Monday 24 August 2009

Large and little


Penny and I have been on a serendipitous tour of massive Yorkshire homes. Everyone knows one of them - Castle Howard. But the one in my main pic may be less familiar. It's in Rotherham. The mighty Fitzwilliam family built it at Wentworth Woodhouse. The bit in the picture is one house; not content with this, they built a second one directly behind and right up to the back wall. It is therefore both the longest private house in the UK and the biggest back-to-back (the latter by far). Alas, it is not open but you can get very close on a public footpath. Click on the pic for full vastness.
Extremely small, by comparison, is this caterpillar which miraculously survived the transit of the lane from Terrington (fab, fab pub with wondrous food) to Castle Howard. I think it's a White Ermine's, or poss one of the Tigers', but as you can see, I only had my extremely ancient mobile phone to take its pic - at the very moment it reached safety. I got Grade 6 in Elementary Maths O level, so you will be able to do much better than my formula for calculating the chances of a successful crossing like this. But here it is anyway: x= { (w ÷ s) ÷ v} ÷ {w ÷ (t x 4} where x is the caterpillar's life chances, w the width of the Terrington-Castle Howard road, s the time taken by the caterpillar to cross, v the average number of vehicles passing during that time and t the average width of their tyres). QED (although I have accounted for my bicycle wheels which came closer than anything else to squashing the caterpillar).

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