Dinosaur sighting in Topsham

I see this van around town from time to time, and never manage to get a decent photo.  Unless (though I seriously doubt it) this genuinely is a plumbing firm staffed by women in fetishy costume wielding flame-throwers, this ought to get some kind of prize for the most jaw-droppingly irrelevant and sexist logo I've seen for years. The sides of the van are the same.

- Ray

Accordion tattoo

For those into such things and in the East Devon area, I highly recommend Glory Bound Tattoos, on Rolle Street in Exmouth. I'd had a couple of recommendations and seen their work online, so went to them for my new upper arm accordion tattoo (left - the dots are actually round when I'm not contorting to take a self-photo). The shop has a nice atmosphere and the staff were very friendly and efficient; they also didn't mind taking on a quite precise self-designed image.

I had the tattoo done as learning the bayan (type B chromatic button accordion) has turned out to be quite a milestone. Although I've dabbled in music for decades, this is the first instrument I've ever felt so completely comfortable with. The decision to get it - see JSBlog posts tagged "bayan" - was a leap of faith that has proved thoroughly worth the uncertainty.

As I said in my Facebook page:

So into my new Russian accordion (first instrument I've felt so in tune with and got good at so fast).

A spot of logic...

I don't often post here, except stuff that is personal opinion that I don't want associated with my employers. Here's one.

Clare and I found on the street a folder of school/college course notes belonging to a student called Leigh Evans: no indication of the school. We want to return them.

Clare phoned the most likely, Exeter College, explained the situation, and asked if they had a Leigh Evans attending. The jobsworth who answered the phone said they couldn't possibly indicate a yes or no.

OK, this was slightly unexpected but understandable: Clare might be a weird stalker or a Terminator out to eliminate Leigh Evans, the future leader of the human resistance.

So what were we to do? They said we should send the folder to the college, and if the owner wasn't a student there, they'd send it back.

They appear not to have considered the logic of this. If they don't send it back, they'll have confirmed that Leigh Evans attends the college - exactly the information they said they couldn't indicate.

So how the hell do we get the folder back to its owner?

- Ray

Topsham Inns reviewed

This review is now at JSBLog.

Topsham Ten (test)

View Topsham Ten in a larger map

Luke Hanney very kindly sent me an annotated map of the "Topsham Ten" he created in Google Maps. Enjoy!

Tax

I don't often write plain gripes, but I'll make an exception. I'm just doing my tax return: eurgh.

I have a theory about why tax remains so irksome. People who work in the tax system are those who are comfortable with that kind of Byzantine rule-based finance-y topic. This makes it impossible for them to empathise with the mind-numbing dullness - to the point where we'll procrastinate to the point of penalty - experienced by those of us who don't have that mindset/aptitude. They think failure to deal with tax is wilful laziness, because it would be for them. In fact many who go into the field of tax bureaucracy are probably borderline-autistic to have an aptitude in that area, which further worsens their ability to understand how anyone can feel differently about it. It also means that their regular attempts to simplify the interface to the system or make it friendlier - such as the hated Hector - are never enough, because they simply can't grasp how forbidding it is, how even the sight of that grey-blue plastic envelope saying Please open immediately invokes the exact opposite reaction of throwing the thing in a corner and letting it gather dust for a year. Even Adam Hart-Davis, who fronted the tax adverts, say the UK tax system is too complicated, especially for the self-employed.

As I said, I'm doing my bastard tax return.

On pseudohistories

I just made it into the local paper with the Express & Echo story "Town 'guide' has residents fuming" concerning my spoof town guide Secret Topsham. Quoting:

One critic, who asked not to be named: "The whole thing is extremely distasteful. It is not in the spirit of Topsham people—we are not like that.

"On Saturday there was a couple visiting Topsham complete with a Secret Topsham quiz they had downloaded from the internet.

"The couple were upset when they realised they had been tricked—disgusted, I think, was the expression used."

A spot of context for those who've come here in response to that story. I maintain the official Topsham website topsham.org as well as the unofficial "Topsham Ten" page. I also run the weblog for the Devon History Society and co-maintain the Topsham Museum website. From this it should be abundantly clear that I think Topsham's a brilliant place, and that I'm also keen on history.

My short response is exactly as I was quoted in the paper (though I don't recall saying exactly those words): "It is really just taking a friendly poke by someone who loves the town at some of the more formal guides you see."

