[r-t] Philip's new Decisions, including Wiki page

[Don Morrison]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 8:05 AM, Philip Earis <pje24 at cantab.net> wrote:
> - A new thing I've done is to remove all reference to cover bells, etc.
> This leads to lots of mess in the existing Decisions.  Fundamentally, if
> something is rung with a cover I've come to think that this should be
> explicitly mentioned in the notation. This also makes my decisions much more
> consistent and elegant. Whilst formally this would lead to very few peals of
> "caters" etc being rung, the method would formally be reclassified according
> to the rules.  The common name wouldn't need to change though, and the
> existing pages of "triples" principles, etc in the Decisions could be
> preserved.

I'm confused by "should be explicitly mentioned in the notation." It
seems to me from my reading of your proposal, cover bells are *not* so
mentioned in the notation. You define the stages by the number of
"changing" bells which would seem to allow, say, caters to be rung on
any number of bells greater or equal to 9, with as many leading or
covering bells as desired. Or, indeed, with bells in the middle that
don't move (yes, this seems possible: jump changes are one way, though
a more straightforward one would be simply two partitions essentially
ringing lower stages at the same time).

In any case, the "formally this would lead to very few peals of ...."
seems antithetical to what I would hope would be an implicit goal,
which is making the decisions record things closely the way to Joe
Average Ringer really rings them. Pretending nearly all peals of
caters are "formally" royal is exactly the same sort of foolishness as
pretending Malakoff is formally something other than a straight
forward, Mx, alliance maximus method.


-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"It's amazing how people define roles for themselves and put handcuffs
on their experience and are constantly surprised at the things a
roulette universe spins at them."       -- Terry Pratchett, _Hogfather_