The big event this Easter is that my sister returned from overseas. Beginning before Christmas, she spent several weeks in India followed by several weeks in Papua New Guinea as part of her training to become a medical doctor. I have told her that if she wants to write something about this for a general audience then I am happy to publish it on this blog, and I understand she’s thinking about it.
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.
Earlier, I reported on the things I planned to see at the Adelaide Fringe Festival this year. Some of these things fulfilled my expectations, while others were disappointing (particularly Jimeoin). In addition to the shows I booked myself, Mum took me to a performance of Cycology. This was a real contrast to Cecile Corbel’s performance, which we saw on the same day, but both were enjoyable.
At Womedelaide, I bought not only music but also a number of craft items, including the eagle in the photograph below:
The rest of this post is dedicated to a review of Mediaeval Magic by the Lumina Vocal Ensemble, a choiral presentation of music from Europe in the Middle Ages. It was the last Fringe event that I’d booked to see, and I went with a friend who I had invited to the show.
Alioth recently recommended a web page on speeding up Firefox. I am trying out the suggested settings (except that I’ve set maxrequests to eight instead of thirty) and there seems to be some improvement but not a dramatic one. It’s hard to tell for sure. Anyway, I’ll keep the new settings unless they seem to cause problems later on.
This seems as good a time as any to discuss the themes and extensions that I’ve installed for Firefox (actually, that’s the real point of this post; the bit above is simply an excuse). What I won’t discuss are my gripes with the software (of which I have several), except when they are relevant to my choice of extensions. One of my gripes can be found in a comment I wrote on Alioth’s post above.
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.
THIS photograph was posted to an Internet forum recently. It’s got to be the coolest tattoo I’ve ever seen (or do I mean it’s the only cool tattoo I’ve ever seen)? I just hope the joke doesn’t wear thin after a few decades.
Today I booked tickets for various performances at the Adelaide Fringe Festival and Womadelaide. Most of my choices involve folk/world music by artists that are new to me, but sound great. For each performance on my list, I’ve invited a relative or friend to come with me.
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).
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.
This is for people who enjoy reading about recreational mathematics (not necessarily doing it) and also like a bit of magic. Basically, some folk over at the magic discussion group Talkmagic liked the way I explained a certain mathematical card force, and I thought my blog readers might enjoy it too.
For more information: The trick in question is the one described here and simulated here. All presentations involve minor variations on the rules, which is to be expected. The original Talkmagic thread is here.
If you enjoy magic, check out my other blog, the “Invisible Hoard“.
