enkiduonthenet

Where are all the heroes and heroines?

[I’m posting this early as I will not be able to post tomorrow or Monday as per my schedule]



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The Cricket World Cup continues and now we have only the final match left. New Zealand versus Australia. The success of the New Zealand team and the reaction to their semi final win led me to think about heroes.

The saying goes that every one likes a winner, and since the New Zealand team has exceeded many peoples’ expectations, the local media are ecstatic. Most ordinary New Zealanders who would not normally be interested in cricket have been tuning their radios and TV to the match commentary or streaming the matches from the Internet. Indeed it would be fair to say that the whole country is behind the team.



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Interestingly, the New Zealand commentators, who covered the semi final and who were jumping for joy when New Zealand won, were almost as quick to sympathise with the losing South African team. This empathy was probably because it was an amazing game with a breath taking finale, played all the way through in good spirit, and the South African team who so nearly won it called truly be called gallant in defeat.

The match could have gone either way up until the very end, and I think this helped the New Zealand team and the New Zealand public to commiserate with the South Africans. It so nearly was the New Zealand team on the losing end of the match. It was an amazing end, with grown men hugging and grown men crying.



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Being a small country New Zealand doesn’t often have sporting heroes or heroines, but it does happen. New Zealand players have gone to Australia the UK, Japan, France and even the US to play their sport, be it soccer, basketball, rugby union or rugby league. New Zealand doesn’t have the funds to pay professional sports persons that these other countries do.

Somehow or other this doesn’t seem to affect the quality of the sports stars in the local sporting arenas. In fact returning players often find it a little difficult to get back into the top level teams on their return from an overseas period of their career.



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In New Zealand the public has a curious attitude to top sports persons. If a New Zealander were to meet one of his or her sports idols, he or she would probably as likely offer to buy him or her a drink as ask him or her for an autograph.

New Zealanders expect sports stars to be approachable, and in many cases they are. Because it is a small country, a sizeable number of the fans will have gone to school with them, or lived next door to them, or perhaps worked with them when they were starting out, before they became professional sports persons.



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New Zealanders tends to excel in what could be called minor sports. This is probably partially because in the larger countries, the ones in which the sport arose or where it has become very popular the best athletes are attracted to the major sports. When a New Zealander or New Zealand team do succeed in major sports it is front page news ‘back home’.

Even when it is a minor sport (such as Greco-Rona wrestling or lawn bowls) if a New Zealander does well they become well known, at least in New Zealand. New Zealanders realise this full well and wryly comment that something is “world famous in New Zealand“.

English: L & P bottle model in Paeroa, showing... — English: L & P bottle model in Paeroa, showing the label design as used from the 1970s to the 1990s Deutsch: L&P Modellflasche in Paeroa mit dem Label, dass von 1970gern bis 1990gern verwendet wurde. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So we have the likes of Stephen Adams doing well in American basketball, and the average New Zealand man in the street knows that he plays for Oklahoma City Thunder, and the average New Zealand sports buff could probably tell you what his scores were.

Heroes and heroines have been around since people started to form towns and cities and to write down their histories. Back in the times that the Greeks and Romans held sway in Europe, it is likely that total population of the Earth would have been measured in millions rather than the billions that live on the Earth today. Towns and cities of the time would probably have appear small to modern eyes – Rome is believed to have peaked at around one million people at its peak in the second century of the Common Era.

Since the populations were so small compared to today it is likely that the heroes and heroines of the time were known personally to a large part of the population. Since the population was so small the six degrees of separation of the modern world are likely to be reduced to three or four. Admittedly the lines of communication would likely be way slower in the ancient world but Julius Caesar was likely be a friend of a friend of a friend of every person in the world at that time.

English: Map of the Roman Republic in 40 BC af... — English: Map of the Roman Republic in 40 BC after the recent conquests of Julius Caesar. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Given the small population of the time, heroic events would be quickly well known and the heroes and heroines would become household names. Since this would happen mostly by word of mouth, the Chinese Whispers effect would be strong. Intentional and unintentional misunderstandings would mount up and would inflate the story, so that instead of the hero overcoming three others, one at a time, he instead reputedly takes on a dozen all at once.

When you read of Julius Caesar and his legions, I at least get the image of vast armies, but a legion was between 5,000 and 1,500 men. Caesar conquered Gaul with only a few legions, say 10,000 men probably which doesn’t seem very many, but there was little real opposition in numerical terms.

The initials SPQR stood for Senātus Populusque... — The initials SPQR stood for Senātus Populusque Rōmānus (“The Senate and the People of Rome”). They were emblazoned on the banners of Roman legions. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s not as if there were a strong national structure to oppose him, as the tribal structure common in those days might extend to a city or two, or a region and Julius Caesar was able to exploit regional rivalries to take control of the region. He of course had to contend with heroes popping up, like Vercingetorix who unified the previous divided Gauls.

Heroes and heroines have only one fate – they win at first (which makes them heroes or heroines), but eventually they lose and then they usually die. Vercingetorix eventually lost to Julius Caesar at the battle of Alesia, and Julius Caesar cemented his hold over Gaul.

Even Julius Caesar, eventually, lost both his empire and his life, at the hands of his former friends, who briefly became heroes themselves, before quickly losing their lives too.

While modern day sporting heroes and heroines don’t actually die, they eventually suffer defeat and become radio or TV commentators, which may be a worse fate. So I hope that the New Zealand cricket team wins the Cricket World Cup tomorrow, but if they can’t manage it, they have put on an amazing show in getting this far.



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Cricket – bat and ball game

That’s how Wikipedia describes cricket – as a bat and ball game. Since the Cricket World Cup is currently being staged in Australia and New Zealand, I thought that I would choose cricket as the topic for the week.

The roots of cricket are in England, though it so happens that the mother country of cricket has been eliminated from the Cricket World Cup (CWC). Cricket has spread to a number of other countries as a result of colonial and other influences and 14 teams have been taking part in the 2015 CWC.

