Slow car

It took me ten minutes to reverse this new red car out of my garage today because I was worrying so much about its sticky-out handles. Then I drove very carefully to work, no revs above 4000 and tried to stay at around 50 mph even on the dual carriage way. It took nearly twice as long as usual to get to work.

And it hasn't got as much room in the boot for all my special junk.

New car day

My new red car is okay.

At the sales room I opened the driver's door, and the rain dripped off the roof onto me. My nice old Volvo never did that because it had a lip round the roof that drained off the rain. I don't like new designs.

And it's got sticky out handles. My old Volvo had handles that were flush with the car. I don't like sticky out handles.

Bye bye old car

Tomorrow I scrap my 19 year old trusty steed, the only car I've ever owned, a car I've had for 13 years. I'd meant to keep it another couple of years - we could have celebrated its 21st birthday! But the government scrappage scheme was too good to miss, so tomorrow I get a new car, and trusty old Volvo goes for scrap.

If you want to know what I'm getting to replace it, you'll have to ring me and ask. I'm looking forward to hearing from you, my friends.

Night sky

I went a bit north to see someone for work and then some relatives so it was getting dark as I drove home. I stopped to photo this sky.

Good news

We're all well pleased that step-daughter #2 who went for a job interview at a building surveyors yesterday has been told she's got the job with remuneration , and she's to start on Monday! Go, girl, go!

I like her sense of humour; she noted on Facebook that she'd omitted to mention on her CV that she was unemployable!

Weekend away

We've spent the weekend in Bath and Bristol, seeing daughter and listening to a concert that included a composition by son-in-law. Interesting time and diverting from life that goes on as normal.

Remembrance Sunday

Today is Remembrance Sunday.

Aren't we supposed to have a minute's silence while we remember those who died at war? But what do you think of during that silence? What do you remember? People?

I used to feel sad that people in the previous generations to me had lost loved ones, like my aunty's husband. Uncle Myles died in World War two as he lead his troop of soldiers along a ditch at the side of a road. There was another troop on the other side of the road too, but having a working radio, they were warned to turn back because there was a sniper ahead. Unfortunately

1. Uncle Myles' radio equipment wasn't working so
   
2. they didn't turn back and
   
3. the sniper got him.
   

I didn't know Uncle Myles, so remembering him wasn't too easy, but remembering his widow and son brought sadness. What could we do to avoid future deaths?

We could remember what went wrong and make sure it doesn't happen again.

Do we remember? No, because British troops still don't have working equipment. See this for example. So for me, there's little point in Remembrance Sunday until we learn from our memories.

Handel's Halleluiah

I quite like Handel's Halleluiah anyhow, but this is such fun. I hope the 'monks' had fun rehearsing it too.

Nephew's restaurant

When I was a teenager, I expressed an interest in learning to cook, so my parents gave me a cookery book, inscribed:

"Waiting hopefully for the results."

Good results didn't appear that quickly, so I was intrigued to find in today's Financial Times an article on an 18 year-old Canadian chef who has his own restaurant. It must be good if he's made it into the British FT. See the restaurant web site here.

Of more importance is my nephew who is training as a chef in the States. Perhaps he'll learn to cook more quickly than I did. I couldn't run a restaurant - I get stressed when I have to cook for more than a few friends and family. Will nephew make it into the FT when he gets his own restaurant? And will he get his own restaurant? I hope so, and then maybe I'll go and try it out. So now I'm waiting hopefully for the results of his training.

Lost Madeleine

This little English girl disappeared when she was nearly four, and is still missing more than two years later, but her parents keep looking. When they heard of that American girl that was found after 18 years, they argued that their child could still be alive somewhere, so produced this video in the hopes that someone knows where their Madeleine is.

Old friends, new places

I met an old friend today, at work, a friend I haven't seen for perhaps ten years, someone whose son is around the same age as mine. We used to live near each other, but lost face to face contact when I moved here. But she's now a full-time post grad student at the OU studying for a doctorate too. So we met over lunch and chatted for an hour, and could have talked longer, but I had to get on and do stuff. (See Frustrating Day).

A colleague commented that it was weird that we'd both ended up here, but it's not really weird. We've got similar children, we have a similar approach to learning, a similar view of life and what's important - that's why we got on ten years ago. And that's why we're doing similar things now.

Making the grade in English

That 1 in 4 pupils fail to make the grade in English (see Telegraph) is not surprising if the evidence from one Buckinghamshire primary school is anything to go by. For some weeks now, displayed in the assembly hall, as if the school were proud of it, is the grocer's apostrophe in a verb. A painted poster proclaims:

"Africa need's money".

With teaching like this at primary level, we shouldn't expect improvements in English any time soon.