But of course it's more complex than that. Amateur local history, as an activity and genre - and I'm talking about everywhere, not just Topsham - has a number of foibles. It tends to enshrine concrete anecdote over the often fuzzy reality, and accept personal testimony uncritically. It seizes on the most tenuous connections to famous persons. It likes its history airbrushed: local persons are always worthy, social unrest and the grittiness of the historical past ignored. Like all histories, it reflects the social biases of its compilers (in the case of local history, usually older middle-class people). And it takes itself far too seriously.

Some of these I had in mind as applicable to Topsham. The Vivien Leigh connection, for instance, is an example of the 'famous person' syndrome; she never lived in Topsham, and the only connection is that she was married for five years to someone from the town. But these are far more widespead foibles characteristic of local guide pamphlets, websites and advertorial articles for many towns and villages, and Secret Topsham is satirising the 'local anecdote' format in general.

Anyone who feels "disgusted" after falling for a hoax or satire they found on the Internet should look to the origin of that feeling. This is all about cognitive dissonance, the discomfort that comes from taking on an idea, then having to radically revise it. It's easier to blame the originator than accept responsibility for believing something uncritically - despite it being well-known that the Internet is full of misinformation - then realising your mistake.

Secret Topsham is full of impossibilities, tall stories, joke names, an unlikely concentration of famous connections, and even a link to the famously fictious Dunchideock Treacle Mines. It's hard to see how anyone could believe it for more than a moment.


Addendum: further to discussions in the comments, I just found Granite State of Mind, Christian Wisecarver's lovely parody that transplants Jay-Z's Empire State of Mind to portray New Hampshire as a seething metropolis.

Effective meme

I liked the recent news report of New Zealander Rudy Heeman's home-built WIG (wing-in-ground-effect) craft - see the Telegraph's New Zealand inventor creates 'flying hovercraft' and the WIG Page - which is an interesting class of vehicle with quite some promise for efficient rapid transport over lake terrain.

I liked less - for its implications about the news propagation process - the misnomer: some twit at some stage (I suspect it might have been someone at Sky News) decided it was called a "wing in ground effective" vehicle, and subsequent news outlets including the BBC (here and here) have brainlessly copied the error.

PS: Bravo. They changed it.

Friday Automata Blogging: It's coming!

A good 50p's worth from the charity shop: a slightly malfunctioning Climbatron (it walks fine, but won't climb). Soundtrack courtesy of Jacques Tourneur's 1957 Night of the Demon (the same one quoted at the beginning of Kate Bush's Hounds of Love).

Nightwish

I'm (kind of) sorry to say I'm acquiring a reputation among my friends for liking weird music (though I don't find it weird). I'm not sure what it means, but I keep on running into music and liking it, and finding it's Finnish. As I said elsewhere - see Finnish folk roots - the Finnish music scene appears to have a strong fusion element, a strong crossover between genres such as folk and pop and metal, that would be marginalised and viewed as a curiosity elsewhere. Anyhow, check our Nightwish, a Finnish metal band (see their official YouTube channel) who do excellent metal / folk / operatic /rock fusion. Examples: Over the hills and far away; Bless the Child, Ocean Soul, this rather brilliant cover of Phantom of the Opera, and Nemo.

PS: this is altogether rather interesting. I'm going to have to investigate symphonic metal.

Friday Automata Blogging: Hanging Around

Friday Automata Blogging: The Birds

Gone astray ...

A sphere coloured by surface area in a ratio 1:φ. The red upper section subtends at the centre of the sphere Professor Greg Parker's Golden Solid Angle.

Oh, dear. Further to the previous post, I notice that Professor Greg Parker writes in Some more on the Golden Solid angle (continuing the topic of his request for natural instances of a solid angle of 1.52786*π steradians):

Some people in trying to help with a reply have gone astray with both the mathematics involved (which aren’t that complex) and the concept.

I assume this means me, as I've been the only one to comment so far. No, I haven't gone astray. My analysis produced exactly the same result as Greg's for gamma, his Golden Solid Angle (γ = 1.52786*π = 4.799913751 steradians) so nothing is wrong with that side of things.

What I have done, that he seems to dislike, is to analyse it in terms of a practical working way to identify the magic angle he's looking for. No-one, not even a specialist, can be expected to look at an object and say, "Aha, that's a solid angle of 1.52786*π steradians." His definition is perfectly accurate mathematically, but near-useless practically. We need a visualization for a rough guide, which I've provided (above), and a simple way to ascertain more accurately whether an object has that solid angle.

