Domestic nomenclature

So now that it looks like this is really happenning, we have a cosmetic, but nonetheless critical, feature of our house to consider: the name.

I don't know about the rest of the village, but our house is one of those which has no street number, but only a name. I like this system. I mean, as long as the postman can cope with it, why not? Names are nicer, and have a lot more character. And character is why you buy an old house in France isn't it?

So at the moment, our house is called Le Preau. It's a nice name, mellifluous in its way, and translates to "the courtyard". Not bad. Of course, our house has no courtyard, so I'm not sure how it ended up being called one. They should have called it "The verandah".

But if we like, we are free to change the domestic appellation. To what, though?

Well, for a long time, Sarah and I were sure that we wanted to call whatever house we would buy "Maison Desepoir". This translates as "House of Despair", which we thought had a nice ring to it. We even discussed graphic concepts, so we could have a nice, friendly sign indicating our address.

The idea here is that it originally said "House of Hope", but through the ravages of a grafittoed "S", everything had changed somewhat. But after some time spent considering this possibility, we decided against.

So then what? Well, the idea that this is Kepler's house certainly opens the door to lots of interesting graphics from Kepler's namesake's time. After all, Johannes Kepler used many interesting diagrams in his work, some of them very graphic indeed. For example, he theorized that the orbits of the planets might be proportional to the radii of nested platonic solids. His original diagram for this was quite detailed:

Not good for a housefront shingle. There are more geometric representations of it, however.

Pretty, but too complex. Personal, just as national, flag design should above all be simple. You want every schoolkid in the country to be able to draw his flag in crayon.

Kepler also did a lot of work on the orbit of mars. All of his celestial mechanics, in fact, the work for which he's best known, were based on observations of mars. Particularly famous is his second law, which states that orbiting planets sweep out equal areas over equal time. His diagram looked something like this:

The idea is that if the planet sweeps out the two grey zones in the same amount of time, then the grey zones have the same area. Now we're getting somewhere. We could call the house "The Orbit of Mars" and we're good to go. And looking further, I find interesting variations on this graphic theme. The East German 5 mark coin had it:

which looks very cool, I think. We could make a big coin, just a scaled-up cast of this one, with "l'orbite de mars" instead of Kepler's name. But that would be very difficult to make, and very shiny, too. I also found this 1950s astrophysical teaching model:

Sarah suggests that we make something like this out of a bicycle rim, with lots of different-length spokes. I'd add a nice gilt smiley-sun in the middle. Anyway it's an idea.

And I love the idea of telling people when they arrive to visit: "Welcome to the Orbit of Mars!"