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Yclept 'Ole Phat Stu'
Bulldogs @ Play :-) 
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Sunday, August 31, 2008
Niche Search Engine ;-)
You know, if I were to come up with a search-engine just for looking for pictures of scantily clad nubile wenches - (I think it could only possibly be a niche search-engine) - I think I'd really have a problem coming up with an original name for it, don't you ;-) Friday, August 29, 2008
Spanish Templars suing the Pope. WTF?What a weird and wonderful world we live in!Back in 1307 A.D. the then Pope (Clemens V.) forbade the 15,000 strong Order of the Knights of Christ, and confiscated all their property too. Roll forward now 701 years to today and we find that in Madrid (Spain) the Asociation Orden Soberana del Temple de Cristo is suing Pope Benedict XVI personally. They demand that he rehabilitate them and acknowledge that Clemens V confiscated their properties worth 100,000 million Euros nowadays. Alledgedly, they are not looking for compensation, which is why they are suing the Pope alone, rather than the Vatican. Four times they have sent a delegation to Rome to negotiate, dressed (traditionally) in long white garb with a huge red cross thereupon, but were not granted an audience. I don't give them much chance, look how long it took the Vatican to acknowledge that Galileo had been right all along. Tough luck, you simple Simons, even if you are saintly! Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Regular Polytopes; help neededObviously there is an infinite number of regular (convex) polygons in two dimensions. And it is straightforward to show that there are only five regular polyhedra in 3 dimensional space. After a while and some (for me) deep thought, I can prove (as Stott did) that there are only six regular polytopes in 4 dimensions. I also know that there are only 3 in dimensions five and higher, but cannot prove it. Can any of my mathematically inclined readers point me to a proof?Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Game Over
Monday, August 25, 2008
Blogrolled here in 06/07 and still going :-)Continuing the theme from monday 4th,monday 11th, and monday 18th, here are links to those of you who entered my blogroll in 2006 and 2007 and are still blogging :
2006
2007 Over the years a half dozen have died, but the other losses were just an inordinate amount of link-rot. So pop over and read the hardy and worthy survivors today! Saturday, August 23, 2008
Ignorant American woman - words fail me! Friday, August 22, 2008
Classic Racing again in SchottenLast sunday - as every year - I rode south 180km to Schotten to see the racing. Classic and vintage motorcycles - lovingly restored - are put through their paces, and there are some (literally) unique machines and homebuilts from the era too. Click on the links to see my photos, even if some are a bit motion-blurred.
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Living in the Shit :-(Almost by definition, you blogreaders are in the first - or if it comes to the worst - the second world. Or if you are in the third world, you are well enough off to be able afford internet access. But today I want to point out the abominable conditions in third world slums. This year - 2008 - is the year in which , for the first time, there are more people living in urban environments than in rural environments. The towns and cities and megacities are expanding. And where are they expanding most? In the slums of course, where the poorest of the poor 'live'. With minimal or nonexistent sanitation :-(I remember reading Friedrich Engels' Lage der arbeitende Klasse in England which he wrote back in 1844. Therein he wrote about the slums of Manchester, blocks of buildings for the working classes where 200 of them had to share the single stinking abort at the entrance to each block. All the effluent ran untreated into the river Irk, turning it black and stinking, a model for Pratchett's River Ankh in Ankh-Morpork. Fast-forward now 160 years to the modern slums of megacities like Bombay, Dhaka, Lagos, Nairobi etc etc. Back in the days of the (British) Empire, they only built water-supplies and sewage systems for the imperial houses and garrisons; natives were relocated to areas of the towns without a sewage system or water supply. So the locals used the river. And this situation was inherited by the people who took over after imperialism and accounts for much of the situation today. Slums, shitty slums. Some numbers perhaps? Kinshasa, which has almost 10 million inhabitants, has NO sewage system. In the slums of Nairobi there are a mere 10 (functioning?) toilets for 40,000 people. In Mathare there are exactly two for 28,000 inhabitants. In Manila only about 10% are connected to the sewage system. Jakarta still uses open ditches rather than underground pipes. Gives a (w)hole new meaning to being up shit creek :-( 
In some places, the roads are named according to their usage, the street shown here is in Zur Haddasa, Israel. Also in Hong Kong there is an area called Sha Tin, including Sha Tin Racecourse. Then there's the lovely little Devon seaside resort of Shitterton not to forget Shitagoo Lake, Quebec. But(t) hygiene is really a problem, not funny. 1 ½ million people die every year from drinking dirty water caused by a lack of toilets, a child dies every 20 seconds. And 1,200 million working days are lost every year due to fecally-caused illnesses, originating in non-existant sewage systems :-( CRAP! There is a movie about this situation, called Bumbay (sic!), directed - appropriately enough - by a man called Prahla Kakkar (joke for my German readers). He says ½ the population of Bombay has no toilet, so they just go outside into the parks etc and shit there. That's a half-million heaps of shit every morning! 500+ tons of stinking human excrement! And you thought Berlin had a problem with dogshit on the pavements?
