The Plot Thickens

The UK is set to sign up to the whole of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. I had a look. One bit that the UK has been signatory to since 1991 is this:

Article 31
1. States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts.

2. States Parties shall respect and promote the right of the child to participate fully in cultural and artistic life and shall encourage the provision of appropriate and equal opportunities for cultural, artistic, recreational and leisure activity.

How do you suppose this squares with banning unaccompanied under sixteen yearolds from Newbury Town Council allotments? To my mind it doesn’t square at all. Arbitrarily banning under sixteen yearolds effectively prevents them from having their own allotment, quite aside from the fact that I doubt the council would let an allotment to a child in any case, and it certainly prevents children from participating fully in cultural and artistic life.

Children should be as free as anyone else to enjoy their own allotment and it’s nobody’s business but their parent’s whether they’re responsible enough to do it on their own. It wouldn’t be acceptable to say blacks or homosexuals weren’t competent to have an allotment, and it isn’t acceptable to discriminate against people on the basis of their age. It’s just bigotry.

But would kids wants allotments? In the national press this week, Joshua Clark aged 14, winner of the best kept allotment in Ripley, Derbyshire, working four hours a day after school to beat 60 pensioners.

Avast! Today be International Talk Like a Pirate Day, arrgh, and sacred holy it be to Pasterfarians aroun’ the world. I be over the allotment, aye, to run up the Jolly Roger, and by the powers, it be Davy Jones’ Locker for any squiffy son of a biscuit eater I catch abroad. Arrrgh.

I’ve just read a thought provoking article by Dr. Richard Wiltshire, co author of the LGA allotment management best practice guide Growing in the Community. He’s a smart bloke sure enough and it will take a couple of readings to understand it all, but the gist is that the allotment movement risks being hijacked by the local food green agenda. For several years now it’s been the lazy refrain that allotments are no longer the preserve of the cloth capped working man. For sure, there’s all kinds of people getting allotments for all kinds of reasons, but it’s the cloth cap brigade - and I guess I’m rapidly joining that club - that kept allotments ticking over when they were unfashionable and that demographic shouldn’t now be shunned as a remnant of the bad old days.

What’s particularly challenging is what he has to say about local food. Basically the argument for growing food in towns and cities doesn’t stack up. Most of the food miles are still saved if the food travels 50 miles. I think what he’s getting at is that traditional allotment values haven’t changes. Allotments should be valued for a whole bunch of reasons, some of which will conflict with others. Sure, allotments are great for growing local food, but they’re great for growing flowers, having a pond, and sitting in your shed with your mates. If there’s a whole new demographic that has discovered allotmenteering for whatever reason works for them, then that’s excellent and to be valued, but that does nothing to diminish the value to the cloth cap brigade of their allotments, nor the value to allotments of their cloth cap brigade.

A period of normalization begins today with the clamping down by the Council on certain bourgeois ideologies. Specifically, there’s to be no site shed and the Growing in the Community working group is to be canceled.

You thought those were water butts? They’re tanks.

  A     B     a~    b~    a-    b-    a     b     a'    b'    a^    b^
.6180 .6180 36.00 36.00 72.00 72.00 60.00 60.00 79.19 79.19 63.43 63.43
.6180 .5466 36.00 31.72 72.00 74.14 68.86 55.57 82.78 78.77 71.99 58.29
.4036 .4124 23.28 23.80 78.36 78.10 58.58 60.71 82.77 83.21 60.00 62.16
.4036 .3486 23.28 20.08 78.36 79.96 70.71 54.64 85.87 82.78 71.98 55.70

I’ve been calculating the angles and lengths of geodesic panels. The first two rows are for the 2v dome, the last two for the 3v dome. For both the 2v and 3v dome the B and C dimensions are the same so I’ve just tabulated the A and B dimensions for the two panels of each of the two unit-radius domes. The diagram shows a panel construction, and assumes the top and bottom of the panel frame are beveled, but all the angles are there for a hub construction too. So A is the strut length, a~ is the angle subtended by the strut at the origin, a- is the angle the strut makes at the hub axis, a’ is the chamfer angle of the top face of the panel frame, a is the angle between the arms of the panel frame in the plane of the panel, and a^ is the angle at which the struts radiate from the hub.

The strut lengths and angles all follow from the angles at the origin - the a~ angles. For the 2v dome these are easy to work out when you see that the base is made up of 10 pentagon edges and when you know that the 12 vertices of an icosohedron are the corners of three mutually perpendicular, mutually centered rectangles of side length (1, t), where t is the golden ratio. However, I couldn’t work out the angles for the 3v dome so I worked backwards from the strut length given on GeoDome. Visit the site and look at the dome calculation pages to see how a dome is put together from these triangular panels.

Edit: I’ve worked out how to calculate the angles for any kind of dome now and put it all down here.