Will I have enough thread to finish piecing the back of the quilt? (The bobbin has very little left either.)
It's not looking hopeful:
Even though I've got a little green thread on a bobbin from another project:
Ahhhhhh! just not enough
Oh well, I can finish it by hand 
"We read books to find out who we are." Ursula K LeGuin.
"Life's too short to stuff a mushroom." Shirley Conran 1975
"I think it's important to define my/our domestic activity in the terms of today's world and not always with reference to the past." Jane Brocket 2007
I could say a lot about the Yarnstorm/Telegraph/Women's Hour controversy. There are any number of strands to the debate: one of which is whether we should be trying to live up to a thirty year old version of womanhood espoused by Shirley Conran in her book "Superwoman".
One of my female role models has a doctorate in computing and a City and Guilds in machine embroidery. That just about sums it up for me.
PS I think I'll get Jane's book.
We got to Alexander Palace by 9.20am, the second coach in the coach park (I think we were also the last to leave). Palm Court was incredibly busy, but once the doors were opened and they let us in, the halls themselves seemed nearly empty.
The best purchase of the day was this lovely Finnish wool from Stentorp. She had some knitted jumpers: I was very taken with one that had Viking ships and motifs - including runes that spelled the name of her farm. (They are pictured on her website.) I can picture a sweater that starts with the dark brown hem, then has the multicoloured wool, then the lighter brown. The palest one will be at the collar.
The second best purchase was this Noro from the Knit Today stall - 10 balls at a massively reduced price. There is only one ball of the red silk garden, 4 balls of the Kureyon and five of the purply silk garden. They did have five balls of a differnet silk garden and I debated for some time over which to get. Then I remembered the colours of the landscape at Lands End, and how entranced I'd been by the colours of the heather, the grasses and the rocks: the purple silk garden could have been dyed to match.
Oh, lets scurry through the rest, as if I don't I'll never get this all posted.
A collection of bits and pieces from various places. The purple sock needles were a hit: at least three people got them. They were from Knit n Caboodle, where I also got a tool to find out WPI and the Baby Surprise Jacket Pattern.
The laceweight and the sock yarn came from KnitWitches. The lace is to make a shawl to go with a purple beaded dress, and matches incredibly well. I'm getting a bit worried though that lace will catch on the beads.
I got a very limited amount of fabric, just six pansy fat quarters.
Exam was yesterday. I wrote for most of the time. I repeated myself lots. I missed out some important information about methods before calculus: that wasn't the question where I repeated myself. My essay on maths in the ancient world kept saying that we had limited sources. My essay on important new developments said why they were important at least twice per development. The bit about square roots of negative numbers veered between i and square roots of other negative numbers. Did I say I repeated myself?
Today, I did nothing. Well not quite, I threaded the sewing machine, and I worked on a cross-stitch kit. The kit was from Traveller's Tales, who are exhibiting at Ally Pally. I didn't go today.
I will do nothing much tomorrow as well. Doing nothing much is slightly more productive then doing nothing. I might actually sew with the sewing machine. I won't go to Ally Pally tomorrow either.
On Saturday, I will go to Ally Pally. I will take my green stripey bag, and I will probably wear a brown jumper with a front made of crochet squares. If you see me, please say hi.
From February 2006 until my exam yesterday, I've had a constant selection of Big Worries. Today is the first day in over 18 months where I have none.
I'll be going to Ally Pally for the Knitting and Stitching show, on the Saturday and on a weekday (I haven't decided whether to go on Thursday or Friday yet). I'll be bringing the bag in my profile photo: if you see it, please do come and say "hello".
Today is Saturday. My exam is on Wednesday. I am taking tomorrow off (I learnt the importance of a complete break from studying many years ago). My course has been distilled onto 27 sheets of A4 paper. I now have to make sure that they get into my brain. YIKES!!!
You'll be glad to note those 27 sheets aren't crammed full. For instance one has six words: "Good calculator Kepler Bad Calculator Leibniz". I think I know that one, and it is probably fairly irrelevant. Achemedes was another person who was good at calulations, phew now I have my three examples from different time periods.
