Break Building

I spent most of the Easter and May holiday week-ends watching the snooker world championship from Sheffield, in the hope that newcomer Judd Trump might win over the old guard John Higgins, and he came quite close.

Rather than abolish the May Day holiday break, surely it is time to fix the date of Easter closer to the Spring equinox, in March, so that the two holidays don't come so close. It's getting like Christmas and the New Year.

Much of the rest of my time was spent revising and checking the section on King tours on the Knight's Tour Notes pages, particularly the enumeration of the tours on boards of two ranks. The totals are given by recursion relations and by formulae involving the Fibonacci numbers. This proved quite troublesome, but maybe that's because my brain isn't working a smoothly as it did even a few years ago.

On the 2x8 board there are 128 closed tours, which is easy to verify, but the number of open tour diagrams works out to the surprisingly large, and surprisingly round number T = 32000. I still wonder whether I've got this right, but the other figures seem to be consistent with this. On the same board there are 584 reentrant tours, and G = 8176 geometrically distinct open tours, of which S = 352 are symmetric. These figures are related by G = (T + 2S)/4.

Waste Disposal Woes

All this morning I spent tidying up the mess left by the bin-men. The photo shows bits of rubbish lying all over the place, and the bins left open. (This was before the second collection where they take the pink recycling bags.) This is not entirely their fault as the black bag left on the ground contained empty glass bottles, which are not supposed to be put in the bins, but they could have taken the rest.

We had a circular a few days ago, resulting from my enquiries, which makes clear that the Council now requires all rubbish placed in bins to be in black bags, not loose. Instead of emptying the bins they now take out the black bags, put them in another bin, and empty that bin into the dust-cart!

I emptied out the bins and put the uncollected rubbish from several weeks into new black bags for collection next week. There was also a number of items that should not have been in the bins, such as two heavy bags of builders rubble! Some of the rubbish included cat-litter - should this be disposed of in this way? One of the bags at the bottom was full of maggots. These I swept onto the garden in the expectation that nature will deal with them.

The white object on the right is a sofa which has been left there for several weeks. No-one in the flats claims responsibility for it. I suppose it will be up to me to arrange for it, and the other unbinnable waste to be disposed of.

It was nice to see a new winner of the World Snooker Championship last night, and an overseas player, Neil Robertson from Australia. My viewing was interrupted by the fire alarm going off just before midnight, a result of the tenant in Flat 3 trying to cook himself a late snack. This afternoon his overflow was running, and still is, though I pointed it out to him.