Quirky places

There are some quirky places in the middle of Dunedin's CBD which I enjoy just visiting every so often. One of them is a house that most people wouldn't know was there. It's hidden behind the terrace houses in Stuart St. There are two ways to access it: via an alleyway beside the restaurant, A Cow Called Bertha, and the other through the basement of the old library. I wandered into the library this lunchtime, went down the stairs into the basement (where virtually the only public toilet in the library used to be in the old days), stopped and had a look at the great cloth artwork showing the history of the Adult Literacy Movement in Dunedin, (they now have rooms where one of my early ISPs used to be: earthlight.co.nz), and then went out into the courtyard that's in front of the house I was talking about above. It's quite an open area - when my son flatted in the house some years ago, he and I used to sit in the sun in the courtyard sometimes. It's a great suncatcher - when there is any sun! (Today's gloomy, but at least it's not windy like it has been for the last couple of days. The wind was utterly bitter, and suddenly blew itself out about morning tea time this morning.)
My son flatted at one point with a young fellow who was doing a medical degree, and on the side had set up his own ISP: hyper.net.nz. I was persuaded to join this ISP, which I was happy to do as Ihug in those days was having real problems with customer service. I went from almost no customer service to service on tap. I was running the shop in Princes St then, just along from the Octagon, and if I needed help I'd just ring up the young fellow (whose name I've now forgot) and he'd hop around and fix it in a couple of minutes.
The house itself is a very dark place: gets no sun at all in most of the rooms.

The other quirky spot is the old Masonic building in Moray Place where Temple Gallery is now situated. I always feel a bit odd going there. Whether it's the leftover stuff from the Masonic days or what I never know, but it has a bit of a creepy feeling to me.
You go up a steep flight of stone steps in a garden that in the summer is abundant, up a steep path and then have a choice of more path or more steps. The building stands above you as though it was going to topple over while you were climbing.
Inside, the stairs leading up to the main gallery are highly polished, and at least two of them are almost invisible to the naked eye: I've missed them both at different times, either going up or coming down. (The Public Art Gallery has one of these 'invisible' steps as well.)
The main gallery is a large room lit by skylights that don't let much of the outside light through. The paintings are usually lit by a series of soft spotlights, adding to the general air of gloom. Today there's a bunch of large paintings by a female artist whose name has also gone from my mind, though her style is familiar. They consist of ferocious feline-women, many in bridal gowns. There are teeth and claws in evidence everywhere, and in several of the paintings a large horse, sometimes intact, sometimes with his rib-cage showing through his skin. The women are sometimes skeletal as well. Can't say they're my favourite paintings, but they're well put together.

The photo of Temple Gallery comes from this site.
hyper.net.nz was taken over by Orcon at some stage in its existence - which is why Orcon is now my ISP.

John Pratt

The picture of Solomon's Temple in the previous post comes from an article by John Pratt which I discovered on the Net. But who is John Pratt? He tells us that he loves 'puzzles, science, math, calendars, and enjoy connecting ideas from a wide variety of disciplines.' He has degrees in physics and math from the University of Utah, and a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona. He teaches astronomy at a state college and keep notes for that class on this web site. He also does computer programming, has three software patents, and hosts a few websites such as for the Utah Table Tennis Clubs.

(By the way, my wife and I purchased a table tennis table - and bats and balls, of course - last Christmas, and have it set up in our upstairs lounge. We've played heaps, and get plenty of exercise rescuing the balls from under tables and chairs and sofas. I've actually improved, and can almost give my wife as good as she gives me.)
To continue on about Mr Pratt. Most of his publications have been about chronology, and he says it's unlikely you'll want to read them. (The sort of thing that most people would take as a challenge, I suspect!) He's also written a calendar conversion program to convert from our calendar to others.
On top of this he's invented a pictorial periodic table which he hopes might make chemistry more fun. It can be used as memory pegs for memorizing long lists of other items too. (There you go, another reason to check Mr Pratt out further. Anything to do with memory is always of interest to me.)
He finishes by saying, 'If you like tough brain teasers, I think I have found a great logic puzzle in the Bible which you might want to try.'
I've just had a very quick look at his memory pegs idea, and it's very sensible. As he points out, most memory pegs are random, whereas his approach is more intelligent. Good on him!

Weighing it up

Rereading the Book of Chronicles (in the Bible) yesterday, I was struck by the amount of gold and silver David stockpiled for the Temple. According to my translation it was in the region of 100,000 talents of gold and million talents of silver. There were 3,000 shekels in a talent, and a shekel weighed (as far as archaeologists have been able to establish) around 10 grams. A hundred shekels, therefore, would make a kilogram, which means that a talent would weigh, roughly, 30 kilograms. I’m not going to try and recalculate that in pounds, as I find it hard enough working in kilograms as it is. That seems a phenomenal weight for what is virtually a large gold ingot. And the weight of 100,000 talents would be in the region of 3,000,000 kilograms. (We haven’t even started on the silver yet!)
No wonder the Temple was considered such a wondrous building. It must have shimmered in the Eastern sun.
Which goes to show, perhaps, that gold has always appealed to human beings as being something of exceptional worth. Even now an ounce of gold – which I discover is equivalent to 28.4 grams (go get the calculator out and you can work out how many ounces David had) is worth a pretty penny. (Apparently bullion bars come in ten ounce units.) If my reading of Monex.com’s price list is correct, the current gold price is edging up to $US700 per bullion bar. (If you’ve worked out how many ounces David had, you’ll be able to figure out what his 100,000 talents were worth.)
Gold is on the rise, it seems, particularly since oil is so iffy. So the expression, Go for Gold, is probably quite apt these days!