Mathematics and Number Wisdom

I've at last got round to updating the mathematics section of my website. The "Rational Mathematics", "Alternative Mathematics" and "Geometry" sections are now all under one index page. I've also transferred the pages on "Altairian Arithmetic", "Numerology" and "Numeromancy" from Esoterica to the Alternative Mathematics section, together with a new page on "Arithmosophy".

I'm not sure that Numeromancy and Arithmosophy can really be called Mathematics but they use numbers and require a knowledge of some arithmetic. I base my interpretation of "Wisdom of Numbers" on multiplicative relationships rather than additive properties. This makes it a more disciplined realm.

I have masses of notes on Geometry, but lack of satisfactory software for producing diagrams has held it back. There is nothing particularly new, just improved arrangement and presentation, making use of CSS.

A Bright Morning's Walk

I seem to have been neglecting this Diary. The last message I intended to post here, about seeing a rainbow at London Bridge, went to the Hastings Humanists blog by mistake.

It was a beautiful sunny day this morning, so I took a walk along the front as far as Glyne Gap to see how the new cycle path is progressing, and there is stil quite a lot of work to be done, but when finished it will be possible to cycle to Bexhill without going on a main road at all.

I went to the Ravenside retail park to have a look at the computers on display in PCWorld and ended up buying one. It's a large Samsung laptop, which I'm hoping will be able to replace the old desk-top machine on which I'm typing this message.

I left about 10 am and got back about 2 pm. There was quite a cold wind, whipping up surf on the sea, which was near to high tide, but the sky was blue like a spring day, and the birds were singing. But soon after I got back the sky darkened and the rain came down. It's just started again now as I write.

Last month, after my visits to Leicester and Bournemouth for the chess, I had some trouble with my right leg and had to rest it, but it seems to have held up today, but maybe a bit stiff in the morning, well see. I needed the exercise anyway.

Words

A day or two ago I finally got round to updating the Words section of my website. There is not much difference really except in the presentation, which now makes use of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to ensure the pages are in a consistent style throughout. There is a lot more to CSS that I need to learn, I've only used the basics to determine the background colours, typefaces, margin settings and suchlike.

In the simplified spelling I've gone back closer to the orignal 1997 article, though with j used for the th sound in 'then' and q for the indefinite vowel. The only new feature is the use of th for the tch sound in 'match' and dh for the dge sound in 'hedge', which I consider an analogous use of h as for sh in 'fish' and in the combination zh often used for the sound in 'leisure'. It always seems to me that there must be another little tweak somewhere that will make the system better, but when I try it there is usually some unforeseen problem. I'll probably come back to the question in another three years.

The z-section, which used to contain the verse anthologies, is now devoted to lists of links, and the s-section whch contained the stories is no more. Instead they are all in the w for Words section.

Bournemouth Weekend

Around the 7th October I got the idea into my head that I should play some more chess and enter the Bournemouth Congress which was on the next weekend 14 to 16 October. Thanks to the internet and email I managed to send an entry form, book a bed and breakfast for two nights and work out a railway journey, along the south coast, changing at Brighton and Southampton Central.

The travelling went very well apart from getting a slow train from Southampton and having to change again at Brockenhurst, to catch the Cross-Country train from Manchester that I should probably have caught in the first place.

This was the first time I'd been in Bournemouth since the memorable BCPS weekend there in 1989. The weather was excellent and I did a lot of walking around the central areas of the town; probably too much as by the end I was struggling to get up the hill to the venue with a stiff right knee.

My results were as poor as at Leicester, winning only the last game, and that only because my opponent blundered away a rook, and refused to agree a draw, which I thought would have been fairer, since he had played well and had the advantage up to that point. There are photos of the event here.

Since I got back on the Sunday night I've been feeling pretty tired and have endeavoured to take it easy and rest my brain and my leg. The photo is of a tethered balloon on which people were booking rides in the Winter Gardens.

Weekend in Leicester

I spent the weekend from Thursday 29 September to Monday 2 October in Leicester, playing in the Chess Congress and attending meetings at Secular Hall. The weather was very hot and sunny, not what I had expected for this time of year, and not ideal for playing chess. However I suppose I can't really blame the weather for my poor results, just two draws (in the first and fifth games) and one of those was against a junior.

At Secular Hall there was a lecture on 29 September about the situation in Libya, though the speaker was a supported of the Gaddaffi regime, who described his 40-year rule as a type of socialist utopia! What is going to happen there in future is of course difficult to predict. On Sunday there was a meeting of a new History Group in the afternoon, and in the evening a most interesting talk on Thomas Babbington and his friends and family and their work for the abolition of the Slave Trade. They did a lot of the work in preparing evidence for William Wilberforce to use in his speeches in Parliament (from which Quakers and nonconformists were excluded).

I travelled to London by train, and to Leicester by coach. On the return journey, also by coach from Leicester I thought I would try the coach to Hastings. This proved to be a mistake, as the so-called 'Express' took nearly 4 hours! It began by going south-west to Mitcham, and so on to Coulsdon and East Grinstead. Then it went on a grand round tour of East Sussex, stopping at Uckfield, Hailsham, Eastbourne, Pevensey, Bexhill and other places.

Allotting Computer Time

Sorry I've not found time to post anything here for several weeks. Most of my time on the computer has been taken up either with Twitter or trying to improve my understanding of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) so that I can improve my website and also help to improve the Hastings Chess Club's website. If you click on the "Events" link you will be taken to a page I've designed, and you will find another if you click on the link to the page abour Jude Lenier's simultaneous chess display. I would like feedback to know how this style is perceived, whether the rest of the site should be updated similarly, and if anyone can offer suggestions for improvements. I've also done a lot of work on sections of my own website, but the pages can only be posted to the site when they are all ready, because they all link together, so there is nothing new to see there yet.

The Birds!

This photo is taken from the window that faces the opposite direction to the previous photo. The local pigeons are usualy flying about in disordered groups. However on this occasion I noticed that they all lined up with miltary precision along the roof ridges of the Holy Child college (formerly a convent), and stayed there quite still for a longish time. I wondered which is the general: the one on the point of the gable, or the one on the head of the christ child? (You may need to click on the photo and look at the larger version to see it clearly).

The local pigeons are of very varied colours, a few white, a few black, and quite a number an attractive brown. On the old RDFRS forum I queried why this might be, when the common pigeons seen in Warrior Square are more uniformly the traditional blue-grey, and seagulls have no noticeable variation. I was informed that this must be due to human intervention. Perhaps by the nuns who used to live there breeding and selecting them.