Pews out, more birthday coincidences and more maths

You may remember I blogged about the coincident birthday chance a while ago (6th July.) Today four coincided: grandson Jack, neighbour Geoff, friend Alan and Brenda’s friend Gay. Not only that, two of them are significant birthdays. Have you checked your facebook friends yet?

I’ve been going through my maths book (Chris has borrowed the Physics one) and just read about the Fibonacci sequence. This is very simple: it starts with 0 and 1 and each subsequent number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two:

0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34....

This simple sequence has all sorts of properties – amongst them explaining the distribution of sunflower seeds:

I’ve never really paid much attention to the relationships of numbers in sequences but having seen this – and the other things that Fibonacci can explain – I’m hooked!

Little Hampden Organ

John and Brian finished the pew removal today: they’ve done a fantastic job and the Chancel is ready for the arrival of the organ.

I said yesterday that work had just started – not really the case. We started on this project in November 2008. The Diocesan Organ Adviser visited us just over a year ago. More of the steps we’ve had to go through later.

Little Hampden Organ – work starts

Work started today – at last – on the Church at Little Hampden in preparation for the new organ which we hope will be installed next month. I say new organ – it’s actually an old organ which is being restored. But it’s a real pipe organ, not a modern electronic one. Digital technology is advancing rapidly and I’m sure we’ll be able to log on to itunes in the service to get the hymns in a few years but at the moment I don’t think there’s anything to match real air blown through real pipes.

The organ is much larger than the old electronic one it replaces so we have had to locate it in a different position in the Church. So phase one of the works is to remove the old choir pews which are in the space that the new organ will occupy. We had no idea what would be the state of the walls and floor revealed when the pews were removed.

John and Brian started work this morning.

Once the South wall was revealed, it became apparent that there was little damage and we wouldn’t have any significant work to make it good before the organ arrives. The wooden flooring, too, is in good condition – rather a surprise because it is laid on the old paving stones which themselves are resting on the earth – damp-proof courses had not been thought of when the Church was built.

So we now have a large open space ready for the organ.

Use both lanes

Great new signs at the RC Church – the Immaculate Heart of Mary – in Great Missenden.

It reminded me of the ‘Use both lanes’ sign you see all over the place: a great example of communication for the sender not the recipient. ‘Use either lane’ would be much better – and would be what the highway department actually meant. There used to be a sign outside Gloucester ‘Use all three lanes’ – while one can straddle two lanes, using all three is quite a challenge.

I used to put a copy of this on my office wall as a reminder to people to think of the recipient when communicating – particularly when e-mailing. I remember working on a project at the Bank of Scotland [should I own up to that? It was a few years ago] I would get e-mails with the title ‘Bank of Scotland’ – probably meaningful to the sender but when I was getting 50-odd e-mails a day, it wasn’t very helpful. It’s even more important for CVs – sending a file called ‘CV’ might be meaningful to the sender but would get lost on the receiving PC.

These thoughts sent me looking for funny signs on the internet. There are lots: a few copied below.

We have fun with parking at St Peter & St Paul – any suggestions for signage that would compete with the one at the Immaculate Heart of Mary? A bottle for a really good one!

Three days afloat

After Wednesday on the canals, we had two more days afloat. This morning as we were motoring towards the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour, the navy came out to welcome us. The RFA Argus came in to port with crew standing to attention.

Royal Fleet Auxiliaries (RFAs) provide support to the Royal Navy – tankers and stores ships. RFA Argus is an Aviation Training and Casualty Receiving ship: she is used to train helicopter pilots – there is space for 5 aircraft on her after deck. She is also a medical base. Because she can be armed, she doesn’t count as a hospital ship under the Geneva Convention. It appears that in this role she was operating this week: a five-day exercise to familiarise MOD medical staff with the facilities onboard – more info on the BBC web site here. More about RFA Argus here.

When we got back to the moorings, one of the swans that live in the harbour, together with two cygnets, approached us for food. 

More pictures here.

Canal trip

Another good day on the cut

Birthday conundrum and holding crosses

You may remember a while ago I talked about probability. Perhaps I should warn you that I bought two books at Neta’s mini fete on Sunday: 50 Physics Ideas you Really Need to Know and 50 Maths ditto. I believe I pipped Neta’s husband to them so I’ll have to let him borrow them. But be warned: there may be some scientific blogs over the next few weeks. One of the statistical mysteries I mentioned a month ago (5th June) was the birthday conundrum: the chances of two people in a group of 25 having a birthday on the same day (not the year) is greater than 50%. I was prompted today to look at the birthdays of my facebook friends. I’m not going to own up to how many I have but it’s more than the 3 I had a while ago – I thought that was rather sad so I linked up with some more. However, going through the list there are 3 dates on which two people in this random group have the same birthday (in one case it’s three people but as two are twins I don’t think that counts.) So, statistics wins again.

