MDMD(2): Notes and Questions

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Monte Davis writes:
[re reduction of possibility to certainty]
> And another echo he leaves it to us to catch: the way Obs are "reduced" to
> results, brushed and combed and ranked in an ephemeris.

Mason suggests, in one of the MDMD(3) chapters, that eventually
everything will be reduced to degrees, minutes and seconds of arc.

[re Loxodromes]
> Or that he's steered to the cabinet (is there a tantalus?) by a feedback
> mechanism that strives to maintain a constant angle on the target? I
> believe that too yields a loxodrome on the plane. 

Maintaining a constant angle between target and some `horizontal' or
`vertical' is easy on the plane - it's a straight line, the shortest
route. On a sphere it's slightly more tricky to follow a rhumb line
and this certainly is not the quickest route, that being a property of
a great circle. But maintaining a constant angle *is* made easy with
the relevant feedback system, a compass.

> >      69.28 `Late Blow, late blow, --' = modern day US what?

> "late hit" -- a tackle after the play has ended (I'm sure seventeen others
> are ahead of me, but this may be the only sports reference I'll ever catch)


Andrew Dinn
-----------
We drank the blood of our enemies.
The blood of our friends, we cherished.