Just some Holiday Pics (from North Fresia)

In the schoolchild tradition of writing about "what I did in my holidays", I'm wrapping up this month by just showing you some pix of our holiday last week, up in the north of Germany, so you can see what it looks like there :-)

We rented this 200 year old cottage former fisherman's cottage up in St. Peter-Ording for a week. Thatched roof, well-restored, but head-bashingly low beams and lintels :-( The cottage snuggles up just behind the 20 foot high sea defenses, and abuts directly onto the bleak salt marshes of the beautiful Wattenmeer coastal National Park.

Correspondingly, there is a lot of bird life on the marsh and the 12km by 3 km beach.

Indeed, the fields landside of the cottage were full of thousands of migratory geese who had spent the winter there and were now preparing to head back to Spitzbergen (Svalbard) and Siberia for the summer. Incredible noise level at dawn and dusk!

We had just a short (200 yard) walk through the dunes (see below) to reach the HUGE beach, 12 kms long and 1 to 4 kms wide (depending on the 10 foot tides).

Great weather, 6 days of hemispherically azure skies, we even got a suntan :-) On the one rainy day, we went to see a local town built by migrant Dutchmen around 1670.

The buildings are interesting both inside and out, for example, the apothecary dating from 1795, the tea shop, the old pump in the market square, the vicar's door (whose bellplate reveals that he is living with an unmarried woman (Sins of the Fathers?) ;-)

Great seafood in the Godewind in Tönning, and the lamb pre sale´ was good too ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 30, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Oscar Schindler centenary

Had he lived, Oscar Schindler would be having his 100th birthday today, and so this is a good opportunity for us all to bow our heads and remember a compassionate man who did his best in very difficult circumstances. Mimi Reinhard, now 92 and living near Tel Aviv, who was his secretary at the time, recalls too sneaking the names of several of her girlfriends onto the famous Schindler's List even without him knowing. To those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, may I recommend you watch Steven Spielberg's very moving film Schindler's List or read Keneally's book Schindler's Ark.

Shalom.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 28, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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The one thing that I must say to the entire world

Sterling Camden has - for some effable reason known only to him - asked that I (of all people) contribute to Mark Dykeman’s latest meme, in which you are required to send your most important message to the world in < 150 characters.
One message, Mark? I'll give you five, and still not exceed your arbitrary 150 character limit ;-)

1. There are no gods (Cui bono?).
2. Always question your teachers (Cui bono?).
3. Never take yourself too seriously (Cui bono?).
4. Verbosity bores (I'm sorry, I have to say that again, and again, and again...).
5. Fortytwo ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 26, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Size matters ;-)

Having just taught a class on easy computer linguistics - basically just showing them how to write a simple grammar for an English subset in PROLOG - I'd agreed to go for a drink with the students afterwards. As I slouched over into The Topless Tequila, where students are snuggling up to the Margarita bar - old salts all of 'em - the barmaid (q.v.) proclaims loudly "Size DOES matter!"

Conversations at all of the tables stops as guests strive to hear what the young lady has to tell for a whorey hoary anecdote.

Tom - who, despite his 6 foot six frame, is for some reason known as Tiny Tom - agrees "It certainly does if you are talking about these tequila glasses; they used to be bigger under the previous bar owner!"

But to my (and all the eavesdroppers' ) disappointment , it turns out they are talking about the size of their vocabularies and trying to come up with strange words the others might not know. Here's an alphabet of the words I didn't know :-

Autachoid, barrace, calumet, doucets, emptysis (which I thought was a dumb blonde), fossick, guanaco (which I confused with birdshit), hoa (no comment!), isodicon, jingal (NOT as in bells!), knap, littoral (which I confused with literal), manque´ (not to be confused with mankey), noutitia, opificer, prommer (which I though was a device to burn PROMs), quihi, ramekin (nothing to do with incest), scattermouch, thanatism ( not a thane into fanatism), Uzbek, villein (which I confused with villain), xerafin (confused with seraphim), yu (NOT you) and zoppo (which I've used but forgot).

