Ian Stewart Space Music

'Carnage' well rounded indeed

My first show of this year’s Stephenville Theatre Festival was God of Carnage by Yazmina Reza. I have to say that I was quite excited about seeing this particular piece, not because I knew the story, but because I had heard that it was being done in the round. I had always wanted to see a piece of theatre done this way and now I have. For those that have not yet seen this play, in the round means is that the stage is surrounded on all sides by the audience, the way that theatre goers during Shakespeare’s time would have found quite the norm.

So I entered the stage quite excited, this excitement was only enhanced by the performance itself. Doing theatre in the round is not easy, no matter how the actors of this particular piece made it appear. The director, Tricia Lackey, made it seem as if this was the easiest way to direct a show.

The actors moved seamlessly around the space, and I never felt that the movement was forced. What I mean is that sometimes you can tell an actor is moving only because the director has told him to do so.

However, in this production every movement was so natural that Ms. Lackey must be commended for her fantastic direction.

That being said, what made this show so good, in my humble opinion, were the actors themselves. Iain Stewart, Nicole Power, Patrick Foren, and Cara Pantalone all turned in the type of performance which I love. To quote an audience member, they were real. I did not once feel like I was seeing actors on a stage, I felt like I was eavesdropping on two couples as they coped with their individual relationships and their relationships with each other.

I believed that Alan was a schmuck and cheered with the rest of the audience when his wife, Annette, finally did what we all wanted her to do. I wanted to smack the sanctimonious out of Veronica and hug Michael when he finally let us see the ‘real’ him. I was pulled in from the first moment the lights came up on the couples in their respective corners.

After the show was over, I overheard a comment from a festival employee saying that the audience really was good, full of energy. I have always been of the opinion that it is the actors who give the audience the energy not the other way around.

When the show first started the members of the audience were a little intimidated, as we were all lit, but we couldn’t help but get caught up by the energy these actors were giving to us. The four of them did not let go of their characters at any point during this show, and I want to thank them for their work, it was amazing.

Cactus Mathematics | Psychology Today

If you visit Arizona you can hardly fail to miss the impressive saguaro cacti that march up the foothills of the mountains near Tucson. So it's not totally surprising to find that a bunch of Arizona mathematicians have turned their minds to the beautiful patterns in cacti. In particular, how do the striking patterns of ribs arise? Patrick Shipman and Alan Newell, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, have provided an important part of the answer. It all depends on elasticity.

Since ancient times, people have noticed strange numerical patterns in plants. Marigolds have 13 petals, asters have 21, daisies have 34, 55, or 89, and sunflowers have 55, 89, or 144. These numbers have been familiar to mathematicians since 1202, when the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa posed a problem about rabbits. His somewhat unrealistic rabbit population increased according to a fascinating sequence of numbers: 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89 144 233 ... Each number is obtained by adding the previous two. Leonardo was the son of Bonaccio, and he later acquired the nickname Fibonacci. His numbers became known as Fibonacci numbers, and they turn up all over the plant kingdom. For instance, the hexagonal segments of pineapples form two interlocking families of spirals. One family winds anticlockwise and contains 8 spirals; the other winds clockwise and contains 13. The scales of pine-cones are similar, and so are the seeds in the head of a ripe sunflower. 19th Century botanists and mathematicians described the geometry of plants and figured out why Fibonacci numbers arise from it - but they couldn't explain the geometry itself. Moreover, some plants break the rules; for instance, fuchsias have four petals.

Botanical experiments showed that plant numerology is determined by small clumps of cells called primordia, which appear successively at the tip of a growing shoot. They space themselves along a tightly wound spiral at angles separated by about 137.5˚, called the golden angle. It has been known since the 1960s that this pattern packs the primordia together efficiently, and that it leads to Fibonacci numbers. But why do the primordia arrange themselves in this manner?

In 1992 Stéphane Douady and Yves Couder traced this to the dynamics of the growing shoot: the existing primordia push each new one into the appropriate position, and this makes the spacing efficient. Their model also explains the occasional occurrence of non-Fibonacci numbers, such as the four petals of the fuchsia. These come from a different solution of the dynamical equations, and follow another sequence, Lucas numbers: 1 3 4 7 11 18 29 47 76 123 ... Some cacti exhibit a pattern with 4 spirals in one direction and 7 in the other, or 11 in one direction and 18 in the other. A species of echinocactus has 29 ribs.

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