Stu Savory's Blog - December 2003

Stu Savory's Blog 100 % anastomotic anagogic analecta.
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I live here(map) Local area photos Search site or WWW Sitemap (bilingual) To STU'S Homepage Who He? Dr. Stuart Savory, overeducated, blatently opinionated, old (1944-vintage), scottish but multilingual, amateur cryptologist, computer consultant, bulldog-lover, Beetle-driver, textbook-writer, long-distance biker, blogger and webmaster living in the foothills south of the northern German plains. Not too shy to reveal his true name or even whereabouts, he blogs his opinions, and humour and rants irregularly. Stubbornly he clings to his beliefs, e.g. that he's not really evil, or even anti-american, in spite of Dubya's efforts to convince him that he should be. ;) Political compass Economic L/R: -1.62 Liberty/Authority: -2.56 Quality Blogs Belle de Jour Betsy Devine Dave Pollard Doug Alders Easy Bake Coven Frank Paynter Jeneane Sessum Joel Sax Making Light Mama Musings Mandarin Design Mercurial Michael O'Connor Clarke Old fash. patriot Scary Duck TFS Reluctant Yule Heibel Neat News Sites BBC News Cryptome Exploding Cigar Need to Know The memory hole Now Reading	Wednesday, December 31, 2003 Year End Wrapup December Feedback : Thanks to the following blogreaders for their december feedback:- To Jane L. for recommending the Bush 2004 campaign site which is so seductively democratic. I was expecting pro-republican crap. To Tilly R. for recommending the Bush Tax site pointing out where US readers are worse off, but pointing away from the central 'Gummint'. To Barbara B. (NOT Bush!) for pointing me to this news story about the pedantic bullies in the Department of Homeland Severity. To the anonymous but italian catholic from New York who wishes to save my soul with a link to a page of Latin prayers, obviously written in English first (where they rhyme) and then translated into Latin (where they don't). Ora et labora. To Mark L. for this version of Santa, about which I'd never heard : QUOTE I thought Santa appears in the bible as St Nicholas. He wants to take jesus a present but gets left behind. He doesn't know how to find jesus on his own so leaves a present for every child in the land in the hope of hitting the target through a kind of blanket bombing of presents . UNQUOTE. Can anybody give me the biblical reference? To Peter (you rock, man!) for the link to a list of things creationists hate. Get the biblical pun in ancient Greek? (Peter = Rock) it was in the new testament even! To Julian Elve' with whom I discussed the risks of old flames and/or relatives reading your blog. Both will keep us honest, Julian. To Billy from Scotland for pointing me to the Perthshire Diary, a daily dose of Scottish and Perthshire history. Ah, Scotland, sweet homesickness. To Jimmy H. also from Scotland - a retired shepherd - who sent me an example of shepherds counting their sheep to base 12 (not 10) :- zeendi, teenty, tethery, mundheri, tickerie, baombe, hecturi, lecturi, seater, over, daover, dek. To Agnete T. for keeping my logic in line by pointing me to a list of logical fallacies. posted by Stu Savory on 31st December 2003 at 08:34 Central European Time Monday, December 29, 2003 Oh Lawdy! Listen up, willya? Well, as was to be feared, my Xmas Eve's blog entry about Xmastime beliefs did indeed offend some. Sorry, but I thought I was mostly relating facts, folks. One of the eMails was from an AOL user im Utah - who, by the grace of Stu, shall remain nameless - accusing me of blasphemy therein. That blogreader sent me a (beautifully formatted) copy of the Lord's prayer, and also demanded that "your tongue be cut out for blasphemy". In the same mail she suggested that I go out onto the street and declaim the Lord's prayer out loud, really loud, as it was "the Lord's own very words". Hmmmm. Very hmmmm. Apart from the fact that it would be difficult to speak - let alone proselytise - with a missing tongue, I doubt I would be widely understood. Living in Germany as I do, I would have to declaim the Vaterunser - which is the same thing in German - to have a chance of being understood. It's a translation. But so is the English version she sent me; or is she naive enough to think that He spoke English? English didn't even exist 2000 years ago, at least not in a form recognisable today. I refer you all to my blog entry of 14th december. Some catholics might understand if I declaimed it in Latin, which WAS spoken 2000 years ago. No ma'am. Jesus was a jew. He would have spoken Aramaic 2000 years ago, since that is where his step-father came from. So if you want to have "the Lord's own very words", they would be in West Aramaic. So let's take a shot at it, if only to extend your knowledge. There are just three villages left (in Syria) where some west aramaic is still spoken, this being the dialect nearest to that which He would have used. They are Malula, Bacha and Dschubbadin(sp?). One of the local farmers in