Shifting Shape

We live quite remote, not Yukon remote, but enough that you don't want to run out of milk because driving to the nearest shop for more will double the cost per litre. Amenities like a cash-point, gas-station, or chinese-takeaway are much more remote. When we go visit Pat the Salt's old place in Tramore, it's different. The library, for one example, is so close you could hit it with a tennis-ball thrown from the garden. We were in town [in our bib-overalls and shedding straw] earlier in June and I popped up to the library to see what they had for non-fiction / science. 

Fair enough that most of the books in a small town library are General Fiction, that's what normal people go to browse the collection. It was kinda woeful that there was just over one shelf covering the whole of DeweyDecimal 500, that includes 510 Mathematics 520 Astronomy 530 Physics 540 Chemistry 550 Earth sciences and geology 560 Fossils and prehistoric life 570 Biology 580 Botany 590 Zoology. Compared to 10 linear metres labelled CRIME. What is this obsession among Citizens with over-stepping the bounds of the law?

BUT, I did find another book Shape: The Hidden Geometry of Information, Biology, Strategy, Democracy, and Everything Else [2021] by Jordan Ellenberg. to carry on from How Not to be Wrong [bloborecent]. Shape is more recent and also 400+ pages but the font is bigger. 

Another book I've just finished suggests that kids can be quite different in their learning styles and good teachers run through a variety of approaches to new material hoping / expecting that some kids will 'get it' in one way, while another bunch will prefer a different perspective. Really great teachers will stop their gallop and pause to ensure that the lesson is learned. Ellenberg confesses early in this book that he never got geometry, preferring an algebraic approach if that was available and appropriate. Euclid, like all the ancient Greek mathematicians / philosophers were embedded in geometrical models: if you couldn't scratch it in the dust, it wasn't real.

I was 'good at maths' and able to get to grips with arithmetic, geometry, algebra, even calculus as they came up in the curriculum. Even outside of class, I would riffle through puzzle books by Martin Gardner and others. One standard set of problems was "Series": being presented with a list of numbers and asked to guess work out what the next two numbers were:

• 2, 4, 6, 8, . . .; . . . 
• 10, 7, 4, 1, . . .; . . .
• 1, 4, 9, 16, 25, 36, . . . ; . . .

The first two Series are changing by a fixed amount [+2 and -3] to generate the next number. But the 3rd one has gaps of 3 then 5 then 7 . . . between successive numbers. Those differences are changing by a fixed amount; maybe we called it a second order series back in the day?Having been drilled in my times-tables, I recognised that third Series as being of square numbers. But one day as a tween I had an Aha! to twig that they were called Square Numbers because you can draw them in the dirt as squares. And further, that was the reason why adding successive odd numbers to 1 [as in the diagram above R] generated the series of Square Numbers.

Because Ellenberg thinks better in the abstractions of algebra, he has had to struggle to make sense of the world through Shape. That struggle has compelled him to think through each problem clearly and that really helps him to explain the issue and solution cleanly.

Footnote on p311 resonated with moi-le-plongeur. "A disagreeable feature of the Erdös legend: it encourages some mathematicians to see domestic work as somehow beneath our station and beyond our capabilities at once. And yet we eat food and wear clean shirts. Fact: thinking about mathematics while washing dishes is good for both mathematiciansand, if your are prone to reveries as most mathematiciansare, the dishes".

I like his throw-away jokes, not always confined to the [copious] foot-notes. "A sporting event is not just an algorithm; it may also be intended to provide entertainment, generate tax revenue, narcotize a seething populace etc. -- but an algorithm is one of the things that it is". He discusses why a match between two players as best of three games [or 20 overs in cricket , or 5 sets of six games in tennis, or playing a league of other teams both Home and Away in soccer] is more likely to find the better players than the result of a single play. There is also a desperate, depressing chapter about how gerrymandering [whc prev] can be really effective in birthing a totalitarian state.

Lafcadio

The years tick themselves off. Nine years ago, every Monday morning, I accompanied Pat the Salt, then 92y.o., to the Tramore Community Centre and Wheels-on-Wheels hub for sessions of The Heritage Club. The Big Room at the TCC looked out over a steep fall of trees and shrubs between Pond Road and Upper Branch Road. That woodland was making its +10-year transformation into the Lafcadio Hearn Japanese Gardens.

On 8th June this year, we were down among The Great and The Good [aka The Olds] of Waterford to witness the official opening of the Kokoro Centre - an all-weather venue with a sweeping view over the rooftops of Tramore Bay and Brownstown Head.

