pumpkinstrokemarrow

Having resumed runs to Cheam following break, have more time to ponder on the spheres of Hampton Court (see above). And on the difficulty, never resolved, of making a concrete sphere of, say, one metre in diameter. First thought was lost wax. Assuming one can make a suitable wax sphere, one then uses that to make a mould, perhaps suspending the sphere in a suitably box and then filling the box with plaster of Paris or perhaps clay. Then warm the thing up to lose the wax, then fill with concrete. Leave to harden then knock the mould off - smashing it off would do. Then polish up the concrete with a grinder, taking care to maintain sphericity. All sounds OK but not too sure how to make the wax sphere. Maybe just take a cube which would be easy to make and carve it down. It would be easy enough to test for sphericity using cardboard patterns rotated on an axial wire, so one ought to be able to monitor the carving using some modification of same. And one could always patch the wax if one made a mistake. The next problem might be the cost of the wax. Lard would be cheap but not hard enough. Second thought was to carve a sphere of concrete out of a cube. This would not have been practical in the olden days but modern power tools should make it a runner. Third thought was to make the mould in segments, like segments of an orange, maybe a dozen of them. Hardboard mounted on a frame ought to be spherical - hardboard of say six inches by six feet would bend quite easily - and strong enough. Finish off with a grinder as under thought 1. Will I ever get around to it? Good for a lark but rather expensive in time and materials.

Two features of interest on the way back from Cheam. First, someone on the upper reaches of East street has had their front hedge layered. Quite a posh job so must have had one of those second career city types from the rural part of Surrey where rural crafts are quite lively. Second, caught a young woman creeping into the hire shop in East street clutching sprog and plastic container for paraffin. Presumably from nearby affordable housing. I would also imagine that there is quite a strong positive correlation between the consumption of paraffin and the consumption of psychoactive substances. Perhaps there is a glue sniffing type connection as well as a poverty one, paraffin being quite smelly stuff. We, of course, are in the clear, having disposed of our deluxe paraffin heaters, not having been used for thirty years or so, last year.

DT scores a TLS today. That is to say, there is a headline saying the the Diana memorial in Hyde Park needs to be rebuilt, followed by a reasonably large chunk of text explaining that this is all nonsense and that the memorial is fine. But as with the TLS, the DT reporters are entitled to their Christmas break.

It would be interesting to be able to measure the percentage of space in newspapers which was canned material. Produced on quiet days and kept in the cupboard for days when news is a bit thin on the ground. Or perhaps have a bar chart barring acreage of newsprint by age - where by age we mean the number of days prior to publication that the acre in question was substantially composed. Or one could measure age by working out the age of the youngest information in the acre and taking that as the age of composition.

What would be the granularity of the analysis? Would the unit be an entire article or would one go down to the paragraph or the line? Given the low density of information in newsprint, the unit could not be too small or there would be no information to age. And whatever unit we did decide on, we would need to take a view on the age of a paragraph which contained no information. Would we just exclude them from the analysis or retain them with a high value score for age? And then do comparisons between newspapers. (On such a measure, this blog would not do terribly well - but then there is no claim here to be news). Clearly a very suitable subject for one of those projects which modern schools like to pad out their carricula with. Lots of scope for elaborate use of Excel graphics and we could be sure that the next generation would be graphic if neither number nor word literate.

Rounded off the old year with a spot of heritage. Sherbourne, Wilton and Salisbury in that order. Stroke of luck on the Sherbourne leg when the hotel decided to charge us only £25 for the night for the two of us, including quite a decent breakfast. Might have been something to do with the fact that the bar and kitchen were shut in the evening following the festivities of the day before. The chap who had been on the day before looked completely done in and presumably there was a no-show for the evening shift. Good for us though, as having nosebagged substantially during the day, a scratch en-suite picnic sufficed for the close of the day. Heritage thoughts to follow.