Dschubbadin, Tawfiq - son of Altun Milone - was recorded there in 1986 (at age 84) declaiming the Lord's prayer in West Aramaic. We can be grateful to Professor Werner Arnold (Heidelberg university) for tape-recording him. So ma'am, for you and any other interested blogreaders to download - here is a 224 kByte (28 seconds long) MPGA file of the Lord's prayer in Aramaic, as He might have declaimed it. On you knees, lady from Utah! posted by Stu Savory on 29th December 2003 at 11:37 Central European Time Wednesday, December 24, 2003 Holiday season beliefs. I read that Rageboy is mocking people for their religious beliefs, but keeping to minor sects such as Rosicrucians etc. Playing safe. Let us NOT mock the believers, let us rather investigate some of the facts about what people believe. The pie diagram shown on the left shows the relative proportions of the number of believers in the world's major religions. Note that the diagram is taken from an 'interested party' (www.adherents.com) though. I declare myself as an Atheist. Religion is a major source of cultural differences of course. Religious fundamentalists - be they Ayatollahs or Dubya - are thus potentially quite dangerous people. These people rate "beliefs" higher than "proofs". For example, Dubya believes that Saddam had WMD, but had (and has) no proof. But he was prepared to go to war based on that belief. Dangerous indeed. Since the majority of my blogreaders are from the US or from Germany here, I thought I'd compare their beliefs. Historically we have to regard what were East and West Germany separately; after WW2 the East grew up under Communism, the West under Capitalism. Here are the results of a 2001 (pre 9-11) study by the Allensbach Institute. %age believing West East USA in the following: Germany Germany =========================================================== the soul 77 43 90 God 71 25 94 life after death 46 15 71 heaven 38 18 84 angels 37 16 76 resurrection o.t. dead 33 10 58 reincarnation/rebirth 21 10 28 the Devil 19 7 68 Hell 13 6 71 =========================================================== N.B. : I regard the discrepancy between the numbers for 'angel'-believers and for 'heaven'-believers as a measure of the inaccuracy of the survey. Ditto Devil/Hell. We see from the survey that the US is a much more 'belief' oriented culture than ours here in Germany. It is therefore no surprise that a 'belief'-oriented person - Dubya is a born-again fundamentalist Christian with all that that implies - could be appointed president. What is disturbing - not only to me, but also to much of the rest of the world - is the amount of power in the hands of a religious fundamentalist. It doesn't have to be the Baath party or an 'Avenge for Allah' organisation. I would much prefer to have rational, thinking, people running the world. Now lets look at how people celebrate the holiday season. My jewish friends just celebrated Channukah. Their religion is too small to show up on the pie chart above, which does not correlate of course with secular influence issues. There are almost no Muslims (Islam) in our village, but Ahmet reports to me that US Muslims are being badly treated in the USA (i.e. with prejudice) these days. Bummer, bummer. Most of the people here purport to be Christian, I guess up to 33% may make their annual visit to the one true church (it doesn't matter which one) this week. Xmas nowadays often has a lot to do with the old Nordic religion, although many may not realise it. They will have an evergreen tree in the house (Yggdrasil), decorated with candles to represent the eternal stars. The tree will have a sunburst figure on top, representing Yule (= the sun) at the winter solstice. The summer solstice leads into the month of July, based on the same name. The tree will be decorated traditionally with apples and nuts, enjoining the return of longer days (after the solstice) and the renewed growth of food. Less traditional people will have bright red glass balls as tree decorations, failing to realise that these are merely symbolic apples. But some people even object to these trees claiming they're Christian. I guess you can be too PC. I don't remember any pine tree in the new testament, do you? Yggdrasil is a heathen tree. The most popular figure is Santa Claus. He represents Odin. Both lived in the far north and had a sleigh drawn by reindeer (Sleipnir was for riding only). Here in Germany there are still 500+ year old farmhouses from the pre-christian era which have an Odin's sled built in above the fireplace which is used for smoking and drying foods. Odin too did a year-end tour, rewarding or punishing (via his alter ego) people, depending on their secular performance. Santa will wear a red coat, as introduced by Coca Cola as a marketing measure about 100 years ago. I don't remember him or them in the new testament either. And it's not just Coke, there is just too much commercialism IMHO. Crappy His Mass, indeed! Some of the commercial crap