An American kind of War

Just a thought : a lot of the American soldiers who died in Iraq and more who have been injured for life, losing limbs etc. are black brothers and sisters.

So how come, when Rumsfeld was in Iraq yesterday, pinning gongs on the cannon-fodder, was he pinning medals on white guys only ? (see photo, left).

Just a question, but likely to piss Jeneane Sessum and others off. What'll Melanie Mattson say to that?

Another kvetch. That Miserable Failure, Bush, has been going on about the dangers of terrorists having bio-weapons. But who has been sending potential bio-weapons to more than 3700 sites in 18 countries? The USA of course! The bio-weapons (viral samples) are Asian flu, which killed between one and four million people (in 1957). Because the virus has not been in circulation since 1968, people born after that do not have antibodies against it - and current vaccines do not guard against it. The College of American Pathologists sent out the bio-weapons (viral samples) between October 2004 and February of this year. ALL of the 3700 need to be recalled. Can Bush and Rumsfeld count up to 3700 without making a mistake? I doubt it, they can't even count votes properly :-(

posted by Stu Savory on 14th April 2005 at 06:14 CEST permalink Email

Return of the shoe polishers . . .

Spring is here and down in the valley near the Brit army barracks here the cherry trees are in full bloom. There is such a bumper crop of Cherry Blossom in the UK too that we can expect the return of the boot-lickers and -waxers (as we call them here) in Britain on May 5th :-(

PS : That was a bilingual (UK/D) joke; sorry all you monolinguals, but tough shit if you miss it!

posted by Stu Savory on 13th April 2005 at 05:49 CEST permalink Email

Why Aspirin^® should be Oak-green

Continuing the science thread I was writing last week, young David (Scotland) asks "Which discoveries are attributed to the wrong person?" Here are three examples, David, and "what I tell you 3 times, is true!" :-)

The Playfair cipher, which I blogged about on February 9th, is wrongly attributed. It was actually invented by the British inventor Charles Wheatstone, he of the Wheatstone Bridge for measuring electrical resistances. Lyon Playfair, the first Baron Playfair of St.Andrews, was a good friend of his; they even looked very much alike (short and bespectacled). Playfair had much better political contacts though, and was able to demonstrate this system to Lord Palmerston (who was Home Secretary at the time) and to Prince Albert (Queen Victoria's husband). Although the Admiralty rejected it, the British Army used this cipher in the Boer war and in WW1, referring to it as the Playfair cipher. Given only pencil and paper and no computers, it is in its striated form a pretty good cipher, as long as the messages are kept fairly short. Lt. J. F. Kennedy (USN) used it too. Although Wheatstone invented it, Playfair was the Marketing guy who took the credit :-(

Also a case for disagreement, the differential calculus was invented/discovered by Newton and Leibnitz more or less in parallel. Each accused the other of stealing his ideas.

More recently (WW2) we have the case of Aspirin^®. The name derives from the willow tree, whose bark is analgesic. This was reported as early as the 13^th century, when bears were seen to strip the willow bark and chew it when they had toothache (broken teeth and/or infected gums). Salycylic acid (the active component) was not identified until the late 19^th century, when chemistry had progressed sufficiently. It is too bitter to use, however. The giant German chemical company Bayer put people to work on derivatives. By 1898 Aspirin^®, acetylsalycilic acid or HOOC-C₆H₄-COOCH₃, came on the market, its discovery being attributed in the mid '30s to two assistant chemists at Bayer, namely Heinrich Dreser and Felix Hoffman.

This is not in fact true! Aspirin^® was invented by Arthur Eichengrün at Bayer. Hoffmann was just his assistant and Dreser was not involved in any way! The Dreser/Hoffman story was put about by the Nazis, because Eichengrün was a Jew and the other two were Aryan! Eichengrün meanwhile languished in the KZ (concentration camp) at Theresienstadt, but survived the war.

Eichengrün fought to re-establish his name, but it was not until 2000/2001 that Walter Sneader of the University of Strathclyde managed to track down the over 100-year-old lab-books at Bayer which confirmed that Eichengrün was the man who discovered Aspirin^®. Now history has been re-written and the Nazi propaganda expunged at long last :-)

Oh, BTW : the German name Eichengrün translates as Oak-green, hence today's header :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 12th April 2005 at 06:12 CEST permalink Email

133.335

Back in the early 20th century there was a famous pure mathematician in England, G.H.Hardy who discovered a natural mathematical talent from India, Ramanujan. Hardy brought Ramanujan to England (Trinity College actually) and they cooperated for a while, but just two years after the war, Ramanujan fell sick and died of tuberculosis aged only 33. Let me relay the famous incident of the taxi licence number in Hardy's own words:-

