Of Unintended Consequences (The large coat for the hood)

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John Gower shooting an arrow into the "air" compartment of a spherical Earth in a portrait from his Vox Clamantis and Chronica Tripertita, from a revised edition published c. 1400 (before Gower's death): in English, text on above image in Vox Clamantis reads: "I throw my darts and shoot my arrows at the world. But where there is a righteous man, no arrow strikes. But I wound those who live wickedly. Therefore let him who recognizes himself there look to himself": image by Bkwillwm, 30 November 2005 (Glasgow University Library)

For sparinge of a litel cost
Fulofte time a man hath lost
The large cote for the hod [hood].

John Gower, Confessio Amantis, c. 1390 v. 4785

Medieval artistic representation of a spherical Earth, with compartments representing earth, air and water: detail from a portrait of John Gower, c. 1400 (see above): image by Leinadz, 21 January 2006 (Glasgow University Library)



Partial lunar eclipse: photo by Graham.Beverley, 16 August 2008; image by Tomruen, 16 February 2009



Oblate (flattened) spheroid. Because of the combined effects of gravitation and rotation, the earth's shape is roughly that of a spheroid slightly flattened in the direction of its axis. For this reason, in cartography the earth is often represented by an oblate spheroid rather than a sphere: original image by AugPi, using Mathematic, 2004; this image by Anarkman, 3 July 2005



Venn's four ellipse construction: four ellipses with all 15 possible intersections: image by RupertMillard, 24 February 2009

A 4-sphere Venn diagram, representing a 4-ary Boolean function. (Four intersecting spheres form the biggest possible Venn diagram, that represents all symmetries and is accessible to humans. The 15 intersections correspond to the vertices of a tesseract.): image created with POV-Ray by Lipedia, 2011

For want of a naile the shoe is lost, for want of a shoe the horse is lost, for want of a horse the rider is lost.

George Herbert: from Outlandish Proverbs, 1640

Different types of horseshoes used in World War I, horseshoe on left with frost-nail; from collection of Mémorial de Verdun: photo by historicair, 13 October 2006

Projection of the Lorenz attractor (icon of chaos theory), example of a non-linear dynamical system: plot of the trajectory Lorenz system for values ρ=28, σ = 10, β = 8/3: image by Wikimol/DSchwen, January 2006



Textile Cone Snail (Conus textile), with tesselated shell pattern development showing the generation of complex, seemingly-random patterns from an initial simple structure (an illustration of Rule 30, describing aperiodic, chaotic behaviour of a one-cellular automaton), Great Barrier Reef, Australia: photo by Richard Ling, 2005



Silver crystal growth over a ceramic substrate: JEOL microscope image by Fernando Estel, 29 January 2008

No detail‥.was too small to be passed over. ...‘For want of a nail,’ as the proverb said.

Mary McCarthy: from Missionaries & Cannibals, 1979

A simple torus fading out to a wireframe structure, simulating a cellular automaton with infinite periodic tiling: POV-Ray image by Kieff, 10 October 2006



Sphere-like degenerate torus. A torus is a surface obtained by revolving a circle about a coplanar axis in three dimensional space. As the distance from the circle's center to the axis of revolution approaches zero, the torus becomes a spindle and then degenerates into a sphere: POV-Ray image by Kieff, 19 May 2007



A zafu, pouffe-shaped traditional seat cushion used in zazen (sitting meditation): photo by Dontpanic, 2 March 2008

"...the large coat for the hood": Inuit woman's parka, made from skins of summer caribou, early 1900s: image by Leoboudv, 4 February 2010 (University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology)