Excellent stuff from Richard Murphy…
I have sketched out some of the reasons why I will be voting Remain on a mind map. To best read this click here. There’s also a PDF of a text version of this here.
Source: Why I will vote Remain
Category: Uncategorized
The Inaugural Autism Awareness Cup
An introduction to the Autism Awareness Cup, a couple of important links (please follow up on both), and a classic infographic with a link to the original post in which I found it.
INTRODUCTION
This post is about an event that has been organised by a young man named Grant Cotton as a fund-raising autism awareness event. I have also included one of the finest autism related infographics I have yet come across.
A SIX A SIDE FOOTBALL TOURNAMENT IN KING’S LYNN
The tournament will take place on July 10th, using the artificial pitch at Lynnsport, 1.5 miles (2.4 kilometres) from the centre of King’s Lynn, and each team will have the name of a country (England, Holland and the Republic of Ireland have all been bagged already). Reproduced below is Grant Cotton’s poster for the event, which can be seen in its original setting by clicking here:
A COUPLE OF IMPORTANT LINKS
My first link, courtesy of my friends at DPAC, is to details of a court case which will impact on the enforcement of the law regarding wheelchair bays on buses (this law is not open to misinterpretation – it states clearly that if a wheelchair bay is not in use the driver has discretion to allow a non-wheelchair user to use it, but the needs of wheelchair users come first – a non-wheelchair user in a wheelchair bay is legally obliged to move for a wheelchair user). I urge anyone who lives in London or who can travel there on Wednesday to be at the court to make our presence felt. I have already shared this story on facebook and twitter and pressed a link on my London transport themed website www.londontu.be.
My other link comes courtesy of NAS, and concerns a new Too Much Information film which will be showing at various shopping centres over the next few months. Of reasonably local interest are the showings that will be happening at Chapelfield, Norwich on August 27 and 28.
A GREAT INFOGRAPHIC
I spotted this on blondemomsense this morning and had to include it. The original blog post from which I extracted it can be viewed here:
Two Small Auctions and Imaging for one Big Auction
An account of Wednesday and yesterday – with plenty of pictures. Also a link to a splendi piece on WEIT.
INTRODUCTION
Most of this post deals with events of Wednesday and yesterday.
WEDNESDAY – NORWICH
We had a small stamp sale at the Maids Head Hotel in Norwich, which necessitated a seriously early start. I was at the bus station at 6:00 as intended (the bus I was going to catch is scheduled to leave at 6:10, and I always like to be there early), but the bus was very late. I considered briefly catching the alternative X1, but was not willing to pay twice as much money for the quicker journey (£11 for the X1, run by First, £5.50 for a day-rider plus on the X8/ X29 Stagecoach route). Finally, over 20 minutes after it was due to leave the bus arrived to pick up passengers. It made good time once it was under way, apart from the inevitable crawl past Hellesdon Hospital, and I was at the venue by 8:15. There were no computer issues, and the sale ran very smoothly. Those items that sold went for good money, and overall the sale was as good as we could have expected.
THURSDAY – FAKENHAM
Thursday featured an early start, but not so much as the previous day, since we were holding a postal history sale at our own premises in Fakenham. This sale was more of a success than the one the day before – due to the presence of internet bidders, and a number of items made good money. Once it had finished I had time to do some imaging for the big auction on June 29th, at which some lots will be sold to raise money for the Royal British Legion’s Centre for Blast Injury Studies at Imperial College, London, and for which the catalogue is currently at the printers. There were some very large flags, one of them so huge that the only way I could image it was in the open air with two of my colleagues holding it up, one at each end. Here are the images…
To end this section, a challenge to my readers: from where did I get the descriptors (giant, supergiant and hypergiant) that I used for the outsize flags?
A LINK AND THE CURRENT TEST MATCH
Having already shared Richard Murphy’s piece on licences for company directors, when I then came across a gem of a piece on WEIT I felt that I could not justify a second such post within such a short space of time. Here therefore is a link to a piece about the Freedom for Religion Foundation going after NASA for giving a grant to a theological study.
England have recovered somewhat from a very poor start. Just before the close of day 1 of this third test against Sri Lanka Jonathan Bairstow reached his century, becoming only the second England wicketkeeper after Matt Prior to reach three test centuries in a calendar year and also only the second after Les Ames to reach two in the same test series.
I finish this piece with a few more photographs:
The time has come to licence company directors
Wise and important words from Prof. Murphy at Tax Research UK…
Imaging
A brief and mainly, indeed almost entirely, pictorial account of my day at work.
INTRODCUTION
Today we were getting the catalogue for the auction on June 29th ready to go to the printers, which meant a lot of imaging for me.
A WIDE RANGE OF IMAGES
My days imaging started with some cigarette/ trade card lots…
These look like old coins but they are actually well disguised cigarette cards based on those coins.
Next up came some left over coin and stamp lots…
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Then there were a few small flags…
Then came 28 vinyl records, some of which are likely to fetch serious money…
Lot 751, first of the records in this sale
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Although I restricted myself to showing 10 of the 28 records this one had to be included.
Lot 778, the last of the records.
Once the records were done, there was a stereograph and some accompanying slides, which occupied 20 odd lots between them…
The Stereograph
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When viewed through the stereograph you get a single picture in 3D
The stereograph was followed by a handful of toys…
The last items of the day were two highly decorated, framed title pages of atlases, for which I provide complete image galleries, all as individual images…
Nick Cohen on Hitchens’s “conversion”
Please read this great piece in full, taking note of the wonderful cartoon at the end of it!