Monday, August 18, 2008
Blogrolled here in 2005 and still blogging :-)Continuing the theme from monday 4th and monday 11th, here are links to those of you who entered my blogroll in 2005 and are still blogging ; in chronological order.Alembic , Blogging in Paris , Joel Sax , Wilson's Blogmanac , Jesus' General , Counterpunch , Johnny Billericay , English Cut , Make: Blog , Rocket Jones , Nappy Diatribe , KnowProSE , and finally Crooks and Liars. Also, sadly, a lot of linkrot too :-( Why not pop over and read the hardy survivors today? Sunday, August 17, 2008
Union Jack, upside-down, AGAIN :-(Scarcely had I blogged (last wednesday) about people flying the Union Flag the wrong way up, than it happened again :-( Sheesh! It gets my goat when marketing professionals screw that up. There's no excuse for PR's ignorance! Saturday was nice weather, so the wife and I rode my motorcycle up to the Diemelsee lake where there was a Biker Show promotion tour. One of the major sponsors is the German dealership of Triumph Motorcycles (UK). Their (witting?) PR department is raffling off a magnificent retro-styled Triumph Thruxton over the duration of the tour, said Thruxton model being proudly displayed at Jochen & Tina's Fährhaus site. 
Yes, dear blogreader, the Union Flag was put on the podium upside-down :-( And no, the man responsible (a Triumph PR man?) didn't know the difference. So I spent 2 minutes explaining it to him (see last wednesday's blog), the mnemonic being "Thick white diagonal at the top, next to the pole." The pole is always assumed to be on the left if not present. Now this was a German PR guy, who had obviously never been taught how to fly the flag correctly. So the fault is with Triumph's Marketing head / PR department (who may be just as unwitting?). Now since Triumph make a big selling point of their's being Brit bikes, they need to at least get the Union Flag right! I suggest they send a memo to every single one of their marketing / PR / sales people /dealerships to teach every single one of them how to place / fly the Union Jack the right way up! And yes, dear Head of Marketing, you may point them to this blog :-) The other thing that annoyed me about this lack of sales quality was the PR man's on-site response. He merely said he'd change it the next day. But remember this is one of their major selling points, so he should have changed it immediately. It couldn't be more than 5 minutes work, but he was just too goddamn lazy? :-( You don't get Japanese bike manufacturers making this kind of mistake ;-) +ve Postscript : I wrote to the boss at Triumph pointing him to this rant and
am happy to report that the German Marketing Head (Markus Heuser)
replied at once :-
-ve Postscript : Jochen thinks I'm a tell-tale-tit for doing that, he thinks it would have been sufficient just to correct the PR man on site. But I still think the only way to fix the (quality)-problem once and for all is to define who is responsible (Head of Marketing) and tell him what needs to be done; then Triumph should never make that mistake again anywhere! I guess I'll just have to live with Jochen's disapproval :-( But it seems I'm the only one cares, because even the British olympic gold-medallist (women's 400m) Christine Ohuruogo celebrated carrying the Union Jack upside down. You'd think the olympic athletes would be taught how to display their own flag properly! Friday, August 15, 2008
Whither Switzerland?
Almost forty years ago I lived for a while in Switzerland (in Gottlieben, on the Rhine river), and got to like their traditions. But now it seems that - almost unbelievably - Switzerland is changing. Even the traditional age-old myths are being challenged. Roger Sablonier now disputes the myth that the 1291 AD Oath of Rütli was taken by William Tell and his freedom-loving rebels to unite the original cantons of Switzerland. He tells (sic!) us that rather it was a conglomeration of nobles to keep their power. Then such Swiss symbols as the airline Swissair and the bank UBS got into existential crises.
