pumpkinstrokemarrow

But even with state of the art, fourth millennium surgery there might be a few glitches: perhaps the nervous network which, having matured through one's childhood, once produced a characteristic grimace, would now produce something quite different. One would not have charge of one's face in quite the way that one did.

Now that computer imagery is up to the mark, clearly the subject for some sort of film: a psychological comedy perhaps?

The second thought sprang from the enthusiasm with which medicos thrust cameras into orifices these days. So one is lying there, in some discomfort, somewhat déshabillé, perhaps gazing at the interior of one's own stomach on a wide screen television, when all of a sudden all kinds of strange monsters swim into view. Perhaps the sort of strange monsters from British Columbia which were celebrate by S. J. Gould in 'Wonderful Life'. (Monstrous in the sense of strange that it is; these monsters were not very big). Perhaps some of the monsters would be talking to each other. A whole intelligent community peacefully going about their business in one's interior.

So, it being the day of strange thoughts, and having been prompted by Gould (see previous post), then thought to pay a visit to the Pre-Raphaelites at the Tate Real. Where we find that about a quarter of the place has been closed for a makeover and that all the older pictures, say up to around 1900, have been condensed down into what can be badly hung in one large room. Most of the rest of the place had been given over to more recent work of, to my mind, rather mixed quality and interest, despite all the helpful & educational labels explaining their place in the world of art. Stuff which I had thought had been safely confined in the converted power station down the river where it would not annoy me. Luckily, I only learned afterwards that I could even have seen an example of an arty pickled sheep. What an earth can Mr. Tate make of all the stuff that they are stuffing into his splendid bequest? OK, so the chap made his dosh flogging sugar from the colonies, but I bet that he was quite into Pre-Raphaelites and would not have approved of pickled sheep at all, however arty they were.

There were two results though. I found on this occasion that I rather liked the 'Ophelia' from Millais and the 'Beloved' from D. G. Rossetti. Both pictures which I had rather disliked in the past. And the second of which, my having forgotten its name, prompted me to ask Google, which, I find can put up lots of small pictures of pictures by a named artist, thus enabling one to put a name to a picture very quickly. Not sure how reliable it is though. Not exactly a catalogue raisonné, more the sweepings of the Internet.

We then moved onto higher mathematics in the form of perfect numbers and perfect quadrilaterals. A perfect quadrilateral being an oblong with integrally lengthed sides with the additional property that the area is the sum of the lengths of the four sides. Then we have a perfect number being an integer with the property that both one less than itself and one more than itself are the areas of perfect quadrilaterals. The point of interest being that the ancient Persians or some such, a gang without proper numbers never mind equations, knew all about such things. To the point that they knew that there was just one perfect number, viz 17. Which meant that the roofs of their better temples were always held up with 17 columns, with each column being assembled from 17 drums.

It is not too difficult to exhibit, by means of a picture of a right hyperbola (y=2x/(x-2)), the rather small number of perfect quadrilaterals, but how did the Persians do it? Did they make up squares with pebbles and try to rearrange the pebbles?