Re: 24 Hour Poll: David's Design

I'm working on the updates now; they'll be ready in a while.

The hill has proved popular, and it's clear that those people who
approve of the hill feel more strongly about it than those that don't.
If people like the *idea* of the hill but would like the precise shape
of it to be changed, they're more than welcome to copy the images and
make these changes themselves.

The golden line is less popular, and it's silly to include it merely
for the sake of heraldic pedantry - there are numerous national flags
in the world featuring colour next to colour; to give one example
among many: Malawi. I've therefore left the line out of the primary
version (with the hill), although I've left it in for the flat
version. If there are multiple versions (and two versions with rays,
two without sounds good to me), then I think it's best for them to
contrast in more than one particular. Ultimately it's up to David how
many versions to keep in the race, but for those of us who don't like
the rays, the version with the hill clearly has more support behind
it.

Opinion on the shade of blue sky is a fairly even split, and has
produced no strong responses. It's worth noting that no national flag
contains pale blue as far as I know (out of those flags illustrated in
_The Times Atlas of the World_ the only one with blue that comes even
close to being pale belongs to Aruba); and at any rate, the sky at
sunrise is not pale blue. A slightly darker shade is probably more
atmospheric. Thirdly, one should try to contrast as much as possible
with both the yellow and the black. In the end, I've gone for an RGB
value of (0, 160, 255). For general interest: an image I found of the
Aruban flag represented its shade as (82, 126, 225).

The idea of setting the flag in the dimensions of the Golden Rectangle
has proved quite popular, so I've gone with that.

As an aside, some time ago I calculated the answer to the following
question. Suppose you have an A5 sheet of paper, and equal margins on
each edge. How many millimetres wide should the margins be so that the
space within them is a golden rectangle?

The answer is 24.511667808963589190336286050032 mm, which comes out as
the result of the following calculation: (1) Take the square root of
two, plus the square root of two cubed, minus four. (2) Multiply that
by five and take the square root. (3) Subtract that from three times
the fourth root of two, minus the fourth root of two cubed. (4)
Multiply that by five cubed divided by four.

Adrian.