List of ICC cricket member nations. Orange mar... — List of ICC cricket member nations. Orange marked countries are test teams, yellow are associate and purple are affiliate member nations. (Note: Certain island nations may not be shown.) For those who may not be able to make out the colours: Shade used for Australia is orange Shade used for United States is yellow Shade used for Mexico is purple (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Cricket playing nations are either full members of the International Cricket Council or associate or affiliate members. The CWC contestants are the 10 full members and 4 other members who are required to qualify for the tournament. The ‘minnows’ as the associates and affiliates are often referred to rarely trouble the full members in matches, but upsets are not unknown.

Of the bat and ball games, cricket is of the class where a batsman defends a target from a ball thrown (“pitched” or “bowled”) by a player from the other team. Points (referred to as runs) are scored by running from one end of the pitch to the other, or by hitting the ball out of bounds.

Cricket is similar to baseball and softball and the informal game of rounders in the sense that the members of the batting team take turns ‘at bat’. The target area is a physical target in cricket (“stumps” and “bails”) but is a virtual box in baseball and softball. There is no specific target in rounders, where the ball just has to be hittable by the batter.

Cricket has two “targets” or wickets, and I can’t think of any other bat and ball sport that has two wickets or the equivalent. The wickets are one chain apart in the old Imperial measures, and the person who delivers the ball to the batsman throws or bowls the ball from one wicket to the other. The game switches around after every 6 balls, with a second bowler bowling at the batsman at the other end of the pitch. This is termed an “over” as the supervising official, the umpire, calls “Over” when six balls have be bowled.

In informal or backyard cricket it is common to have just one wicket and a single pole (or stump) for the bowler to deliver the ball from. Other rules are ignored or modified as appropriate from the much smaller space available. In recent years, there has been a move to formalise at least some games of backyard or beach cricket and to institute competitions in the formalised code. These are still considered “fun” games though.

There are variants of cricket played in some Pacific Islands, The rules of these variants are also informal, team sizes are variable, and the bat often resembles a war weapon. Teams can contain both men and women and people of all ages. The Wikipedia article mentions that there have been attempts to formalize the rules of this variant of the sport.



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The original format of the formal game of cricket is multi-day, multi-innings. Even the Island form of the game runs to several days, but that may be related more to the social nature of island cricket than anything else. As in any formal game the equipment and the uniform is closely specified and in particular the uniform is white – known as “cricket whites”.

The multi-day format is unusual in sports and arises from the fact that each team has eleven players and each may have to have their time at bat twice in a game. Shorter forms are often played at a semi-formal or provincial level, many being completed in one innings in one day. Cricket is not a quick game in terms of time taken, as each batsman may face upwards of one hundred balls. The semi-formal “village green” cricket is a leisurely affair, in spite of the fact that the ball may be bowled at speeds of up to 150kph.

A family playing cricket on the Village Green (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A new form of cricket has developed where the number of overs or sets of six balls is restricted to 50 for each team. The uniforms are not restricted to white and some other minor changes have been made to the rules. These changes have led to a more exciting, quicker form of the game and the matches are over in one day. This is the form that is being played for the Cricket World Cup.

There is an even shorter version of the game called Twenty20, which is a fast paced version with only 20 overs per side. Both the 20 over and (slightly less so) 50 over versions of the game result in fast scoring and more excitement than the standard version of the game as teams, both fielders and batsman take a more highly charged attitude.

Turner slides to prevent a boundary during a T... — Turner slides to prevent a boundary during a Twenty20 Cup match against Gloucestershire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The sport is professional at the top level, and the top players are treated as celebrities. Since the sport is international these days players get to play in many countries. In particular many overseas players play in the Indian Premier League, a very rich Twenty20 competition based, as the name implies, in the Indian sub-continent.

The stance of a batsman in cricket is side on, with the bat grounded before the bowler start his delivery and raised backwards in preparation for the stroke. Consequently there are left hand and right batsmen (and bowlers). Since the game has been around there are unique terms for various matters to do with the game.

Collins's batting stance — Collins’s batting stance (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For example, the field positions have traditional names which might seem whimsical. “Silly Mid On” is one of them. It certainly is “silly” as it is close to the batsman in the natural line of a stroke on the on or leg side. The position is intended for a close in catch and is obviously dangerous as the ball is hard, much like a baseball. Some Silly Mid On fielders wear protective helmets and other gear.

One field position that I had not heard of until recently is “Cow Corner”. A fielder at Cow Corner is in much the same line from the bat as Silly Mid On, but much further away, almost on the edge of the field (the “boundary”). The name seemly relates to the rustic roots of the game where the field was indeed a field or paddock that had to be cleared of livestock before a game could commence.



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Of course, the cattle would most likely have left deposits behind them which could trouble the fielders during the game.



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Discworld

There’s an apocryphal story of an eminent lecturer (some say Bertrand Russell) giving a lecture on astronomy, describing how the earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the centre of the Home Galaxy, the Milky Way, when someone objects and states that the earth is a flat surface, balanced on the back or a turtle.

The lecturer questions what it is that the turtle is standing on, and the objector states that the turtle is standing on the back of another turtle. The lecturer asks what the second turtle is standing and gets the answer “It’s turtles all the way down“.



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It’s always struck me that the objector’s argument is paralleled by the lecturer’s own argument. The moon orbits the earth, the earth orbits the sun, the sun orbits the Home Galaxy, the Home Galaxy orbits the Local Cluster of galaxies. It’s orbits all the way down.

Of course the lecturer’s world view is a lot more sensible than the objector’s world view, wouldn’t you say? Well a confirmed sceptic would be dubious about both claims, but the man in the street assuming he wasn’t by chance a turtle believer would probably side with the lecturer.

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s worth remembering that the current view of the universe as espoused by the lecturer is fairly recent in historical terms. Sir Isaac Newton and his near contemporaries (both in Britain and elsewhere) cemented the physical view of the world as the paramount paradigm. Again it’s worth noting that Sir Isaac and co did not completely ditch the mystical view of the world. He was very interested in alchemy for example, though this could be considered to be a rational belief at a time when the field of chemistry was still relatively immature.

Sir Terry Pratchett took the turtle theory and ran with it in the Discworld series of books. What would life be like on a world shaped like a disc, carried by four elephants, on the back of a gigantic turtle? This is the basic premise of Pratchett’s books, which I enjoy immensely.

Obviously, sort of, such a world cannot be ruled by the laws of physics, so it is ruled by the laws of magic, which seem parallel the physical laws in some ways. Pratchett’s Discworld clockwork is run by magic, not by physics. Indeed one of the characters muses on the magical laws and wonder whether or not there might be “another way”.