produced in His name (not just at this time of year) is really, really bad! Nothing particularly Christian about the holiday season for many then, it's just Old Nordic religion rewarmed. I suppose Rumsfeld would rage on about Old Europe if he read this :-) End of today's rant. Now go have a happy and peaceful holiday season. posted by Stu Savory on 24th December 2003 at 06:41 Central European Time Monday, December 22, 2003 Solstice Introspection (as thumbnails). A solstice is always a good time to pass review and make future plans. So I've borrowed the Checkerboard-layout of link-pix idea from Michelle (thanks!) and have arrayed 15 steps through my life in roughly chronological order here. The ALT texts give some datelines and context. Otherwise just click on a thumbnail and see if the links behind each thumbnail interest you. If not, try another. Some of the linked pages are in German, so just look at the pix if you can't read German. My thumbnail autobiography. Show us yours too! And as the Irish say : Top o' the Google, to ye Sorr! posted by Stu Savory on 22nd December 2003 at 06:10 Central European Time Sunday, December 21, 2003 How Saddam was REALLY captured The non-PR version : I suppose we are all used to Dubya's lies and PR shenanigans by now. So the folks in the USA probably haven't been told this version of Saddam's capture by their media yet. I'm translating freely from this German source Focus news magazine. "Saddam was actually found by kurdish militants, after a tipoff by the iraqi Dschabur clan. (Saddam's son Udai had raped one of the daughters of the clan, and this was their revenge). The kurds then put Saddam under drugs and removed the bullets from his weapons before stuffing him back into the spiderhole. Then the Americans were called who came with their PR & media-men to record their capture of the (unarmed, drugged) Saddam. So it wasn't a success of the US or UK intelligence services at all." According to Focus, the paragraph above is reported by a member of the British secret service, as reported in the UK press, namely the Sunday Express. But I could no longer find it on their website. Censorship perhaps? Or fiction? On Sunday at 11 am CET, I found nothing on the Sky News website on the subject, nor on the BBC News website either. So what are we to believe? Your choice. Unilateral disarmament unlikely : Now that Ghaddafi has renounced WMD, thus setting an example to the world, isn't it time that the owner of the world's largest WMD arsenal - a certain Dubya - followed suit and scrapped his "nukulah fowass" too? Another unlikely thing : My thanks here to Bob (not Bruce) from Australia who mailed me, saying that when he Googled worldwide for "Savory" - also my surname - he found out that my blog comes out top in Google. Needless to say, I was chuffed at this, but think that it must be some form of Google artefact, i.e. Google handles Blogs preferentially because they are both updated and referenced often. But Technorati says only a dozen other bloggers link to mine. And with only about 20 hits a day, I'm not even a C-list blogger, more like a Z-list. But what really brought me back to earth, was seeing how Google has categorised my blog , viz: Category: Home > Cooking > Nuts and Seeds > Pine Nuts So Google thinks I'm a nut !! (they may be right :-) posted by Stu Savory on 21st December 2003 at 11:40 Central European Time Friday, December 19, 2003 Wozzat, dude? Explanation : I've been asked to explain the new blog subtitle anastomotic anagogic analecta (don't you guys'n'gals own a decent English dictionary?). anastomotic = communicating by cross-connections to form a network. anagogic = of the strivings in the unconcious towards morally high ideals. analecta = collected literary fragments. So it means interlinked (=anastomotic), morally improving (=anagogic), collected literary fragments (=analecta). In two simpler words blog rants. All clear now :-) ??? So what do I usually rant about? Vote Cheating : At least five convicted felons secured management positions at DIEBold, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, according to critics demanding more stringent background checks for people responsible for voting machine software. A Sacramento audit of DIEBold Election Systems voting machines in California has revealed that the company installed uncertified voting software in all 17(seventeen!) counties that use its electronic voting equipment. DIEBold's CEO has already stated publically he wants to deliver all the votes to Dubya! And it is on public record that a DIEBold voting machine was preloaded with a large negative number for Al Gore in 2000. Chuck DIEBold out! This scandal is an example of the sort of thing that pisses me off! It is perhaps not mere Jungian coincidence that DIEB is our German word for Thief. Moral improvement necessary! But I also get annoyed when busy-body government officials interfere unneccessarily , or when they are massively incompetent, or - in the case of