Ringing the changes

I find human behavior absolutely baffling a lot of the time.

I've spent a significant fraction of my life thinking, "Why did (s)he do/say that?"  One positive result of this is that it's turned me into a dedicated observer of the other members of my species.  Even so, I have to say that my efforts have, on the whole, been a failure.  After 64 years on this planet I'm no closer to figuring out why people act the way they do than I was on day one.

Mind you, I'm not saying all the behavior is bad.  It's just that a lot of it is weird.  Take, for example, the English practice of change ringing, one subset of a larger topic called campanology -- the study of bells.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Keichwa at German Wikipedia., Poppenreuth-glocke-1695, CC BY-SA 3.0]

"Ringing the changes" involves taking a sequence of tuned bells and using them to ring a series of patterned mathematical permutations.  So with six bells -- numbered from 1 (the highest-pitched) to 6 (the lowest) -- it might start with a straight cadence down the scale, 1-2-3-4-5-6.  But from there?

One possibility is called a "Plain Bob Minor" (being England, all of the patterns have extremely creative and quirky names), in which each bell takes a turn working its way down the sequence and then back up, and the rules are (1) no sequence can happen twice, and (2) each bell can only switch on each subsequent sequence by a single position.  Here's a part of the Plain Bob Minor pattern, following the positions of the #1 and #2 bells with blue and red lines, respectively:

As you can see, the pattern is mathematical; in fact, whole books have been written analyzing the math of change ringing.  And let me tell you, it's complex.

I first ran into change ringing in the wonderful mystery novel The Nine Tailors by the brilliant British author Dorothy Sayers.  The whole story revolves around it; even the chapters are named after change-ringing patterns, often involving clever puns (Sayers is at her sparkling, intellectual best in this book).  Despite being fairly good at math, how the patterns work (on the larger scale) escapes me; but -- amazingly -- practicing change-ringers have entire sequences memorized.

This is even more astonishing when you consider that a "Full Peal of Seven" -- seven tuned bells -- has 7! (seven factorial, or 5,040) different permutations, each of which has to be rung in its proper place. 

Ringing a Full Peal of Seven takes over three hours.

Here's a group of people doing a sequence called "Jump Changes," which requires twelve bells.  Fear not, this is only a small part of the sequence.  A Full Peal of Twelve would (literally) take years to ring.

What strikes me about change ringing is that although it's mathematically and historically interesting, it's not very interesting to listen to.  At least not for me.  Because a Full Peal goes through all possible permutations, it includes some that sound pretty random.  And long sequences just kind of go on and on.  And on.

In the case of Full Peals of Twelve, AND ON AND ON AND ON.

So it seems like kind of an odd hobby.  Don't get me wrong; I'm glad people are keeping it up.  For one thing, if you watched that video, you probably noticed that change ringing would be really good for building upper-body strength.  For another, it's a piece of English culture that goes back centuries, and it would be sad if it died out.  But more than that, I love that people are so devoted to something so purely weird.

I might not get why this pastime appeals to you, but more power to you if it does.  Hell, if I can spend my time making ceramic Doctor Who figurines, you can be deeply invested in memorizing mathematical patterns of bell ringing.

Maybe I don't understand all the strange side alleys of human behavior, but I definitely encourage them.  The world would be a far happier place if more people devoted their energy into odd and pointless, but entirely harmless, hobbies, rather than using it to figure out how to make groups of people they don't like as miserable as possible.

So hooray for weirdness.  Be proud of what you love, even if other people don't approve.  I was told over and over when I was a child, "No one wants to hear about that," whenever I talked about stuff I was interested in.  The experience left me with a lifelong reluctance to talk to people about what I love most.

And how sad is that?

So let your freak flag fly.  You collect bottle caps?  Cool!  You're a geocacher?  Awesome!  You carve little statues out of bars of soap?  Amazing!  We need more of that kind of thing, and less of... *gestures around vaguely at everything*

Time to ring the changes on your own individuality.  Proudly.

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