The head of the army had to resign, and it looks like the
Well, at least they can still yodel. The 2008 national yodeler festival attracted 12,000 yodelers, alp-horn blowers and flag-swingers. 360,000 spectators attended the orgy of Swiss tradition. To which I can only say "Holleri du dödl di, diri diri dudl dö" ;-) Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Flying the flag : Union Jack orientationOh boy! Some of you blogreaders really DO pay attention to detail, which, however, leads to interesting comment discussions and even new (to me) discoveries :-) Here's an example of a recent correspondence :-Back on 26th of September of 2007, I took people to task for flying the Union flag upside down, showing a photo of Tony Blair's upside-down flag. One attentive reader wrote :- "I noticed you called a bloke out for installing his Union-Flag decal upside-down on his Triumph M/C. I just wanted to point out that you can't make a Union Flag be upside down - the image is identical when flipped.... The bars from the St. Patrick's Cross (red saltire superimposed over the white saltire of the St. Andrew's Cross) are on the lower position on the left and the upper position on the right. Therefore, if you flip the flag, they're still in the same respective position to the viewer. Just thought I would point that out as you were a little hard on the guy...." To which I replied :- To which my blogreader replied :- Now I'm in favour of experimental evidence instead of dogma (I'm an Atheist, after all), so I dug out my two Union Jacks with the following very interesting result. I wrote :- "This turns out to be rather interesting, because it depends on the particular flag, i.e. whether or not its pole-side suspension points are symmetrical. I have one flag which just has two eyelets for carabiners, so its suspension is symmetrical about the horizontal axis and behaves as I described earlier, that is, you CAN fly it inverted! But I have another flag, the one shown in these photos, which is assymmetrical about a horizontal axis because there is a closed loop of rope at the top and a loose end of rope at the bottom. It behaves as YOU described :-) 
The photo above is my second (asymmetrically mountable) flag on my lawn, pole on the left (a garden hoe), flag the right way up. I attached a strawberry shaped tablecloth weight to the top left corner to mark it. Closeup shown on the left below. 
Then I turned the Union Jack over, the top left corner becoming the bottom left, see closeup (right) above. The overall view of the flipped flag is shown below, of which the rightside detail above is a closeup of the same strawberry shaped tablecloth weight. 
Union flag flown upside down :-( Technically of course, I have committed Lese´Majeste´ by showing you the Union flag upside down. But I hope Her Majesty the Queen will forgive me, inasmuch as did it in the spirit of scientific experiment and explanation to my readers. Nor did I actually hoist it in this position, you notice ;-) Monday, August 11, 2008
Blogrolled in 2004 and still going strongContinuing the theme from last monday (4th), here are links to those of you who entered my blogroll in 2004 and are still blogging ; in chronological order.Dave Pollard , Grrrl meets world , Making Light , Orcinus , Susan's Hindsight , Kalilily Time , Rude Pundit , Irregular Times , La vache qui lit , Secular Blasphemy , Simon Perry , Carpetbagger , Pen Elayne , The Left Coaster , American Samizdat , and also Mamamusings . Why not pop over and read them today? Friday, August 8, 2008
All back to front on 8/8/8Today being the eighth day of the eighth month of the eighth year (pace Terry Pratchett), we have a reversible date, so here are eight neat palindromes :-
For Liz, from Wales, I have "Kill a blind sheep!", which is "Lladd dafad ddall" ;-) To a Ex-girlfriend of mine, Lillimor (Sweden), I'd say "You speak Latin well", which is "Ni talar bra latin". Medieval witches would recognise ""In girum imus nocte et consumimir igni". My Czech readers "Do not pour beer for a stag" = "Jelenovi pivo nelej" And that story in the Bible about Jesus' expected resurrection may just have been put in there
so that the author could get a couple of palindromes in Hebrew. The passage where He is asked
"Eternal Father be Thy name, why hast the King Messiah not yet come?" is
a translation from the Hebrew palindrome
Oh, BTW, if you can read German, here's a short story I wrote back in 1997 :-)
Thursday, August 7, 2008
Amateur CrastinationThis must be amateur crastination, because if it were procrastination, I'd be getting paid for it ;-) In the meantime, sensible blog content has been delayed til tomorrow.Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Spiralling Inflation Blues :-(