Dubya - both. Moral improvement : The Bush administration has been judicially warned in its attempts to reduce your constitutional rights : "Even in times of national emergency... it is the obligation of the judicial branch to ensure the preservation of our constitutional values and to prevent the executive branch from running roughshod over the rights of citizens and aliens alike," the 2-1 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals said. New Links : So, having now ranted ( = anagogic) and provided you with integrated direct links ( = anastomotic) to the referenced press articles, it's time to give you some newly collected literary fragments ( = analecta). For something more prurient than Halley, try the blog of a professional lady of the horizontal persuasion, Belle de Jour. If that's too direct, take your choice from the Guardian's Best of British Blogging 2003. Or if you think I'm not making an educational point - as I often try to do - see if your points are made correctly. posted by Stu Savory on 19th December 2003 at 11:55 Central European Time Keithsday, December 18, 2003 Gathers no moss. Keith Richards : will be sixty today. So let's all dig out our Stratocaster or Flying-V, tune it to D-major with the upper string lowered by an octave and - using five strings only - join him in a 12-beat blues groove version of "Too old to Rock'n'Roll but too young to die"! Congratulations Keith, there have been times over the last four decades when I've thought you'd never make it that far ;-) You've come a long way from being an unambitioned art-student on that Dartford railway platform in autumn 1961 where you met a certain long-haired economics-student carry an armful of Chuck Berry records, hey? "Don't Stop". posted by Stu Savory on 18th December 2003 at 09:22 Central European Time Wednesday, December 17, 2003 Kittyhawk Contempories Kill Devil Hill, NC : 100 years ago to the day the Wright brothers made the first (12 HP) powered flight. 36 meters in 12 seconds, so there must have been a 20+ mph headwind too. Coastguard John T. Daniels took that famous photo you'll find on lots of news-sites today. The 4th flight was 260 meters in 59 seconds. Groundspeed was walking speed too. Later, a gust picked up the parked Flyer I, hurled it back over the dunes and smashed it to pieces, taking the aforementioned John T. Daniels with it, who thus became the first person to be injured in a powered airplane accident. The only remaining original Wright Flyer Type I is to be found here in the Deutsches Museum, as I read there. Now the question is sometimes asked: were they the first powered flights? Maybe not. So lets look at some contempories. Wilhelm Kress : built a flying boat with three wings arranged behind one another. His attempt to fly off an artificial lake near Vienna (Austria) in fall of 1901 was a failure, nearly drowning him when the thing capsized. So he wasn't first. Hiram Maxim : The machine-gun inventor built a huge (31 meter span) five winged 180 hp steam powered contraption in England which collapsed whilst still on the ground in 1894. Nor was he first. Gustav Whitehead : Born Gustav Weisskopf in Leutershausen (Germany), wrote in his diary for 14th August 1901 that he flew his twin-engined Machine Nr.21 for over 800 meters near Fairfield in Connecticut. However, there are no photos and Whitehead was notorious for his story-telling. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Here in Leutershausen there is a street, a school and a museum named after him. A replica of Machine Nr.21 has however been flown, albeit not using Whitehead's acetylene powered engines, but modern ones of the same HP. So he probably wasn't first. Karl Jatho : Born 1873 in Hanover (Germany), died 1933. He made a short hop of 18 meters at a height of 75 cm on 18th August 1903 on the Varenwalder Heath. His diary records also several witnessed flights up to 60 meters at a height of 2.5 meters in November. However, these were probably in ground-effect and he himself states that the 12 HP motor was too weak to sustain flight. So he was the first, but didn't have full 3-axis control as the Wrights did. The sketch shown above is a profile of his biplane (bat-shaped as in da Vinci's sketches). Again, a replica has flown. posted by Stu Savory on 17th December 2003 at 06:22 Central European Time Tuesday, December 16, 2003 Yclept Answering Machine Oh weh, O yea. Mail flood. It seems that Mandarin Design recommends me as an answering machine where Ask Jeeves can't help. I'm not, OK? And in particular, I don't do schoolkids' homework assignments for them, so stop asking! That said, I've picked out a couple of the more interesting Emailed questions:- Numbers : A US highschool pupil's question was : Thanks for explaining why 26 letters, now tell us why only 10 numbers, Why not 11,12 or 13? Actually, there are infinitely many numbers, you probably meant digit. Latin for finger. *Man is the measure of all things. We count to base 10 because we have 10 fingers. 