I am trying to think of times when books weren't important in the development of maths. There is logarithms (although that is printed tables) and also the contest between Tartaglia and Fior, where Tartaglia developed a new method of solving cubics, and won 30 dinners from Fior. There is more to that story, and it leads into the publication of Ars Magna by Cardano. That's an important book, as is Newton's Principia, Euclid's Elements and Apollonius' Conics. Also the textbooks by Lacroix and Lagrange.
My favourite important book is "The Castle of Knowledge" by Robert Record, who wrote a series which also includes "the Grounde of Artes" and the "Pathway to Knowledge". They sound like they ought to be a fantasy series: which is kind of funny, because Record seems to have been a very straight forward kind-of guy, unlike his near contemporary Dr John Dee.
Of course, these are the things I know: now back to the sheets to learn the things I don't know.
Earlier this year, I had the vague idea that after I'd done this History of Maths course I might possibly do an MSc in the History of Science in a few years time.
However the course was really interesting. Not always easy, but even then it was a case of getting my thinking into the right lines. Also, I was getting (very) good marks. I started to make a more specific plan.
At our last tutorial yesterday, I to plucked up courage to ask the tutor whether this plan was feasible. I expected her to give a bit of general advance ("do this, rather then that"). But she didn't: her response was beyond what I'd hoped for.
She said I ought to consider a research degree (the MSc's I'd looked at were all taught), and that she would get in touch with several different research groups on my behalf.
I simply can't describe how I feel.
We went to the Eden Project and looked round the domes. Anyone following me would have heard squeals of amazement and delight when I saw the star fruit tree. It went something like: "A star fruit tree! Look, its a star fruit tree. Oh wow, its a tree with star fruit on it! They grow on trees!" I don't know why it appealed to me quite so much, but it was the plant that most I was most interested in.
The domes are quite amazing from an architectual prospective:
View of the vents from the inside...
...and the outside:
I have lots of photos of Cornwall, which I haven't sorted through.
One place I went to, for which we have no photos, was Cotehele Hall. It belongs to the National Trust and photography was banned inside the house: there are numerous extremely large tapestries covering many of the walls. It would have taken many man-years to produce all of them: it took a year for one person (usually a man) to produce one square yard of tapestry. A single tapestry might take several men three-four years to complete.
They had several "Liberal Arts" series tapestries - "Grammar", "Arithmetic" and "Geometry" in different parts of the house.
"Geometry" is of particular interest: it depicts Euclid sitting next to a globe of the Earth, with a lady measuring distance. Of course, the word "geometry" comes from the words for Earth-measurement, so from the prospective of a speaker of Ancient Greek - which included many educated men of the Renaissance - the imagery is apt. However, it is entirely inappropriate for a historian of mathematics.
At the time of the creation of the tapestry, the mathematical subject of geometry was that described in the first books of Euclid's Elements. This is the part of geometry we know call "Euclidean Geometry". It's the geometry we get taught in schools, where the angles in a triangle add up to 180 degrees. However, the geometry of the sphere is different! On a sphere the angles of a triangle don't add up to 180 degrees, and the other axioms of Euclidean geometry don't work either.
In the nineteenth century, mathematicians gained a much wider understanding of geometry. Euclidean geometry is a special case of more general geometries, and depends on the "space" in which it is measured having a constant curvature of zero. The curvature of a sphere is also constant, but it is not zero: it is related to the radius of the sphere. Globes do not conform to Euclidean geometry!
I find this rather amusing.
My essay has been finished and posted. (I used 1347 words to conclude it was "partial". It's against OU policy for their students to post essays to the 'net, so you'll just have to fill in the other 1346 words for yourself.)
I got this from Frogs and Ravens. I think at least some of you will enjoy it.
Language of the Norse, Older Futhark! Thirty symbols, all told. And no hardier, more warrior-like tongue has ever graced the longships of the Viki or left the Celts and Saxons in such quivering fear. There's only one drawback, that being you died 800 years ago.
