PATTERNS CAN EVEN BE FOUND ON THE SIMPLE HANDS OF A DIGITAL CLOCK.

When scientists discover new things they are aided most times by the patterns or models on which those objects are based. Calendars, for example the Gregorian calendar, were based on patterns drawn from natural observations, and so for so many scientific examples, like gravity, relativity etcetera. The list can go on and on.

I like to pretend I can be an inventor. Pretense or make-believe, where one works towards it, can lead to undiscovered treasures. So in my make-believe in looking for patterns in everyday objects like license plate numbers, colors of clothes people wear, shoe sizes at the market and telling the time, I search for factual patterns, hoping to make a sale.

Voilà, I did succeed one unholy day. That day was the tenth of October, two thousand and ten or when written in numerals, 10/10/10. It’s not everyday that the date and time gives you a pattern, and by the way, those do not look like patterns, just chance coincidences, so I decided to concentrate on the time.

Another eureka! It will surprise that when you copy and paste the hour hand on the minute and seconds side, you can get a pattern for every hour of the day, whether counting by 12-hour or 24-hours?

Let’s start from one o’clock in the morning. You will always get to the time: 01:01:01, that is one minute and one second to the hour. Another is 02:02:02 or two minutes and two seconds to two o’clock in the morning.

 

11

11

11

I noticed that every hour can be copied and pasted on the minutes and seconds side.

13

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13

Even when the hour is close to midnight.

22

22

22

I really cannot find any functional value of this patterns except for the fact that they possess some aesthetic value. Also, I find much delight waiting for the next pattern to appear on the digital watch embedded on my handset.

There are times though when the patterns do not really make good matches on the hour, especially when you want to flip the hour.

For example, at one o’clock, when you flip the hour and paste it on the minutes side and then flip the minutes and paste it on the seconds side, sometimes the patterns follow but sometimes they do not.

01

10

01

The one o’clock hour do follow beautifully, but these pattern is followed until six o’clock.

05

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05

But at six o’clock, when you flip 06 at the hour, you do not get a translation for the minute hand.

Notwithstanding, from ten o’clock, the pattern starts to make another connection.

10

01

10

 

11

11

11

And this connection continues until the fifteenth hour.

15

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15

And breaks up at the sixteenth hour, when 16 cannot translate to the minute when you flip the hour readings. But at the twentieth hour, our pattern continues again.

20

02

20

 

23

32

23

Looking for unbroken patterns on flipping the hour hand is not possible, but the start and continuation of the patterns can create a good aesthetic graphic display.

As I said before, patterns in nature if one cannot find the functional value yet, can serve for their aesthetic value and also as a time killer, to kill the boredom. When I do find another pattern in nature, I’ll surely be blogging on it.

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IF ONE GREEN BOTTLE ACCIDENTALLY FALLS DOWN…

We all love nursery rhymes. I do remember, as if it was yesterday, the rhyme about counting ten green bottles on the wall, subtracting them by one until all the bottles on the wall have fallen down. I think it is a skill children learn about subtracting and how to count backwards.

Counting has always been with man since he knew how to acquire things. When one discovers that he has started accumulating material objects beyond the singletons, then he develops the innate ability to be able to remember how many they are, if one is lost, which it was and plan towards acquiring more. That is counting. While counting, one also develops the innate ability of naming the things counted so that he can group them together for remembrance and memorization. Therefore, a man possessing goats, yams and lands, names these things and counts each of them so he can distinguish all of them while being able to group them as his properties.
The simplest way of counting, which we all learn even from infancy, is to count by watching others. Then we express this ability with our lips. This is what some call recitation. From recitation, we decided to develop the number system so that counting can be done easily and quickly. Numbering can be done through tally or writing out numerals depending on whatever system one desires.

If you visit the market, you will be astonished that counting is a skill traders practice and have learnt to master. They have to know the totals of what they possess. They count as if by rote, even while sleeping, while walking and eating. They count the cash they have, the goods in the store, the debt they owe, the number of times the relative or girlfriend who comes to solicit for funds come every month. They have learnt to count so well that this skill has become a personal sin.

I think that is why from counting, they have also learnt to calculate.
Without the ability to calculate, we wouldn’t find a meaning to what is being counted. If you are counting forwards, do you wish to do addition or multiplication? Do not forget that multiplication is addition done in groups. Some count by adding one to the things before, some in groups of five i.e in multiples of five; some can also count backwards, doing subtraction or divisions.
Calculation makes it possible that you can predict the outcome of future counting. For example, if you know you have x goods in the store and you sold y number of them, by calculation of the subtraction, you can predict the outcome of a future count of those goods taking y from x.

