psmv6: The start of September

There had been enough rain by the beginning of the month to bring two striking thistles out of nearby verges.

Presumably the same species, with the differences being down to context. Is the weaker appearance of the second just down to deprivation of something or other?

Presumably they start to shoot up and flower at some point. But is that something that would happen soon, if unmolested, or would they wait until the spring?

Google Images seems clear enough that the first image is a common thistle (Cirsium vulgare), with this flat rosette in the first year and (usually) the tall, flowering stem the second. This is consistent with both references 7 and 8, although neither provide a similar image. But Bing turns one up at reference 9.

I pass on separate checking of the second image.

Back at home, the end of my spectacles case caught my eye. The rectangular array of white dots decorating the outside had turned into a spiral. What was going on here?

Closer inspection suggested that this was the result of the slight misalignment of the top and bottom of the case, with the top shifting one step with respect to the bottom. Which did not seem terribly satisfactory as a proper spiral is not made up of arcs of circles.

But I thought I would give it a go in Powerpoint, just to see. Which resulted in the snap above, with four loose ends rather than two, which I had not managed to work out inside the brain, without access to paper and pencil (or Powerpoint, as the case might be).

You can cheat by shifting one half two steps rather than one with respect to the other half. You still get four loose ends, but they are more agreeably aligned this way. More spiral like - but not what is happening in the case of the spectacles case.

The basic idea was to chop a nest of circles in half using the Snipping Tool, and then to put the two halves back together appropriately. Then adding in a couple of missing arcs. But I would say that I found it a bit fiddly to add the final arc at the top, resorting to the arc shape, which I do not use very often. It might have been quicker to use the remove background tool, but then I do not use that very often either. Was I missing something?

I wonder how difficult it would be to ask Copilot, which I think is embedded in Powerpoint these days, to produce the figure? Would he have managed a better job than I did?

In the meantime, I have brushed up a little on some long forgotten geometry.

And while we are on mind games, I have recently been brushing up on the NATO alphabet of reference 2, and found that I had mislaid 'uniform' and was reduced to asking my telephone. All back in place now, I am pleased to be able to report.

From there I moved onto the animal game, a version of that reported at reference 3. In brief, the idea is to roll through the alphabet giving the common name of a mammal for each letter. Water mammals are allowed. An important rule is that if a B comes after A, B cannot name the same animal as A, nor can it name a sub-group or super-group of A. So while it might be tempting to use 'elephant' for 'E', that would rule out using 'Indian elephant' for 'I', which is even more convenient.

For this game, I did not resort to the telephone, managing to recover 'hyrax' and 'urial' under my own steam. I knew that there was some group of animals for 'X' which included sloths and anteaters, but failed to recover 'Xenarthra'. And Wikipedia failed to include it very visibly at reference 4. There is, however, reference 5. The word makes it to Webster's, although not to OED - and I give it the benefit of the doubt.

As it happens, one of my holiday reads was the book at reference 6, from which I learn that these animals are important in the myths of the first peoples of South America, although I don't think that Lévi-Strauss uses the X word: he may not have been aware of the connection, despite his extraordinarily wide reading. But more of that in due course.

On a slightly different tack, during my latest visit to the hospital, I was using the same notebook that I had used during a previous visit, a Pukka Pad from the branch of Smith's there. I was reminded that I had spent quite a lot of time on a version of Simpson's paradox, getting as far as generating some examples of my own. I had meant to write it up, but, in the event, the matter only made a passing mention at reference 12. It is described properly at references 13 and 14.

But what I cannot now recover is what sparked my interest in the matter in the first place, or how I found out that the paradox had been named for Simpson. Maybe it will come back to me, and maybe I will have another go.

Moving on to today, out to check the pond, where the water was all present and correct, gently washing over the bar below the brickwork at the bottom of the snap.

Neither geese nor coots to be seen, but plenty of noisy ducks and some moorhens. I think that the blobs of reference 1, which I had thought might have been goslings, were actually large stones on the top of the island.

Maybe tomorrow I will remember to take my monocular to help me along, as I had intended today.

PS 1: there was a senior moment in the course of checking OED for Xenarthra. I pulled the first volume off the shelf, before the brain worked out that I really wanted the (rather heavier) last volume.

Noting in passing that whoever bound up my copy, perhaps the library at the school at Guildford who were the original owners, started well, with modest volumes only a couple of inches thick, but got meaner as they worked their way through the alphabet, with fat volumes, three or four inches thick, getting more common.

PS 2: the wretched Letby business has reappeared in the news with the publication of the Thirlwell Report, to be found at reference 10. I am not yet good for its three fat volumes, but I am turning the pages of the summary, a modest 75 pages. All rather depressing. Previous notice is to be found at reference 11.

PS 3: I have now tracked the paradox to its source. It seems that it was a digression which was spawned at the time of the post at reference 15. I did do some further work on it after I left hospital, but did not bring it to the point of a post. The curious reader can try reverse engineering the figure snapped above.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-end-of-august.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/breaking-rhythm.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-alphabet-game-revisited.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-toed_sloth.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenarthra.

Reference 6: The jealous potter – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1985, 1988.

Reference 7: https://bsbi.org/learn/resources/identification-guides/thistle-i.dentification.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirsium_vulgare.

Reference 9: https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/weeds/Media/Html/Cirsium_vulgare_(Spear_Thistle).htm.

Reference 10: https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/the-report/#Summary-report-on-report-page.

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=letby.