Kaleidoscope

photographs through kaleidoscope

 

musical experience to share

musical experience to share
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

excellent stuff

FIIR Oshodi

FIIR Oshodi
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

Ted Jefferies had the idea for, set up, built, and was the first director of, the Federal Institute of Industrial Research in Nigeria. It is located at Oshodi, which is close to Lagos Airport. This is an early picture. There is a link here to Margaret Jefferies' 1951 Nigeria Trip diary, which predates this picture and the building of the institute, by several years.

quartic mandelbrot 060703

quartic mandelbrot 060703
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

MGJ sent me a link to visionsofchaos, whose software generated this image which comes top of the popular/interesting rank at www.flickr.com/photos/rabinal/

I am now trying to recover some old C programs, by writing a new image driver for them using GD and the Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for C/C++ at Bloodshed (google it).

The original chaos work and fractal generation dates from the early 1980s, before I became Editor of the IJE.

Mathematics and Clergy

The Vicar and the Virger are standing in front of the church looking up at the West door, over which is inscribed the year when the church was built.

Vicar:- "It's funny, but that number is the sum of the squares of the ages of my cousin's two daughters"

Virger:-"I can't tell you their ages uniquely. Are they the same age?"

Vicar:-"If I was to tell you that, you'd be able to do the problem, so I'm not telling you."

Virger:-"Aha Vicar, now I know uniquely" and he tells the Vicar the ages of the cousin's two daughters.

When was the church built?

----------------------
credit David W Masser, Nottingham, 1970s. 

Students

This is an observation about students. I seem to remember in the 1960s being considered to be a very bright student. This was probably because I always tried to appear to understand everything that was said to me in tutorials, and to express my own insights in my own words.

Recently some students have not understood why they are marked down for plagiarising other sources. With the time pressure we are all under nowadays, there is every motivation to submit pre-cooked work for assignments; it saves effort and in its own way requires careful selection and assembly of material. Academics have been doing this for years, with their long lists of sources, references, and bibliographies in published articles. The rules of the game are that one gives credit to other people for their contributions.

Plagiarism by students wears down the academics, who instead of providing helpful feedback, spend hours searching for likely prime sources for what they are reading. Often the work goes through undetected, to be quoted anew by later plagiarists.

Eventually, people ask about everything, "where did that come from?" which is unsettling if the work in question really IS novel and original.

Strange attractor

sec2 - attractor
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

Follow the links from the picture to see what this might be all about other than just being a pretty proto-biological pattern.

Ball games

Teams

DJ Ecuador
CJ Iran
CV Australia

9th June 2006
Ecuador 2
Poland 0
Yay!

12th June 2006
Australia 3
Japan 1
Yay!

15th June 2006
Ecuador 3
Costa Rica 0
Yay! Yay!

21st June 2006
Summer Solstice
Iran 1
Angola 1
Yay!

22nd June 2006
Australia 2
Croatia 2
Yay! Sigh of relief!

Parus Caeruleus

Parus Caeruleus 2006 at 14th May

Newly hatched eggs. There is another nestbox waiting to hatch, a few days later. The site below will show both boxes.

For birds see

www.flickr.com/photos/parus2006/

For other topics see also

www.flickr.com/photos/rabinal/

LP record processing

CJ's method:-

Use Mac powerbook laptop or other Mac
Use iMic (Griffin) line-to-usb input converter
Use decent turntable, play record and capture as .wav file on Mac using free "final vinyl" software from griffin site.
Use "max" software (google it) to convert .wav to .mp4 file.
One Vinyl LP occupies 40MB as .mp4
Play .mp4 on iPod or Mac directly.

Windows users, play using realplayer
Download freebie realplayer (NOT full version)
Go to realplayer site, click on 5th tab along saying "realplayer" and choose "basic version" for download.
About 17 LP records fit on one CD as .mp4

Music evolution

I asked JHBD how many playable pieces of piano music lasting 30 minutes he thought could exist, mathematically speaking. He replied "more than a million factorial". So if music evolves by random mutation and natural selection, what is the probability of finding a new appealing piece which will enter the canon of "classics" and last indefinitely in the public domain? It seems that most music which is written is doomed to extinction, and the remainder provides a pool of "life" from which further mutations may be made.