Threading the Discworld books and the Discworld universe are certain key characters, the first of whom is the failed wizard and professional coward Rincewind, from the first Discworld book “The Colour of Magic”. Rincewind’s quest for a quiet life is forever dashed by circumstances which often result in Rincewind escaping from some life-threatening situation or other by the skin of his teeth.

Rincewind as illustrated by Paul Kidby in The ... — Rincewind as illustrated by Paul Kidby in The Art of Discworld. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Rincewind’s case is watched over by Death, who describes himself as an “anthropomorphical manifestion” and who looks after a room full of “life-timers”, huge hour glasses containing the sands of a person’s existence. When the sand runs out, Death appears to the person and with a sweep of his scythe cuts the person’s lifeline. What happens then varies, but usually the person or soul travels over a dark plain.

Rincewind’s lifetimer apparently looks as though it was constructed by a glass blower with a bad case of the hiccoughs, and Death has ceased to wonder when Rincewind will die, but merely retains a “professional interest” in Rincewind’s exploits.

Death (Discworld) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

One thousand words cannot do justice to the inventiveness of Pratchett’s Diskworld. It is peopled by trolls, dwarves, werewolves, vampires, heroes (professionals of course), wizards, witches, talking dogs, a smell with its own personality, druids, priests, gods and godesses and many many other characters.

Over the series of books the geography of the Diskworld as are some of its physical (or maybe that should be “magical”) properties. The geography is centred socially in the twin city of Ankh-Morpork, and physically by the Hub Mountains (home of the Ice Giants and “Dunmanifestin”, the home of the rather down market major gods of Diskworld).

Sir Terry Pratchett’s Diskworld is, as can be seen from the above to be a complex one, interleaving and referencing many well-known myths and legends which Pratchett weaves into enthralling parodies of the originals.

For example, the heroes that Rincewind and others encounter are mostly bumptious self righteous individuals who seem to possess very little in the way of intellect. They win because they are heroes and heroes always win in the end, not because they are shrewd campaigners.



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An exception to this model of hero is Cohen the Barbarian and the Silver Horde. These ancient heroes are shrewd and survive because they have decades of experience in not dying. The overcome a bunch of martial arts experts by using there experience by not being there when the martial arts experts makes a move.

Pratchett references all sort of myths, legends and stories and often delves deep into the roots of the myth. He traces the roots of the “Father Christmas” myth in the book “Hogfather” back to one bloody version of the possible roots of the myth.

Folk tale depiction of Father Christmas riding... — Folk tale depiction of Father Christmas riding on a goat. Perhaps an evolved version of the Swedish Tomte. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

His coven of witches who appear in several books harken back to Shakespeare’s three witches in Macbeth and also to other witch myths, such as (supposed) pagan myth of the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. Shakespeare of course, like Pratchett is tapping into earlier myths.

The adoption of the alternate reality scenario allows Pratchett to tap into all these myths and legends and to mix and match them with similar myths and legends and put them up against present day society. There is for example the Last Continent of XXXX, obviously a reference to current day Australia, the social problems of immigration, typified by the Dwarves who are mild mannered at home, but who turn into drinking, carousing menaces singing about gold when they immigrate to Ankh-Morpork.



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Pratchett’s strength were to be able to draw on all these myths and legends and to build engaging stories around them. Even if you don’t know the legend, you can enjoy the characters and the story, and recognise the parallels with the real world.

You can enjoy the stories of the three witches turning the tables on card sharks who try to take advantage of three little old ladies, for example. Or the invention of surfing by the Burser of the Unseen University when the faculty find themselves offshore of the Last Continent (aka XXXX). Or sympathise with Death when he becomes disenchanted with his role as an “anthropomorphic manifestation” and takes a holiday.

Mustrum Ridcully as he appears in Unseen Unive... — Mustrum Ridcully as he appears in Unseen University Diary 1998 , illustrated by Paul Kidby (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You do all this while enjoying the marvellous stories. RIP Sir Terry Pratchett. You will be sorely missed.

Time waits for no man

English: Text: "You can't stop time... bu... — English: Text: “You can’t stop time… but you can turn it back one hour at 2 a.m. Oct. 28 when daylight-saving time ends and standard time begins.” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s approaching the equinox, that time of the year when the day and the night are of almost equal length. It’s the vernal or spring equinox here in the Southern Hemisphere, and the autumnal equinox in the Northern Hemisphere. For a number of reasons, the day and night are not of exactly equal length, and alternative definition is the time when the plane of the earth’s equator passes through the centre of the sun.

At around this time of the year many countries adjust their clocks to take advantage of the increasing daylight in the evening. Most countries who do this change their clocks forward in spring and back in the autumn, hence the mnemonic “spring forward, fall back”.

The reasons for the usage of “Daylight Saving Time” are debatable. The original intent was to align working day more accurately with the daylight hours while leaving more daylight time at the end of the day. Without Daylight Saving Time, people rose in the morning after an hour of usable daylight had occurred. It was during the two World Wars that “Daylight Saving Time” was first practised extensively in many countries.

Nowadays we are accustomed to “Daylight Saving Time”, and naturally there are dissenters who believe that it is unnecessary or counter productive. A farmer may point out that his cows don’t practise “Daylight Saving Time” and so the changes in the clocks are of no benefit to him, and can even cause him inconvenience.

“Daylight Saving Time” is around one hundred years old, so it is a fairly recent invention. Indeed the synchronisation of clocks, even in a single country, is a recent phenomenon. Now we have clocks synchronised globally.

Computers have clocks. Indeed the very functioning of a computer requires a very accurate clock, so it should be no surprise that we take advantage of this requisite to extend computer clock usage outside of the computer itself.

In the early days of computers, the clocks were not synchronised between computers. In fact that synchronisation had to wait for the development of networked computers. The people who used these isolated computers had to set the clocks manually, which was acceptable when computers were rare, but became a chore when computer usage started to climb and more desk had computers on them.

In a computer there are two sorts of clocks, a hardware clock and a software clock. The hardware clock is the fundamental clock in a computer system and it ticks thousands of times per second. If you’ve ever browsed the specs of a computer system you will likely have noticed the clock specification, the (these days) gigahertz rating. This is closely related to the clock speed, and the number of operations that the computer can perform in one second.



