[r-t] proving a touch

[Glenn Taylor]

Ian wrote:

> I think, for cambridge though, that it does contain all 720 rows, as 
> well as no rows appearing more than twice.
> So I don't know what the footnote is supposed to mean.
> What other criteria could there be that it fails for Cambridge?

Graham added:

>You are quite right Ian. It is true to Cambridge, but not Beverley, so it
seems to have been published the wrong way round.


Glenn comes out of his hole:

The touch is true to Cambridge but not Beverley and so the details are
indeed the wrong way round, the missing rows being a consequence of the
asymmetry of the 5-6 section. It would be easy to make the claim that "it
must have got messed up between sending and typesetting" but it is
overwhelmingly likely that the original error is mine because I have found
the composition in my file (from 1990) which is similarly incorrectly
described.

I think the idea behind the composition was based upon the fact that the
+X6XXX half leads are  predominantly false with -X6XXX half leads, so if you
ring all of a 720 except for two of the +X6XXX leads and then add five
complete negative courses there is a strong chance that these, between them,
will include all the rows in a 1272. There is nothing in my notes to
indicate that I'd worked out the outcome for Beverley/Surfleet and Cambridge
but wrote it up incorrectly, or whether I made a mistake in my calculations
in the first place. Anyway, apologies all round for this.

In passing, I am one of the "every change once, some of them twice but none
three times" school of thought. additionally I also subscribe to the
quaintly strict definition of only describing a quarter peal of minor as
being spliced when both the constituent 720 and 540+ contain two or more
methods.


Must try harder

Glenn