Simple Complications

Counting how many times a ceiling fan spins is dizzying work. But someone has to do it; all those fans can’t just go uncounted, can they? We’d lose vital data on the spins of ceiling fans (or indeed, any fans). But there is an astonishingly low number of people who want to count fan-spins. Indeed, I am the only person I am currently aware of who counts fan spins. I try and do a good job of it – I’ve got a whole list written down in the back of my French vocabulary book (I never write down French vocabulary), of the various spins on various days. It spun fastest on the 15th of August, 306 spins/minute. That was the really hot summer when we had the fan on full whack permanently. After a while it overheated (there’s some irony there) and shut down.

Today it’s a lot cooler, and I’ve only counted 198 spins/minute. For another two minutes I watched it, my head rotating a little in time, before satisfying myself that my original count had been correct. I wrote it down neatly, next to the date and time: 9:26am, 19th July 2007.

My job done, I closed the book and looked for the flickering light in the corner. It hadn’t seemed to change flickering rate since the last time I checked, at 9:13am, but I started to count anyway.

Halfway through my counting Mrs Bennett called my name.

“Danny, what was I saying?”

“Hmm?” I looked at her blankly, then glanced at the board. Basic long multiplication. “It’s a hundred and fifty.”

Mrs Bennett sighed impatiently. “Thank you for jumping five minutes ahead in the lesson. Please stay on task and pay attention.”

I managed to focus on the board for five minutes and two seconds. Then I stealthily opened my desk and drew out my programmable calculator. I’d created a calculator-version of Turtle (that logo-drawing programme they taught us to use in Year 3 or something) and I often fiddled with it when I was bored in a lesson. Such as this one.

I’d been trying to make a Penrose triangle on it, but had failed miserably. Only last night I had discovered that Penrose triangles can only be created with shading, which Turtle (my version, anyway) doesn’t support. So today I was starting my new project: a simple Celtic knot.

The thing with Celtic knots is that they’re very structured, very repetitive. And I already had a couple of curves saved in its memory, so it was simple enough to modify those to the appropriate shape; quite a shallow curve, lots of different files for the different sorts. The next stage was arranging them correctly, a challenge I embraced.

Around me the lesson changed from theory to practice, but I took no notice. The knot was totally absorbing.

“Eh-hem.”

I glanced up to see Mrs Bennett looking down at me, her hand held out.

I hit the key that implemented auto save-and-shut-down (I programmed it for moments like this), and handed the calculator to her.

“Page 33, maths textbook, all the questions.”

_______________

I finished the questions fairly quickly, and went back to counting my environment. The light and fan were doing a steady pace, so I calculated the leaves falling outside the window. I used this data to figure out how many minutes it would take for an entire tree to be bereft of leaves, assuming constant speed. I expanded on that calculation for an entire forest, then got bored and estimated the number of squares in all the maths exercise books in the class.

Just after I’d finished doing that we moved onto English.

We were going round the class, reading a paragraph at a time. I dreaded my turn to read; it was hard enough keeping up with the others. How could they be so confident, so sure of the meaning of the squiggles of ink? How could they be so sure that they’re looking at a q, not a p, or a d instead of a b; how can they tell the difference between thorough and through?

I put my head down on the desk, and thought about Pythagorean triples.

Around me, the story unravelled.

They make it look so easy…