Reading, Writing, & Arithmetic Club

Sitting on your deck with your laptop now, you realize there are so many possibilities in spiral-making.  From wikipedia:  Some of the most important sorts of two-dimensional spirals include: The Archimedean spiral The hyperbolic spiral Fermat's spiral The lituus The logarithmic spiral The Cornu spiral The Fibonacci or golden spiral The Spiral of Theodorus The involute of a circle spiral What to do? So many spirals, so little time. You decide to make a new spiral out there every week. You start playing around with short snippets of code that make spirals, like this: angle = PI * (3 - sqrt(5)) for i in range(1 to 800):         t = i * angle         x = sin(t) * t         y = cos(t) * t         drawpoint(x, y) By changing the angle, you ended up with a large variety of spirals to choose from: You spent the next five months making spirals in your field. You forgot about the original intention - to (maybe) signal any UFO's up there. It just became an engrossing exercise in doing re

You're sitting on your back deck. It's mid-morning in late Spring. You have your coffee in hand and the local paper on your lap. You're looking out over the back 40. You decided not to plant corn on this parcel to let the soil recuperate a bit.   There's an article in the paper about a farmer who lives not too far from you who swears he saw a UFO. You don't think so. But to prove to yourself you're open-minded, you get the idea to make some kind of design on your parcel that would signal to a UFO that there is semi-intelligent life down here. You look up how to make a spiral. You decide that an Archimedean spiral (named after the 3rd-century BC Greek mathematician Archimedes) will suffice.  You are going to make something that looks like this: You figure 800 footsteps will do. You grab a stake, measuring tape, and a pair of snow shoes. You pound the stake and start walking in a circle, letting out the measuring tape a little at a time. It takes you less than 20

In numbers, there lies a beauty profound, In spirals, this beauty is perfectly wound. From sunflower fields to the galaxies' twirl, The spiral is nature's own charming whirl. Born of the digits, a dance in array, Unfolding in elegance, in a cosmic ballet. Each spiral unique, with a twist of its own, A story in curves, through seeds it has sown. Oh, spiral, you're the golden angle's delight, Your logarithmic twist an amazing sight. In the nautilus shell and the hurricane's might, Your form is captured in every sight. In the sunflower's face, your secret we find, Seeds spiraling out in patterns aligned. A mirrored image of the starry night, Linking the earth to the cosmos' flight. From Fibonacci's sequence to the Milky Way's band, You twirl and you twist, both simple and grand. Oh, spiral, your beauty is a sight to behold, In each sweeping curve, a story told. Your dance, a harmony of space and time, A testament to the universe's rhyme. In every tu

  Welcome to the revived and revamped blog originally called Quincy Writers Group. The new blog is called Reading, Writing and Arithmetic Club. We are readers and writers and people who have a fascination with numbers and images (although this isn't required to be a part of the group). We want to read good books and get together to discuss them. We also want to write essays, poems and just about anything. Some of us love numbers and like to write code to generate pictures and maybe write about that too!