The following week, Tom brought along a dictionary and read out words chosen at random (at which he got better the more he had drunk). We told him what we thought they meant and kept track of the incorrect portion. And since the flyleaf of the dictionary told us how many words it defined, we got an estimate of the size of our vocabularies. Just FYI the gutter press restricts itself to about 8000 words; the Grauniad has a vocabulary of over 30,000. FWIW, the barmaid prefers big ones ;-)

And the motto of today's tale? Never go boozing with your Linguistics students; lest it turn out to be floccipaucinihilipilification^* ;-)

Book Tip : Ammon Shea; 'Reading the OED', ISBN-10: 0399533982.

Margarita Serving Tip : Cynnie recommends "The perfect Margarita is 3 oz tequila 1 oz premium triple sec (preferably Cointreau) 2 oz lime juice serve in a margarita glass ( on ice with salted rim !!)"

* : FWIW, Floccipaucinihilipilification is the longest English word which does not contain the letter E.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 24, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Box Office Girls :-)

W hile the C-5 was turning over its engines, a female crewman gave the G.I.s on board the usual information regarding seat belts, emergency exits, etc. Finally, she said, "Now sit back and enjoy your trip while your captain, Judith Campbell, and crew take you safely to Afghanistan " An old MSgt. sitting in the eighth row thought to himself, "Did I hear her right? Is the captain a woman?" When the attendant came by he said "Did I understand you right? Is the captain a woman?"

"Yes," said the Attendant, "In fact, this entire crew is female. And all blondes!"

"My God," he said, "I wish I had two double scotch and sodas. I don't know what to think with only women (and blondes to boot) up there in the cockpit."

"That's another thing Sergeant," said the crew member teasing the MSgt coquettishly, "We no longer call it the Cock-Pit. Now it's the Box-Office" ;-)

As told to Stu Savory and blogged here on April 16, 2008; author unknown. permalink Comments Email

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. . . at the Speed of Sound

L ong term earthquake prediction has proved to be an illusive elusive goal :-( My arbitrary definition of 'long term' being 'sufficient time to evacuate people'.

But short term warnings are feasible, albeit not at the epicentre but at some distance from it. 'Short term' = enough to shut down dangerous processes.

Here's how.

There are two different kinds of seismic waves which reach the seismometers. First comes the P wave. That's P for Primary not because you P yourself when feeling it ;-) The P wave is a compression wave and travels faster than the S waves which are the ones that cause the damage because they contain so much more energy than the P waves. That's S for Secondary not because you sh*t yourself when feeling it ;-)

S also stands for Slower and for Shear Waves, that's the mnemonic.

Assume you were 100 kilometers from the epicentre. Then the P wave reaches you after 17 seconds and the S wave after 28 seconds. That's 11 seconds in which to do something. What something? Shut down a nuclear reactor. Stop a fast train. Close safety valves in chemical plant. Stop lifts (elevators) in skyscrapers at the next floor and open the doors. Turn off the house's gas supply. Open firestation doors. Turn on the emergency electricity generators in hospitals, schools, old peoples' homes. Turn traffic lights all red. Radio to all police cars. And anything else you might think of.

You can do even better than that, saving the initial 17 seconds too. The speed of light (even in copper) is far faster than the speed of sound. So if you had a network of such detectors you could broadcast the warning to the shutdown-bots at the speed of light. And with multiple detectors you can identify the epicentre within seconds. Given that, you can decrease the size of the unwarned central ring by quite a bit. And the size of the (theoretically) annular ring that needs to be warned can be calculated from the strength of the P-waves too, so no false positives far away.

Japan, Mexico and Taiwan are already installing these seismic warnbot nets, triggering at e.g. Richter scale six. And I fully expect (japanese) car makers to put warnbot receivers into their car-radios in the future, so I didn't even go patent the idea :-) Once you'd stopped, your car's navi system could then even display a map showing the epicentre and the expected circle of damage so that you could reroute around it.

Technology is a blessing; well, some of it is. It's a bonded nerd's quantum of solace ;-)

N.B : This blog article was written yesterday in anticipation of the new U.S. Geological Survey Forecast: "Big quake likely in California", due out tomorrow, for more details see here.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 14, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Using GoogleMaps as a time machine

N ostalgia isn't what it used to be ;-)

There are two worlds for each of us : the world as we remember it and the world as it is now. Google Maps let's us compare them. Then vs. Now ?

