Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Cardigan continued
BH won hands down. Now the proud possessor of a shiny new woolly cardigan all the way from Scotland. Quite surprised how much smarter and warmer it is than its predecessor, the fate of which is presently under negotiation. Quite surprised also how much the thing cost; not the same as shopping in a charity shop at all.
Not doing so well on the chocolate front. FIL being rather fond of chocolate but rather averse to gluten, I tried investigating the gluten content of a Galaxy bar with Mr G. First thing we find out is that there are lots of chocoholendentious geeks out there who build elaborate interactive web sites about chocolate. So I could contribute reviews of the latest version of Kit-Kat to a range of such places; an alternative, of sorts, to burbling here. There are some folk out there who express chocorage about the latest twist in the recipe for their favourite bar. Maybe they go to the lengths of freezing large supplies when their supplier gets it right for once. Second, it took a few minutes to find out who actually makes a Galaxy bar. Galaxy appears to be a widely used brand name, and the chocolate version appears to be owned by the Mars corporation and to be mixed up with a Greek-American confectionary entrepeneur who invented Dove chocolate, another big brand of which I had not previously heard. Drill through to Mars to learn that while it might be a world wide snack food operation, the Mars bar was first made in good ole Slough, UK. In my day, Mars used to be a brand name owned by Grand Metropolitan - who also owned milk and hotel companies. But no suggestion of that on the Mars site. And no nutritional information about bars by Mars on the Mars site either. One might have thought in this age of food and health consciousness that a supplier would feel the urge to put up all kinds of information dressed up in scientific clothes, but no. The best I could do was rather crude recipes attached to the review sites I started out at. Not really detailed enough to be sure about gluten. So off to the Coeliac roadshow. Next in Surrey on the 25th March. Report back in due course.
In the course of all this, I learn how easy it is to get it wrong, cruising around web sites without a paper and pencil. There is so much stuff out there that one can easily get into a dreadful muddle. But all quite entertaining, if not quite as worthy as jigsaws which exercise the gray cells properly.
By the way, those interested in odd web sites might care to try http://www.zibabim.com/ which has just be drawn to my attention and which seems to be an entry point to all kinds of oddities. I tried searching for cute animal pictures, in the course of which I got some vibrating pop-up which told me I had just won some competition. Click here for more information. Have your credit card fired up and ready to go...
Getting into a differant sort of muddle with Sir R. Penrose, an eminent physicist, or perhaps astrophysicist. Acquired one tome of his from a charity shop, fairly rapidly followed by an even larger tome from a more reputable source. The first tome, telling one all about everything, smelt a little of mature scientist finding God peeping out of the bottom of a dirty test tube. But persisting, I find the chap has a very good way of expounding mathematics and physics to a lay audience. In my experience, most popular science books about physics become impossible after the first few pages. They look accessible, so one buys the book. But very soon ones finds that science is hard, neither easy nor accessible. So the remainder of the book remains unread. I think what happens is that a scientist writes a splendid digest of his science which captivates his colleagues - who actually know it all already - as a splendid digest, and who make the mistake of thinking that those of us who do not know it all already will also think it splendid. Write gushing reviews of same to ensnare the likes of me. But Sir Roger does much better than average and does stir the long dormant mathematical part of my brain.
I learn, for example, that the apparently simple problem of a symetrical simultaneous collision of three billiard balls, is not simple at all. I have not checked the numbers - which I suppose if I persisted I could just about still do - but it seems that the solution is unstable with respect to the order of collision. Simulataneity is unlikely but that would not matter if all near simultaneous collisions gave the same answer. But it seems that they do not. There is a discontinuity at the point of simultaneity. Ball A hitting ball B first, then C hitting A and B just after gives quite differant answer than A hitting C first, then B hitting A and C just after.
And then that one cannot rely on the order of events. Suppose there are two events on Andromeda (which is a long way away), say A and B. Suppose that I am walking down one side of the road and that you are walking up the other side, in the other direction. If the conditions are right, I might claim that A happened before B and you might claim that B happened before A. No idea how that one worked but the assertion seemed clear enough.
Moving onto the larger tome, I am learning that there is far more to complex analysis than I ever learnt at uni, despite, as I recall, doing a whole unit on it. Maybe I missed out doing pure mathematics, rather than the mathematics with physics which was, in those days, a far commoner option. I am starting to feel I understand why being a complex function being differentiable is such a big deal. Even what a Reimann surface is - something I first heard of in 'Brave New World' maybe 45 years ago, but never got much further forward with. We will see at what point I get stuck in the this larger tome.
Perhaps it was all this Penrose which moved me to have another go at Soduku. Failed miserably on a DT moderate, but sailed through the Daily Mail competition one from Monday. Whacked it off in ten minutes or so. If I send a text off somewhere I might win a Soduko gadget. Competition entry fee a pound, so I wonder what the Mail makes of it. How many thousands of people bother to send the text? Or is it only tens?
