Essay - all done

Well, I have at last finished my 2000 word essay on English Natural Philosophy 1660-1720. I hope my tutor doesn't mind that that I said there was "a confusing web" of ideas.

My creative impulse has been to make a XXXX for a swop, and until I know the swoppee has got it, I won't be posting about it.

I also gave a Greek geometry lesson to Kiddo's class during their Ancient Greek Day. That was fun, and they seemed impressed that you could draw an equalateral triangle using a ruler and compasses. I'm tempted by the idea of going into help with maths on a more regular basis...

It also gave me a chance to see what the other mums had done about costumes. Put it like this: Kiddo was the only Hoplite, but I saw a lot of bed-sheets.

I've started making water bottle carriers for our summer holiday. I ought to take some photos...

Just arrived...

What are they queued up for?

The latest Yarn Forward magazine:


It's mine, I tell you, mine!

Yarn Forward News

I'm feeling smug - I managed to post about the latest Yarn Forward news on Ravelry before anyone else, and the news isn't yet on the Yarn Forward blog. The news came out in an email sent out to subscribers.

We’ll be sending out a pdf press release throughout the day to major knitting retailers, designers and companies. We’ll also be posting on all the big forums, blogs and anywhere else that we can to spread the good news.

Impressions - Hyperbolic Crochet Reef

I was in the South Bank yesterday, with a few spare minutes to look at the Hyperbolic Crochet exhibition. I only had time to gather impressions rather then descriptions.

The dominant impression was of the soft velvety texture of the reefs made from thick chenille yarn, which longed for me to touch and stroke them. This contrasted greatly with the hard, defined, jewel-like reef made of seed beads, shut away behind protective glass.

The one structure that stood out was a knitted sea anemone.

It got me thinking. If I was alone in a room with a net guru and the hyperbolic crochet reef, would I use it to explain the database that was ravelry? What if I was too unimportant to have a name badge, and he was too important to need one?

A million ends

I haven't been able to show my knitting, because it is for a swop. A swop with the dealine for posting at the end of May. However I chose a very pretty pattern, without reading the Ravelry comments about it. One would have warned me "there are a lot of ends to sew in".

Part one of the pattern was simple but each repeat of part two took longer then I expected, and I could only do a limited number at a time

Actually I exaggerated in the title, there aren't a million. But there are about 100, (unless I've under-estimated) and I did the 36th today.

Messy Lives

When my parents were well and healthy they did things like knit multiple ponchos for my brother's bridesmaids, and did much pruning in our garden and travelled to Machu Picchu and met princes and former ambassadors. I talked proudly to the other mums about what they were doing at playgroup when I collected children. And my friends talked about the interesting things their parents did.

And then my parents got old and ill. And when they decided to move house, I had to travel for two hours (each way) to meet the estate agent and show them round the house. And then my mother went into hospital, and the move happened around my father, and I signed the things that had to be signed, and orgainsed the storage unit. And when I mumbled about this to my friends at the school gate, a different set of friends told me about the daft things their aged parents and parents-in-law were doing, and I realised that my parents were part of a different set of parents. Some people's parents might be climbing mountains, and talked about with pride by their grown-up children. Other people's parents found climbing stairs beyond them, and their grown-up children kept quiet.

And that is today's installment of messy Tuesday.

Wooly metaphors in seventeenth century science

I have a 2000 word essay to write about Descartes, which is one reason I haven't written anything here recently.

While researching it, I discovered that Pascal carried out experiments on a variety of things, including wine and wool. That led me into checking up about wool and experiments in the seventeenth century, and it seemed that wool - by which they meant fleece - was a useful metaphor for air. They were investigating about air pressure. We are used to thinking about air as having weight, but in the seventeenth century this was a matter of debate.

Torricelli compared a column of air to a cylinder filled by wool. When a weight is placed on the top, the wool is compressed. He said that if a knife was thrust through the cylinder, the wool-pressure is unchanged. Pascal pointed out that the weight of the wool itself compresses the wool at the bottom of the heap.

