Daylight Hours

There have been a couple of things I have wanted to achieve over the last two weeks, and both of them require daylight. This greatly restricts when I can do them, cos it's winter and dark when I get home.

I have been anticipating Saturday (today) when I can get on with them. However, I woke up a little bit worse for wear after all the fun of last night. So the first thing I did was stay in bed until the sun had moved quite a long way across the sky. Then I  eventually made a start to my day.

Unfortunately I soon discovered that both my tasks for today are not really the sort of thing you want to be doing with a thick head. First off I had to fix the fence that got a bit damaged in the strong wind of a couple of weeks ago. Which involved hammering. It turned out to be nowhere near as bad as I was expecting. I could hammer quite gently and not make too much noise. And amazingly, I didn't bash my thumb once.

The second task on my list is proving more problematic. Recently I have started making videos of me playing the piano to share with my friends on das internet. And due to my antiquated camera I have to do this when it is light outside. I made some when it was raining one afternoon and it looks like I am playing by candlelight in the middle of the night. So I have a little play on the piano, and realise that I don't have the concentration for playing well, and I really don't fancy thrashing out my new Placebo cover with this headache.

There is only one thing to do in a situation like this - make a cup of tea.

Seventeen Minutes

I made a risotto this evening. And it was lovely. I was guided by a recipe of Jamie Oliver. (It would be inaccurate to say I "followed" the recipe.)

Let's start with the ingredients. The recipe called for raw prawns, which is fair enough. And having watched countless shows about all the amazing seafood our country produces I was happy to get prawns. However the only uncooked prawns I could find in the supermarket were from Thailand. Why?

I don't know much about wine, so when I saw a bottle that said "Good Dry French Wine," I thought, "That's the one for me." Ordinarily, I wouldn't know which wines are good and which are not. But this one said it was good. I couldn't find Parmesan, so I used cheddar. I don't have any olive oil in at the moment, so that is Morrison's own sunflower oil. And that isn't a real lemon either

Why didn't home economics teach me something useful, like how to chop finely?

At this stage it didn't really fit in the pan anymore. Then I had to add peas, prawns, cheese, butter and more peas.

Jamie says this is where the magic happens. Leave it alone and it will become creamy. Okay then.

A hearty portion.

Poll: The Results

I have been planning to review the results of the polls on my blog for some time, and it seems I have finally gotten around to it. Needlesstosay the turnout has been rather poor. Which is surprising, because 100% of respondents said they vote in polls. Extrapolating that result shows that everybody votes in polls. I guess just not on my blog. Here are the highlights of what we have learnt:

• Judas Iscariot is the people's favourite disciple, however he only got 50% of the vote and doesn't have an overall majority. He needs to form a coalition with any of Simon Peter, James or Bartholomew.
• Amy Pond is the best
• Ainsley Harriot is the sexiest TV chef.
• Robots are our masters
• All sorts of people like cryptic crosswords.
• Absence makes the heart grow fonder

AH was delighted to hear he was voted sexiest chef on TV.

There will now be a change of tack with regards to the polls. I think instead of trying to garner people's opinions on topics I shall ask simple questions with factual answers. You have no reason not to vote now.

Solar Panels

Here is a quick thing that has pissed me off.

I just saw this story on the TV about something to do with financial incentives to install solar panels. I could go back and read it properly, but I doubt I will. While watching, I think, "great, there is a scheme to encourage people to get solar panels, and consequently save energy [and the environment]". But the story quickly turns out to be about how some people are worried about the future of the [solar panel installing] industry. Oh no, some people might loose their jobs! *gasp* Surely they are missing the bigger picture? All those suits they were interviewing should be putting saving the planet as their highest priority and not making money.

Look, here is a house with some solar panels on the roof.

In other news, my exciting TV schedule seems to be winding down. Congratulations to Ash Mair on winning Masterchef: The Professionals. Of course the real winner is the food (or Michel's beard). Greg makes some hilarious noises and Michel makes some hilarious expressions; it really is entertaining viewing. Also congratulations to Harry Judd and his professional partner Aliona Vilani. I would have liked to see Jason Donovan win, but Harry was probably the better dancer.

There has been some sort of comedy show on Saturday evenings. In between Brucie's stand-up slots they play music. There may be some dancing or something going on, but I don't pay that much attention.

This means I have more time for other things. Like being bored. Or maybe, just maybe, working on my blog. I an idea for a series (two) of posts. We will have to see...

Polar Bear Christmas

Can somebody please explain to me what polar bears have to do with Christmas. I totally get that in parts of the northern hemisphere the celebration of Christ's birth happens to fall in the season of winter. So it is natural to associate wintry things with Christmas. E.g. snow, robins and holly with red berries. (Of course the holly is there all year round, but the berries only come out in winter)

What I don't get is polar bears. They don't migrate south into New York state in winter, or anywhere else. So why do we see so many pictures of them cheesing it up for X-mas?