10 is actually pretty impractical, only having divisors 2 and 5. In the past, for practical purposes, the Anglo-Saxons used 12. 12 is divisible by 2,3,4, and 6. Thus 12 pence to the pound in the old sterling(UK) currency. Threepenny bits and sixpence coins. And farthings and groats. In the US you have a coin called a quarter, four to the dollar. From a mathematical point of view, we would prefer to count to a prime base like 11 or 13. Know why? Consider the decimal 0.36 ; as a fraction it is expressible as 36/100 or 18/50 or 9/25 or 108/300 etc. With a prime base every systematic fraction would be irreducible, Lagrange knew this back in his day too. Little green extraterrestrials may indeed count to a prime base. In his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy* books, Douglas Adam's aliens claim that 69=42. And given that this were true, then we can deduce that the aliens count to base 13, because 413+2=69=54(decimal)=510+4. Want to know a neat fraction? Calculate 355/113 :-) BTW, the man in the photo here is Godfrey Hill, from England. His only regret in life is never having been able to buy a pair of gloves! (Tip: count his fingers). Crypto : From California, Jesus asked Can you publish what you want about code-breaking? Isn't that helping terrorists? What crypto do you recommend professionally? No. What gets published and what you can export are limited by the Wassenaar arrangement, which I respect. I just publish simple stuff, keeping the rest between my ears :-) And their coding, which they teach in chapter 13 of the Jihad manual is pretty straightforward stuff. Jobwise, I recommend the AES Rijndael algorithm, and Twofish (with 5 loaves of bread, Jesus! :-) How do I win at Monopoly? Well the Xmas season is coming, so some of you may be spending time playing Monopoly®. This link explains the best Monopoly strategy. And yes, all you Linux fans, the question did come via an official microsoft.com server ;-) But I decided to take it at its face value, ignoring any possible satire (sorry, Bill). posted by Stu Savory on 16th December 2003 at 06:22 Central European Time Sunday, December 14, 2003 How big is yours? 26? Alphabet, of course ! Elsewhere last week Michelle asked me a deceptivly simple question WHY does English have 26 letters? which I couldn't answer at the time. But I promised her I'd try to blog an answer. So here's that try (and please remember, I'm not a linguist, emailed corrections from professional linguists are welcome): Europe never produced its own alphabet. A comes from the semitic Aleph (which means Ox, the pictograph was a rough outline of an ox's head). So when Halley raves about her Alpha Males, maybe she just likes big Oxen? :-) B comes from the Semitic Beth (which means house) etc. When the Anglo-Saxons became literate (in the sixth century AD) they simply stole their alphabet from the Romans (Latin has 22 letters, AFAIK). However they had three sounds for which there were no latin letters. So they took three letters from their old runic alphabet, namely W (pronounced double-you [except by eejits]), thorn (pronounced "th" and written like the lower-case Greek rho [it's not on the keyboard here for me to type in, sorry]) and eth (written like the lower-case Greek delta, and still in use in both parts of Ireland, as far as I'm aware). When the Normans came (A.D. 1066 and all that) they added G and Z and eventually dropped Thorn, because they couldn't get their tongues around it. So 22 plus 3 plus 2 minus 1 = 26, Michelle, OK? Now spelling was not a strong point in the Middle Ages. Looking at Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall of Hard Wirds published in 1604 (the first English dictionary, AFAIK) we see that he even spelled words two ways on the title page! More than 80 (sic!) spellings of Shakespeare's name have been found. There are only six known signatures made by the Good Bard, no two spelled the same, he even spelled his own name in two different ways in the same document! Much Ado about Nothing, indeed! So you need rules on how to spell (i.e. what are legitimate combinations of letters?). Not only so that you can write The nine billion Names of God (a short story I thoroughly recommend, BTW), but even just for everyday life. You might think that the average person has problems pronouncing tchst, sthm or tchph ? Not so! Just say matchstick, asthma or catchphrase. Introduction of the printing press brought standardisation on the London spelling. And NO it wasn't Gutenberg's invention, he merely printed a Bible. Movable Type (not MT, bloggers!) was invented by a Dutchman called Laurens Janszoon Koster whose apprentice ran off to Mainz in Germany taking some of Koster's blocks with him. Said apprentice became a friend of an obscure mirror polisher and stonemason just prior to 1455. Who was that? Johannes Gutenberg! In the UK, Caxton's use of printing helped standardise on 26 letters. Clear now? I could go on explaining enthusiastically for