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The original computers had speeds rated in kilohertz, so today’s computers are of the order of one thousand million time as fast as the old klunkers.

The software clock is related to the hardware and takes the clock information and translates it into a human usable date and time. It can’t do that without reference to the outside world as the hardware clock consists merely of a stream of “ticks” and doesn’t understand the concept of seconds, hours, days, months and days of the week. There is no weekend in the hardware clock’s world.



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The reference to the outside world in the early days of computing meant the operator typing in the time, and the software clock relating that to a tick of the hardware clock. From then on the software clock just counts ticks and works out the human usable date and time from that.

As computers started to be networked together, a problem arose. Computer A’s and computer B’s clocks will have been set by a human to as close as the human can manage, but they may be several seconds apart, a lifetime in computer terms. This can cause issues like money appearing in bank accounts before the money disappears from the sending account when the transaction is automated. All transactions are automated these days.

At the same time as computers got networked, some far seeing people decided to set up a network of atomic clocks. These clocks are much more accurate than computers hardware clocks which can “drift”, because not all computer clocks tick at exactly the same rate. As a service this service is provided on the Internet and this has almost universally been adopted.

Your computer will contact a local time source, which contacts a less local time source, and so on until one of the top tier time sources is connected. Thus they all synchronise with the top tier time source. All the top tier sources synchronise with each other so eventually all computer clocks are synchronised.

A computer synchronises with its time source by basically sending a packet of data to its time source and the time source replies. The computer compares the times and repeats the process a few times to get an average, and then, since the packet has to go out and back, halves the average and estimates the time at the time source as the time sources knows it. Then it sets the hardware clock to match. It continually does this, constantly updating its clock as necessary, which gives a very accurate value for the local time.

One might question the necessity of this accuracy. Isn’t it being a bit pointless to set clocks with such nit-picking accuracy? In a news story which I can’t now track down, a financial organisation lost millions, maybe billions of dollars because they did not handle a “leap second” accurately. Automatic stock market trading programs made thousands of trades in the few milliseconds that the company was out of sync with the rest of the world. But to you or I, doing our “online banking”, it won’t matter.

It’s worth remembering that the world-wide time system is pretty new. In these days we are accustomed to be able to contact someone on the other side of the world and to know what the time is with the contactee. But this is new.

It used to be the case that the local time was a sort of local consensus and did not rely on clocks. Then when clocks became more common the local reference time source was the clock in the spire of the church. Time was still local as the church clocks were not synchronised.

As time keeping became more important, the local time zone might expand to cover a time or a city. Clocks could be synchronised in a small area by use of travelling clocks or watches, and really accurate clocks and watches enabled the explorers from Europe to travel the world.

The advent of long distance travel (by the railways) and of telephonic communications resulted in the need for consistent time information across countries and across continents. However, standard time was only legislated in the United States in 1918, and this subsequently spread to the parts of the rest of the world that were not using Greenwich Mean Time.

A plate indicating the Greenwich meridian in S... — A plate indicating the Greenwich meridian in Stidia, Algeria. Photo taken in July 2005 by François Noël. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

10 fingers and 10 toes

[Ooops! Late again.]

The seed pod of milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Most living things come from seeds or eggs. A fertilized egg or seeds has all the information in it to generate the organism that springs from it. All the organs of the organism are implicit in the egg or seed, but minor details, like freckles or fingerprints are not encoded in the egg.

The environment and chance play a part in the final shape of an organism. A seed may fall in a good environment or it may fall in a less favourable environment and the shape of the organism can be totally different in the two environments, to the extent that an unwary botanist may categorise them as two different species.

This property of plants was used by the writer of the Christian gospel in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13:3-23). Interestingly this comes just before the part where the Gospel writer expounds on Jesus’ reasons for teaching in parables.

Some plants and animals change significantly as they mature. Lancewood is so different as a mature plant from its juvenile form. The juvenile leaves are narrow and spiky while the mature leaves are broader and softer, and while there are competing theories as to why this is, my favourite theory is that the juvenile plants had to discourage browsing by animals, and in particular the extinct bird called the Moa. Since the Moa is extinct this theory cannot be tested!

Japanese horticulturists have used this feature of organisms to fit themselves to the environment to create miniature trees in a pot. Basically the tree is grown in a small container which obviously can’t maintain a full sized tree and as a result a perfectly formed miniature tree can be formed with care, sometimes over long periods of time.

It would seem obvious that you can’t produce bonzai human beings, but in fact this can be done. Whenever a drought or famine hits a country the children who grow up there are small and underdeveloped (as well as having other deficiency problems.

When researching this topic I came across an article on the Internet which discusses this topic, and the authors state in part:

Therefore, by coding for proteins, genes determine two important facets of biological structure and function. However, genes cannot dictate the structure of an organism by themselves. The other crucial component in the formula is the environment.

This overstates the role of the environment a little, I feel, as in most cases the organism’s structure is determined in the most part in its genes, so that it looks much like any other member of the species. It is only when the environment is unfavourable (as in the case of the bonzai trees) that the gene expression leads to significantly differently formed individual. Droughts and poor soils will also leads to significantly differently formed individuals, but those are deficiency effects.

Early succession on poor, sandy soil at Øer, D... — Early succession on poor, sandy soil at Øer, Djursland, Denmark. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is more clearly true in the case of organisms like humans. Unless the environment in which a human grows up is very extreme, there is actually little difference between individuals, and those differences, race, eye colour, hair colour and things like the tendency to myopia are almost certainly genetic.

So I am arguing that genes result in the major characteristics of any organism, except in certain rare cases. Somewhere in the human genome the number of fingers and toes are coded for, and only rare individuals with genetic variations have more or less digits. We don’t all speak the same language, but that is not a genetic trait, though the ability to learn and speak a language may be genetic.

Genes are interesting things. As mentioned in the article, genes can code for structural proteins or for enzymes which affect the chemical reactions in the cell. I suspect that the line between the two is pretty blurred as building the structure of the cell is after all a chemical reaction.

Of course, not only must a cell’s genetic mechanism build and maintain its own organisation, but a cell is part of a tissue, and in, for example, the liver, a cell must maintain itself as a liver cell. Similarly for cells in other organs.