Poor Larry Alex Taunton has been beaten to death for his dumb book on Christopher Hitchens’s supposed late-life interest in becoming a Christian; and I won’t belabor the man after this post. But several readers called my attention to a new drubbing of Taunton by Nick Cohen in the Guardian: “Deathbed conversion? Never. Christopher Hitchens was defiant to the last.” (Taunton, of course, is a Christian, trying to claim an atheist for his own.) It’s worth reading Cohen because, well, it’s always worth reading Cohen, and, as usual, his piece is unusually perceptive. Plus he wrote to Hitchens’s son for comment.
First, Cohen recounts some of the slurs the tawdry Taunton levels against Hitchens and his friends:
The Faith of Christopher Hitchens: The Restless Soul of the World’s Most Notorious Atheist is the work of a true fanatic, who has never learned when to seize a golden opportunity to hold his…
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Musical Keys and Imaging
An account of today at work and yesterday at Musical keys.
INTRODUCTION
This post has two very disparate strands – yesterday’s Musical Keys event for Autistic People and tody at work.
IMAGING
While I have imaged a wide variety of stuff today at work I am going to concentrate on some commemorative coin lots that were of particular quality…
MUSICAL KEYS
The 12 years and older session of the Musical Keys workshop run as an NAS West Norfolk activity started at 4:45PM yesterday and ran until 6:15PM. I was there both as participant and as one 0f the two designated committee members to be present at the event (the other was group leader Karan whose younger son was participating). As usual with Musical Keys the main piece of equipment we were using was a miniature computer:
For the first part of the session we were playing computer drums:
After a mid-session break during which a birthday cake which Karan had very kindly made (gluten-free as her son has an adverse reaction to gluten) and which was absolutely delicious, we moved on to the second part of the session, which featured a system whereby lines had to be drawn across the screen so that balls would bounce of them to create sounds. For those of my generation it looks a bit like a very early BBC Micro game!
The basic set up
An arrangement of lines which prevents any of the balls (released from the nozzle you can see top centre) from escaping. I do not know what kind of sound this generates, as at no time while the sound was on did I have this many lines in place.
As anyone who knows what the weather was like in King’s Lynn yesterday early evening will be aware it was not suitable for photography on the way to the Scout Hut, where as so often with NAS West Norfolk events this took place, but I did get this picture on the way home…
Angel Falls
A reblog of a fantastic post from WEIT featuring two videos of the world’s tallest waterfall.
Two great videos featuring the world’s tallest waterfall (all 979 metres of it)…
I doubt that I’ll ever make it to Venzuela to see Angel Falls, the highest uninterrupted waterfall in the world—3212 feet, or 979 meters: 6 times the height of the Washington Monument. But this video, from the BBC’s Planet Earth, is a decent substitute:
And here’s a longer video, well worth watching. It also shows the plane from which Jimmie Angel first saw the spectacle in 1933. Trying to land on the plateau in 1937, he crashed the plane, but it was recovered by helicopter in 1970 and now sits by the airport in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela.
An Eulerian Birthday
A distinctive (I hope) way to mark the occasion of my 41st birthday.
INTRODUCTION
Today is my birthday, which is the last part of the title explained, so where does the word “Eulerian” come in?
THE MOST PROLIFIC OF ALL MATHEMATICIANS
For all his immense output Leonhard Euler (pronouned “Oiler”, not “Ewe-ler”) is best known to the world at large for his solution to the “Bridges of Konigsberg” conundrum. Citizens of this then German town (it is now Kaliningrad, Russia) used to amuse themselves by trying to walk around the town crossing each of its seven bridges once and once only in the course of their peregrinations. Nobody ever managed it, and Euler (pioneering the science of topology, a minor offshoot of which is the “Beck Map”, versions of which are now used worldwide as an easy way to display urban public transport routes, in the process) proved that there was no way to do this. This is because each the four landmasses involved contained an odd number of bridgeheads – had specifically two (and it could have been any two), or all four of these landmasses contained even numbers of bridgeheads it would have been possible to devise a walking route using each bridge precisely once.
Much less well known than the above, Euler also noticed that if you feed values into the equation Y = X2 + X + 41 every value of X from 0 through to 39 produces a prime number for Y, and even after the inevitable break to the sequence where X = 40 produces Y = 1681 = 41 * 41, and X = 41 produces Y = 1763 = 41 * 43, the formula continues to produce a very large number of prime numbers – far more than any other formula of similar type. This then is why I described this an Eulerian birthday – it is my 41st. A clue to bear in mind for next year’s birthday is that the person who will play the role in my blog post on that day that Euler has played today was proud of the fact that he was born in Cambridge in 1953 and had initials DNA. More details, including a full listing of the primes produced before X = 40, can be found in Keith Devlin’s “Mathematics: A New Golden Age”.
PICTURES
I have some pictures, mainly from today at work. These are presented as a ’tiled mosaic’ – click an individual image to view at full size.
From here to the Watt medallion are tokens that I scanned at high resolution and worked on to produce the clearest possible images.
These last few pics are not work pics – they are the best images I have managed to get of the James Watt medallion I bought recently.
AFTERWORD
Many people on both facebook and twitter have wished my a happy birthday and I thank all of you for so doing – the main celebration, a Sunday lunch at the Crown in East Rudham two days before the actual day was superb.
I love trees, do you?
Wise words from Anna – King’s Lynn politicians take note!
I don’t get why the politicians in my municipality Trosa keeps erase our forests. They think building houses is top priority. They don’t care for the climate changes at all. They keep b…
Source: I love trees, do you?
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