Friday, October 14, 2011 Lethbridge
5:10 am
The temperature is -1 C, with a high predicted of +11 C. From the Environment Canada website: Today Increasing cloudiness this morning. High 11. Tonight Clearing late this evening. Low zero. Normals Max: 14°C Min: 0°C
5:20 am Morning Musings
Priority One: lose some weight and get myself into a more healthy lifestyle.
I lost a pound. Trivial perhaps, but psychologically it is a plus. Nothing beats a little positive news.
Priority Two: geocaching.
I am trying to get this activity up to speed. I have just checked one of the tables that geocaching.com provides as part of the user statistics and noted that I have never found a cache on October 14. A silly statistic but I will try to find one today without driving too far. So far I have found 174 caches this year. The totals for my previous years are 81, 441 and 390. The trend is down. There is lots of time yet to get my total up to 200 and I might try for 300. There are a number of new geocachers in the Lethbridge area and they are beginning to place new caches that don't involve driving a long distance. This will help.
Priority three: model trains.
I will try to spend a couple of hours on this today. The idea will be to play with the Ship It software and familiarize myself with the overall reports.
Priority four: mathematics.
I will spend at least an hour looking at a book I bought a few months ago on symmetry.
Priority five: Go
I will continue to play a few games of Igowin.
Priority six: Literature
I want some light reading at the moment. The novel Guards! Guards! was recommended to me by a friend. I will begin this today.
Six distinct activities is a lot for one day. I will be able to combine the first two activities as I have noticed that there are two geocaches that are close to my coulee walk.
10:30 am Mathematics
I have begun reading "The Symmetries of Things". Wow!
I read the first chapter (Symmetries, p. 7 - 13) and skimmed the next chapter (Planar Patterns, p. 14 - 27).
The first chapter introduces a totally new notational system for describing symmetrical patterns. It will take some practice before I am comfortable with this. The initial emphasis is on finite patterns in the plane, but at the end of the chapter this is extended to both infinite patterns and to patterns on the surface of a sphere. The second chapter goes into detail on repeating patterns on a plane surface (i.e. that are infinite in both directions). There is much here that requires careful consideration and practice.
This also raises the idea of trying to find examples of such patterns in reality. There are 17 distinct planar symmetry patterns. One of my favorite books is "Symmetry" (2008) by Marcus du Sautoy. The third chapter describes his efforts to find all 17 symmetry patterns in the Alhambra Palace in Grenada, Spain.
Typing "17 plane symmetry groups" into google gives a number of websites that provide detailed infomation on these different patterns.
Another idea would be identify the GPS coordinates of a location and the direction one should face at that location in order to see a particular type of pattern.
This leads to the idea of creating a few (say 4) locations and then open it up to all geocachers to find examples of the other 13 patterns. I like this!!
I could begin by setting up a few puzzle caches that require one to go to a particular coordinate, face a specific direction, and then describe the object and indicate how many, and what kind, of symmetries it contains. I will play with this.
11:20 am Model Trains
The track cleaning tank car for my layout arrived this morning. That is less than 24 hours since I paid for it electronically. Impressive!
3:30 PM Geocaching
I combined my geocaching with my coulee walk. I had identified 2 new caches at the university and not far from the route I take when doing my coulee cardiovascular. I had read the description for these caches as well as the logs of people who had searched for them and was confident I could find one of them without using my GPS unit. However I did bring it along, just in case. However I quickly found it without any difficulty and the GPS stayed in my pocket.
- GC35E6D - The Troll
Looking at my updated statistics, this was the 200th different day (out of 365) that I have found at least one cache. My total finds for 2011 is now 175.
8:00 PM Literature
I have begun reading "Guards! Guards!" by Terry Pratchett. I have noticed his books in stores but have never bought one until now. The first few pages are indeed a delight. Pure literary fun.