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It appears that, as the genetic material is identical across the whole organism, that there must be some way for a cell to “know” that it should develop as liver cell and not as a brain cell. This is done by switching genes on and off, but I don’t understand how this happens in multi-cellular organisms. It seems that there are environmental influences within the organism and within the tissues that determine this.

It’s likely that these environmental influences are based on something like chemical gradients. Otherwise, when a bone is created there would be no way of telling the process of bone creation when to stop. It is evident that it is an approximate influence because fruit flies have different numbers of eye cells between left and right eyes (about 1000). If it were an accurate influence then the number of eye cells would be the same in both eyes.



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Apparently scientists do not know exactly how it work either. In this web page, “10 Questions Still Baffling Scientists“, the claim is made that not even the experts know. Of course these Internet lists of things may or may not be accurate, but it is an interesting link.

Of course fractal generation programs can be used to generate pretty good imitations of the structures of trees, and changing a few parameters fed to the fractal generation programs can change the shape of the “tree” from a bushy structure to an extended poplar type structure.

Some similar mechanism might be involved here. Fractal programs are simple, can produce a wide range of shapes. The trouble with fractals is that there is usually no way to stop the shape generation, so any stopping mechanism is probably not part of any possible fractal method for generating. Some other method for stopping the growth of an organ once it is the right size and shape most likely exists.

From the link above it is possible that this mechanism is not yet known, but it does appear that organ growth and shape is encoded in the genes, and is effected by switching genes on and off. Some fractal type mechanism might be involved.

English: Apprentice. Man and boy making shoes. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Round the Bays

Well, today I took part in the local “Round the Bays” event. Thousands of people gave up their Sundays to run or walk en mass along the roads that circle the bays of this city. Many other cities have similar events. Participants can choose to run or walk or something in between, over distances ranging from 6.5km to a half marathon (just over 21km). I chose the middle 10km option.

As I was walking by myself this year I caught the train to town and therefore arrived before the runners who chose the longer distance had been started off. The start area was filled with people stretching various muscles and sinews, some contorting themselves strangely and probably uncomfortably.



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There were groups stretching in synchrony and individuals doing their own stretching exercises. I suppose that these people would be pushing their bodies pretty hard and really needed to “loosen them up”. There were others, like myself, just wandering around, having presumably decided that they would not be pushing themselves that hard and such vigorous loosening up was not necessary!

Since the race bibs were colour coded it was easy to tell which event someone was entered for. Young and old were represented and of course all ages in between. Some were probably even older than me! All frames from skinny to very much over large were represented.



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As the half-marathon was about to kick off, all participants were called to the line. Well, actually, the fastest, the “elite” were called to the line, and people were asked to place themselves in order of fastest at the front, slowest at the back. To assist with this some of the organising people held notices on poles with an estimated finish time, so that slower starters would not impede the faster, or to put it another way, the slower participants would not be trampled by the more speedy.

There was the usual “10, 9, 8,….” countdown and someone fired a maroon, and off they went, disappearing down the road. An event like this causes massive disruptions as roads are closed for obvious reasons.

English: 2007 peachtree road race crowd shot (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Each runner or walker has attached to his or her shoe a little tag, which records the time that they cross the start and finish lines. As a consequence of this the participant can delay his or her start if the start line is too crowded. In fact, since the pack of runners and walkers extended 30 or 40 metres back from the start line, the shoe tags meant a participant could cross the start line minutes after the start and still get an accurate time for the journey.

Many people did in fact decide not to be too prompt to cross the line and there were queues for the loos right up to and after the official start. However, eventually everyone was away, though participants continued to trickle through the start for a while.

A bit later they called for the 10km runners and walkers, and again, the fastest were asked to go to the front and the slower people were urged to stay at the back. Once more the maroon went off and people started passing the start line. I held back because I knew that there was always congestion at the start line, even with the shoe tags helping to spread the rush.

When I came to cross the line there was a slight slowdown, but I’d fortunately judged it quite well, and we were away. I’m always wary of starting too fast and getting tired at the end so I didn’t try to push through the throng too much, but it spread out pretty quickly.

The first part of the course is actually a block away from the waterfront, past Te Papa, the national museum, and only joins the waterfront after a few hundred metres. The rest of the course though follows the coast quite closely, first going out to a headland and then back into the next bay around the harbour.

Of course, with thousands of people on the road, it is closed to traffic, but people don’t seem to mind this. Most car parks were empty, both those on the side of the road and those on private properties, so locals seem to have made plans to cope with the road closures.



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After a couple of kilometres I put on some pace and started passing a fair number of other walkers. Others with similar plans but fitter bodies were also passing me, I should mention!

With thousands of people thundering up the road, there were no bicycles or skateboards, but there were a few runners without race bibs who had either not heard about the event or who had decided to run along the course anyway. Along one part of the Parade there is a quite large fountain, and this was playing as we made out way past.

The second stage of the course winds round some small bays which border much larger bay. We lost the view of the city as we looped through these bays. Quite a few of the local residents were watching from their balconies as we passed. A few had hoses out and offered cooling showers, but the day was not too hot and they had few takers.

And then we were 500m from the finish! But we had only travelled just over 5km! So we took a left and travelled around 2.5km and the same back again. This loop took us past the airport and several flights blasted off as we passed. It can be quite loud and surprising down on the road as the runway is elevated, so you can see or hear them coming until the last minute.

As we went out, we were passing the half-marathoners and the faster 10km runners who were on their way back, travelling the last few kilometres to the finish. The turning point was a great relief and I knew that there was not much left to do. When I finished the out and back the course merged with the course that the 6.5km participants followed (and which we followed up to the point where we followed the loop). Many of the 6.5 participants had already reached that point.

So eventually we all, half-marathoners, 10km runners and walkers and 6.5km runners and walkers, arrived at the finish pretty much at the same time! The result was not chaos though as people were efficiently passed through the channel, given a banana and a drink, and issued into the wider park behind. Oh, and I was relieved of my shoe tag too.

The park was crammed with participants and their “support teams” and various booths set up for participants of various teams, there was a band on stage and much going on. But for me it was simply a matter of catching the shuttle back to the station to get home, having had a great time.

