Unimpressive and quirky

[UsuallyPresent]

Quirky? I like marmalade on omelets.

Grape jelly on scrambled eggs here.

 

[Blind_Justice]

I'm left-handed but do many things like a right-handed person - using the mouse, playing drums (none of that weird "hi-hat with the left hand" stuff), unlocking my apartment... The only thing I never managed, despite my parents' efforts to beat it into me, is writing with my right hand. I'm a blazing fast touch typist though.

 

[Rob_Royale]

I let Calgon take me away at least three times a week.

 

[Bramblethorn]

No. Consider that a triangle has to have straight lines.

Agreed, but for geometry on curved surfaces we need to define what "straight" means.

The usual interpretation of "straight line" is the shortest path connecting two points. (Give or take some complications to handle the case of line segments that travel more than halfway around the sphere, but let's leave that for now.)

On a sphere, the equivalent to a "straight line" is a great circle, i.e. one whose centre (as defined in 3-D space) coincides with the centre of the sphere. A "triangle" on a spherical surface has three sides which are each segments of great circles.

two straight lines on a sphere have to be perpendicular to the third in order to be straight.

No. This is not correct.

You might be thinking of the fact that in spherical geometry, unlike plane geometry, it is possible to draw three "straight lines" all perpendicular to one another (forming the 270° triangle that AwkwardMD mentioned earlier). But this does not mean that every set of three lines (great circle segments) has to be mutually perpendicular.

 

[Erozetta]

I have bought full-sized candy bars to give out at Halloween for the past 20 years.

I always buy too many and my co-workers look forward to me coming back to work after Halloween.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

I stand corrected on your last point, Bramblethorn.

 

[SimonDoom]

I like almost all kinds of food, but I have a weird aversion to eggs. Something about the smell. I nevertheless like many foods that are made with eggs, like flan and pastries, and I can enjoy an omelet if it's spiced up enough and topped with hot sauce or HP sauce.

I can't abide lima beans.

 

[UsuallyPresent]

Butternut squash is one common food that can make me heave. Something about the squishy/grainy texture is just r-o-n-g!

 

[THBGato]

I make a chocolate cake using kidney beans instead of flour. It started off as a way to get my vegetarian, non-vegetable-eating children to eat a) vegetables and b) get some protein.

Now I make it because I have a colleague who is gluten-free.

I think the most unimpressive thing about me is I can't keep time, despite years of drum lessons. I was once co-opted by the school orchestra to play the cymbals, but was so bad I was fired after a single performance of Pomp and Circumstance.

 

[MrPixel]

I was once co-opted by the school orchestra to play the cymbals, but was so bad I was fired after a single performance

In other words, you crashed.

 

[onehitwanda]

French the language or French....?

We'll call her Annabelle French for the purposes of this memory. She had wavy gold hair that fell to the middle of her back when she wasn't tying it up into a haphazard ponytail, and the blue eyes to go with them. She was tall, and slender, and awkward rather than graceful. She was also frighteningly intelligent - but far, far too kind and warm to be at all smug or bitchy about it. And oh my God could this girl paint.

I was sixteen or so and just starting to realise that I probably liked other girls more than I really should by the politics and morals of that time. And I wasn't exactly the sort of girl who got noticed much - good enough to get by at most things but with no flash of brilliance to make me shine.

It was double English, probably something like mid-morning in Autumn. We were all still in summer uniform; at any rate - the glamorous and fetching olive-green synthetic skirts and brown (yes, brown) jumpers that the boys from our co-located-but-completely-separate brother school always used to borrow any time they needed "trees" for their house plays.

(Some inspired senior boy worked out that you could dress a bunch of year seven boys in brown girl school jumpers, give each boy a a branch or two and instructions to hold them, e voila - instant forest. One boy's house had a tradition that they'd always send two year nines onto their house play set to play "Woodcutters" - they'd pick a year seven tree and chop it down while the main actors carried on, pretending complete non-interest. Always got a laugh from the parents...)

Anyway...

Annabelle always picked a desk by the window, I always picked a desk by the opposite wall. I remember we were doing a comprehension exercise or something that required us to read a piece and answer essay questions on it. I looked up at some point to stretch out my shoulders and noticed that she'd been acquired by a sunbeam. It was like one of those hackneyed "her hair was a golden halo" moments, but honestly her hair glowed like the little girl from Rembrandt's "Night Watch", falling partly over her face as she hunched forward and wrote her no doubt brilliant and insightful answer to whatever question she'd been posed, because she was that kind of girl - quiet, somewhat shy, but staggeringly good at anything she turned her attention to.

It's thirty years ago and I can still remember the scene, and the... pain, I guess it was, somewhere around where I suppose my heart is.

I'm not sure how long I stared at her, but it can't have been too long because I finished the questions with time to spare. But the image of her has lived rent-free in my head since. It's one of the few "nice" memories I have of my school years, and I revisit it every so often - like I'm doing here.

I ran into Annabelle perhaps eight years out of school, at a house party in a distant city. We did the old "Hey! Aren't you..." and "Yes! Aren't you..." and reminisced about people we knew from school and what they were doing.

She was married, and working for an AIDS related charity. A totally different future than I'd have imagined for her, but she looked happy and seemed happy. I (in my usual, stupid unfiltered way) wanted to tell her that I'd had the fiercest crush on her at school, but for once I was wise and didn't. I like to think she'd have been flattered, but sometimes it's best to leave the fantasies in my head rather than exposing them to the blowtorch of reality.

