[r-t] ringing-theory Digest, Vol 89, Issue 11

[Don Morrison]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 7:28 AM, King, Peter R
<peter.king at imperial.ac.uk> wrote:
> terms like symmetric, having plain bob lead ends are unambiguous.

Not really.

Most of the time when we hear "symmetric" we assume the usual,
palindromic symmetry, which is fortunate, or we'd have even more
threads like this one. But there are lots of other possible
symmetries, several of which have been used in methods that have been
rung more than once.

Do you consider "123465" to be a Plain Bob lead head? Most people
don't, but I believe it's included in the definition Richard Smith
gave of what he considers to be Plain Bob lead heads. And from his
defintion, it's not clear (at least to me) what he considers Plain Bob
lead ends to be. The only reason this ambiguity doesn't cause
frequent confusion is that we all usually implicitly assume exactly
one hunt bell, the treble. But it would be easy to have conversations
where we considered a broader class of methods for which Richard's
definition became particularly useful.



-- 
Don Morrison <dfm at ringing.org>
"He sometimes wondered if the mating call of the male
[kakapo] didn't actively repel the female, which is the
sort of biological absurdity you otherwise find only
in discotheques."   -- Douglas Adams, _Last Chance to See_