The whole event was smoothly organised by Sport Wellington, sponsored by Cigna Life Insurance, and supported by Wellington City Council and Wellington busses and trains, and many others. It was a thoroughly enjoyable event.

Breaking the Chain

An elephant named Neelakantan owned by trying to break its chain on . (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A good friend of mine has posted at least one picture a day for a long time now. He has posted for well over a thousand days without a break. It’s a phenomenal achievement and I’m in awe of his accomplishment.

Just recently he has been ill and confessed yesterday that he had been close to breaking the chain, which would have been a real shame. But his predicament led me to consider my own blogging and the drives that make me add a new post every week and prevent me from breaking my particular chain.

Figural sculpture representing ‘Introspection’ at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I can’t speak for him of course, obviously, but I can do a bit of introspection on my own blogging. When it comes down to it one can only speak for oneself and attempts to speak for others are doomed from the outset.

I have tried before to create a blog and failed. I’d get three or four weeks into it, I’d forget and then months would pass before I thought of it again. This time I’m well past the 100 posts and pushing on. To put it another way I’ve been burbling on for around two years and I’m still going.

25 Years – The Chain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I don’t do it for an audience, though around 100 people have “followed” this blog over the months. I don’t know how many people, if any, actually read this blog on a weekly basis. So although I put it “out there”, I do it mainly for myself, even though I hope that those who stumble across it like it.

So what is different this time? When I started this blog it was intended to be a record of my culinary activities and each entry was just a few hundred words. Then I switched to posting more general stuff and the number of words reached 1000 per post. Early on I decided to post once a week. Now I post pretty much only “general stuff” and waffle on for 1000 words.

English: cooking in desert (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I posted earlier on how I choose the subjects that I post on. Roughly speaking something suggests itself to me or I sit down and pluck a subject out the air at the last minute. I don’t generally find it difficult to reach 1000 words – Look! I’ve already typed more than 300 words and I haven’t yet got to where I thought I was going when I started!

I was going to talk about the urge to keep the chain going. Come Saturday I might have an idea in mind, maybe not. If not I might not have even thought about the blog, but come Sunday it is nagging at the back of my mind.

The grotesque nagging wife (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There’s no question that I am going to write the blog entry, but my enthusiasm may be low. It may seem a chore, something that is going to take up my time, when I could be slouching around doing nothing. I call that relaxing.

But I may also have thought of something that I want to write about. I may have some idea of the points that I want to make, but I always think that I won’t have enough ideas to bulk out the article to 1000 words, even though I have never failed to reach that limit every time!

…More Than 1000 Words (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I expect that in the early days of my blog, if I had missed a week that would be it. I doubt that I would have picked up the thread again. The chain got longer and longer and it would seem to be a shame if I were to break it now

As it was, I nearly broke the chain when I and my wife went away for a weekend, and I didn’t have the time to write the blog for that weekend. However, I had posted that I was going to catch up, and catch up I did, thank the little gods. Even though I may not have many regular readers, I felt an obligation to any that I might have to keep the chain complete.

English: The M2 missing link, Ballymena See 190444. A view of the site for the missing motorway, some eleven years after the M2 had opened. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have a period coming up in the future when it will be very difficult for me to post weekly as usual. I will be away from home for a month or so and will not have easy access to my usual computer. I will have to work out a way of getting past this period, either by cutting down my posts in size or just by declaring that I will be skipping a few weeks.

Preparing and planning for a break is a bit different to having difficulties in posting because of illness or some other reason. If illness or other reason prevents one from posting and forces a break there is of course the possibility of making an extra post to re-link the chain. Posting weekly as I do, I have a week to catch up, but my friend does not have that luxury as he posts every day. I’ve been able to catch up before my next post is due, so far at least, so it is less likely that a break in my chain would be fatal.

The missing-link between corset and corselette from 1914 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

However, when we talk about likelihoods, we must take into account the people involved. The blog in question has gone through several versions, including a version on Usenet newsgroups and a web-based version. It started as a newsletter for New Zealand expatriates, but has evolved into a blog featuring my friend’s interest in photography. And birds. So it has survived and evolved, and I hope and suspect that it would continue to survive and evolve even if some event should occur which causes a hiatus.

English: Sgùrr a’ Mhaim and the Devil’s Ridge Taken just as the ridge drops down to the hiatus in the ridge. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What about mine? Well I’m frankly amazed that I have managed to keep going for so long. My previous efforts have lasted a few posts at the most. Obviously, at some time or other my blog will cease. I just hope that I can keep it going for a long time yet.

I don’t think that I will run out of ideas and if I do I can just take a metaphorical pin and stick it in the Internet somewhere and pull out a topic. After all, Google has an “I feel lucky” button. Pressing that button reveals that 22 January 2015 was Grandfather’s Day in Poland. Hmmm, I could make something out of that, I think.

“The Favorite” – Grandfather and Grandson – “Ο Αγαπημένος του Παππού” (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

All things are connected

English: computer network IP address (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

There are networks everywhere. Not just the Internet or the LAN at work, but everywhere. A network could loosely be defined as being comprised of a number of nodes and a number of connections between them. A node is a point or thing which is connected through a connection to another node. A connection is what joins nodes together. This rather circular definition will do for now.

A family can be described by a network. Let’s consider a typical average nuclear family with parents and 2.4 kids. Errm, on second thoughts, lets make that 3 kids. If each person in the family is a node, we can’t really have 0.4 of a kid.

A Date with Your Family (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

So there are multiple connections between any one family member and another. The father has a connection with his wife, his daughter and his sons. The daughter has connections with her father, her mother and her brothers. One way that this could be shown in a diagram is to draw a pentagon, each vertex of which is a member of the family and lines between the family member showing the relationships.

That’s a total of 15 interrelationships in a small family. Actually depending on the way you look at it, there may be more, as the father is the father of his daughter but the daughter is not the father of the father (obviously). This can be looked at at two relationships, one from father to daughter (A is B’s father) and another from the daughter to the father (B is A’s daughter), or one relationship between father and daughter.



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If you consider that there are two relationships between any two family members, then each relationship can be considered to have a direction and a value. “A is B’s brother” and “B is A’s brother”, for example. Alternatively the relationship could be simple viewed as “brothers”, in which case the relationship has a value, but is non-directional.