Underneath the street-level room with terrace [seen above] is another auditorium which may comfortably seat 100 guests. That was where the dignitaries [minister, mayor, local TDs, senior trustee, ambassador] made their speeches.

Then it was outside [L] into the almost drizzle, for more [shorter] speeches and unveiling of plaque. Astutely, the management of the event had realised that The Minister would be late, so allocated the first hour to the distribution of tea & canapés, networking and wandering around the gardens. People who can take a couple of hours out of a Monday afternoon skew Old and you really do not want a flock of hangry pensioners loose on the premises and/or queuing for the t'ilets. The canapés were catered by Daoti Sushi which are in business on Queen Street not 200m from the gardens - that's how cosmopolitan Tramore is in 2026.

We were last on Kokoro business fully 20 months ago when the previous ambassador 'laid the foundation stone'. So building a 2½ room extension in the Gardens has been quicker than finishing the National Children's Hospital. But I must point out that the Empire State Building was opened on 1st May 1931, 18 months after foundations were sunk. 

And Solution begat Problem

Institutions, governments and countries all have structural inertia. I worked for several years teaching science in The Institute. Science has been the driver of the technical changes impacting Life for at least 100 years. I can do things from my sofa you 11.y.o. me wouldn't believe (video call to CapeTown; pay Joe the washing-machine whizz; buy a book from Kennys; order Tesco to deliver bacon, cabbage and spuds asap). Tech which is commonplace now, was unimaginable 5 or 10 years ago. We teachers at The Institute aspired to launch students who were equipped to thrive in the New New. Devising a new course was was easy: ask what needed teaching, and what resources were needed to achieve that. But, getting the new course approved by management was trudging through a paper mangrove swamp: learning outcomes LOs had to be written up in Officialese; deliverables had to conjured in optimistic babble; technical staff had to be schmoozed into, like, working with new kit rather than drifting between tea-breaks. What gets lost in the obsession with curriculum, documentation and LOs is teaching our technical good-pair-of-hands students to think on their feet rather perform by the book.

Although life is 'more convenient' it is also more complex. The number of things Ordinary Folk can/should do themselves diminishes with each passing year. In the house we bought in England, I installed a new electric-socket on the far side of the living room by hauling a cable after me in the crawl-space under the floor-boards. I wouldn't do that now: I've known at least one case where faulty wiring caused a fire between the studs of a kitchen wall. This January, I learned about RCD [residual current detectors] which are now routinely installed in domestic electric circuits to trip before incommming water causes an electrical short, fire and multiple deaths. One thing I learned in January was that you really don't want to lose power to your fridge or freezer while you're away on, say, holiday or a field-trip.

But modern Sparkses are aware of that issue and modern best practice is to put the fridge-freezer on a separate circuit. So that, for example, a leaky kettle doesn't trip off the entire kitchen circuit and ruin your wholesaler stash of frozen pizza. That's a solution to a potential problem, but the devil is in the details of implementation. Pat-the-Salt's old gaff on Costa na Déise has spent the last year undergoing a major refurb and refit. We were down there for a few days at the beginning of May: cleaning and gardening and chopping wood for a new stove. As we were leaving, Dau.II pointed to the wall switch [as L ☉] beside the fridge and asked "Should that be off?". We agreed that the light should be red and the fridge should be left ON. And it was so, and we left, without getting into blame about who had switched the freezer off.

Four weeks later we were back in the house and I opened the fridge to get a dash of milk for the tea. Because I was alone in the kitchen and right in front on the door, I heard a click and noticed the fridge light went off. Aha! If anyone opens the fridge door fully, it makes contact with the separate-circuit rocker switch on the wall and turns the fridge off. The electrician's solution to a vanishingly rare eventuality was to install a switch which is far more susceptible to getting switched off accidentally. Very slow hand clap.

We are now canvassing solutions. I favour gluing half a beach-combed tennis ball to the fridge door (anywhere will do, except right opposite the switch). But a stack of hilarious fridge magnets, or half a wine cork would serve as well. Someone else suggested a frame round the switch - it just needs to be 2cm proud of the wall. 

8 by 9

When I was young [in England, Ireland was ambivalent about WWs, poppies] Armistice Day was still marked on the 11th of November, with a 2 minute silence at 11:00hrs. You were expected to STOP what you were doing, stand up and remember the dead of WWI. But as the survivors of WWI diminished through subsequent attrition, and as Britain was again at it during WWII, this national mark of respect was considered too damaging to the economy and the main ceremonies were shifted to the nearest Sunday, when many workers resting anyway. Most other official religious and secular holidays have shifted to the nearest Monday rather than the day itself. St Patrick's Day is a most welcome bucker of this trend as it cycles through the week rather than being bundled into a Long Weekend.