Not doing so well on the chocolate front. FIL being rather fond of chocolate but rather averse to gluten, I tried investigating the gluten content of a Galaxy bar with Mr G. First thing we find out is that there are lots of chocoholendentious geeks out there who build elaborate interactive web sites about chocolate. So I could contribute reviews of the latest version of Kit-Kat to a range of such places; an alternative, of sorts, to burbling here. There are some folk out there who express chocorage about the latest twist in the recipe for their favourite bar. Maybe they go to the lengths of freezing large supplies when their supplier gets it right for once. Second, it took a few minutes to find out who actually makes a Galaxy bar. Galaxy appears to be a widely used brand name, and the chocolate version appears to be owned by the Mars corporation and to be mixed up with a Greek-American confectionary entrepeneur who invented Dove chocolate, another big brand of which I had not previously heard. Drill through to Mars to learn that while it might be a world wide snack food operation, the Mars bar was first made in good ole Slough, UK. In my day, Mars used to be a brand name owned by Grand Metropolitan - who also owned milk and hotel companies. But no suggestion of that on the Mars site. And no nutritional information about bars by Mars on the Mars site either. One might have thought in this age of food and health consciousness that a supplier would feel the urge to put up all kinds of information dressed up in scientific clothes, but no. The best I could do was rather crude recipes attached to the review sites I started out at. Not really detailed enough to be sure about gluten. So off to the Coeliac roadshow. Next in Surrey on the 25th March. Report back in due course.
In the course of all this, I learn how easy it is to get it wrong, cruising around web sites without a paper and pencil. There is so much stuff out there that one can easily get into a dreadful muddle. But all quite entertaining, if not quite as worthy as jigsaws which exercise the gray cells properly.
By the way, those interested in odd web sites might care to try http://www.zibabim.com/ which has just be drawn to my attention and which seems to be an entry point to all kinds of oddities. I tried searching for cute animal pictures, in the course of which I got some vibrating pop-up which told me I had just won some competition. Click here for more information. Have your credit card fired up and ready to go...
Getting into a differant sort of muddle with Sir R. Penrose, an eminent physicist, or perhaps astrophysicist. Acquired one tome of his from a charity shop, fairly rapidly followed by an even larger tome from a more reputable source. The first tome, telling one all about everything, smelt a little of mature scientist finding God peeping out of the bottom of a dirty test tube. But persisting, I find the chap has a very good way of expounding mathematics and physics to a lay audience. In my experience, most popular science books about physics become impossible after the first few pages. They look accessible, so one buys the book. But very soon ones finds that science is hard, neither easy nor accessible. So the remainder of the book remains unread. I think what happens is that a scientist writes a splendid digest of his science which captivates his colleagues - who actually know it all already - as a splendid digest, and who make the mistake of thinking that those of us who do not know it all already will also think it splendid. Write gushing reviews of same to ensnare the likes of me. But Sir Roger does much better than average and does stir the long dormant mathematical part of my brain.
I learn, for example, that the apparently simple problem of a symetrical simultaneous collision of three billiard balls, is not simple at all. I have not checked the numbers - which I suppose if I persisted I could just about still do - but it seems that the solution is unstable with respect to the order of collision. Simulataneity is unlikely but that would not matter if all near simultaneous collisions gave the same answer. But it seems that they do not. There is a discontinuity at the point of simultaneity. Ball A hitting ball B first, then C hitting A and B just after gives quite differant answer than A hitting C first, then B hitting A and C just after.
And then that one cannot rely on the order of events. Suppose there are two events on Andromeda (which is a long way away), say A and B. Suppose that I am walking down one side of the road and that you are walking up the other side, in the other direction. If the conditions are right, I might claim that A happened before B and you might claim that B happened before A. No idea how that one worked but the assertion seemed clear enough.
Moving onto the larger tome, I am learning that there is far more to complex analysis than I ever learnt at uni, despite, as I recall, doing a whole unit on it. Maybe I missed out doing pure mathematics, rather than the mathematics with physics which was, in those days, a far commoner option. I am starting to feel I understand why being a complex function being differentiable is such a big deal. Even what a Reimann surface is - something I first heard of in 'Brave New World' maybe 45 years ago, but never got much further forward with. We will see at what point I get stuck in the this larger tome.
Perhaps it was all this Penrose which moved me to have another go at Soduku. Failed miserably on a DT moderate, but sailed through the Daily Mail competition one from Monday. Whacked it off in ten minutes or so. If I send a text off somewhere I might win a Soduko gadget. Competition entry fee a pound, so I wonder what the Mail makes of it. How many thousands of people bother to send the text? Or is it only tens?
# posted by Jim @ 10:29 PM 