pages and pages, Michelle, but a Blog is not the write (sic!) medium for that. So let me wrap up by recommending a Bill Bryson book called Mother Tongue, ISBN 0-380-71543-0. Bill is a far better writer than I will ever be. It's a very enjoyable and erudite book; do please read it, all you blogreaders. posted by Stu Savory on 14th December 2003 at 07:00 Central European Time Saturday, December 13, 2003 Positive Feedback Dog Talk : Several dog-lovers wrote praising thursday's posting which I did for Frank Paynter. So this is a collective thankyou to all of you. Our current bulldog bitch Wilma is nine years old now and healthy; thanks for asking, Agnete. BTW Frank, you have lots of sympathisers from all around the world, I think, not just me! West Point Mail: Yesterday I got a mail from West Point (the US military academy), confirming that a cryptography paper which I had submitted is to be published in the specialist journal Cryptologia early in 2004. So I'm really happy about this, after all, Cryptologia is the prestigious publication for code-breakers. It may be less widely read than Pennhouse, in which Halley appeared, but I'm surely just as proud as she was. I do hope that doesn't sound too narcissistic! Bloggers' inside joke: How do you spell narcissism? Answer: I'm not sure, but I think it starts with rb, ends with rb, and there's probably an rb in the middle as well :-) And yes, I do know that Pennhouse should be spelled with a "t", I'm just making a sly joke in German there, OK? And I now realise that those website hits I've been getting lately from dotmil, dj0 and other dotgov hosts were probably just reviewers of that Cryptologia submission checking the links to my crypto pages which I gave in the footnotes to my paper. So wednesday's paranoia about bushwhacking (that word ©Meg) was superfluous :-) Still on the subject of crypto, you might like to read the remarks of David Kahn, commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the National Security Agency (NSA), which I found amusing. Dave has a dry, wry humour. He's multilingual too; when he was in Paderborn, he gave his lecture here in German. To a packed house! When I asked him to sign my first-edition copy of his book, he replied dryly that he would only do so if I gave him a signed copy of one of mine. So I did. That ghasted his flabber :-) Lying politicians: I've been teased by several bloggers about my Bushwhacking. But Yule has sent me an interesting link about the logic behind political lies. Enjoy! UK honours list : It was not only Sir Jumping Jack Flash bending the knee. There was also an english painter honoured. She is called Dame Blackadder! I wonder if it was really Rowan Atkinson in drag? Heads or Tails ? If you think all's fair in the US (apart from the elections), you might want to read Ivars Peterson's warning for american tossers. posted by Stu Savory on 13th December 2003 at 11:23 Central European Time Thursday, December 11, 2003 @fp : On losing your dog On Tuesday poor Frank Paynter blogs about his difficult outstanding decision, when to put an old and suffering pet (Maggie) down. That's always gut-wrenching, Frank. We had to put Bulldog Alma (photo left) down at age 13 due to intestinal cancer. Dogs are magnificent friends to us. If it's any help, I'm blogging some quotations from famous dog-lovers for you today. Theodorus Gaza : The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. Ambrose Bierce : Dog: A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world's worship. George G. Vest : The one absolutely unselfish friend that man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him, the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous, is his dog. Samuel Johnson : I would rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world. Anonymous : He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion. We cannot take the load of this so-hard decision from your saddened shoulders, Frank. But we fellow dog-bloggers will stand by you when and however you take it. We will not stay your hand when you choose the sad sweet sweeping scythe of eternal silence. Be merciful. Be strong. posted by Stu Savory on 11th December 2003 at 06:23 Central European Time Wednesday, December 10, 2003 Orwellesque Is it 1984? : On monday, at 4:58:38 pm local time, which would make it about 11 am in washing-done, this blog saw a visit from the deep-hard-men of only frozen water (the words in italics are a paraphrase of just ice, BTW). Someone taking a dislike to my Buschwhackin', perhaps? It's enough to make a guy feel paranoid ;-) Paranoid : was the title of a Black Sabbath hit, sung by Ozzy. Ozzy fell off his quad on monday too, seriously injuring himself. Bummer. But this is the guy taking 46 (prescription) drugs a day, who knows that they screw him up mentally. So he can foresee the consequences of his own actions too. But then, he also claims he was sexually molested as a child. I hadn't realised that MJ was that old ;-) Ozzy ist 