Likewise birthdays, if you-as-an-adult are going to have A Party to celebrate clocking off another year, chances are you'll shift it to the nearest weekend - to increase the likelihood that your friends & relations can be present to raise a glass and down some cake. Today, according to Daylight Saving Time, is my birthday: my actual birth was just before midnight on 16 June 1954 but all the docs give d.o.b. as the 17th. Dau.I and Dau.II aka Bookie and Cookie invited us up the Dublin last Sunday Lá Fhéile Caomhán . . . for Cake (and a walk). 

They asked what sort of a cake The Patriarch would prefer. I replied with aggravating faux-humility that "Oh, I don't want a whole cake, just a slice of cake would do". Dau.I announced that, whatever I had to say, she was going to have another go at perfecting her lemon and raspberry cheesecake: she is making it her signature bring-a-cake solution when required at work or after work. On Saturday, I noticed we had an egg-glut at home, and decided to make my signature 5-egg, 1.7kg fruit & nut "Christmas" cake. Dau.II, meanwhile, who has been baking novelty cakes since she was about 8 y.o. took my comment literally and constructed A Slice of orange butter-cream chocolate layer cake of Brobdingnagian size [L with teapot for scale]. So it was Cake Wars on Sunday afternoon when we came back from a walk in the Glasnevin Botanic Gardens.

In the past, I have asserted that The icing on the cake of day is for me to spend it alone on the hill, so long as there was tea-and-toast at five o'clock. But scoffing cakes with family makes a prretty good day too. But Today is the Actual Bday when I turn 72 = 2³ x 3² still have my marbles, knees still work, not homeless, life is good.

Lett Us Create

On dit que The definition of stupidity is doing things over and over hoping for a different result. It's defo like that with me and lettuce. I like a BLT; shop-lettuce is a dollar a pop & can be awash with coliform; we have hectares. 
Q, How difficult could it be to GIY?
A. For me, molare-sappingly, uneconomically difficult.
But here we are in 2026 on lettuce-repeat. I bought seed, they cost money. I planted them in tiny pots on 21 April. Five weeks later, half of them were no-show; half were 5-leaves / 8cm big and cluttering my window-sill. I planted them out [R]; they fell over, and despite the referee counting they were disinclined to get up.

In May, I was given a 5-leaf courgette plant among a trayful of misc tomato and squash. It is doing much better [L]. Not to be the ingrate, but I get cognitive dissonance over yellow courgette, so I'll have to eat them blindfold. Likewise bell-peppers, which should be green or maybe red, but they are often sold 🇧🇯 🇲🇱 🇨🇲 🇧🇴 🇨🇬 as if a) we all had a faarm in Africa and b) were ardent patriots. We have grown bell-peppers in the polytunnel . . . two of them, the size of crab-apples. At least they were green.

There has been a bit of a reno down at Pat the Salt's gaff on Costa na Déise. A pair of antient wrought-iron gates turned out to be supported entirely by rust and brambles and were pulled out of the gap in the road-frontage wall. Only mad people have steel gates down on the Costa where the half-life of a wheelbarrow is about 15 months. It's the salt, innit. The Beloved was inclined to screen the gap with a garden trellis and encourage honey-suckle or sweet-peas to fill in the gaps. These trellises are made from lath-and-staples which might stop a jack-russell, but were scarcely capable of having me lean-on-the-gate while chatting to the neighbours. and they only came in 600mm, 1200mm or 1800mm lengths [we needed 2300mm] and they cost €40.

It's not for nothing that I've spent half my life, combing the beaches of the Costa. Fathoms of rope, scores of buoys, a dozen fish-boxes, an anchor have all been saved from Poseidon Manannán mac Lir and given a new life ashore. But I have also been slowly progressing a project to make a sculpture from wave-tossed and sand-scoured tree-branches which in cycles litter the tide-line.  I figured that when I had 206 pieces of the right size (from phalanges to femurs) I could assemble an articulated wooden pal for buoy-boy. Obvs, I knew that I'd need more like 2060 timber-toes to pick-and-choose from. 

A few days later, when I was alone on site, I gathered by driftwood archive together. I made a frame from 5 pieces of timber off-cut about 1m long and made a proof of principle ProtoTypoGato; 

I left the original where The Beloved couldn't help but see it and sent a photo to the next generation. Everyone hated it! But were kind enough to say little. Which was just as well because, once The Shock of the New had its corners knocked off by a couple of sleeps, I had constructive comments about how the basic idea could be improved. Rip some of the Western Red Cedar planks from the 2016 woodshed project to make the horizontal rails, for example.  I feel a mort happier about this than I do about verdomde GIY lettuce.