Here's an example. Do the white end caps of the pool ball (left) subtend a Golden Solid Angle at its centre?



There's no way to reach inside and apply some hypothetical ghostly solid-angle protractor, but what we can do is look at the cross-section (right - not too close, to avoid perspective distortion) find the centre O and the angle θ subtended by the edge of the end cap.

Then the solid angle subtended by the cap = 2*π*(1-cos(θ))



We can see it's about 55 degrees, so the solid angle is

2*π*(1-cos(55*π/180)) = 2.679298269 steradians

So, no, our pool ball end cap is too small for γ which is 4.799913751 steradians. As I said in the previous post, we're looking for an object where θ is about 76.345 degrees. The same kind of analysis would apply if we were looking at something other than a sphere, such as a cone-shaped plant or animal structure. There's no way to measure solid angle directly; you need to measure θ on a cross-section, then calculate the solid angle using 2*π*(1-cos(θ)).

The angle at the blunt end of some species of cone shell, incidentally, looks as if it might be near the required angle.

PS: Sorry about the problem with the comments; I switched them off while using this site to prototype another. Comments are now enabled (and I actually publish mine).

Update: Greg has posted an update More on the Golden Solid angle still disputing my view that's there's not likely to be significance in dividing a sphere's surface area in the ratio 1:φ. He writes:

Unfortunately this is quite incorrect! Go down one dimension to the Golden (planar) angle of roughly 137.5 degrees and you will find this angle appearing time and time again in the subject area of Phyllotaxis

Yeah, I know. But this is an essentially fallacious argument: that because something works in 2D, it will if generalised to a different dimension. It won't necessarily: an example in this very area is the Golden Rectangle, which has the nice property that if you chop a square off the end, you get a smaller Golden Rectangle. This property doesn't generalise to 3D; there is no cuboid where you can chop a cube off the end and get a smaller object geometrically similar to the original. Or another geometrical example: equilateral triangles tessellate on a plane thus; but regular tetrahedra can't tessellate 3D space.

There's no reason to assume a geometric property that depends on the specific properties of 2D packing will work in 3D.

Discovered or invented?

A posting at Felix Grant's weblog The Growlery - Oh, that this too too solid angle... - just made me realise I've been astonishingly remiss. A considerable time ago, Simon & Schuster sent me a copy to review of Mario Livio's Is God A Mathematician? Ouch - it arrived right in the middle of panicking about my tax return and got buried under paperwork .. and it just resurfaced. I'll write about it, I promise! But first...

Felix is asking for response to Professor Greg Parker's The Golden Solid Angle – first written for publication 14th June 2007. The idea is this: imagine a sphere with a circular spot on it, like the 8-ball in pool. Greg - I'll use that for brevity as Felix does - proposes such a sphere where the spot has an area proportional to 1, and the remainder of the surface an area proportional to φ (phi aka the golden ratio) whose value is (1+√)/2 ... about 1.618034). This spot would subtend a solid angle Greg calls The Golden Solid Angle. He writes:

So I wrote a paper on “The Golden Solid Angle” for the Mathematical Gazette, which was in fact turned down as “although the result was new, just having a new result is not necessarily having something worthy of publication” – well that’s a new one for me! So wishing to stake my claim as the discoverer of the Golden Solid Angle (sent to the Mathematical Gazette on Thursday 14th June 2007) here’s the thing explained for the first time below.

This very much impinges on the subject of Is God A Mathematician?: Mario Livio - who has also written a book on the golden ratio - asks if mathematics is "discovered" or "invented". To cut to the chase - there's a review by Marianne Freiberger in Plus magazine - a bit of both.

π is a classic example of a "discovered" number. Apart from being the ratio of a circle's radius to its diameter, it's ubiquitous in mathematics, cropping up as the result of integrals, statistics, various forms of numerical series, and so on, that appear to have nothing to do with it. φ, on the other hand, Livio considers to be "invented". This is perhaps a harsh assessment, in that it does crop up in natural forms where the classic Fibonacci sequence generates it as a ratio. But it doesn't surface repeatedly in mathematics to the sheer extent of π. As the Plus magazine review puts it:

Much like the umbrella was invented in England and not the Sahara, so was the concept of the golden ratio invented by the Greeks, and not the Indians or Chinese. The Greeks' preoccupation with geometry brought them into frequent contact with this ratio, and so they needed a name for it — beyond that, there's nothing universal about this particular object.