"I (Hardy) remember going to see him (Ramanujan) once when he was lying ill in Putney. I had ridden in a taxi-cab number 1729, and remarked to him that the number seemed to me a rather dull one, and I hoped it was not an unfavourable omen. 'No' he reflected, 'it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways". [Hardy, 1940]

FYI, 1729 = 12³ + 1³ and = 10³ + 9³. Hardy then asked Ramanujan if he knew the answer to the same problem for 4th powers? Ramanujan replied 'No, but it must be very large'. FYI, it is 635,318,657 = 59⁴ + 158⁴ and 133⁴ + 134⁴. BTW, 1729 is also interesting because it is a Harshad (divisible by the sum of its own digits, 1729 = 19*91). It is also the largest number which factorises into the sum of its digits times its reversal. 1729 is also the smallest number that is a pseudoprime simultaneously to bases 2,3 and 5. So Ramanujan had only seen one aspect of what makes 1729 interesting, but a great mental performance nevertheless.

That was the background, now back to MY ghost story. A few years ago I took a taxi from the railway station to the University at Kaiserslautern where I was due to give some lectures on AI (Artificial Intelligence). I got in the front, next to the driver. You can do that in Germany, they're not Hansom cabs, just regular cars painted beige, usually a Mercedes. The waiting driver had been playing chess against a handheld chess-computer (called 'Mephisto', incidentally), so we talked about chess during the drive. Then I saw the cab's licence number and said, almost jokingly "5282, that's a pretty boring number".

Time slowed to a crawl as I remembered these were almost the very words in the anecdote as told by Hardy, as quoted above. "Not at all" replied MY taxi-driver, "it's the number of ways of placing 8 mutually non-attacking rooks onto a chess board". Thus spake the Mephisto-man.

As I heard this Ramanujan-like reply, the hairs on the nape of my neck stood up and a cold, cold shiver ran down my spine. The whole world stopped moving and I knew in that very moment, I just KNEW that I daren't turn around, or I would have seen two ghosts sitting in the back seat of the cab, Ramanujan and Hardy, grinning evilly. I'm telling you, that line scared me witless!

And what does all this have to do with today's subject line (133.335)? 133.335 is an interesting number because it is the Dewey Decimal Classification for 'numerology'. But it is also scary in a devilish way, because if you reverse it (like one of those Heavy Metal records of yore) and add, you get 133.335 + 533.331 = 666.666 the Number of the Beast, repeated. Mephisto again ???

posted by Stu Savory on 10th April 2005 at 06:10 CEST permalink Email

The big D ; 500 daily visitors reached now

Jimmy McCarthy (Wick, Scotland) wrote "I enjoyed your coverage of Hans Christian Andersen's 200th anniversary. Like you I remember the fairy tales. Among my favourites was The Emperor's New Clothes One might say that it is apt as a parable about the media driven obsession with celebrities!". Jimmy also read Wednesday's blog about Jenner's cow-pox vaccination discovery and sent a link pointing to his great photo of a Hielan' Coo.

Jeneane Sessum had a close shave, but scraped through OK ;-) Glad to hear it went well!
Anna Pashen pointed me to Jaakle, who points to another Pentagon incompetence story. Michelle confirmed getting our revenge present for the one she and Rob sent us from Hawaii. Jane reminds me that the MotoGP season starts on Sunday & sent me a photo of Rossi's 46:-) Biker friend Matthias Sander (Germany) spent a tiring, but adventurous and worthwhile weekend learning to race a Supermoto bike, and recommends the Supermoto training school. Alex spent the weekend racing a friend's little 600cc Honda Supersport in Mugello (Italy).

Graham Lawrence (Geneva, Switzerland) tells me he has a Swedish colleague who has met Frode Weierud, the crypto-collector at CERN; it's a small world! John Alexander (Leicester, UK), also a crypto-collector (usually M209s) was here a couple of weeks ago to collect a 'wet and rusty' 1944 Schlusselgerät 41 for delivery to a friend in Scotland. Myself, I've just got hold of a Confederate cipher disc from the States, trivially simple of course, but historical :-)

Several blogs I'd like to have read have been often down this week, I'm told that is because Blogger sucks big time :-( Public utility reliability? No way. And that's why all the HTML and CSS on THIS blog is handwritten, folks! My provider's host only went down for a few hours last year.