The frightful spectres of recession and spiralling inflation are raising their heads in Europe too. Not to the same extent as in Zimbabwe of course, but nevertheless a cause for a certain unrest. The Europe-wide inflation rate reached 4.1% in July (after 4% in June), the highest rate since Europe-wide counting began (in 1996). Last year it was only 2.2%, so it seems to be spiralling up :-( Here in Germany it was 3.3% in July. Excluding the price of fuel at the pumps and of heating oil and gas it would have been still 2.2% , which is more in line with the European Central Bank's(ECB) target rate (below 2%). To dampen it, the ECB raised its interest rate by ¼% to 4¼% at the beginning of July, but this may not be enough, I expect them to add another ¼% to ½% in this year :-( What does this mean for the average family? Expenditures are 2682€ more per year! Driving 40,000 kms per year translates to 1040€ more per year. The 7½% rise in food prices adds 513 Euros to their annual bill. The 15% rise in the price of gas for heating adds 347 Euros to their (27,000 kWh) bill. Electricity is about 10% dearer, so that's 110 Euros more for 5,000 kWh. Health insurance premiums are rising about 10 % over the year, making 672 Euros more per year for the average family of four (and a dog :-) And have incomes increased correspondingly? Not here in Germany, they haven't :-( But in other Euro-countries (like Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain) pay is coupled to the price-of-living index, either by law or by union contracts. So this drives the inflation spiral up even more. Indeed, these countries have the highest inflation rates in Europe. Belgium had 5.1% in May (the latest figures I have), Luxemburg 4.8% and Spain 4.7%. And because we now share a common currency with these price-of-living indexed countries, we non-indexed countries get a spiralling inflation too and have to foot the bill for their profligate living, as well as footing the (oil) bills for Americans who have been consuming more than their fair share of the world's resources and living beyond their means for many a year. So we pay for them too as the dollar devalues :-(
 The effect is most on the poor of course :-( Whereas the official inflation rate in Germany is 3.3%, it turns out to be 2.1% points higher, that is 5.4 % for people with a net income below 1700 Euros/per month. And that means about a third of all households in the country, particularly the unemployed and old-age pensioners :-( Monday, August 4, 2008
People I rolled 5 years ago :-)No, not what you are thinking, this post is about people who had been on my blogroll at some time in 2003. Both Meg (IRL) and Juan (ESP) have asked why my blogroll is so short. That's because I can only read about 30 to 40 blogs regularly and only the ones currently read regularly are listed. Blogs get swapped in and back out again when I read someone else more often. I don't keep a long and accumulative blogroll of all blogs I've ever visited (even if only once) as some people do. So for those of you who want an accumulative version, here's the list for the year 2003. Others will follow. But I've only included those perennially industrious people who are still actively blogging, in chronological order with duplicates removed. Frank Paynter (read him from day one :-) , Halley Suitt , Emptybottle , Life Outtacontext , One Pot Meal (now Tawny Grammer), Neal Pollack , Burningbird , Charles Eicher , De Steen der Eigenwijzen , Gary Turner , Kevin Marks , Accordion Guy , Scary Duck , Yule Heibel , Betsy Devine , Boston Blue Eyes , Dave Pollard , Doug Alder , Easy Bake Coven , Jeneane Sessum , Michael O'Connor Clarke , and Old fashioned patriot . Just 22 of the bloggers I rolled in 2003 are still going. Go read 'em, they're still good! |
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& His reply
"Know from your forefathers that I will not be embarrassed, I'll return to you at the due time"
is a palindrome too
.
And so my Atheist question is : Was the resurrection merely put in the Bible so that the author of that passage
could just show off how clever he was at making palindromes? A biblical Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair? Think about it, e.g while listening to
Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 47 (3rd movement) ;-)
This blog is not (even politically) correct. It consists of 72% satire & sarcasm,
31% scientific reporting, and at least 4% arithmetical errors ;-) Thus everything blogged
here should be taken with a pinch or 3 of NaCl.
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