So yes, I would have loved to have "done" French, but back then that was a complicated thing to do, when you were sixteen and living in a repressive society that was only just starting to become open to the thought that maybe not all girls want to get married to boys and that maybe some of us were "Satan's children"...

Here's to you, Annabelle, wherever you are. I have no doubt you are just as bright and shining as you were when we were young.

You've been listening to Radio Free Wanda.

 

[Jackie.Hikaru]

Here's to you, Annabelle, wherever you are. I have no doubt you are just as bright and shining as you were when we were young.

Aww

Here’s to all the Annabelles

 

[yowser]

It's thirty years ago and I can still remember the scene, and the... pain, I guess it was, somewhere around where I suppose my heart is.

This is the best bit of memory-arousal that I've read in weeks.

Thank you.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

Um, wow. Thank you for that, Wanda.

 

[Erozetta]

I also bake when stressed or sad. Or bored. Or have a shit ton of Halloween candy to get rid of. Last night was dark chocolate brownies topped with a dark chocolate ganache, chopped up 100 Grand bars and plain M&Ms. Co-workers are in a sugar coma, but smiling.

Now I just have 140 more candy bars to bake through. *Sigh*

 

[MillieDynamite]

I don't know why new post aren't showing up for me from this thread?

 

[TheLobster]

Hey, @onehitwanda, haven’t you noticed this is a thread about unimpressive things? Get out with that beautifully charted trip down your memory lanes!

 

[Britva415]

Spheric geometry's triangles […] two of the angles have to be at least 90 degrees each.

If that were true, you wouldn’t be able to draw an equilateral triangle with angles close to 60 degrees on the surface of any sphere. This is obviously possible on any sphere, so

 

[Britva415]

I don't know why new post aren't showing up for me from this thread?

Notifications, you mean?

Or you don’t se new posts at all when you look at the thread?

 

[UsuallyPresent]

If that were true, you wouldn’t be able to draw an equilateral triangle with angles close to 60 degrees on the surface of any sphere. This is obviously possible on any sphere, so

If you place the vertexes at the maxima of each axis, covering 1/8th of the sphere, you get 90 degree angles.

Pulling the vertexes in closer and the angles shrink down towards the planar normal of 60 degrees as the curvature flattens towards a plane.

I can't figure out the max angle if you go past the maxima of the angles and put the bulk of the sphere inside the triangle instead of just one eighth of the whole, not that it really matters to this conversation.

 

[Tio_Narratore]

If that were true, you wouldn’t be able to draw an equilateral triangle with angles close to 60 degrees on the surface of any sphere. This is obviously possible on any sphere, so

The first part of my statement is correct, and shrinking the triangle may approximate flat space, but never is flat. You can get angles totaling close to 180 degrees, but never 180. Barmablethorn has corrected my error in the second part of my statement.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Agreed, but for geometry on curved surfaces we need to define what "straight" means.

The usual interpretation of "straight line" is the shortest path connecting two points. (Give or take some complications to handle the case of line segments that travel more than halfway around the sphere, but let's leave that for now.)

On a sphere, the equivalent to a "straight line" is a great circle, i.e. one whose centre (as defined in 3-D space) coincides with the centre of the sphere. A "triangle" on a spherical surface has three sides which are each segments of great circles.



No. This is not correct.

You might be thinking of the fact that in spherical geometry, unlike plane geometry, it is possible to draw three "straight lines" all perpendicular to one another (forming the 270° triangle that AwkwardMD mentioned earlier). But this does not mean that every set of three lines (great circle segments) has to be mutually perpendicular.

A good friend is a theoretical physicist. In the hubris that accompanies his advanced degrees, he loved to do this little proof that parallel lines intersext(leaving this typo here because, well, we're on an erotica site). Of course, he use a spherical geometry to do so, not plane geometry.

He was a little nonplussed when I called him on it pointing out that by definition parallel lines do not intersect, so in fact, what he had proved was that they don't exist in spherical geometry. He has since stopped showing off with that particular proof, and I tell the story whenever I can manufacture an opportunity to do so.(case in point).
I consider my work there done.

 

[Britva415]

I can't figure out the max angle if you go past the maxima of the angles and put the bulk of the sphere inside the triangle instead of just one eighth of the whole, not that it really matters to this conversation.

It approaches a maximum possible total of 900 degrees

You can think of it as the triangle enclosed by what otherwise looks like the outside of that equilateral triangle. Each vertex has an angle of something barely less than 300 degrees (360 - 60)

 

[Britva415]

It approaches a maximum possible total of 900 degrees

You can think of it as the triangle enclosed by what otherwise looks like the outside of that equilateral triangle. Each vertex has an angle of something barely less than 300 degrees (360 - 60)

You know what’s super interesting about that question? The sum of the inside angle at each vertex and the outside angle at each vertex is still only 360 degrees, no matter what the curvature of the surface is (spherical or hyperbolic).

That means that the total for all 3 angles, summing interior and exterior angles, is always 1080 degrees (360 x 3) no matter what the requirements of the “inside” angles are in that particular geometry.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Yes, notifications.

Notifications, you mean?

Or you don’t se new posts at all when you look at the thread?