Walking Randomly

As some of you may have guessed from the lack of updates – I have been on (a much needed) vacation for the last week or so.  Along with my wife and a couple of friends, I went to a lovely little seaside village called Portreath in Cornwall and discovered that it is indeed possible to spend a happy week without the Internet.

We stayed in a a cottage called Gull’s Roost (highly recommended by the way) and the weather was absolutely glorious.  While swimming in the clear azure sea with the sun beating down, I felt more like I was in the south of France or Italy rather than in the UK.

One of the biggest tourist attractions in the area is The Eden Project (click here for the wikipedia page) and we spent a wonderful day there.  For those of you who haven’t heard of it, The Eden Project is essentially a couple of very big greenhouses but that’s a bit like saying that the pyramids are big piles of rock in a triangular formation.  The greenhouses are in the form of massive geodesic domes (referred to as biomes within the site) large enough to accommodate entire rain-forest trees (and they contain several).  Some of my photos are below.

The variety of plant life there was truly astonishing and I imagine that if I had visited the site when I was younger then I would easily have been convinced that a degree in botany, rather than theoretical physics, was in my future.  The so called sensitive plant for instance which quickly responds to touch was very cool.

The site has plenty of mathematics as well though if you know where to look.  The geometry of the biomes themselves is interesting enough but there is another building there called The Core whose architecure is based around the Fibonacci numbers.

Another visitor attraction I highly recommend is the Camel Valley Vineyard.  I only recently discovered the fact that there were good quality vineyards in the UK thanks to a TV series and it turns out that some of them (such as Camel Valley) are world class.   We had a tour of the vineyard along with a tasting and everyone loved it.

So, I’m back and have a lot of things planned for Walking Randomly over the next couple of months including

• Book Reviews
• SAGE tutorials
• Mathematica tutorials and tricks
• MATLAB tips and tricks
• A more in-depth look at Maple 13
• New Wolfram Demonstrations written by me
• More Python/NAG

and a lot more besides.  If you have a maths related news-item that you would like me to publicise or just an idea for an article that you would like written then feel free to drop me a line in the comments section and I’ll see what I can do.