maths – don't confuse the narrator

correlations

Way back in the distant past, I studied maths. In fact, due to some bad choices early in my life, I actually got as far as starting to study maths at university, although I moved to a less challenging course after the first year.

Despite not completing the maths degree, I remember enjoying the history of maths module and I have fond – though somewhat blurred – memories of learning about relativity through stories of stick figures who chased each other across the blackboard, one of them flashing a torch at the other with the light never arriving as they were travelling so fast.
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prime time

Yesterday evening, the clock on my phone tried to convince me that the New year was here hours before it was due. Then time appeared to whizz by and what seemed to be a mere minute later the display read 2018, 31st December.

It was all a bit confusing and I certainly needed that extra second of 2016 to work out what was going on.
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stars and stats

The poetry course that I’m taking started with a discussion of sand and stars. More precisely, with the statement that there are ten times as many stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth. (If you’re interested, here’s the maths that backs up the estimate.) I don’t think we mentioned, though, that there are more atoms in a single grain of sand than there are stars in the universe.

Either way, macrocosmos or microcosmos, a number that big is hard to comprehend, and the human brain tends to look for simplifications and ideas closer to home.

I’ve just been out in the garden and, unlikely as it seems, I suppose I’ll just have to assume there are more stars in the universe than there are blossoms on the plum tree.

millions and billions

Rabbit reading by Lance Tooks — drawing courtesy Lance Tooks

I was intrigued by the BBC website Magazine story entitled Do the dead outnumber the living?

My attention was caught in particular by the table at the end showing a total for the number of people who have ever lived as 107,602,707,791.
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of poetry, maths and cars

Although I was brought up surrounded by poetry, I don’t remember being aware that any of the adults around me actually wrote poems; not even light verse. Not until I was studying for A levels, that is.
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