Archive for December 31, 2007

Happy New Year!

Posted in Personal Stuff by John E. Pannell on December 31st, 2007 at 4:26 am

For your listening pleasure: Auld Lang Syne like you never heard it before.

Those who have no party to attend, choose to spend the night at home, or have to work can play this at midnight. It starts out plainly enough, then all changes about 1 minute into the clip.

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"The first nonabsolute number is the number of people for whom the table is reserved. This will vary during the course of the first three telephone calls to the restaurant, and then bear no apparent relation to the number of people who actually turn up, or to the number of people who subsequently join them after the show/match/party/gig, or to the number of people who leave when they see who else has turned up.
The second nonabsolute number is the given time of arrival, which is now known to be one of the most bizarre of mathematical concepts, a recipriversexcluson, a number whose existence can only be defined as being anything other than itself. In other words, the given time of arrival is the one moment of time at which it is impossible that any member of the party will arrive. Recipriversexclusons now play a vital part in many branches of math, including statistics and accountancy and also form the basic equations used to engineer the Somebody Else's Problem field.
The third and most mysterious piece of nonabsoluteness of all lies in the relationship between the number of items on the bill, the cost of each item, the number of people at the table and what they are each prepared to pay for. (The number of people who have actually brought any money is only a subphenomenon of this field.)"
Douglas Adams


Lodge 296: 2007 Fall Fellowship

Posted in Nayawin Rar 296, SR-7B Lodges by John E. Pannell on December 31st, 2007 at 1:06 am

This is the second of two recent issues from Nayawin Rar lodge sent to me by Greg Grimes. This fellowship is an adaptation of the black and white motif used on several recent flaps from this lodge. They are proof that you can have a nice looking patch without using lots of colors.

Fall Fellowship should have been sometime ago, but I only just heard word of this patch just now. It seems my usual sources of information have let me down on these two latest patches. ;)
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"[Mathematics] is an independent world created out of pure intelligence."
William Wordsworth