A Different Kind of Power

In the 1991, the fellows of Trinity College Dublin elected a new Provost, a well regarded Classical scholar who wrote the books on Cicero. So far, so conservative. But Mitchell was the first Catholic in the post for 300 years . . . and <frisson> the first who still had children young enough to be housed in #1 Grafton Street his official residence. The three boys had bedrooms carved out of the cellars and it was the first time a dart-board was installed in the Provost's House. Having close relatives who were actual students in his patrimony gave him an insight into the doings and needs of that often disregarded under-class. Catholic? children? it took another 30 years for Ye Fellowes to elect a Womanas Provost, but here they are now.

Three of the last four Presidents of Ireland have been women. On the far side of the World, they started electing women as Prime Minister in 1999 and since then only about half those heads of government have been men. Good thing too, women hold up half the sky, and we should put them in charge about half the time. They don't have to be better at the job than blokes, just different.  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result [NotTwain, NotEinstein]. 

I've just finished ear-booking Jacinda "PM, GNZM" Adhern's autobiography A Different Kind of Power [2025] in which she describes reinventing herself as a youngster, leaving her Church [LDS-Mormon] because of its repugnant attitudes of the status of The Gays and women, not to mention BIPOCs. I try to make time for people who have changed their mind on something embedded in family or culture. It may be mere contrariness, but more often [i.m.e.] it has required some deep thought about uncomfortable [cognitive] dissonance. Adhern joined the NZ Labour party before she was old enough to vote because she looked around her at The Dispossessed and a) decided that's not good enough and b) asked what can I do?

She was on a half-year semester abroad at U.Arizona when aeroplanes crashed into buildings on 11Sep01. Most classes were cancelled that day, but one Professor insisted that His class would schedule as normal . . . because, else, the Enemy would win. He invited the class to say how they were feeling, and accepted without comment sentiments which lurched from outrage, patriotism and defiance to frank expressions of Islamophobia. Adhern felt obliged to call out this superficial assessment and demonization of 2 billion people, including 4 million legit resident in the USA. Her "Not all Muslims" speech from the floor fell on deaf ears; but someone needed to speak the words.

It would be a tiresome book if it was chocka with tales of how Adhern was Right, or Compassionate, or AheadOfTheCurve. And indeed, the only times I felt a bit choked up as I listened were when Other people were unexpectedly kind and supportive.

Exec Summ Elec Proc. 30 years ago, NZ ditched the UK-adjacent FPP electoral system in favour of " mixed-member proportional (MMP)". There legislative branch is UniCameral - so no Senate, let alone a House of Lordlings. 60% of the 120 seats are elected in the British way: the winner of the most votes in 72 constituencies gets a seat in parliament for the next three years. In the run up to the election, each registered Pol Party goes into conclave and rank all their candidates in whatever order seems good to that caucus. Each ballot in the election offers two votes: one for a candidate in the locality and one for a party. These latter votes are all tallied up and the remaining 40% of seats in the national parliament are divvied up proportional to the popular vote. 

Putting others first 1) The 2008 election, Grant Robertson, big, gay, bespectacled, rugger-playing insider was nominated for the Labour List. He stood up and declined the honour unless and until Jacinda Adhern was listed for the party. As it happened Robertson held his constituency for the Labour party and Adhern sailed into parliament by being sufficiently high up The List. He didn't have to do that, it wasn't in his interests to do that, it was notably unusual to do that, but he did it. Believing that the country would be better off by gaming Adhern into a seat of power. Less than 10 years later Adhern was Prime Minister and her first cabinet appointment for Grant Robertson as Finance Minister. It was never seen by either of them as pay-back time, because for both of them politics was a vehicle for making the world a better place . . . for Others . . . for Everyone. <snif snif, me>

Putting others first 2)  On 15 Mar 2019 a 20-something gun-nut [conspi]racist from Australia carried out a mass-shooting in Christchurch, NZ: killing 51 people in and around two Sunni mosques.. Adhern, the leader of the country, binned her diary and turned up to bear witness and answer questions [R Christchurch City Council Newsline/Kirk Hargreaves] in Christchurch the next day. She calmed a crowd of distraught, grieving, confused people in a local Community Centre. She had a difficulty task, not least because The State would have to over-ride the Sharia imperative of getting the dead back to their families, washed, shrouded and into the ground asap. Her preferred soundbyte for media became They Are Us: because her New Zealand was, and was happy to be, a multicultural society; where diversity of people generated diversity of solutions to the ongoing enshittification of human existence. [See Caitlin Moran?]. Later she visited the mosque to show she cared, to listen to the pain, to answer questions. Towards the end of the session an 8.y.o. Kashmiri girl raised her hand. Her question was "And how are You?". Because some people, be they 8 or 18 or 80, can read the souls of those who are hurting and can by their tone and demeanour offer solace. A while later, this same girl waded through the departing crowd to the front of the room to hug the Prime Minister, her Prime Minister. <sobbin'>