Boyle used the analogy in a different way, referring to wool that was being compressed. He states "upon the removal of the external pressure, by opening the hand more or less, the compressed wool doth, as it were, spontaneously expand ... till the fleece hath either regained its former dimensions", or at least as close to its dimensions as the "compressing hand... will permit".

Descartes too used a wooly analogy, but unfortunately his was wrong. Asked why mecury did not flow out of an inverted tube, he said that the air was like wool and "the ether in its pores to be like whirlwinds moving about in the wool." Everything was moving in a circle: there couldn't be a vacuum at the top, because Descartes thought vacuums were impossible.

Knitters versus the BBC

Or maybe that should be the BBC versus knitters.

If you hang around the same knitting groups I do, you'll have come across this Angel Knits thread, and this Ravelry one.

And now even the BBC itself is posting about it.

The BBC article does seem really quite fair from my understanding of the story: it refers to the "unscrupulous" other people who were using Mazzam's patterns. (I think their legal team have checked it very throughly.)

The essence of the story is that Mazzam created a pattern for knitted Adipose babies from the first episode of the current season of Dr Who and posted it on her website. Then someone started selling copies of the pattern on ebay, and I think Mazzam complained to ebay and the patterns were removed. After that the BBC got in touch with Mazzam etc etc. My guess is the ebay seller shopped her to the BBC, but who knows?

FWIW, the nice thing about Dr Who is that I always see the latest episode within 24 hours of its' first showing. I never need to worry about spoilers on the net, unlike almost every other sci-fi program I watch.

very large spiders

I'm not normally a person who gets scared of spiders. However when I saw an enormous one [1] in the basin before I had my coffee, I couldn't help but let out a little screech.
(All pictures clickable, but you might not want to look.)

It took about an hour until I was brave enough to deal with her, with a plastic cup and a piece of junk mail.


After I took the cup off her, she paused as if to pose for photographs.


Then suddenly she scuttled in the direction of the open front door...


... but instead scooted behind a flowerpot and off into the shrubs.


[1] That's enormous spider for England, not enormous spider for places like Australia.

All paths lead to knitting

It is possible - no, easy - to get from silver mining in Saxony in the sixteenth century to Knitty, 21st Internet Knitting magazine.

1) Georgius Agricola was a sixteenth century doctor who lived and worked in the town of Chemnitz, in Saxony. He was extremely interested in mining - it was the main industry of the area. He studied the diseases of miners, the technology of mines and geology.

2) He synthesised all his knowledge into one great work, De re metallica, which was published the year after his death. Before any one tells you it was 'modern', well it wasn't that modern. It wasn't an alchemical work, but he still thought in Aristolean terms.

3) De re metallica was the main mining reference well into the eighteenth century. It was written in Latin.

4) A copy came into the possession of Lou Hoover, the wife of the future United States President. She had studied Latin and geology at Stanford, and after she discovered there was no English translation, she and her husband worked on the translation together.

5) After the translation was published, she became First Lady, which meant people were interested in her knitting. The letter she wrote describing how to knit a blanket was the source for the "Hoover blanket" published in an early issue of Knitty.

6) That Hoover Blanket was one of the first internet knitting patterns I really noticed, and it was one of the few things I connected with Lou Henry Hoover.

And that is the trail of links from sixteenth century Saxony to Knitty magazine.

Boring Post

Whoops, I thought I'd posted more recently.

I thought about doing a Messy Tuesday post about defrosting the freezer yesterday. It was a little bit overdue. The post would have shown a photo of the inside of a slightly icy freezer. Then there would be a photo of lovely clean freezer, with a stack of home cooked frozen meals neatly wrapped in foil. But the latter picture would have gone completely against the Messy Tuesday ethic, and I wouldn't have wanted to post just the first picture.

On the creative front, I wrote two essays last week. One was on whether Galileo's trial came about because of his book the Assayer, published in 1623 (summary of essay: "no"). The other was whether the Spanish Inquisition had an effect on 16th century science (summary of essay: "maybe)". However my essays were supposed to be 749 words longer.

I also knitted a bit more of my entralac bag from Yarn Forward.