There is, in addition, a long history of (having decided φ to be a significant number) slotting it into contexts that wouldn't naturally or mathematically produce it, then ascribing significance to them - e.g. a circle with diameter φ is the Golden Circle - and that is pretty unambiguously invention. And that brings me back to Greg's concept of the Golden Solid Angle (which divides the surface area of a sphere in the ratio 1:φ). I think it would be a "discovery" if it had surfaced unexpectedly from some analysis; but as it stands, it seems to be the result of an arbitrary choice to put φ in as a value - an invented situation that could just as easily have been a ratio of 1:π or 1:3 or 1:e. With definitely no insult intended to Greg's explorations of interesting mathematical relations, I can understand the Mathematical Gazette's "So what?" response.

Unless ... meaningful "discovered" occurrences of this Golden Solid Angle can be found. If you see a sighting in the wild or know a mathematical process (such as an optimisation) that makes an object with a Golden Solid Angle γ = 4.799926453, let Greg know.

A sphere whose surface is divided in that proportion will look like this:



Derivation, for those interested



It's easier to do the analysis in cross-section. We'll take a sphere of radius = 1 for convenience.

A sphere's surface area = 4*π*r^2 = 4*π in our case.

The surface area of the spherical cap = 2*π*(1-cos(θ))

We want the sphere's surface area divided in the proportion cap:remainder = 1:φ
which means the fractional areas of the cap and the rest are 1/(1+φ) and φ/(1+φ)
or in actual areas (4*π)/(1+φ) and (4*π*φ)/(1+φ)

Now we can equate the two expressions for area to get θ. For the cap:

2*π*(1-cos(θ)) = (4*π)/(1+φ)
1-cos(θ) = 2/(1+φ)
cos(θ) = 1 - 2/(1+φ) = (φ-1)/(φ+1)

θ = ACOS((φ-1)/(φ+1))

Plugging in φ = (1+sqrt(5))/2 we get

θ = ACOS(sqrt(5)-2) = apprx. 1.332478864 radians = apprx. 76.34541519 degrees

Just to confirm the result: this will give a surface area for the cap (and solid angle for the whole cap) of:

2*π*(1-COS(1.332478864)) = 4.799926453 = 1.527864042*π

which corresponds with Greg's result at Some more on the Golden Solid angle obtained by directly solving for surface area ratio (4*π-γ)/γ = 4*π/(4*π–γ)
which gives γ = 4.799926453

(While it's a little longer, I actually prefer my analysis in terms of θ because angle seen in cross-section is a parameter more readily understood than solid angle).

Unreal instruments

Clare just got an e-mail that Mr Know-it-all instantly spotted as a hoax:

Read this first, then watch.

AMAZING!

Turn your sound on for this.

This is almost unbelievable. See how all of the balls wind up in catcher cones.

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa ... Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft , Iowa ...Yes, farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort. It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

The accompanying clip was in the fact the above, Pipe Dream, minus the onscreen credits, from the music animation specialists Animusic. I've expounded a bit more on their lovely works at JSBlog: see Self-playing harps.

Maybe I've watched too much computer animation, but I can't see how anyone could think this to be real for more than a moment. Nor did I realise how ubiquitous the e-mail is: enough to be mentioned on a number of debunking sites such as Snopes. Needless to say, the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa do not exist. The discussion at The Blog of Phyz - Fooling our elders... - is enlightening if depressing; I know well the syndrome described, where the person who spots a hoax becomes cast as the bad guy:

The person who sends the hoax is regarded as a happy-go-lucky victim with a positive outlook on life, but the person who responds with the truth is regarded as a curmudgeonly killjoy.

The alternative, I suppose, is the recipient admitting being fooled. In this case, however, the hoax is doing down a remarkable piece of work, and by removing the credit may even count as video piracy. As the Hoaxslayer entry says:

There is no need to malign this fantastic animation by tacking on a foolish and totally fictitious cover story. Such clever work speaks for itself and needs no embellishment. Moreover, the real creators of the animation deserve credit for their genius. If you receive this email forward, please let the sender know the true origin of the "farm machine music" video.