Then : From the age of six, I remember that we lived in the station house at Wragby (UK); father was the station-master there. Our house was on and along the platform, only one room wide, a corridor along the windowless platform side, a huge yard.
Now : All gone! there isn't even a railway line there any more, let alone the station house. The rationalisation of the Beeching Axe had chopped away my childhood :-(

Then : Skip forward 3 years, I was 9. We had moved to the station house in Metheringham (UK). The house had a big garden and stood alone, a mile from the village at the end of the station road opposite the end of the wooded manor drive.
Now : the house still stands, but there is a road (Park Crescent) through the garden and three(!) houses on the lawn where I used to play. The whole mile to the village is now built up, but the wooded drive to Blankney manor (itself gone!) is still there.

Then : Skip forward 3 more years, I was 12. Carre's Grammar school was a couple of buildings dating from 1604, backing onto the headmasters house and shady lawn.
Now : the headmaster's house and shady lawn are still there, as are the old buildings. But the huge school playground between Northgate and Mill Field Terrace is now full of modern school buildings. The school has been expanded and modernised considerably.

Then : Skip forward 6 more years, I was 18. City University, London, UK.
Now : Considerably expanded it seems, but the old clock tower still casts its shadow. The secret defense research labs - hidden in the woods behind Stanmore Common - at which I subsequently worked, appear to have been scrapped and is now a building site for a housing estate it seems. None of the old buildings remain standing :-(

Then : Skip forward to 1969. I lived in an old block of flats on a little quiet street overlooking the picturesque old Eschersheimer Tor (which is in Frankfurt, Germany).
Now : Eschersheimer Tor still stands, casting its monumental shadow. But my flats are gone, the quiet street too, the Tor stands alone, an island in the middle of a 6-lane inner city ring road crossing! So the wooded 2-minute walk to the subway is now a filthy urban subterranean tunnel, I guess. NOT much of an improvement in my eyes :-(
Two years later I lived in a beach house on the island of Reichenau on Lake Constance (German/Swiss border). The house is still there, but the island - agricultural even then - appears to have been filled with new greenhouses! Economic pressures, I guess.

As I move forward through the years, the changes are less of course, as expected.

But enough of my personal Google Maps Time Machine, dear blogreaders. Why don't you try your own personal nostalgia machine and tell us about it in your own blogs?

Looking at things in the other direction - i.e. predicting the future - is of course much more difficult ("It's a poor memory that doesn't work in both directions"). However, the Modern Mechanix blog has reproduced an article written in 1968 entitled "What Will Life Be Like in the Year 2008?". Go read their predictions from just 40 years ago :-)

And weep at our lack of predicted progress :-(

PS : For comparison purposes only, here's a Timeline of Science Fiction's Predictions.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 12, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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What do spacefarers weigh?

B ack around the turn of the century I had a chance to talk to two of the Mir cosmonauts, one of whom holds the out-of-this-world orbital duration record. We talked about a potential trip to Mars and I wanted to know what were the space specific dangers involved. I had thought that solar radiation would be the biggest problem, after all the Mir, and the ISS operated within the protection of the Earth's own magnetic field. Either that or going mad from being shut in a small metal canister for months on end ;-)

But they told me that cosmonauts were not chosen for their active imaginations, in fact the converse is true. His major worry was keeping physically fit. Most of the trip would be made in weightlessness (zero boost). During his stay on the Mir he had lost weight; even the bones grow weaker and muscle tone deteriorates. When he landed back on Earth he could barely stand. Indeed he looked rather thin and light to me.

The human mind works in mysterious ways, at least mine does (as many blogreaders had already suspected). Now we fast-forward eight years to last week. My subconcious one night popped up with the following question : "That Mir cosmonaut said he had lost weight. How does he know? After all, he was weightless all those long months."

It's not as if he could stand on a bathroom scale and weigh himself while in free fall. Obviously that won't work. So "weight" was the wrong word, I must have translated him wrongly. He must have said "mass". And so the question became : "How does one determine body mass in weightless conditions?". I tossed and turned all night as my brain wrestled with this question, but I refused to get up , turn the PC on and go look it up in Wikipedia, that'd be too easy. Besides, it'd wake the missus; don't want that!

