Jasper
Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is a British novelist. Fforde's first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in
2001. Fforde is mainly known for his Thursday
Next novels,
although he has written several books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series and has begun two more independent series, The
Last Dragonslayer and Shades of Grey. His published books include a series
of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next: The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost
Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of our
Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died
a Lot.
The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections
before its eventual acceptance for publication.
Fforde won the Wodehouse
prize for
comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost Plots. The Big Over Easy (2005),
set in the same alternative universe as the Next novels, is a reworking of his
first written novel, which initially failed to find a publisher. Its original title was Who
Killed Humpty Dumpty?, and later had the working title of Nursery
Crime, which is the title now used to refer to this series of books. These books describe the investigations of
DCI Jack Spratt. The follow-up to The
Big Over Easy, The Fourth Bear, was published in July
2006 and focuses on Goldilocks
and the Three Bears. Fforde's
books are noted for their profusion of literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots,
and playfulness with the conventions of traditional genres. His works usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy. None of his books has a chapter 13 except in
the table of contents where there is a title of the chapter and a page
number. In many of the books the page
number is, in fact, the page right before the first page of chapter 14. However, in some the page number is just a
page somewhere in chapter 12. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Fforde
Educated at Trinity
College, Cambridge, Nigel McCrery is
a film maker and writer. He created Silent
Witness and Touching Evil and produced All the King's Men staring Maggie Smith
and David Jason. He is the
author of six Silent Witness books and won the Edgar Allan Poe award for crime
fiction. He is the man who arranged for
the remains of Tsar Nicholas and the Russian royal family to be brought to the
UK for the forensic tests that showed they were the real bodies. http://unitedagents.co.uk/nigel-mccrery
First interview with Nigel McCrery: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1084088/Revealed-The-rags-riches-life-master-storyteller-TVs-secret-superstar.html
Find Nigel McCrery
bibliography divided by fiction, series and non-fiction at
DEMOTIC adjective 1. of, relating to, or written
in a simplified form of the ancient Egyptian hieratic writing 2.
popular, common 3. of or relating to the form
of Modern Greek that is based on everyday speech Origin: Greek dēmotikos, from dēmotēs commoner, from dēmos
first known use: 1822 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/demotic
The Demotic or popular script, a name given to it by Herodotus, developed from a
northern variant of the Hieratic script in around 660 BC. The Egyptians themselves called it 'sekh
shat' (writing for documents). During
the 26th Dynasty it became the preferred script at court, however during the
4th century it was gradually replaced by the Greek-derived Coptic alphabet. The most recent example of writing in the
Demotic script dates from 425 AD. The
Demotic script was used for writing business, legal, scientific, literary and
religious documents. It was written
almost exclusively from right to left in horizontal lines and mainly in ink on
papyrus. Demotic inscriptions on wood
and stone are also known. During the
Ptolemaic Period it was regularly carved in stone - the most famous example of
this is the Rosetta Stone, which is inscribed with texts in the Hieroglyphic
script, Greek and Demotic and was one of the keys to the decipherment of
Ancient Egyptian scripts. See Demotic
glyphs representing single consonants glyphs at http://www.omniglot.com/writing/egyptian_demotic.htm
Botticelli:
Little Barrel The painter Botticelli was born at Florence in
1444 in a house in the Via Nueva, Borg' Ognissanti. This was the home of his father, Mariano di
Vanni dei Filipepi, a struggling tanner.
Sandro, the youngest child, derived the name Botticelli by which he was
commonly known, not, as related by Giorgio
Vasari, from a goldsmith to whom he
was apprenticed, but from his eldest brother Giovanni, a prosperous broker, who
seems to have taken charge of the boy and who for some reason bore the nickname Botticello or Little Barrel http://www.nndb.com/people/734/000084482/
In 1706, William Jones – a self-taught mathematician and one of– published
his seminal work, Synopsis
palmariorum matheseos, roughly translated as A
summary of achievements in mathematics.
It is a work of great historical interest because it is where the symbol
π appears for the first time in scientific literature to denote the ratio of a
circle’s circumference to its diameter. Jones
realised that the decimal 3.141592 … never ends and that it cannot be expressed
precisely. “The exact proportion between
the diameter and the circumference can never be expressed in numbers,” he
wrote. That was why he recognised that
it needed its own symbol to represent it.
