[r-t] various

[Graham John]

Robin wrote:

> I found it easily, however, in the provisionally named section
> of the 'most' official site - methods.org.uk.

But methods.org.uk is the personal domain and website of Tony Smith. It
clearly state that it hosts the official collections, but the provisional
collection is in a separate section of other material copyright Tony Smith,
so is not itself an official collection, but part of Tony's personal
website.

Having said that, I do import Tony's provisional collection into my
database. But, until the CC meeting,  the methods false in the plain course
were not included in the provisional collection either, presumably because
Tony did not consider them methods, as opposed to not-conforming to the
decisions for some other reason such as being only rung in a quarter.

> I cannot see the reason for a method with only one lead

This is the thinking that prevents innovation. Because you can't see a
reason, doesn't mean that there will never be one. While the need for 2nds
place Bristol S Major may not be great, there are other examples that could
be defined as one lead methods, such as the 24-bell ringing at the CC
centenary, and Monster Triples published in the RW of 3 October. These
presumably would be expected to be defined as non-method blocks, as John
Harrison reported the following:

> I asked Peter whether they had considered the fundamental
> problem that to define a method you had to ring it in a peal
> but that peals had to be in methods of a type already defined.
>  Tony Smith replied, saying that they had solved that problem
> by allowing blocks, so anybody could ring anything in a peal.

Unfortunately this is not true either because of an arbitrary constraint
added to calls in non-method blocks:

J.A.3. A call in a non-method block is effected by altering the places made
between the last two rows without altering the length of the block.

This clause prevents 2nds place Bristol  from being defined as a block as
you want to use half-lead and lead-end calls. Similarly the block-end may
not be the place you would want a call to produce a touch of the RW
Centenary method.

Graham