number?
I neglected my allotment and finally the council took it off me. They said I’d lost the plot.
A few days ago I wrote about an elegant proof that a regular dodecahedrons has 4 diagonals that all intersect at a point other than the centre of the polygon, see https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/viewpost.php?post=248909
Since then I have found a paper by Poonen and Rubenstein [1] in which they completely solve the problem of concurrent diagonals in regular polygons. They prove several interesting facts, including:
If the number of sides is odd there can never be 3 concurrent diagonals.
The smallest number of sides that allow 3 diagonals to meet at a point other than the centre is eight, for diagonals twelve sides are needed, and for 5 concurrent diagonals eighteen sides.
To get more than 5 diagonals meeting at a point other than the centre we need to go to thirty sides. The regular triacontagon has sets of 6 and 7 concurrent diagonals.
And then suprisingly it stops. No regular polygon, however many sides it has, can have eight or more diagonals intersecting at a point other than the centre.
[1] https://mathproblems123.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/ngon.pdf
This sounded like a portent of doom
“So fear the wren”.
But the speaker was actually talking about a film star.
Looks like all the graphics have disappeared.
Interesting how cliches morph into phrases totally disconnected with the original. Tonight I heard ‘Beats into a cocktail’. The speaker didn’t mean egg flip, just that A was hugely better than B.
But that’s how language changes and all power to it.
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