Dear Sir / Dear Madame, Accept greetings from the Czech Republic ! A few days ago I have managed to find an information in more detail how to get in touch with the sundial mailing list. As far as the main reason of the message is concerned I would like to get & keep in correspondence touch with penpals with similar hobbies.
I am a married male, 41 yrs old. As for my job, I work as a process engineer for a German Co. producing metal parts for European automotive companies. My hobbies are: hiking, tramping, travelling, sailing & sea navigation, sundials (their theory and construction - on arbitrary oblique planes with rod indicators as well as reflecting dials using mirrors instead), astronomy, spherical astronomy and applications, sky observing, GPS, VLBI, geography, mathematics, horseriding, corresponding, reading and music. Mathematics (better said spherical astronomy and trigonometry) has always made me "run" for discovering new solutions. Since my childhood I have been always very interested in geography (atlases and maps) as well as keen on getting to know their useful properties. I once met the gnomonic, stereographic, orthographic, Mercator etc. projections along with the (great) circle, loxodrome and other "spherical affairs" - izoazimuthal curve, spherical hyperbola and ellipse. First when I started attending our grammar school in 1979 I was not into maths too much but despite of the fact I found a special mystery or something like this being found between land and heaven which covered the circle functions as I felt inwardly. I was first unable to come across more suitable special books, so was gradually re-discovering myself formulae being valid in gnomonic charts and dials for computing azimuths, distances, distortions and so on. By means of my own "research" and studying as a self-taught person within about 20 yrs I was getting such a knowledge of spherical trigonometry and its applications I could not even dream of when just based upon my first knowledge of the circle functions as a teen-ager. Could you please pass the message text on to someone who goes in for a similar hobby who might be into corresponding? Any reply, contact or address would be appreciated. Yours sincerely, Jan Safar P.O.Box 379 Praha 1, 111 21 Czech Republic --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
