Month: May 2012

New Pattern!

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Because You Can Never Have Too Much PI – pi fez!

Okay, it’s a beanie – unless you felt it into shape. And add a tassel. The numbers down the sides list π to 50 decimal places. To  be specific, it starts: Π ≈ 3.14… i.e., π approximates to 3.14, etc. Cos that’s how I roll.

Fun Facts About Π:

  1. 50dp is overkill. Only 39 decimal places of Π are required to calculate anything to redundant levels of precision – for example, you could navigate across the known universe and be no more than one atom’s width from your intended destination at the end. More than my satnav can manage…
  2. The Guinness World Record for memorising Π is held by Lu Chao – 67,890 digits. Some people really have nothing better to do.
  3. Π is known to 10 trillion dp – calculated by Shigero Kondo in October 2011, using an ordinary home computer. Mr Kondo was unavailable to comment at his parents’ basement, as he was waiting for a pizza delivery.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig

Monday midday I got a call from the Children’s Hospital. They had an 8am Tuesday cancellation, if I could get the Mighty Offspring there fasting for his endo and biopsy. Given that his own appointment might be months off, I went for it. MIL drove down and collected us that evening, and drove us to the hospital in the morning (my car is still off the road…).

Mighty Offspring was stellar. He put on such a performance, all the staff loved him. He told jokes, explained the procedure to them, got drinks and ice lollies for the other patients after they came back from surgery. He was a bit sick and woozy after the procedure, but that passed quickly.

The worst moment for me was when he passed out when they gave him the anaesthetic. One moment he was blowing up the “balloon” like a good’un, then his little arm flopped down and his eyes closed. It felt like he’d died. I had to go outside and chain-smoke until the ward sister rang to say he was in recovery. I never want to go through that again, but I will.

The surgeon didn’t see anything on the endo, but he says that in his experience, with MO’s numbers, the biopsy usually comes back positive for coeliac disease. If that happens, he’ll need another endo in six months, to confirm that a gluten-free diet is working. If it’s not positive, the diagnosis will be latent CD, and the endo will have to be repeated in 12 months.

Either way, I’ll have to watch my only baby flop into unconsciousness again. And I’ll do it.

And we’re off –

I got my first pattern accepted for publication!

Can’t say much about it, but it is a typically weirdy thing (see previous post) and will probably be in print in about a year’s time. I actually submitted two designs, as a matching set, but the second was a garment that had a lot more competition. There, I don’t think I’ve given too much away! I’m exploring where I can publish the second pattern. Possibly with a few mods, possibly not.

So now I’m trying to put together the most comprehensive spreadsheet of sizes in the known universe. I’ve got the Craft Yarn Council’s Standards, used by Knitty amongst others, a spreadsheet by Marnie McLean, who is one of those designers whose pieces I recognise instantly, a chart from a bra company that I can’t find online any more (why didn’t I bookmark it!), and sundry other charts for babies, children, teenagers and adults, covering heads, hands, feet, and anything else I can think of. If you’ve got a body part, I want a measurement chart for it. And no, photos are not acceptable. Yech.

Meanwhile, the head is a-buzz with ideas. As part of an effort to be more organised and logical, I’ve created a set of folders on my laptop for calls, submissions, acceptances, random ideas, useful information, etc. Now I’ll have factor in work times to sit down and do a certain amount of work each day.

One thing the submission process taught me is that I desperately need a decent digital camera. My Fuji FinePix, crapulent thing that it was – one snap and the batteries died – has finally departed this mortal coil, and after selecting a new mobile phone specifically for its high-spec camera, the photos from it are corrupted every. single. time. I had to use the thumbnails for my submission… I do have a great selection of film SLRs, but running off an entire film for each submission, then travelling thirty miles to a developer and paying over the odds for digital copies, just to have a single photo of a sample just doesn’t jib with me. Maybe for Knitty, where I’d need to submit the photography, but otherwise? Nah.

Unfortunately, I don’t really understand digital cameras. Megapixels, CCDs, all wash over me. Apparently, for reasons that I don’t really understand, a digital camera with so many MP will produce much better photos than a camera phone with the same MP, all other things being equal. I’m reasonably good at spotting quality film cameras, but digital is still a bit of a mystery. All I really know is, the higher the MP, the bigger the resulting photo can be without degrading the quality, and digital zoom is way less important than optical zoom.

Okay, ya got me. The teacher will out. Supposing you want to print your photo at a fairly high-quality 300dpi (dots per inch = resolution = clarity), and you need a standard-sized 6″ x 4″ photo to fit in your photo frame. The formula for the minimum number of megapixels you need is

MP >= (height x dpi x length x dpi) / 1,000,000, (or (hl.dpi^2)*10^-6 if you prefer)

(6 x 300 x 4 x 300)/1,000,000

MP >= 2.16

So you need a camera with at least 2.16MP for this size of photo at this resolution. However, if you want an A4 (11.7 x 8.3) size photo – the typical size for graduation photos, for example – then the formula goes

MP >= 11.7 x 300 x 8.3 x 300 / 1,000,000

MP >= 8.7399

So realistically, you’ll need 9MP for that special day. Interestingly (well, for me anyway), if you wanted to announce the event in the newspaper, you’d need an image that’s only at 72dpi. How big an image can you send them from your 9MP camera? Well, we can work the formula backwards to get the area of the photo:

 Area = (MP x 1,000,000) / (dpi x dpi)

(9 x 1,000,000) / (72 x 72)

Area = 1 736.11111…

Now, at this point, I would usually square-root the answer to give me a rough value for the height and length of the image – around 41″ x 41″, if you’re interested (I know I am) – or you could try something a bit more principled, like using paper dimensions. The A0 size (46.8″ x 33.1″) comes in about 8MP. For comparison, that’s 1 square metre, about twice the size of a full spread broadsheet newspaper like the New York Times or the Daily Telegraph. You’d need to be really proud of yourself to pay the publication rates for a pullout centerfold poster in any of those…