Cutting a long story short, here's the solution I came up with. A mass attached to a spring will vibrate at a frequency which is a function of the spring-rate and the mass. So I would attach the mass to two rubber bands attached to the walls, displace the mass, and measure the frequency at which he (the mass) vibrated back and forth :-)

Well, it's not quite that easy. The cosmonaut's body is not a rigid mass, his internal organs could flop about inside him due to the vibration. So he would need to roll himself into a tight ball - in a reproducable way - so that his centre of mass remained in a constant position relative to the rest of his body. Furthermore, we would need to constrain his body to only vibrate back and forth in one dimension instead of 2 or 3. Finally I had him belted in tightly into a seat which ran back and forth along guiding rails. That should be feasible and reproducable between 'weighing' sessions, I thought.

Next morning I looked it up on the net and was dead chuffed to find out that that is exactly how NASA weighs their astronauts in space :-) Shake 'em up baby, now :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 10, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Hillary Clinton Hairy Naked Ass Photo ;-)

A braying stupid ass is symbolic for the US Democratic Party and their TV election ads are run as a TV series called Jackass, I was told on April 1st ;-)

Sounds like a belated April Fool story, doesn't it? So is this one too ?

Actually, this is an experiment in misleading the search engines. Whimsley has pointed out that nowadays most blogreaders come in via search engines, which take them directly - via deep links - to single target pages in the archives. Furthermore, subjects most often searched for are xxx Porn (of coarse!) and the names of the US election candidates. So by combining these in today's title, I hope to see if the search engines are stupid enough to send people here to see the above photo of a neighbour's hot ass donkey 'Hillary Clinton' ;-) Yup, a belated xxx April Fool idea, played on Google.

And if you came here really expecting to see an XXX photo of Hillary Clinton's Hairy Naked Ass, then you are horny gullible enough to vote Republican ;-) Shame on you!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 8, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Maker of Worlds

Except if you are Terry Pratchett - Maker of Discworlds^® - or a fundaMENTAL Islamist who believes the world is flat just because the Koran says so, you will usually believe the world is a ball. Not quite a sphere, more like a spheroid, flattened slightly at the poles because of the Earth's spin. Makers of globes use the sphere approximation though. And since spheres do not map undistorted onto a plane , makers of plane maps have some choices to make, generally known as map projections. The one we are most used to is the Mercator projection. It conserves directions at the meridians but distorts areas (more so nearer the N and S poles). Conservation of direction (known as Rhumb lines) was useful to sea-going navigators.

Other projections (e.g. Peters) render areas more realistically but no longer conserve directions. Wikipedia has quite a good article on map projections to which I refer you.

Let us consider instead the inverse problem of the Globe maker. He has plane maps but need to dissect them, cutting them up into orange-slice pieces so that when glued to a sphere they will represent the territories, preserving both area and direction!

Luckily there is SW on the Internet which will do just that. See the PPM Globe pages.

Both the globe-to-plane and plane-to-globe projections use a sphere in their assumptions. This is because the Earth is large (=massive) enough that gravity pulls it together into a sphere (spheroid, due to the spin). How much more difficult is it then to make realistically shaped "globes" of asteroids and moons which are too small (under 800 kms) and too light for their own gravity to have pulled them into a sphere?

This is the problem that astronomical 'makers of worlds' face. Now Chuck Clark (of Atlanta, Georgia, USA) has tackled that problem. In particular, astronomical researchers are interested in projections which preserve areas correctly. Clark realised that the "orange slices" do not need to have regular symmetric outlines and so came up with the plane map shown below. When cut out and stuck together (along the pairwise coloured edges) you get a 3D model of Phobos, one of Mars two moons.

Here is a much larger (1076 by 1424 pixel) printable version for you to try out.

If this were a Rorschach test, I'd say I was seeing an astronaut, arms raised, and with a rock-sample collection tube attached to his leg, exploring Phobos in the future ;-)

Well done, Chuck Clark, thanks to whom I now have my very own Phobos 3D model.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 6, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Calling any Bloggers and Bikers in Scotland

I shall be touring Scotland solo on my motorcycle in June and would like to meet up with any scottish bloggers and/or bikers reading this. I've already set up to meet Morag for some biking on Skye and to meet friend HaggisChorizo on the east coast. But other contacts are welcome too, especially any scottish bikers who can show me the best and most scenic roads along my route, single-track roads preferred.

