..we could connect nothing with nothing.
Actually, it wasn't that bad: we made a pretty good hash of our Fibonacci spiral.
We had a 30m line and a stick and we worked out an effective MO: one of us at the action end applying a considerable centrifugal force to drag a tethered stick through the heavy, wet sand to mark out the sections of the spiral, the other at the centre playing the important role of 'dead weight' : anchoring the line and encouraging the hapless scribe: "keep it taut! keep it taut!"
We constructed 10 sections, the last with a radius of about 25metres, marking out, then, a pitch of about 500m2
The beach rangers didn't like it all. "We don't like it at all", they said, dismounting from their landrover. "What is this about and can we please see your CRB certificates"
"It's a Fibonacci Spiral", I said, "constrructed from a famous sequence of numbers discovered by Leonardo of Pisa, son of Bonacci, and often, it turns out, found in nature, defined as F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2), Pete! Keep it Taut!"
"And with the ratio of successive terms tends toward the Golden Section!", exclaimed the young beach warden, relaxing, "That's OK - we were worried that you were doing something irregular".
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A psychologist once said: “To live is to have problems, and to solve problems is to grow intellectually”
Pattern Recognition is cool. Gauss, the prince of mathematicians, when a young boy was given an assignment to find the sum of numbers from 1 to 100. The teacher, hoping to keep the class busy for as long as possible, was quite surprised that Gauss had the correct answer in just few minutes. Gauss had realized that the numbers could be arranged in pairs which add up to one hundred e.g. 1+99 = 100, 2 + 98 = 100, 3 + 97 = 100. Since there are forty-nine of these pairs, plus the numbers 100 and 50, the grand total is 5050! (quote and story is courtesy of a Wujec book)
Meanwhile, back to Young Beach Warden: “...doing something irregular” - I bet the beach rangers kicked your b**t big time! When u gonna stop bluffin Dennis? I bet your nose has grown few more inches and you will start earning a second code name: Pinocchio. Produce your own Spiral Pic and you are off the hook:-)
A thought addressed to Botogol (not Dennis or Pinocchio) Hanson’s Dapper V Schnook: What if the subjects of the experiment were blind? Could it be explained that the subjects, if cognizant of their latent abilities, can actually smell/sense emotions e.g. ‘fear’ hence the behavioural reaction which would lend Dapper V Schnook to be flawed and has nothing to do with appearances?!!!
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