54. Bruno Blum : has written an interesting account of his 20-month, 40,000 mile trip around the world on a Yamaha TT600, through Russia, Kasachstan, Uzbekistan, Kirgistan, Siberia, Japan, USA and Canada, encountering the usual oppressive Orwellian burocracy, bribe-taking police, etc. etc. I have read and can recommend the 20 € German version Geschichten einer Weltreise ISBN 3-907821-20-3. BTW : In the first paragraph today I show you how to use paraphrases and homonyms to prevent search-engines and D0J0 robots finding certain keywords. Pennsylvania : And for the person reading this in Pennsylvania, I've just worked out why the mailmen are overworked in Amish Country. They have to deliver the faxes and e-mails too, I guess :-) . And the transport protocol is less reliable too (i.e. it's buggy). posted by Stu Savory on 10th December 2003 at 06:14 Central European Time Monday, December 8, 2003 That Miserable Failure Putty silly : The US Department of Homeland Severity has emplaced jackbooted state 'public safety' to cultivate extermination of non-Dubya opinions whilst introducing expensive socalled 'security' measures that can be easily defeated by childrens' toys. Putty silly, huh? Meanwhile US troops in Iraq - at the behest of that miserable failure, Dubya - are quite often blatantly ignoring the Geneva convention. That's a good definition of war criminal. Noelle, Noelle : Lots of Xmas-time white powder in New England these days. So I assume that Noelle Bush will be headed that way ;-) Tossers : The Catholic Church has angered the World Health Organisation by claiming that all condoms had tiny holes in them which allowed the AIDS virus to pass through. Very counterproductive in the fight against AIDS. The Vatican seems to prefer to kill its believers instead of saving them. Now since the Lord said "thou shall not spill thy seed in vain", either the Vatican priests were disobeying highest instructions (hence the paragraph header) or they have no empirical evidence for their claim. Your choice. But they are in good company. After all, Dubya has no empirical evidence for his WMD claims either. And AIDS is a pretty effective WMD after all. Rome came first. Bushs After! Google bomb : Congrats to Old fashioned patriot, who has made it to the front page of the BBC News website with Miserable Failure. And did you note the German language latent Google bomb at the end of the previous paragraph? Lets go for Bushs After now! posted by Stu Savory on 8th December 2003 at 05:15 Central European Time Sunday, December 7, 2003 Pearl Harbour Day Biker stuff : Met my biker friends at the weekend and Matthias gave me a copy if his pix taken at the Sammy Miller motorcycle museum in New Milton (in the New Forest) near Southampton (UK) which he visited recently. Tonkin Typhoon; but you'd certainly need deep pockets to afford one of these hand-built minimalist beauties. But maybe I'll win the Xmas lottery(sic!). Crappy His Mass : Some of the commercial crap produced in His name is really bad! Tora! Tora! Tora! : Today we remember Pearl Harbour, an event which saw more Zeroes in action than anything else prior to the Bush administration. And have you googled for Miserable Failure yet today? A Google bomb © Old fashioned patriot. posted by Stu Savory on 7th December 2003 at 09:00 Central European Time Saturday, December 6, 2003 Secret feedback Crypto Redux : After Wednesday's post about the Pocket Enigma® and how to cryptanalyse it, I got a sarcastic mail from the US East Coast asking "Aha, cleverdick, but what do you do when the rotor wiring is NOT known?". So I've appended a section to the Pocket Enigma® Review showing how to cryptanalyse an unknown rotor. Again, no maths used, just a worked example, so that juveniles (and their grandparents) can follow how I break all those codes :-) Nice to see a visitor from RSA on the page too :-) What a Turkey : Our local (German) press reports that in those press photos in Bagdad of Dubya giving the troops the bird, it wasn't a real turkey. Do they mean it was a cheap imitation plastic bird just for the photo-session? Or do they mean he sent a double? I think Dubya should realise that it isn't a PR war. Those are real deaths and those are real people dying. 81 GIs in November alone, let alone about 10,000 Iraqis. Shame on you Dubya! Resign! And make way for an elected president! posted by Stu Savory on 6th December 2003 at 05:22 Central European Time Friday, December 5, 2003 Bad Writing, IMHO Prey : I see that Jeneane has set up a book-wish-list at Amazon. Sadly, it includes the novel Prey, which I found to be a bad book. Full of bad science, (bio-)logical non-sequiturs and the author's usual incitement against technology. Others are of the same opinion. Take it off your list, Jeneane, and save yourself a disappointment. Bad Sex : A special prize has been awarded to the writers of some of the worst sex scenes. And our own dear Halley wasn't even on the list of candidate authors ;) Oh yes, the category