I’ve described the familiar relationships in detail to hopefully bring out the facts that relationships between nodes and connections can be complex or describe complex situations. It’s entirely a matter of what you want the network to show.

The Internet is what people tend to think of when someone says “network” and it is indeed a complex network with myriads of interconnections across the globe, but in another way it is quite simple. Basically you have a computer, say your desktop or laptop, connected to the Internet. When you request a webpage, your request is sent to another node on the network, which then sends it to another node, and that forwards it on to yet another node and eventually the request arrives at the destination.

The clever part is that you might think that every “node” on the Internet needs to know where all the other nodes are, but in fact all it needs to know is where to send the request next.

It seems almost magical. Your computer doesn’t know where wordpress.com is, though it does look up its unique address (known as an IP address). It still doesn’t know where wordpress.com is, so it sends the request and the IP address to your ISP. Your ISP looks at the IP address and sees that it isn’t one local to the ISP, so it passes it on.

As noted above the message is passed on and on until it reaches its destination and then more magic happens as the remote machine responds to the request and sends the response all the way back. It may even travel back by a different route.



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The magic is that some of the nodes know around 200,000 addresses on the Internet and where the next step should go. These addresses are in the most part partial in that the address will be like the street address, without the building number.

So although the Internet is a complex network with many many connections between nodes, the basic principle by which it works is simple, based on an address lookup system (DNS) and a simple unique address for each device on the Internet.



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(OK there’s more to it than that, but the complexities are mainly at the “edges” of the Internet and mainly spring from the need for security and for organisations to have a “gateway” or single address on the Internet).

When we plan a journey over the road network, we generally have some idea of where we are going or we get out a map. We then scan it for the start and end of our journey and work out what direction we need to travel and the intermediate towns.

But if we travelled like a message travels on the Internet we would first travel to the nearest town and ask someone where we need to go to get to our destination. He or she would point us to the next town to which he or she believes we should go. We would then travel to the next destination and ask again.

It would seem that such a process could result in us going round and round in circles, but eventually we will reach a place where the traffic director knows a large part of the roading network and is able to redirect us to another city which is known to be closer to our destination. Once we are on the right road, the process will eventually result in us reaching our destination.

Another network is the network formed by people we know and the people that they know, and the people that they know and so on. There is a theory that to from you, to someone you know to someone they know and so on, it takes six or less steps to reach any person on the planet. This is referred to as “six degrees of separation“.

Similar numbers can be calculated for smaller sets of people. The Kevin Bacon Number relates movie stars through films that they have starred in with other people. Number higher than 4 are rare. The Erdős Number relates people by the number of scientific papers that they have co-authored.

head of Paul Erdös, Budapest fall 1992 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

These somewhat whimsical numbers do demonstrate how closely linked the human race is. So far as I know no study has been done of the importance of bridging individuals is. I’m talking about those who perhaps emigrate to a country, thereby directly linking together two populations that may be less loosely connected, increasing the connectivity and reducing the number of degrees of separation.

Phone amnesia and other things

[Unfortunately I wrote this but forgot to publish it. Which is ironic given the title of this post. I will publish this week’s post shortly]

I suffer from phone amnesia. At least, that’s what I call it. Here’s how it works, or rather, doesn’t work. I answer the phone and talk for any amount of time. I put the phone down and my wife asks me who was on the phone. Often I cannot recall. I literally cannot recall who I was just talking to.

If I mentioned the persons name in my conversation, my wife will ask what “person X” wanted. Very often I will not remember at all what the point of the call was. The effort I make to remember is almost painful.

I’ve noticed that it is often the case people don’t recall what the point of the conversation was, and on the contrary if the person who takes the call wants to tell someone about the call immediately they will have no problems.

So it seems that when we hang up the phone we also hang up our recall at the same time, sort of like filing a letter away. A few minutes later we may remember the call and what it was about. If we’ve trying to remember what it was about, it comes as a great relief!



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I appear to have a more extreme version of phone amnesia, but it seems to me that many people have this issue to some limited extent.

This all started me thinking about quizzes and recall. I like quizzes and do them all the time. What constantly surprises me is the answers that I know, in subjects which I have no interest in. I recently knew the answer to a question about women’s fashion, a topic which doesn’t interest me in the least.

Another example was the question about the date of some historical event. I’ve never been good at history. I can’t remember dates, you see. But I knew the correct answer to a history question, the answer to which was a date! Of course I can’t now recall the question or even the quiz. All I can recall is that I was astounded that I knew the answer.

Yet if another history question were put to me, I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t be able to answer it. But I could be wrong about that just as easily.

It seems that my brain is storing information about things that I have no interest in and I don’t recall even hearing, but for some reason a part of my mind decides to remember stuff.

If I try to memorise something, it means reading and re-reading and re-re-reading the information until it sort of sink in. It’s like parading the information in front of my mind until it can’t help but remember it. We sort of bore the mind into remembering the information.

And all the while the mind is remembering fleeting facts that we barely notice as they flit by. Facts that are of little real interest to us.

Of course memories are not reliable. I “remember” something that happened to one of my sisters when she was small. Her push chair rolled down a small slope and crashed into the barrier round a small flower bed in the park. Over the other side of the barrier was a pond, I was worried that she would fall into the pond.

When I visited the spot many years later I was astounded. The flower bed was there and so was the pond. The distance between the barrier and the pond was such that she could never have fallen into the pond after hitting the barrier unless she was moving at a huge speed. Also there were no paths sloping down to the flowers and pond. The paths were all definitely up the hill.

It’s likely that there were some real events which led to me having this “false memory”. It may be that my sister’s push chair did roll away some time, or maybe my parents suggested that the push chair might roll away if I didn’t hold it tight. My mind could have turned the memory of the suggested event into a memory of the event as if it really had happened.



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My mind obviously built a worst case scenario around the event and associated it with somewhere that I knew. It altered a few details, the long hill down to the barrier and the pond, the narrow distance between the barrier and the water. It’s much more exciting that way, and “exciting” seems to be more memorable.

Back to the phone amnesia. When I do remember what the phone call was about (may be hours later), I can recall most if not all of the conversation, not word for word, but in general gist. It seems that the information was stored in memory, but the links to it were missing.