Today Tricia, Wendy and I visited the Young Enterprise company at Stony Dean school.

This group in the special needs school is incredibly enterprising, helped by some very supportive staff. They make the holding crosses we give to newly-baptised children at Church and Wendy is going to write an article about them for the Parish Magazine. Juliet the lead teacher is leaving at the end of term but we met her replacement who is keen to continue the company – and producing our crosses. They have a number of activities, horticulture being probably the most profitable. They have a polytunnel in which they grow a range of plants to sell to staff and the public. They also made and sold a range of products around the World Cup – including flag keyrings of participating countries. They have a small residual stock of England items but are confident that they will sell them eventually.

Visiting Stony Dean and seeing how these youngsters are developing is inspirational.

Changes for the good

A good day for change: first the new copier has arrived in the office. At last we’ll be able to read what’s been copied now!

And this evening I had a call from John Budgen who is restoring the organ for Little Hampden Church. Work is well advanced and we have a date in early August when John will install the organ.

The story of Daniel and Neta's mini fete

This morning the theme of the family service was the story of Daniel. Elizabeth, Martin and Brenda had a gang of children either as fire or lions – the latter had their faces painted and were very frightening.

Then we went to Neta’s fete. This was the first major rundraising event for our Emergency Repair and Improvements Appeal. The weather held, thetakings were good and one of the stars was 9-year-old Mark who has only been learning the trumpet for less than a year.

Poppies and Union Jack

The wheatfield in front of our house had a band of poppies earlier in the week – but I missed them. However, there were a few this evening. And the wheat is starting to ripen. Don the farmer has been servicing his combine harvester – won’t be long now.

Earlier in the week I had a sail. The navy were playing again – they have a pair of cranes in the middle of Portsmouth harbour to which they tow their warships to fuel and arm them – presumably to be away from the centre of population in the event of accident. The ships carry the Union Jack (yes, it really is a Union Jack when on the jackstaff of one of HM ships) when moored at the cranes, but as soon as the tug takes control the flag is lowered – the navy is not in command at that time!

Night hike

It’s 22:30. We’ve just had a ring on the doorbell and found four young scouts on a night expedition. They had come about two miles from the Rignall Road and were not quite sure where they were. They are walking through the night and are challenged to get as far east as possible. They were on their own but were instructed to phone periodically. They obviously had done so because when I took them back to the footpath to set them off in the right direction, their scout leaders arrived.

What a great way to give the youngsters an adventure and expose them to the real world at a manageable risk – at least I assume the leaders were on top of this. I was talking to a mother the other day; she was lamenting the change of attitude: when she was young, not so long ago, she would just set off on her bike to find friends and arrange a game of tennis or a swim whereas today everything seems to be organised and scheduled. Well it’s not – at least for this gang of scouts.

South Africa

In the press a lot at the moment! SA has clearly come a long way since the apartheid days but has still a long way to go. I hope the football will bring further improvements. I remember a TV programme in the bad old days when a London school sent some pupils – a multi-racial group, of course – on an educational trip. It was a very moving program, some of the students having difficulty in understanding why they couldn’t swim with the whole group – or even use the same loos. I have an abiding memory of the last shot in the programme when the camera panned round the group waiting at the airport and then turned towards one of their minders who immediately put his hand up over the lens.

On her blog, Practising the Presence of God, Archdeacon Karen is having 25 days of prayer for the diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman in the Northern Cape that is linked with Oxford. Karen explains the background on her posting of 27 May. Images of South Africa abound and the contrasts are still stark. I found another blog of SA townships – I have no idea whether it’s typical but take a look at it here http://townships.iblog.co.za/

Do support SA by following Karen’s blog at http://archdeaconkaren.blogspot.com/

Probability and Life

It’s a while since I did a vaguely scientific entry but a few things have occurred this week. Firstly the Reith Lectures have started: Sir Martin Rees’s first lecture suggested that challenges facing science in the 21st century are much more profound than previously: GM foods, stem-cell research and so on present many ethical problems; scientific and engineering developments in the past were much simpler and their use much more obvious – although I guess the Manhatten Project would fall into the modern category. Then last night I was idly watching a program about design. A claim on this is that things as we know them are being subsumed into generic electronics: TVs, radios, music players, telephones, computers, cameras, books all had their own identity. Now they are all merging into one basic format where the physical design is minimal and the user interface is key. What’s next?

