My life is going downhill fast: June 2011

Sunday, June 12, 2011

Skateboarding President and Philip

North Shore Times Wed 8th June 2011

Philip is afflicted with Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy
so we got him a new chair to get him around

Carpark Capers

On a rainy day there is not much to do so so it's off to the carpark. We have this wonderful little carpark very close by with 5 levels of toeside downhill. Hit the bottom and it's into the fire stairs to get back up there. It has an up and a down ramp in the 'double helix' pattern. The ramps are 15 metre wide and we just love it. Undercover means rainy days - we are still skatin'.

About the Number '42'

42 is:

The number achieved by multiplying the Devil's number (6) and God's number (7).

The angle in degrees for which a rainbow appears;

42 is the product of the first three terms of Sylvester's sequence; like the first five such numbers it is also a primary pseudoperfect number.;

In 1966, mathematician Paul Cooper theorized that the fastest, most efficient way to travel across continents would be to bore a straight hollow tube directly through the Earth, connecting a set of antipodes, evacuate it (remove the air), and then just fall through. The first half of the journey consists of free-fall acceleration, while the second half consists of an exactly equal deceleration. The time for such a journey works out to be 42 minutes. Remarkably, even if the tube does not pass through the exact center of the Earth, the time for a journey powered entirely by gravity always works out to be 42 minutes, as long as the tube remains friction-free, as while gravity's force would be lessened, so would the distance traveled at an equal rate;

42 is the number with which God creates the Universe in Kabalistic tradition;

From the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is calculated by an enormous supercomputer over a period of 7.5 million years to be 42. Unfortunately no one remembers what the question is.