My planned route is :- Newcastle - Hawick - Stirling - Inverary - Easdale Island - Glencoe - Fort William - Inverness - Cairngorms - Skye - Ullapool - Tongue - John'o'Groats - Wick - Dingwall - Braemar - Trossachs - Newcastle upon Tyne.

Your road suggestions are welcome, riding along together would be even better :-)

PS: Attention Bikers : click on today's links for 5-10 minute YouTube videos of riding through Scotland.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory (on an FJR1300), datelined April 3, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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April Fool :-)

A pril Fools' day is the time to play practical jokes, so I thought I'd waffle on about some of my more STUpid ones today.

Like when I was living in France and 'borrowed' this local council sign only to return it on April 1st. In the sandpit of a children's playground :evilgrin: ;-)

Later I spent many happy years working for a fun company called Nixdorf Computer AG, which, unfortunately was later taken over by a Bavarian monolith of gray humourless boring (has-)bean-counters, whereupon the April Fools' day fun came to a grin-ding halt :-(

One April first, a couple of us went through the building at lunch time looking for terminals which had been left logged in (people too lazy to log in again after the break and with no feel for computer security). This was in the days when UNIX was new to the company. We then changed the prompts on all these open terminals from "\$" to "Login attempt was incorrect. Please Login again:". Then we logged them all off ;-)
You can imagine the chaos that ensued and the irate calls to the service dept. ;-)

Another year I came in early and 'got at' the terminal of the guy responsible for testing device drivers (including the glass-TTY screen driver of course). Opening up the back of his terminal, I reversed the CRT horizontal yoke leads. Thus all text was displayed backwards (from right to left). He spent 2 days looking at the device driver code ;-)

On a more physical level we did toilet humour one year. Emptied a whole bottle of detergent into a toilet water tank in the Ladies loo, early on April Fools' day. First lady there flushed it as usual, getting huge clouds of suds overflowing the whole cubicle ;-)
A Pril fool, geddit?

The company had also removed ½ of the light bulbs in the toilets in an attempt to stop employees reading newspapers etc in there. As a result, the toilets were very poorly lit. So we snuck in early, raised the seats, taped a sheet of cellophane tightly over the toilets, then lowered the seats and lids again. Bit too messy, that one :-(

Nixdorf also made the first PABX (private digital telephone exchange), their model 8818. This was in the pioneering days of ISDN, and the marketing people tended to overload the 8818 with features without thinking the consequences through. One top boss's secretary always made herself unpopular by chewing people out, so on the evening before April 1st a couple of us went through the building setting EVERY phone to call her back once she hung up. The 8818 PABX duly stored a queue of several hundred people with callback requests on her extension. Next morning, as usual, she called the canteen to order coffee for her boss and hung up. So her phone called back the first phone in the queue. The unsuspecting employee had a confusing conversation with her about who was calling whom and why. After a dozen of these, she was pretty pissed off, but daren't tear anybody off a strip lest it be a genuine call. Of course we'd included our own phones, so that we wouldn't be suspected ;-) Needless to say, the featured queue length was lowered to a maximum of five within a week ;-)

Then there was the year when NASA put out a call for proposals for scientific space missions. I knew that NASA has a propensity for exotic abbreviations and acronyms. Thus spacewalks were known at NASA as Extra Vehicular Activities, with the acronym EVA. And - honouring the Polish SF author - they gave the Lunar Excursion Module the acronym LEM. So my best mate and I printed up some stationary which showed our proposal coming from the Chief Space-Hardware-Institute of Technology-Head, Hofnarrplatz 1, Peenemunde (just in case anybody at NASA remembered whence their space technology came). We even dated it April 1st ;-) Earnestly, I wrote a serious-looking project outline called Space Mission Exploring Geo-Magnetic Anomalies. NASA stole adopted some of the ideas, but for some reason changed the project title ;-)

At a previous company, where a small team of us were writing the COBOL compiler, there was an objectionable tester, always pernickety, a miserable bloke. Now COBOL has an AUTHOR statement in the IDENTIFICATION DIVISION. So we had the compiler inspect the AUTHOR statement, and, if it contained his name (and only his), then the compiler would insert a random bug into the generated code at a random position ;-)

But enough from me. What were the best April Fools you perpetrated (or suffered)?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on April 1, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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