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Mindfulness - a perspective after ten years of practice

As I approach ten years of doing my best to live mindfully, I thought it might be useful for people thinking of dipping a toe in the 'mindfulness' water to hear a perspective from someone who's been doing it for a while. I'm no paragon of mindfulness - but I have at least plugged away for long enough to have had sufficient successes to know that it's worth persisting. Why I began At the time (about 10 years ago), I'd managed to get an assignment remotely working exclusively with a remote team. It was a great job, and a wonderful team to work with. However, this meant I got zero personal contact other than a very occasional trip to visit them. After a while I began to realise that this wasn't doing anything good for my state of mind: I found myself getting more and more stressed, for no obvious reason. I guess that, during the last couple of years of the Covid Pandemic, self-isolation and working at home, problems like this have become rather normal - so perh
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Alliums: a watercolour experiment with sea salt

It's allium time in the garden I rather love alliums: the way the flower head seems to 'explode' from the top of the long, elegant stem. Here's a beauty, growing in our back garden Sea salt to the rescue When it comes to painting them, at my rather rudimentary stage of learning with watercolour, they present a bit of a puzzle: a dark spherical 'starburst', dotted with brightly coloured seed-heads and flowers. So I thought I'd try out using some sea salt, to get the pattern of light and dark on the individual flowers. I found some Cornish sea salt in our store cupboard... Sea salt The painting
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Welcome to the new 'Pennies down the well'!

After a rather long gap, I thought it would be nice to do a little blogging again. Topics may range rather wide, from painting and drawing, to coffee, software, data analysis, physics, music, and anything else that takes my fancy. When I say 'rather a long gap' I mean it: those with an exceptionally long memory may remember the previous incarnation of 'Pennies down the well', which lives on at  phippen.blogspot.com  which, as you will see, has not been updated since 2012. It's so very ancient that it's become non-maintainable - so it will remain exactly as is.
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Some maths \(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\)

Just trying out some maths - to see if it will work!  When \(a \ne 0\), there are two solutions to \(ax^2 + bx + c = 0\) and  \begin{equation} x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a} \end{equation}  interesting integral: \begin{equation}\int_0^\infty \frac{x^3}{e^x-1} dx = \frac{\pi^4}{15}\end{equation}
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