New Stuff For Old Stuff :: Blog

I n part 1 I wrote about using Kendall Down's Knitwear Designer on a BBC micro to generate my knitting pattern. That was November 2020. I'm not a fast knitter. I tend to just knit a few rows each day rather than spending hours at a time on it. Plus I spun the yarn for this project.  Here it is done. I don't have a record of the exact measurements I fed into the program, but the fit is fantastic, so top marks to Kendall Down.  For those interested in the details of the spinning and knitting, I made quite a chunky yarn. (The gauge I gave the program was 5 stitches per inch, which I got on 4.5mm needles). I made a 4-ply yarn with 3 plies of Devonia from John Arbon , which is a blend of British sheep breeds, and one ply of Tussah silk dyed 'cyclamen' by Katie of Hilltop Cloud The pattern just gives you stitches and allows you to work in your own choice of colourwork or stitch pattern. 

H ere's today's question: I played 40 games of backgammon and scored 25 points.  A win counts as one point, a draw counts as half a point, and a loss counts as zero points.  How many more games did I win than lose? At first glance it looks as if you can 'formularise' this (ie w + d/2 + 0l = 25)  but you can't solve that, it seems as if there are many values that could work. My title refers to an old kids' joke - "how many beans make 5?" The answer I knew was "two beans, a bean and a half, half a bean and a bean" (said quickly!) But other kids had their own version of this and you can have many combinations of beans and half-beans.    The question is curiously-worded. "how many more times did I win than lose?"   My starting point was that if you could see all the possible values of w, d and l  that total 25 points, the pattern would be obvious. So the problem becomes one of printing out these values. The easiest brute-force way is to

T odays' Friday Quiz maths problem is as follows:  At the Animal Olympics, Charlie Cheetah ran at 90 kilometres per hour, whilst Sid Snail slithered along at 20 hours per kilometre.  Charlie kept it up for 18 seconds.  How long would it take Sid to cover the same distance as Charlie? This is not very difficult to work out as long as you make sure to take account of all of the units; hours and seconds, kph vs hpk. I won't spoil it in case you want to work it out for yourself. despite being a simple calculation, it occurred to me that it would be fun to find the answer by running a simulation - ie show the race graphically, with a clock, and stop the clock when the snail reaches the cheetah.  And that it would be fun to run that simulation in real-time (slight spoiler, the answer is a number of hours). My Minstrel (Jupiter Ace clone) is on my desk at the mo, and I really am getting a lot out of working in Forth. What makes this project particularly interesting is that it needs fl