Jordan life

camel plus
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

CRV has observed that nearly everyone in meetings in Jordan, smokes. In the UK we have forgotten what this was like. Ted Jefferies's first modification of any new car he bought, was to add a spring clip to the dashboard to hold his (lit) pipe while driving. He would then detach the pipe from its clip at regular intervals, and suck on it to keep it alight. He also had a deft way of lighting it, clamped between his teeth, single handedly using his lighter. We became used to the smell of smoke and nicotine and tar in the car, mixed with exhaust fumes, oil, and petrol.

Braidwood organ

braidwood-organ
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

This organ is in the Anglican Church in Braidwood, NSW. My experience of taking this photo is very memorable; the intrusive diptera all stayed outside the door of the church, giving me blessed relief.

For a nice blog (in French) of exotic organs and organ cases please see

didber.club-blog.fr

author Didier de Rennes - France

Huitzilopochtli

In the education game there are two statements that are often made.

"They don't know about this, because they haven't taken the course on it yet"

"They had this material in year X, so they certainly know about it"

Both these statements are often wrong.

It appears that the network manager here, CJ, has never needed formal instruction but is now very useful. How did this happen?

Sandbanks, Poole

Jefferies and Galton family history at this site dates from the first half of the 20th century. This is a spit of sand at the mouth of Poole Harbour, on which are built many des. res.

This (seaward) side of Sandbanks is known in family parlance as the "rough side", and the harbour side is contrariwise the "smooth side". The elder Jefferies used to search for cockles, which lived on the interface between sand and squidgy mud in the harbour, by using their bare feet.

victor

victor
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

Iconic remark

model-express

model-express
Originally uploaded by rabinal.

Picture for Joshua

A month late

daffodils 

Oriental addition

Bamboo

(fargesia)

'bimbo' 

Patio palm

Cordyline australis 'red star' 

Patio gardening

Rock heather

Pieris japonica 'prelude' 

Consciousness and memory

Somewhere in the past week has come into my mind that consciousness is not an attribute entirely contained in the brain, but involves interactions with the world outside in the form of people, images, the written word, visits to places, and so on. This concept has been reinforced by my revisiting archived colour film negatives with a scanner, from the distant past. All of a sudden one realises that one knows and comprehends very much more than comes to mind if one just sits in one's chair and trys to remember. The old images bring to mind much associated detail that one had thought forgotten.

In a similar way, listening to old recordings that one has made as an instrumentalist brings back the state of mind one was in when one recorded them. The point is that the information in the recall is lots more than the information in the prompting image or recording, but would not be accessible without that prompt.

Panops's template disaster

Panops (this blog) has been down for some time, with a corrupt template file caused by trying to post to it from a Mac Mini, and then from a linux box. By choosing a new template and republishing, the situation is recovered. Thanks to the helpful folk at Blogger who responded to the request for guidance after a search of the FAQ pages had not resolved the issue.

More photos

Today, Monday, has been spent scanning slides with the film scanner and taking a few town photos on my morning constitutional to get the paper (The Courier Mail if you need to know, it is a Murdoch one).

To get some order into this I went into the archive and looked for slides of African animals for a start; it is easier to deal with one subject at a time. I can also practise finding the latitude and longditude from Google Earth using the various tools one can find out about from the geotagging group. I might be enthused enough to add links to some of these later.

must move on!!!

More learning

Well so far I have added a link to the Flickr photos and my email address. More customisation later still!

Panops: Learning and using

Panops: Learning and using

Learning and using

Now I am retired from the coffee making, reporting to the tax-man life led before we moved to 'Sunny Queensland' I must start to use the tools I have. With the 'fast' internet connection there is a world of opportunity.

Currently I am working on the scanning of photos, having got the film scanner up and running. Some results can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/ogcodes/91326382/ for example but there are lots to come.

More later!!