Referring to yesterday's subject, Ivan thinks that ALL the major discoveries (wheel, fire, etc) were made by accident (or better, by chance observation). There may be some truth in that!

posted by Stu Savory on 8th April 2005 at 06:08 CEST permalink Email

Discovered by accident

Let's kick off with that classical (sic!) example, Archimedes (287-212 BC). Archimedes was a Greek polymath, of whom many tales are told, some true, some probably not. It is true that he invented the compound pulley, using it in the several war-engines he had built (ballista?). The water-snail, a screw in a pipe used to raise water for irrigation, is also attributed to him. He was also good at maths and came up with formulae for calculating volumes; indeed Plutarch tells us that his grave was marked by a sphere in a tight-fitting hollow cylinder, engraved with the formula for calculating the unoccupied volume remaining between the two.

Vitruvius (a Roman historian) tells us the following anecdote: King Hieron asked Archimedes to determine whether his crown was made of pure gold, or had been diluted with silver. Archimedes came up with the idea of calculating the crown's density by dividing its weight by its volume, the volume of its irregular shape being equal to the amount of water it displaced. Vitruvius says that Archimedes came up with this idea when getting into a full bathtub and seeing the water overflow, being displaced by his own body's volume and then running naked through the street shouting "Eureka!" (I have it!).

Personally, I think this tale of intuition unlikely, Archimedes was quite capable of performing a thought-experiment to come to the same conclusion. Stick a (cylindrical) wooden branch into a piece of clay. Let the clay dry in the sun, then cast some metal into the hole in the clay. Afterwards fill the hole with water. It is obvious that the volume of the metal equals the volume of the wooden branch equals the volume of the water. Volume not weight, Archimedes could have deduced, even without taking a bath and running naked through the street.

So let's look at another accidental discovery, in recent recorded history, this one by Otto Stern (1888-1969). [BTW: Stern and Einstein used to go to brothels together, asking the girls to leave, so that they could discuss physics together with no fear of being disturbed by the rest of the faculty!] Now, quantum theory predicts that atoms such as silver should possess a magnetic moment. So Stern and Gerlach did an experiment to measure the deflection of a beam of silver atoms by a magnet, with the electromagnet turned on versus with it turned off. The difference was expected to be miniscule. They observed a hairline of silver which gradually turned black and resolved into two barely separated hairlines, but only when Stern peered at the hairline. It turns out that Stern's breath contained sulphur from those terrible cheap German cigars Stern smoked. The sulphur blackened the silver, turning it into silver sulphide and revealing the two separate hairlines more clearly. This accident made clear a result otherwise diffuse.

Another accidental discovery was made by (Sir) William Herschel (1738-1822). Herschel wanted to see how much heat there was in the various colours of sunlight. So he set up a large prism to split sunlight into a spectrum and hung his thermometer into the violet, the indigo, then the blue, the green, the yellow, the orange and finally the red, recording the temperature rise against his room thermometer which was out of the light. Having measured all the colours he went for lunch. When he came back, the sun had moved the spectrum around so that the thermometer was beyond the end of the visible spectrum. Nevertheless, the thermometer was showing the highest temperature of all. Thus did Herschel accidentally discover the infrared!

Finally, a Jesuit anecdote, in particular about Father Rheinberger in 1954. Some Jesuits have had an interest in science too. Around 1900 Father Odenbach (Cleveland, Ohio,US) built a seismograph and started keeping seismographic records. Then in 1909 he had the idea of equipping many Jesuit colleges around the world at a small capital outlay with seismographs in order to follow the movements of the Earth's crust globally. Sydney, Australia was part of this network. In 1954 Father Rheinberger there found a seismographic signal which appeared to coincide with the H-bomb test on Bikini Atoll. Confirmatory checks with all the other Jesuit seismographs correlated in four cases, all of which had been secret nuclear tests, and the Jesuits could even plot the sites of the test. This was the accidental beginning of worldwide nuclear test monitoring! "Jesus sees everything, we are merely his agents", the monks said :-)

Science does not always proceed by theory, experimental confirmation OR alternative theory, experiment, etc. etc. Quite often discoveries are accidental, giving rise to new theories.

posted by Stu Savory on 7th April 2005 at 06:07 CEST permalink Email

Another jab at Etymology

Continuing monday's etymological thread, I'll explain today how we got the word "vaccinate".