If you want to put this lovable creature in your garden this Christmas then you are a deranged maniac. But the good news is you can totally buy it from Walmart. (Out of stock at time of writing.) Not only that, but America's friendliest supermarket has generously discounted it from $54.00 to $53.93. That is a hugemongous 0.13% saving, after all, this is the season of good will.

Additive Number Theory is Hard

.. for example nobody has published a (correct) proof of the Goldbach conjecture that claims every even number is the sum of two primes. Maybe this isn't actually additive number theory as it concerns the addition of prime numbers, and prime numbers are the building blocks of multiplicative number theory.

But let me tell you a couple of interesting results I found recently on the internet.

Question:
Suppose I want to add some numbers and get a specified total. How many ways are there to do this?

Let's see how many ways there are to add up to 4. You have 1+1+1+1, 1+1+2, 1+3, 2+2 and 4. That makes five ways to add up to 4. Amazing. It makes sense to restrict ourselves to using positive integers, and to ignore the order of the summands. Adding up numbers like this to get a total of n is called a partition of n. So we get to say there are 5 partitions of 4.

Let's define a function!

p(n) = The number of partitions of n.

Simple aye? Here are the first few values. Notice how it grows rather quickly.

n	p(n)
1	1
2	2
3	3
4	5
5	7
6	11
7	15
8	22
9	30
10	42
11	56
12	77
13	101
14	135
15	176
16	231
17	297
17	297
18	385
19	490
20	627

This is the partition function and encodes the answer to the above question. Of course it is still hard to evaluate p(n) for a given n, so we are no closer to answering the above question. But you have to feel that by learning about this function, we are making progress.

If you restrict in some way the numbers you can use to get to your specified total, (e.g. primes or squares) then you can do some interesting maths...

Every positive whole number can be written as the sum of four squares. (The four squares theorem)

Now we know a few technical words I can share the interesting result I found.

If n = 5k+4 then p(n) is divisible by 5.
If n = 7k+5 then p(n) is divisible by 7.
If n = 11k+6 then p(n) is divisible by 11.

It seems crazy to me that the divisibility of the number of partitions of n should be related to n like this. Check them for yourself using the table I helpfully provided. The sequence of numbers in the right hand column is one that naturally turns up all over the place and people love to spot patterns in apparent randomness. I strongly suspect that the ancient Greeks or whoever had seen that these results hold for all the values they could check, but were unable to prove them in general.

These results are attributed to Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician whose genius was so unlike anything before or since that you can't help but regard him as a bit mad. His works are dense with the most complicated formulas and I am always bewildered at how he discovered them.

Rhubarb: Part 2

It seems customary these days to begin my post by explaining why it is so long since the last post. However I can't imagine anybody is eagerly waiting for an update on Coughing Fit. The explanation is simple; I have been putting more of my spare time into other things recently. Like watching all the cookery shows on TV at the moment.

Today I finally got to do some gardening. Which is a relief, because I was on the verge of missing my opportunity to get lots of tasks done before winter really prevents gardening. This morning was one of those rare occasions when the weather and my family responsibilities simultaneously allowed me to get in the garden. I seized the moment and made sure I got everything done I needed.

There are still lots of leaves left on the trees, but I got most of the ones on the ground. If I don't get a chance to collect leaves again this year I don't think it will be too bad. But more importantly I moved project rhubarb along a bit. Having cleared a suitable space last time, today I continued to prepare the ground. I mixed loads of home made compost into the clay and rocks. I also removed a few rocks. The soil gets a little better everytime I go out there. As instructed in my rhubarb book, I stuck a whole load of compost into some deep holes and marked the spots ready for spring.

Not only that, but today was one of those very rare occasions when I do some gardening that isn't just weeding and tidying - I planted some things. I had three peonies to plant - can't wait to find out what they look like when they grow. They were just weird bits of twigs when I opened the bag. I hope I put them in the right way up. After that I started the knee-destroying job of planting enough bulbs to keep the Dutch economy going a little longer.Well, perhaps not that many. There were 65. The idea is that you randomly toss them over the site and then plant them wherever they fall. The first part of that is much more fun than the second.

At first glance this may appear very similar to my previous photo of the site. However now it actually contains three peonies, which are virtually invisibly at this stage. And a stick indicating where to plant rhubarb.

After al that work I was tired and dirty and reckoned I deserved a little rest. So I treated myself to a luxury lunch of Heinz smoky BBQ beans on toast. Which was pretty good. Perhaps the second best BBQ type beans I have ever had. The best was at a BBQ earlier this year: some people who I didn't know did them properly, cooking bacon and onions and things. They were nice.

Beans on toast: A meal fit for a king