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This is similar to old feeling that something is “on the tip of your tongue”. You know (or believe) that the information is there, but you can’t access it. I expect that much of the time the memory is not there, and we only remember the times when it is recalled at a later time. That “tip of your tongue feeling can be very strong though.

It appears that our minds have memories of events (or pseudo-memories of events) and also memories of memories of events. The links between the two can fade out or maybe not be created properly in the first place, so that we can remember that we have a memory of something but we can’t access that memory, and the memories of memories of events are more easily accessible. It’s like a sort of unreliable index to the rest of the book that comprises our memories.



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The rest of the memory book, the actual memories, can be fact or fiction or both (like any biography or history book), which makes life interesting in so many ways. Every couple have had conversations about events that have happened to both, and in some cases the two people might be talking about different events, so different are their memories of it.

Computers and cells

(Oops! One day late this week!)

A computer has some similarities to living organisms. Both produce something from, well, not very much. A computer program has data input from various sources, and produces output to various sinks or targets. A living organism takes in nutrients from various sources, and produces branches, leaves, fur, bones, blood and other organs.

Of course there are differences. A computer is much, much simpler than a living being, even single celled organism. A computer in general only has a relatively small number of parts, but the “parts” in a living organism number in the billions. And of course, living organisms reproduce, but that may change in the foreseeable future.

Some animals are sentient, but I’m not going to discuss that here. Maybe in another post.

A computer has hardware, software and operates on data. The data is either part of the software or read from buffers in the hardware. It stores its calculations in “memory”, which is special hardware with particularly fast access speeds.

The computer produces results by placing data into buffers in the hardware. This results in things happening in the real world, such as printing a letter or number on paper, or more frequently these days, on some sort of screen. It may also do many other things, such as control the flow of water by moving a valve or other control mechanism.

Computers communicate with other computers, by placing data in an output piece of hardware. The hardware is connected to a distant piece hardware of the same sort which puts the data into a buffer accessible to another computer. This computer may be a specialised computer that merely passes on the data. Such computers are called routers (or modems, or firewalls).

Computers, specialised only in their usage, are found in washing machines, cars, televisions, and we all these days have multi-functional computers in our pockets, our cellphones. It would be hard to find a piece of electronic equipments these days that doesn’t have some sort of computer embedded in it. Very few of these computers are completely isolated – they chatter to one another all the times by various mechanisms.

(Incidentally, I came across a bizarre example of connectivity of things the other day – a wifi teddy bear. Say you are sitting in the lounge and you want to send a message to your child who is in her bedroom. You pick up your tablet and send a message to a “cloud” web site. This sends a message to your child’s tablet which is in her bedroom with her. The teddy bear, which is connected to the child’s tablet by wifi, growls the message to the child. No doubt scaring her out of her wits.)

So in the current technological world everything is connected to everything else. Much like all the cells in a living being are connected to all the other cells in the organism, directly or indirectly. So how far can we take this analogy, where the organism is the network and the individual cells as the computers. (Caveat emptor – I am not a biology expert, so don’t take what I might say from here on as gospel).



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A computer consists of hardware, software, and operates on data. A cell is sort of squishy, so “hardware” can only be a relative term, but a cell does have a relatively small number of organelles, such as mitochondria. The nucleus, which contains most of the genetic material, acts as the control centre of the cell, much as the CPU is the control centre of a computer.

The function of the nucleus is to maintain the integrity of these genes and to control the activities of the cell by regulating gene expression—the nucleus is, therefore, the control center of the cell.

In the cell, the genetic material is in some sense the software of the cell. It contains all the necessary information to create the cell itself or more interestingly the information needed to cause the cell to split into two identical daughter cells. This information is generally encoded in the DNA of the chromosomes.

The cell also contains, within the nucleus, an organelle called the nucleolus. This organelle (which is part of the nucleus organelle) seems from my reading to mostly relate to RNA, while the rest of the nucleus mostly relates to DNA, very roughly. RNA and DNA perform a complex dance called protein synthesis in organelles called ribosomes.

Cells produce chemicals, which can be consider analogous to computer outputs and receive chemicals from other cells, and so cells communicate, in a sense, with each other. Since all cells are equal genetically, it follows that a cell’s type, liver, skin, lung or brain neurone is determined by factors in its environment.

The model of an artificial neuron as the activ... — The model of an artificial neuron as the activation function of the linear combination of weighted inputs (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This only loosely true as each cells is the daughter of another cell and inherits its type, but in the early days of an organism’s life, before organs are formed cells do differentiate. Just as when computers were new, they were all very similar, keyboard, monitor, and beige case.

As the computer-sphere evolved, special types of computer evolved, such as routers and modems, and firewalls. Not to mention phones. Computers became specialised. Similarly cells become differentiated, some going on to become liver cells for example, and others brain cells (neurones).

When an organism is young and a cell divides both cells are the same type, but when the organism is very young there is no differentiation. The DNA in the cell contains the necessary information to determine the cell type and tissues and organs are created in the more complex animals.

This process obviously can’t be random, otherwise cells of the various tissue types would be all mixed up. It seems to me, maybe naively, that while the “program” for creating cells is in the DNA, some factors in the environment convey such information as how old the organism is, and what type of cell needs to be created.

an example of a Program (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We know from investigations into fractals that a simple equation can result in the creation of an image that looks very much like a tree or grasses and that small changes to the equation can lead to different tree or grass shapes. It is tempting to think that a similar process takes place in organisms – a general rule is given which results in the right sort of cells being produced in the right places.

The problem with the fractal idea is that it only creates simple shapes. An arm with fingers, skin and so on is beyond the capabilities of a fractal process so far as I know. Fractals don’t stop. Again, so far as I know there’s no way to iteratively create a tree structures with leaves.



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So the “software” of the cell, the “program” embedded in the DNA doesn’t appear to be analogous to a simple computer program that draws fractals. Of course that doesn’t mean that we can never describe a simple organism completely in fractal terms, and create analogous distinct individuals.

It seems that a long as the analogy is not pushed too far, computers in a distributed network are reasonably similar to living organisms. Please note I am note referring to the fractal type computer programs, but am talking about the way that computers themselves in a network are somewhat analogous to living organisms. Primitive ones!

Sample oscillator from hexagonal Game of Life. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)