Time for a revolution

I’ve always thought that our way of telling time doesn’t fit our culture very well, particularly the way that a day officially begins at midnight. What sense does that make in a culture where people so often stay up beyond that time? Below is my idea for a better system.

Let the day be divided into four sections: morning (6:00am to midday), afternoon (midday to 6:00pm), evening (6:00pm to midnight) and night (midnight to 6:00am). It seems to me that these definitions are very similar to the way people already use these terms, but under my proposal it would be official.

Let night be known as post-evening and also as pre-morning, so that “post-evening Saturday” is synonymous with “pre-morning Sunday“. This should be thought of as analagous to the fact that in music, “C Sharp” is synonymous with “D Flat“. Thus the six hours from midnight to 6am would belong equally to both the day before and the day after, and during that period you could please yourself how to use the terms “yesterday” and “tomorrow” (just as people do now after midnight, but without the uneasy feeling of being technically incorrect).

Floating seeds in mountain rivers

A few years ago (around 2004 or so) I was working on an instrumental composition with the working title “Floating Seeds in Mountain Rivers“, but somehow I got distracted with life and never finished it. Anyway, I have decided to make the portion that I wrote available to musicians, and you can click here to read it.

If this inspires you to write an ending of your own, please get in touch and arrange some way to share your ideas with me. I’m not looking for help, as I can improvise any number of endings, but to see what endings other people come up with would be interesting. Perhaps some day I’ll get around to completing the composition for myself.

Vine tiles for kitchen

Plans to renovate my kitchen are currently under development. Which reminds me: quite some time ago, I had an idea for the wall tiles that I’d consider ideal for my kitchen.

Unfortunately, none of the people who actually manufacture tiles seem to have come up with the same idea, which involves a vine pattern made up of two types of square tiles that can be combined in arbitrary ways. The best way to explain this idea would be with some pictures.

More Starshots: The location of Heaven

Using Starstrider (the software I mentioned in my previous post), I have found a G-class star with a really nice view. I’m choosing to believe (at least in jest) that it is the location of Heaven. The star in question is about four hundred light years from Earth, and is known to astronomers by such inspiring names as HIP 20740 and HD 28113. Here are links to its web pages on Simbad and Wikisky.

What do I like about this star (apart from the fact that it’s a yellow G-class like the sun)? Well, for one thing, the Pleiades are about 100 light years away and perfectly aligned with the gap in the Milky Way which contains the stars Deneb and Sadr. Exactly 180 degrees across the sky, the stars Betelgeuse and Rigel guard opposite sides of another gap in the Milky Way. I happen to think these alignments look cool, and would probably give rise to interesting mythologies (the only snag is that you generally wouldn’t be able to see both from a single location on a planet).

Our place in the sky

Have you ever wondered what significance our Sun might have in alien astrology? This post contains pictures of imaginary constellations from the night skies of hypothetical planets orbiting real stars. All stars in these constellations are real, and in each case one of them is always our very own Sun.

I created the images using the shareware program Starstrider. It’s an excellent program in theory (and mostly in practise, too) but I’ve always felt it’s a little too buggy for the $50 US asking price. However, I’ve now decided to buy it, for two reasons. One, the exchange rate right now is such that it probably really is worth the price. Two, I expect that the next release of the program (which might fix some bugs) will not be compatible with my computer.

First of all, the the view from Alpha Centauri shows our Sun to be the very tip of an animalesque constellation’s snout. Compared to Delta Persei, which is quite a different orifice of the same beast, we may consider ourselves fortunate.

Introduction to “The Tale of the Three Altars”

This post contains excerpts from a magic routine that I invented; the excerpts should give you some flavour of the performance without giving too much away. Since originally writing this, I have started a seperate blog dedicated to magic, and the full routine can be found there - provided you can persuade me to give you the password.

It is basically an elaboration of the well-known 27-card trick, which magicians often regard as one of the most boring tricks in existence. But my version revitalises it by adding a story in which the cards represent treasures layed upon the altars of the gods, and also by having the cards shuffled by both the magician and the spectator in the middle of the trick. All the cards really are shuffled.

Puppets on the houseboat

In my previous post, I mentioned that we did a puppet play on the boat, and promised to elaborate. As part of our activities to involve the children, we made a couple of puppets from packaged kits. I made a caterpillar, and Rosemary made an ostrich.

Mum suggested that I should write a puppet play including these characters. With some help from Ellis (who contributed a couple of key ideas to the plot, including the ending), I did so. A sock puppet bird and a paper butterfly were constructed as minor characters, and the play was performed on Tuesday evening - the same day that I wrote it.

People who participated in the play were Kate (who acted the part of the tree, the cave and the rock), Kaye, Rebecca, Ellis and myself (as narrator). People in the audience were Mum, Dad, Sue, Robert, Katrina, Rosemary and Leah.

Robert videotaped the play, and I hope to get a copy at some stage. A transcript of my narrative appears below. This play was written on the same day as the final performance, and was rehearsed exactly once.

Calculator

If you designed your own scientific calculator - nothing too fancy or revolutionary, there are no bonus points for breaking with tradition nor for seeing how many buttons you can fit on - where would you place the buttons to make the calculator most pleasing to your mind’s eye? There is elegance and intellectual beauty in a layout whereby buttons adjacent to each other implement similar functionality and there is a reason for every button being situated exactly where it is, but how exactly would you maximise the elegance of your calculator? In this post, I will consider my own answer.

Elemental

Recently, I invented a new solitaire card game, which I have named “Elemental”. I’ve uploaded the rules in .pdf format, and I’ve also created a slideshow-like tutorial for people who prefer a gentler, slower explanation.

[Update: In October (whilst on a houseboat) I invented an improved version of the game. The official rules have now been updated to cover both the original and revised versions, but the tutorial still describes only the original.]

Script evolution

The hobby of conscripting is related to the hobby of conlanging (in fact conscripting is very often a part of conlanging). A conscript is the writing system (e.g. an alphabet) used by the inhabitants of a fictional reality. The inscription on the ring in The Lord of the Rings was written in a conscript.

It’s not something I’ve ever got into. However, one aspect of conscripting that I have played with a bit is that of simulating the way that scripts evolve over hundreds of years. In the real world, it is well known that different scripts are related to each other, as the shapes of letters were gradually modified by generations of writers. I recommend this website for the animated illustrations of the process, including the evolution of the latin alphabet (you may need to do a forced refresh (Ctrl-F5) in order to see it more than once).

So let’s play a game in which we take an existing script, and speculate on how it might have evolved in an alternative reality.