Calculation also helps the counter understand the outcome of past counting and design appropriate counting projects. By calculating our counting, we can derive patterns from them due to repeated counting. For example, I have found that while counting the sum of the license numbers of Nigerian plate numbers that every time the sum is a multiple of 3, I can juggle the numbers so that they can fall in ascending order. Imagine a plate number is LH855KJA, the sum of the numerals adds to eighteen (18), which is a multiple of three, so I can rearrange the numbers as 666, then take one from the leftmost number, six (6), and add to the last six to derive a number that falls in ascending order: 567. Quite some maverick practice, but it works when you find pleasure in counting and numbers.

Abacus, one of the earliest mechanical calculating devices

Counting and calculation has been as old as man itself. A short history of counting involves when we counted by recitation and with the fingers. A mechanical calculation device, the abacus, was thereafter invented to aid in faster counting and calculation.

William Oughtred, the inventor of the slide rule

A Scottish mathematician, John Napier developed logarithms in the sixteenth century. Logarithms made it possible that multiplication and division were converted to addition and subtraction respectively, thereby making counting and calculation of numbers more easy, especially for very large numbers. William Oughtred, an English Mathematician, built upon logarithms to invent the slide rule, a mechanical calculation device, for logarithms.

Calculators which are electro-mechanical devices successfully replaced the manual devices above and eventually, they have all been usurped by the computer. The beauty and sweat of man’s efforts to count and calculate efficiently is embodied in the computer. Thanks to the computer, the absolute impossible, for example, genotyping living beings, is possible. Every single gene in the human body can now be counted and understood.

So, even if all the green bottles fall off the wall, you and I will still be counting in some other way, either through an app on a mobile device or a computer game.

Talking about games, I intend doing research on games that can aid in numerical ability in the nearest future.




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SOME RAMBLINGS ON THE HEAVENS, THE DEVIL AND THE UNIVERSE.

Life is so full of pain and suffering. Sometimes, you wonder why we care to endure life? No wonder so many persons crave the cold comfort of a peaceful, comfortable free-from-care life in heaven. That thought, of heaven, brings smiles to my face. Why? Because I’d rather think of what is observable and possible than what is unobservable, beyond the imagination and not of my control.

Although science has achieved so much, everyone knows there are things science cannot explain. Like unobservable things in the universe. Do you believe there are living beings on other universe? Is it because your eyes cannot see beings on planet Mars, Jupiter, Venus etcetera that you believe there are no beings on these planets? I shudder to think that is impossible, because it would go against the grain of a designer for the universe. Why should an all wise creator create this vast universe and want planet Earth to be the only universe with living beings in the Milky Way galaxy? It is quite inconceivable. But if life was to be found on any other planet and we make contact with them, then what is heaven and where is heaven? Can you imagine heaven without going there? If you had to go, wouldn’t have to die?

Just some foolish rambling of mine. I think Nigerians are deeply religious, so I do not want to disturb their brains with thoughts like these.

First Shot at the moon, after sunset

The picture above was shot with a Kodak camera, 4.0 megapixels. If you look very carefully, center right, top, you will see a very small whitish dot. That is the moon while I am standing on ground level. I thought I could catch a sharper glimpse of it. I really tried.

Second Shot at the moon, after sunset

Fifteen minutes later, I took another shot. You can see that the sky is getting darker. I had to move closer to the moon. You can see the balcony of an upper floor on the background.

The moon, sun, earth – my, all these works are lovely. If they are all created by a designer, what would the anti-designer have done? Destroy them?
When I reflect on the Devil, the Devil whom we all abhor, I think he is not a creature to be abhorred. I think he should be recognized as a designer in his own class and right, because only a designer can destroy another’s design. Imagine a non-programmer hacking at and introducing bugs into a software program? That is not possible.

If you don’t respect the Devil, I do. I think he is as intelligent as Jesus Christ! I am not talking about the Hebrew Devil, or the Bible Devil, but the Devil in general, a being or force that works against creative design. That is how I see him. Sometimes I wonder why, during the heavenly ceremony before Job’s trials, he had to appear in heaven? Why? Why? Because although he was out of favor, he still has INTERESTS or FUNCTIONS to perform which no other being up there can. You cannot trifle with interests and functions. If you ask me, I’d place him as the second ranking angel in heaven, if you are Christian and believe the Christian bible, directly after Jesus, that is why only Jesus had the power to throw him down. You do not trifle with that! Only Jesus had the power to throw him down? You don’t trifle with an anti-designer, rather you learn lessons of survival and subterfuge from him.

Because Nature abhors a vacuum, he wouldn’t have been thrown out of the heavenly places if Jesus didn’t learn the power, skills and function he serves, replace them and make his welcome distasteful. I think that is why it took him so many years before he could accomplish that feat.

Third Shot at the moon, after sunset

The picture above is the third shot of the moon. You can see that the view now is darker. It’s getting close to seven p.m. I really had to strain to get this shot before dark. I wish I had a better camera.

Just in the mood for some religious ramble and deep meditations about religious beliefs. You don’t have to agree with me. Would love dissenting views and comments.



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