This time last year The Rest Is Politics Leading interviewed Jacinda Ardern. If you haven't time to listen to an entire book.

math book thud

I've been on a math-for-norms book binge. Singh then Eastaway and now Jordan Ellenberg's How not to be Wrong (2014). Which is the same title as a book by James "LBC" O'Brien. The subtitles distinguish: JE . . . The Power Of Mathematical Thinking [US] OR The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life [UK IE] vs JO'B . . . the Art of Changing Your Mind. Want an insight into the tawdry prejudice that can inhabit the head of a radio presenter [or your own]? Choose O'Brien. Deal with your own math-anxiety and get a better crap-detector? That would be Ellenberg. He doesn't claim that math is easy, but maintains that you will be better off [and less often bamboozled by sharks] if you knuckle down to the work of squeezing sense from numbers. Compared to Singh and Eastaway, Ellenberg's book has more pages and a teeny-tiny font and many even smaller footnotes and an index: it is meant to be taken seriously, hence "thud" in the title. But it is also meant to make math fun and some of Ellenberg's waggish asides 

It's also okay to make your own fun where math meets literature. As when you hunt for ELS [equidistant letter sequences] in The Torah, [or like Meeee in genomes, or GenBank or Magna Carta]. The Torah = the Pentateuch = The first five books of the Old Testament: Gen Exo Lev Num Deu = The Word of God! About 30 years ago, three math-comp-phys whizzes loaded up the Torah and wrote a program to look for hidden messages in a text written 2,500 years ago in Hebrew. In fine, they looked by ELS for, and found, the names and b.days of 32 'modern' rabbis. They also jumbled the order of the holy letters to see whether you could find that good of signal in random Hebrew letters . . . and [compufolk can do that sort of thing in perl or python] then re-jumbled the text a million times to get a measure of just how unlikely were their prophet-finding results! It caused a stir at the time and not just among people who'd done the bar-mitzvah. Push-back came quickly and Ellenberg uses the tale to be skeptical about other crazy 'truths' which seize the public imagination every few years [Dan Brown, we see you].

One of the themes which runs through the book is Utility: how evaluate competing desiderata so as to come up to some optimum solution. He quotes one pundit as saying that "If you never miss a plane, you're not doing it right spending too much time at airports". To get to the airport in Good Time, you've skipped breakfast and left home before airport-shuttle: so you're down the cost of a taxi AND a €9 croissant from Costa Packet. If you fly twice a month those deficits (we'll ignore the sleep deficit and the hazard of using the airport t'ilet) will far exceed the cost of rescheduling the missed flight. And not only travel: Surgeons who never kill patients aren't pushing the envelope of their cutty craft.

Also The Variance! There is a whole chapter on winning the Lotto. For about a decade, Massachusetts ran a lottery where on some occasions, the expected utility of a $2 ticket was ~$5. Something, something roll-down excess jackpot something something match 5 winners. On such draw-days, at least three different consortia bought A Lot of tickets. One group wrote a script to generate 000s of different 6 number combos. Another group just rocked up to convenience stores with $10,000 in cash and did quick-pick; which saved the confederates some RSI from making pen-marks on Lotto forms. The winnings were about the same for each strategy. Across the state, ordinary folk were winning also but with only $2 up-front their odds of winning were slim enough. The consortia, by covering more bases, smoothed out the variance and more or less ensured that they would cash out close to the expected utility.

Because we love each other ver' much, Ellenberg has some overlap with The Blob: Poincaré's bus-step; Cantor's infinities; Abraham's armour; Nate Silver's uncertainty; Shannon's bits; Hamming's bit-errors; Pearson & Son.  I recommend this book: you don't have to read all 120,000 words. And it will help your crap-detector for interpreting Gallup polls, press headlines, and political pundits.

Amen to this: "I think we have to teach math that values precise answers but also intelligent approximation, that demands the ability to deploy existing algorithms fluently but also the horse sense to work things out on the fly, that mixes rigidity with a sense of play". But later he says ""Nobody ever looks in the mirror and says "Let's face it, I'm smarter than Gauss"."" Maybe we should hope that at least one reader may grow up to be that Nobody.