Saturday 5 August 2017

All The Fives ...

But First, Sunflowers.
Mrs fbb is keen on making the little plots of gravel tat surround fbb mansions in something worth looking at. Her horticultural efforts are often a delight to the household and to passers by. Her annual crop of sunflowers has suffered from some "thing" eating the leaves. They do look bedraggled.

But nature is a great survivor and the plants are producing some joyous flower heads despite the attack on the foliage.
It was as a weary fbb settled down on the 1520 from Waterloo to Axminster just over a week ago that he was surprised to see sunflowers out of the train window.
They were not growing but painted on the side of one of Mr Souter's red inner suburban trains. 
Does anyone know why? And did you know that the number of seeds in the spirals are Fibonacci numbers? Of course you did.

A medieval mathematician, Leonardo of Pisa, usually known as Fibonacci, published a book, Liber Abaci (The Book of the Abacus) in 1202. While studying the way in which rabbit numbers increase, he described a sequence of numbers that bears his name and that has been a source of interest ever since.

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144 and 233

You start with 0 and 1, then each successive number is made up by adding the previous 2. This strange sent of numbers keeps popping up in nature, including the number of seed in each spiral of the Sunflower seed head. Try counting one!

Four-Oh-Five to Five
No 1 son has been in Vancouver doing something important at a conference. He sent his papa a picture of a Vancouver bus on which he "commuted".
The grid on the front is for carrying bikes as per this shot pf sister vehicle R16120.
405's destination honours the truly imaginative Vancouver road naming convention.
The main roads in Richmond have equally intriguing names.
With a few extras in between the names are numbers, from 1 to the west to 6 in the east. No 1 son's bus serves mainly No 5 Road.

So from a comfy room in the Accent Inn ....
... the boy (boy? Haha!) needed to get to the Kwantlen Polytechnic University ...
... near the junction of 126 Street and 72 Avenue. But not this 126 Street ...
... he wanted to get to this one ...
... in Surrey, of course. The given map for the 405 is basic in the extreme.
... but the hotel was at the intersection of the red bus route and the big grey road (top right). Here is a local bus stop:-
Lavish isn't it? Absolutely no information! Just like travelling in many parts of the UK.

But the 405 doesn't go to the Kwantlen Polytechnic university.

Clearly No 1 son has not vouchsafed the full travel plan to his eager and excited father.

Maybe more tomorrow?

Meanwhile, more work to do.
Interesting - or just plain tedious?

 Next Vancouver mini-blog - Sunday 6th August 

2 comments:

  1. The flowers on the 455 show that it has the new AC traction. It's for staff to quickly see from a distance if it's an AC or DC unit (without having to check the number on a list)

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    Replies
    1. Only with the first two 'test bed' units though. Once the project was in full swing the body sides of converted units were no different to before

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