It is thought that he chose π either because it is first letter of the
word for periphery (περιφέρεια) or because it is the first letter of the word
for perimeter (περίμετρος). (Or because
of both). The symbol π was popularised
in 1737 by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler (1707–83), but it wasn’t
until as late as 1934 that the symbol was adopted universally. http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs-adventures-in-numberland/2015/mar/14/pi-day-2015-william-jones-the-welshman-who-invented-pi
Dr. Edwin J. Goodwin, M.D., a physician in the community of Solitude, Posey County,
Indiana, was one of a long line of mathematical hobbyists to try to square the
circle. Dr. Goodwin thought he had succeeded, and, apparently a loyal
Hoosier, decided that the State of Indiana should be the first beneficiary of
this "new mathematical truth."
In 1897, Dr. Goodwin wrote a bill incorporating his new ideas, and persuaded
his State Representative to introduce it. Representative
Record submitted the bill, House Bill 246, on January 18, 1897. Dr.
Goodwin had copyrighted his solution to squaring the circle, and his idea was
to allow Indiana to use these new facts in its schools free of
charge. People in the rest of the
country and the world would have to pay him a royalty. Petr Beckmann, in
his History
of Pi, wrote that the bill contained "hair-raising statements which
not only contradict elementary geometry, but also appear to contradict each
other" (p. 175). Towards the end of the second of three
sections of the bill, it says "the ratio of the diameter and circumference
is as five-fourths to four." Pi is the ratio of the circumference to
the diameter of the circle, and the ratio 4 to 5/4 is 3.2. The House Bill
246 was referred to the House Committee on Canals, also known as the Committee
on Swamp Lands. Representative M. B. Butler, chairman of the Canals
Committee, recommended that it be referred to the Committee on Education, and
this was done on January 19. The
newspapers followed the debate. The Indianapolis Sentinel, on January
20, reported that the bill was "not intended to be a
hoax." The House Education Committee, chaired by Representative
S. E. Nicholson, reported the bill out of committee "with the
recommendation that said bill do pass."
It was taken up by the full House on February 5, and passed unanimously,
67 to 0. On February 5, the head of the
Purdue University Mathematics Department, Professor Clarence Abiathar Waldo,
was in the Statehouse lobbying for the University's budget appropriation.
Professor Waldo had been an instructor of mathematics (and Latin) at several
seminaries, institutes and colleges in the Midwest for more than 20 years.
He was the author of a book titled Manual of Descriptive Geometry. He was astonished to find the General Assembly
debating mathematical legislation. The
committee reported the bill favorably the next day, and sent it to the Senate
floor for debate. This time its reception was different.
The Indianapolis
Journal had
Senator Hubbell saying that "the Senate might as well try to legislate
water to run up hill as to establish mathematical truth by law."
Senator Hubbell moved to postpone further consideration of the bill
indefinitely, and the motion passed. According to Beckmann, the bill
"has not been on the agenda since" (p. 177). The official
history of the Indiana General Assembly (p. 429) gives the credit to Professor
Waldo. Thanks mainly to this alert professor,
who convinced the Senate not to tamper with "unsolvable mysteries . . .
above man's abilities to comprehend," the Indiana General Assembly failed
to do in 1897 what no one before or since has done, i.e. square the circle. Link to the full text of HB 246, 1897 at
March 14 (3/14) is celebrated annually as Pi
Day because the date resembles the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its
diameter — 3.14 for short. And in 2015
the date syncs up with the first four digits after the decimal point, so
3.14.15 looks a lot like 3.14159265359.
That won’t happen again until 2115. http://time.com/3743279/pi-day-2015-wackiest-celebrations/
Link to
"Pi Mathematical Pi Song" and "Pi Sightings: Pi Pie Pan" at http://www.piday.org/
Corned beef
gets its name from the corn kernel-sized salt crystals originally used to
preserve meat. Abraham Lincoln chose
corned beef, cabbage and potatoes for his inaugural luncheon on March 4, 1861.
Get a recipe for St. Paddy’s Day Corned Beef and Cabbage Salad
at
http://parade.com/382914/parade/st-paddys-day-corned-beef-and-cabbage-salad/
With more vegetables than meat, the
ingredients include green beans and potatoes.
The dressing has molasses, apple cider vinegar, and mustard in it.
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1270
March 16, 2015 On this date in 1750, Caroline Herschel, German-English astronomer, was born.
On this date in 1861, Edward Clark became Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston,
who had been evicted from the office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to
the Confederacy.
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