Edward Jenner (1749 - 1823) was a country doctor in Berkeley (Gloucestershire (UK), not the San Francisco area one) who noticed that milkmaids had a resistance to smallpox, then a prevalent and often fatal illness. Jenner was short on the ethical front though, so when in 1796 a local herd of cows suffered an outbreak of cowpox, he did an ethically dubious experiment. Cow pox transfers to humans too, but is only a mild affliction in humans. Jenner found a milkmaid (one Sarah Nelmes) with the cowpox boils and jabbed his lancet into her suppurating pustules (well, I did warn you, in the very first line, today!), extracting the pus. Yeuch!!

With the same infected lancet he injected the pus into an (unwilling) idiot farmlad, one James Phipps. A month later he extracted pus from a smallpox corpse (smallpox being fatal) and injected it into the poor farmlad Phipps. Phipps survived, confirming Jenner's vague theory. This practice ("Jenner's jabs") was then generally adopted, it working far more times than not.

A half-century later, Louis Pasteur (1822 - 1895) honoured Jenner's discovery by naming this process vaccination , from vacca(I) or vache(F), meaning cow, instead of the Brits' Berkeley dialect idiom "Jenner's jabs". Science does not always progress as cleanly as we would like to think ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 6th April 2005 at 06:06 CEST permalink Email

A short political note

That's an interesting juxtaposition of headlines on the BBC News this mourning (sic!).

In the UK, Tony B. Liar is about to declare a new election for May 5th, it is reported. That doesn't give the Brits much time to fix the gaping holes in the UK election laws in order to assure a fair election. I'll submit an application as an international observer again, like for the US election.

posted by Stu Savory on 5th April 2005 at 10:34 CEST permalink Email

---

Monday, April 4, 2005

An Etymological Thread

Just the other day, over at English Cut, Tom Mahon explained the Savile Row origins of the English idiom No strings attached, which was new to me. It got me wondering about how other (peculiar) words came about, a not unrelated thread (groan!) :-

People with no knowledge of the classical languages - Latin and Greek - often made up new words with one syllable coming from the Greek and the other coming from the Latin. This grates on my nerves even now, although the words have long since been accepted into the English language. Example : Auto-mobile should have been either Auto-kineticon or it should have been Ipso-mobile, but not the bastard mixture of both languages which we've got now.

Examples in German : During the Third Reich they tried to replace all classic words with a wholly teutonic vocabulary. Thus we still have Fernsprecher (far speaker), now in parallel to Telefon, and Verschluckung (swallowing) instead of the perfectly valid Absorption, and Umweltlehre (whole-world-theory) instead of Ecology. Of course in German we just string other words together to make new ones too. Example : Donaudampfschiffgesellschaftkapitänswitwespensionsfund (Danube steam ship company's captains' widows' pension fund). If the English were to do this too, I would estimate it to be completely worthless (floccipaucinihilipilification) ;-)

FYI, floccipaucinihilipilification is the longest word in the English language which does not contain the letter 'E'. Incidentally, there is novel "A Story of Over 50000 Words Without Using Letter E", by E.V. Wright, published in 1939 by Wetzel Publishing Co of Los Angeles. Wright wrote this (lousy) novel of 267 pages(!) without using letter E at all, which is otherwise the most frequent one.

Inventor's personal names are often adapted for the product they invented. To vacuum cleaner the floor is known in England as Hoovering it. Making a photocopy is known in German as 'eine Xerox machen'. Coats made waterproof by rubber coatings, were invented by one Charles Macintosh. Charles Goodyear's process for curing rubber is however known as vulcanisation, after the classic god 'Vulcan'. The very word 'rubber' was given by the British chemist Joseph Priestley, who noted that "a piece of caoutchouc will rub (erase) pencil markings from paper". Such a 'rubber' is also known in the USA as an eraser. Now I just need to establish the etymology of the american noun "a rubber", as used in the poem "Where the hormones, there moan I" ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 4th April 2005 at 05:34 CEST permalink Email

---

Saturday, April 2, 2005

A Fairy-Tale Bicentennial

Today is the 200th birthday of Hans Christian Andersen and it seems the whole of Denmark is celebrating. Andersen was born on the 2nd of April 1805 in the coastal town of Odense (which is on the danish island of Fünen) and he died aged 70 in Copenhagen.

I remember reading some of his fairy-stories as a child:-

• The Emperor's new clothes,
• The little mermaid, (have you seen the statue in Copenhagen harbour?)
• The Princess on the Pea,
• The Ugly Duckling,
• Little Match Girl.

