Spiral logic

I must be getting old. One of my brighter students asked me today to demonstrate a piece of physics with the irrefutable logic of mathematics. No, this wasn't a complex problem, but I found myself looking for an elegant, shatterproof piece of algebra that satisfied me, which I found a little bit demanding. Which led me, as spirals will, back to Fibonacci and I asked myself whether I could use a spreadsheet to reproduce a two-dimensional Fibonacci series as an equation.

This is how far I got in twenty minutes. I was quite pleased, since at the very least, it doesn't break any rules and at most, it's quite pretty. I might try again with a similar problem next year.

International Day

Despite a late night last night, for reasons too dark, complex and unpleasant to relate, today was really rather jolly, being International Day at school. There are thirty-seven different nationalities, excluding Cornwall which insisted on its own T shirt, six more than Baskin Robbins, and everyone makes an effort to celebrate their cultural identity with singing, dancing, music and food. Parents vie with each other - there's a competitive feel to the proceedings - to help put on the most lavish culinary displays - the Americans and Egyptians almost came to blows over the 'borrowing' of six tables that were earmarked for the hamburgers and Kool-Aid fresh in from the US base - the South East Asians were appropriately dressed in multicoloured national costumes, the Lebanese girls wiggled bejewelled hips seductively on the stage and, inevitably, the Kuwaitis paid someone to do it all for them. A few flavourful images, enjoy...

Eostre

Another Embassy visit today, for the Easter Dawn Service.

Rumour has it that we can thank the Venerable Bede whose writings include references to the Anglo-Saxon  Eosturmonath, the month of the goddess Eostre for naming Easter.

A frequently repeated - but wholly unsourced - story relates how Eostre found a wounded, freezing bird and transformed it into a hare to ‘save’ it. The hare continued to be able to lay eggs and did so each spring in gratitude to the goddess.  A neat, improbable conjoint, I think.

Eostre (or 'a') seems to have been the divinity of the radiant dawn, of upspringing light, a spectacle that brings joy and blessing, whose meaning was perhaps adapted for the resurrection-day of the Christian God, the ancients being notorious for hedging their bets since allegiance to one deity invariably ticked off the others - rather like supporting two football teams at the same time. Bonfires were lit at Easter and according to popular belief the moment the sun rises on Easter Sunday morning, she (or perhaps, he) gives three joyful leaps, and dances for joy. Water drawn on Easter morning is, like that at Christmas, holy and healing. Maidens clothed in white, who at Easter, at the season of returning spring, show themselves in clefts of the rock and on mountains, are suggestive of the ancient goddess. 

In the Embassy gardens this morning, no maidens, clad or otherwise, peeped out from behind the bushes, no hares gambolled, no eggs were discovered in hedgerows; instead a dawn chorus of familiar numbers from Godspell started off the proceedings. Lovely. However, I still think that sticking to Pesach would've been much fairer to everyone.

Contrasts

...continued

I met a photographer the other day, and paid him the gravest insult imaginable by making some completely inane remark about how many weddings he must have to attend every year. Sorry, Charlie. It did, however, provoke me into looking at my own mediocre photographic archives - everyone's a David Bailey since pixellation and Microsoft. I'm fascinated by the differences between the man-made and naturally occurring - the man-made having a fractal clumsiness while the natural has a breadth and sweep of detail which makes the man- made look half-finished. A couple of images illustrate the point, shot with my very own Kodak EasyShare V803. There was unfortunately a brewing storm, which rather took away the sharpness and the feel of Lego bricks that I wanted. The bottom shot is of an Oxfordshire wall.

Serendipity

Kuwait occasionally has the power to surprise. I'm not a great lover of IKEA, being neither in my mid 20's nor having a relish for unfinished pine and flat-pack. It so happens, however, to be the 25th anniversary of their startup here and instead of stark, Scandinavian minimalia, in a corner of the restaurant there was an exhibition of Arabic craftsmanship, with artisans using hands, feet and curiously shaped, improbably sharp knives with the cavalier abandon born of a lifetime's practice, making beautiful furniture, children's toys and sea-chests, in celebration of local culture. The contrast was curiously warming, like finding something beautiful in a place where beauty ought not to be, like a flower seller in a war zone. This man took less than twenty minutes of relaxed, effortless manipulation to make a child's toy from scratch, including stripping the date palm, making holes, fitting and finishing. An impressive performance indeed.

Yesterday's post was depressing and in bad taste. Perhaps this will redress the balance a little

The Dark Side

Kidnapping is by no means unknown here, together with ransom demands. Someone sent this to me recently, and I'm reproducing it word for word here. Carrefour is a busy, modern hypermarket in the middle of a vast shopping mall, frequented by the well-heeled, Westernised and, one might suppose, civilised members of the community. A few days ago, this happened...

A mother was leaning over looking for meat and turned around to find her four year old daughter was missing. I was standing there right beside her and she was calling her daughter with no luck.

I asked a man who worked at Carrefour to announce it over the loudspeaker. He immediately walked right past me after I asked and went to a pole where there was a phone. He made an announcement for all the doors and gates to be locked - using a store code or something. So they locked all the doors at once.

This took all of three minutes after I asked the guy to do this. They found the little girl five minutes later in the store's toilet cubicle - drugged.
Her head was half-shaved and was dressed in her underwear with a bag of clothes, a razor, and a wig sitting on the floor beside her - most likely to make her look different! Whoever this despicable person was took the little girl, brought her into the bathroom, shaved half her head and undressed her in a matter of less than 10 minutes.

Most of us float comfortably on the warm waters of secure and predictable events. Underneath - not far below the surface, it seems - is a dark, putrid, seething stewpot of pure evil, which we rarely even see, much less touch. Were this my daughter, what kind of blind, unreasoning rage would have been unleashed in me, and what kind of vengeance would I have exacted, had I caught the perpetrator? I wonder, does this make me as evil as him?

In  lighter and tastelessly flippant bad taste, I came across this image. Ironically over 50% of Kuwaitis are clinically obese.