A teacher could stand or sit next to the device, place his hand behind it and, by using the holes, rotate each sequence into place above the pointer as the last sequence is finishing. You’d stick a finger through the next hole from behind and move it until your finger hit the post, at which point the next sequence would be in place. The student would observe and play each sequence as it rotated into place. The above is of course all wild ass guessing on my part.
However, as I understand it (and I never even heard of “change ringing” before this) there is always some mathematical pattern to the changes from one set to the next. I can’t see any obvious pattern on this wheel.
Perhaps it’s some sort of guide or reminder for the bell ringers themselves that tells them which sequences of bells to play on the hour for a 12 hour period?
I am a change ringer (or, have been in the past), and I can’t see any way that would really relate. Ringing on 3 bells is very rare if done at all. On 5 bells you’d want to see all 120 changes (permutations) in legal order (you can only swap adjacent pairs of bells). The permutations of 5 shown there are not in any legal order (nor are the sequences of 3).
If you need a visual aid, it’s usually a chalk board, with lots more written on it than shown on that wheel.
Also, you don’t ring just one set of permutations each hour. The hour chimes are done by a mechanical or electronic device (disengaged while the ringers are using the bells).
If it is not a random number generator such as a wheel of fortune it is simply the dial used to control a more complex machine such as the bell ringer cited above. And yes, why art? Because, that’s why.
I think it refers to this passage from ST:IV (the one with the whales)
Kirk: You mean the profanity? That’s simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays attention to you unless you swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.
Spock: For example?
Kirk: Oh the collected works of Jacqueline Susann. The novels of Harold Robbins…