I'm sure many of you blogreaders will remember these with affection too. Altogether he wrote about 160 fairy tales. He also wrote drama, poetry, novellas, travel accounts and autobiographies (sic!). Although he always wrote in Danish, many of his works were translated into German (e.g. by Adelbert von Chamisso) and indeed published in German first. Somewhere (I need to sort our 7000+ books here thoroughly some day :-) I have a reprint copy of "Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung", his autobiography from 1846, probably in the attic :-(

This bicentennial occasion is being celebrated in Denmark with ties bearing his signature, coins showing his face, newspapers printing day-by-day extracts from his diary etc. Yes, indeedy, Marketing is by Disney! There have even been "Hans Christian Andersen"-ambassadors appointed; these include Harry Belafonte´, Nina Hagen(sic!) and even Pele´. In Copenhagen there is a 62-stop "Hans Christian Andersen" city tour, which includes a visit to his nondescript grave in the 'Assistens Kirkegarden'. While you are there, take a look at Søren Kierkegaard's grave which is nearby, then you've covered both ends of the Danish cultural spectrum ;-)

As a fairytale conclusion today, let me show you a photo of the wholly natural 'Faerie Ring' on our back lawn, an ellipse of pretty little violets. Sadly the photo doesn't do the 'Faerie Ring' justice, for it is a vibrant purple (well, violet, of course) contrasting brilliantly with the green.

posted by Stu Savory on 2nd April 2005 at 06:02 CEST permalink Email

---

Friday, April 1, 2005

Friday Feedback - your comments this week

Crispin Burdett (London,UK) took up the theme of absentmindedness which I blogged about last saturday and sent me the following anecdote about the mathematician David Hilbert :-

"Hilbert [...] was perhaps the most absent-minded man who ever lived. He was a great friend of the physicist James Franck. One day when Hilbert was walking in the street he met James Franck and he said, "James, is your wife as mean as mine?" Well, Franck was taken aback by this statement and didn't know quite what to say, and he said, "Well, what has your wife done?" And Hilbert said, "It was only this morning that I discovered quite by accident that my wife does not give me an egg for breakfast. Heaven knows how long this has been going on." -- from The Physicist's Conception of Nature, reprinted in T. Ferris (ed.), The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics, Little, Brown & Co., 1991, p. 604."

Crispin, as it happens, I remember staying in a hotel in Göttingen, whose rooms were numbered Zimmer 1, Zimmer 2, etc. The big suite however was named "Hilbert Raum", an insider joke that only mathematicians as guests might understand ;-) Indeed, I always wondered thereafter if they could accommodate an infinite number of guests ;-)

Robin Kirkey (Baltimore, US) sent me her Pyansky (Ukrainian Easter Egg) picture, which she did using her stained glass method outlined on her website. She also links to this 6 MB flash film, knowing what a big Dubya fan I am ;-) N.B: This film is highly likely to piss Meg off ;-)
In answer to the question about our prettiest egg, it is this huge ostrich egg, professionally painted in South Africa (Hi Mike!), where I bought it. Here are its 4 faces: Pic1, Pic2, Pic3, Pic4.

Malcolm (a UK policeman) sent me a whole raft of police jokes, here are the best three :-

• A cement mixer collided with a prison van on the Kingston Pass. Motorists are asked to be on the lookout for 16 hardened criminals.
• I saw six men kicking and punching our superintendant. Another constable said 'Aren't you going to help?' I replied 'No, Six should be enough."
• An armed criminal hijacked a bus full of Japanese tourists. Police are looking for him on the basis of fifty-three photos ;-)

Marshall Kirkpatrick (Eugene, Oregon, U$A) is starting up his own company and asked to use my Mt. Dachstein photo from the meme on his website. It's a blog for his just-begun consultancy, teaching social change organizations, small businesses and others how to use blogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking and podcasts. Permission granted, I'm all for startups :-)

Jane liked the aerobatic photo I blogged last sunday and asks to see what it's like in the cockpit during aerobatics. I don't have a good photo of that, Jane, but there's a good one over at Delta Aviation (UK). And for my good friend Ina, here's the ICAP II EA-6B Prowler cockpit.

Nicole (Switzerland) asks, since I'm such a polymath (it IS april 1st), maybe I can interpret these two juxtaposed traffic signs for her ;-) Since this is April 1st, and probably unaware of the connotations of the colour BRAUN hier in Germany, Anon (a US Army SSgt stationed here) is saluting the red,white and BROWN. BTW, Dubya's other 2 letters are U and H, as in Up His ;-) Thanks to the Dept. of Biometric Security, the Presnit's passport now contains his digital ID :-)

Phil points us to the statisticians' report that Dubya manipulated the vote (not just on April 1).

Finally, there's a tight little scottish joke (to coin a phrase) on Doug Alder's site :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 1st April 2005 at 06:01 CEST permalink Email

---