Working families

I don't support the recommendation that MPs' spouses don't work for them. It's normal and natural for families to work together, whether they be spouses or children. Watching the farmer's son helping on his market stall this week in the Aylesbury Farmers' market, the child was both learning, and contributing to his family's business, and to society in general. He could be proud of his contribution. I know that some MPs have abused the system, but bad cases make bad law, and this recommendation is one that ought to go, not be implemented. Let the spouses work.

Younger wives

Husband has just discovered here that having a wife younger than himself is good for him.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8325579.stm

Half term

It's half term so I'm nipping out this afternoon to watch the newly released film of the Fantastic Mr Fox. It's had some good reviews so I shall enjoy the treat with two young relatives.

Waving or drowning

Remember last week the news about the balloon boy family? For those of you who dismissed the family with the child not in a helium balloon as a trivial episode, Mike Todd found this cartoon to pull us up short:

http://miketodd.typepad.com/waving_or_drowning/2009/10/hello.html

Random thoughts

This ambulance driver blogs in a readable and amusing way. In this entry, he is complaining about working the night and the extra hour when the clocks go back.

He accidently let himself be booked to work that night and swears at his own stupidity. Oh dear! But he changes all the swear words into non-swear words.

I hate hearing swearing, and I loved reading the way he put it. In my head, I always understand the literal meanings, and hear aggression in the words, so the way he put it meant I read, not aggression, but his pent-up frustration that he'd done such a daft thing, but just the sort of thing lots of us would have done. I know I would have made the same mistake because my husband gave me a lecture last night on the meaning of 'Sunday morning'.

I hope it wasn't too bad a night for him.

Inefficient services

A colleague was telling about her young son having had several ear operations recently. He's all right but what she noticed with her manager's eye, was that for a twenty minute procedure they had to sit around in the hospital for eight hours. Of course, she's grateful for the care but surely they can organise people's work and lives better than that.

On a similar theme of how to use time efficiently, she explained that before her son was off school, she got some work for him to do at home. They spent only half an hour a day on it, but when he got back to school the teacher announced that he was right up to where the class was. How can it take five hours of class work to match thirty minutes of one to one work, she asks? Why should it take ten times as long to cover material in class as it does at home? No wonder some home educators seem to hot house their children. I do think that schools need more teachers and smaller groups more than they need extra expensive computer equipment.

My mother's birthday

It's my mother's birthday. May she enjoy it.

Guided tour to theorem country

What's a theorem? An assertion you can prove is true, at least that's what I'm asserting following yesterday's seminar at an Oxford University Continuing Education (OUCE) day.

If you've seen the web site Theorem of the Day, then you'll get a flavour of the day, created by the presenter, Robin Whitty. That web site is challenging though and so was the day. However, if you like thinking, and thinking in good like minded company, then you'd have enjoyed it too. The company included physicists, sixth formers, an eminent professor of biology, chemists, a member of the society of mathematics and her husband who had a PhD in maths, though not in the same area she hastened to assure me, and retired maths teachers.

Starting with some maths language and shorthand helped me remember some of the maths I used to know, and others in the audience were equally forthcoming with questions, which made for a relaxed atmosphere. Theorems covered included:

• Euclid's Infinity of Primes
• Ramsey's Theorem (I can see how to relate that to how many people you know)
• Contraction Mapping Theorem
  
• Hardy-Ramanujan Asymptotic Partition Formula - partitioning is so simple that you teach it to infant school children - it's how many different ways can you add up a number, like 5 is 2+3, and also 4+1, and 1+1+3 and so on
• Erdos-K-Rado Theorem on intersecting permutations - we got a bit confused on this one because Robin initially told us to think of Rubik's cube, but it isn't quite the same.
• The Robbins problem - I like Boolean algebra
• Morley's Miracle - that was an amusing story of a school teacher who discovered this by accident. If you tri-sect the angles of a triangle then at the intersections of the trisection lines, you can make the vertices's of a triangle. The miracle is that no-one ever noticed before Morley did, but then drawing a trisection isn't very easy.

We looked at the philosophy of maths - Are the truths of mathematics invented or discovered? A Canadian high school philosophy competition asked this question. The context, rules and winning answer can be downloaded from here.

Finally we had a discussion about whether computers 'do' maths. There's a Faustian battle between mathematicians: you have a choice between geometry and algebra. If we use computers, then we turn to algebra to compute rather than geometry that allows our intuition.

For example, someone had been presenting partitions from using the Pascal's triangle. At the end of the lecture, one person, Corteel, saw a bijection along the rth diagonal within the binomial expansion that matched the rth row of the partitioning - a computer couldn't have seen that!

I might go to another OUCE maths day - like the one next year on the history and consequences of calculus.