The next event was a series of phone calls on Friday. Probability theory is fascinating and often yields difficult-to-understand results. Have you heard the birthday conundrum? The chance of two people in a group of 23 having the same birthday is greater than 50%. So next time you’re in a cocktail party, ask around! Another strange probability fact is that the most likely time for a truly random event to occur is immediately following the previous occurrence of such an event. So don’t feel at ease flying immediately after a crash; and if air crashes occur at regular intervals you should suspect some intervention rather than random occurrences. I had a good example of this with phone calls on Friday. As some of you know, we divert our home phone to my mobile so calls go to the mobile if we don’t answer or if the home phone is in use. I think the phone calls we receive are random – although the people who try to fix my computer or award me a cruise seem to call at regular intervals! Twice on Friday I received a call on my mobile while talking to someone on my home phone – I think this proves that the calls are random and that probability theory is correct!

The last scientific reminder this week was one of the series of 2-minute talks on Radio 4. Brian Eno described the Game of Life which was invented by mathematician John Conway in 1970. I had forgotten this but it reminded me of long discussions and fascination with work colleagues when it came out in the Scientific American. 1970 was well before personal computers and the internet so it was quite difficult to play at the time but these days it’s very simple – have a play here.

The Reith Lectures can be heard here.

The role of the state

A fascinating series of articles in The Times this week by Roger Boyes has made me think about the role of the state. Boyes’ articles report how he has been reliving the time he spent in communist Poland during the Cold War as a foreign correspondent when he was under regular surveillance by the authorities who suspected he was a spy. He met again his landlady who used to report on his movements, listen in to his meetings and, using her key, let the secret police into the flat to copy his correspondence. He has also seen some of the files recording all this information. Much was destroyed when Communism fell but enough remains to give an amazing insight to the intrusive state at the time. The Polish authorities eventually gave up on him but not before accusing him of ‘Nonchalantism’ – negative and nonchalant reporting of the Polish leadership.

At a time when our new coalition government is talking about reducing the size and impact of the state, both for idealistic and financial reasons, I’ve been thinking about our attitude to the state. The Boyes example is an extreme one although I believe we have more CCTV cameras per capita than anywhere else in the world. But we can trust our police and other authorities can’t we? However, we seem to have much lower respect for them than we used to and than other countries do. I spent three days in France last week. One day was with our French friends who live just outside Paris. Walking round their town I was struck by the civic buildings and developments – open areas, a market hall, a boules park and a magnificent Hotel de Ville. And I don’t detect any resentment about this level of spending.

I have similar thoughts when visiting Birmingham. The wonderful town hall and art gallery was built 125 years ago and echoes with civic pride.We seem to have lost this today. I’m sure any authority would have difficulty with such an investment these days. Back in France it’s easy to look at the extensive French high-speed rail network and compare it with our one line into St Pancras (I won’t mention HS2!) From the Eurostar train the sparsely-populated Northern France looks easier to plot a route through than Kent – much less the Chilterns!  But I sense that the French government would be much more assertive at making things happen – and would get away with it.

Looking at tax levels is interesting, too: I remember seeing some statistics a while ago when the government was trying to change our tax base – I forget which way but it was by less than half a point when measured as a percentage of GDP. Currently, if you believe Wikipedia, our total tax revenue in the UK is 39% of GDP, France is 46% and the USA 28%. Are we just culturally different from France or just ahead of them? I see that binge drinking is taking hold in France with Apéro Géant parties planned on Facebook: there was one threatened last Sunday on the Champ-de-Mars (the park around the Eifel Tower). The authorities didn’t ban it, they just reminded people that drinking alcohol in the park is illegal! So perhaps they’ll catch up with us one day.

Back to Poland in the cold war: one interesting comment from Roger Boyes refers to a time when he was having difficulty with his new Polish father-in-law. He says “I had never admitted that to myself; hadn’t framed or spoken the thought out loud. Yet the secret police had truffled it out and analysed it with precision. At times their knowledge of me was deeper than my self-knowledge.”

Now, what about all these potholes?

Roger Boyes' articles are available here, here and here

April in Paris

OK, so it’s May. We had a quick trip to Paris on Eurostar last weekend. It was a good weekend to pick – not a cloud in the sky and as it was Pentecost, a holiday weekend in France, lots going on. Champs Elysée was transformed into a sort of farm. Half the length of the road – from the Rond Pont to L’Etoile – was filled with all sorts of growing plants in large planters – virtually the full width of the road. There were wheat, beetroot, lavender, hops, haricots, maize and lots more including plants for bees!

Down the sides of the Avenue were stalls run by the French Young farmers – all sorts of things to taste including oysters from 3 sources: the Arcachon ones were the most expensive! And there was beer, wine and champagne to taste.

How’s your French? Have a look at the web site

And what are the crude wooden huts high up on the Pompidou centre?