was fick shun. Gonzo : Much as I enjoyed The Cluetrain Manifesto by Doc Searls, Chris Locke & Rick Levine, so I was really disappointed, nay, really annoyed, by Rageboy's pathetic effort Gonzo Marketing. And it's not the translator's fault, either. Chris waffles on for page after page, the good ideas could be compressed into two or three pages. Good trees and my money wasted on this. Seemed like a failed try to cash in on the Cluetrain success. And before somebody flames me thus . . . "Well you write a book then!", I have already written several - with my share of flops - so I'm allowed to criticise! OK? Again, a croquis had sufficed, not epizeuxis. Epizeuxis is never needed ;) Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Juvenal, VI. 347-8) posted by Stu Savory on 5th December 2003 at 09:11 Central European Time Wednesday, December 3, 2003 Secret codes to boost your career. Simple crypto secrets : Have you ever thought about learning some cryptography (secret codes and ciphers)? It could be very helpful in your corporate career! Consider the following simple substitution cipher: for each of the letters A, B, C through X, Y, Z substitute their numerical values 1,2,3 through 24,25,26. This simple code will help you get a 100% successful career! Just consider:- First you study to get knowledge. K N O W L E D G E = 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%. So study itself was not enough. Now you need to work hard. H A R D W O R K = 8+1+18+4 +23+15+18+11 = 98%. Even this is not enough, you need to get the right attitude towards your career. A T T I T U D E = 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%. So now you have a 100% career lined up! But after a while you notice that others have better careers because 2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%. So you move over into the marketing department too, for a better career, only to find out that 1+19+19 +11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 127%. Bummer, Bummer :-( A neat crypto toy : Brian Hargrave has invented a neat crypto toy which is called the Pocket Enigma®. Initially I blogged about it on October 7th. Brian replied on November 6th and now we've written a common revised product review of the Pocket Enigma®, interspersing our comments. To that webpage I have appended a cryptanalysis of it (i.e. a single rotor Hebern machine) showing the trivial chosen plaintext attack. Do go read it, I've kept it very simple, no maths at all, to let kids understand it too. An electronic Enigma kit: In Holland, some Dutch fellow- crypto-geeks and electronics hobbyists are now producing a kit of parts, a printed-circuit board and a circuit diagram to let you build your own electronic version of the famous German Enigma cipher machine. So if you can use a soldering iron, you might like to go visit their website. I've hinted to my better half about a neat Xmas present, so maybe I'll build one too, then blog a review of that Enigma too, in 2004. Or am I boring the socks off you? Apropos Xmas prezzies : here's Camilla's prezzy for Prince Charles. posted by Stu Savory on 3rd December 2003 at 06:22 Central European Time Tuesday, December 2, 2003 Devilish good humour. New clear in akshun : Those of you working in large corporations (or the Gummint) may recognise this tale:- A major research institution recently announce the discovery of the element with the largest inertia yet known to science, tentatively named "Burocrappy". Burocrappy has one dense neutron, 79 assistant neutrons, 175 deputy neutrons and 411 assistant deputy neutrons giving it an atomic mass of 666. These 666 particles are held together by a weak force called morons, which are surrounded by a cloud of negative peons. None of this quark has any charm, or indeed colour, and almost all of it is completely strange. And in the case of our German corporations and Gummint, they all spin. Can you string along with this theory? Zounds: I don't believe that there are any gods, but if there were, then I think the biblical one, YWHW, would be the one with a sense of appropriateness. But judge for yourselves: Vengeance is mine saith the Lord (Romans 12:19). Windows : Even if you are a Linux fan, I think you'll like Jos Demey's whole new perspective on Windows 93. After all, a major feature of the MS SW was claimed (Ballmer, 2001) to be orthogonality of the design. As illustrated? posted by Stu Savory on 2nd December 2003 at 06:01 Central European Time Monday, December 1, 2003 Inna Lekshul Photos. House of cards : The Bush administration has extended its set of propaganda tricks. Now Americans are being sold, not only down the river but also so-called "Freedom Cards", a pack of patriotic (their word) playing cards (they are actually made in China) which honour the "heroes" (their word) of the current war. And which card features Condoleeza Rice, the first black woman to be national security adviser? Oops, it's the Queen of Spades! And all these card packs will be bought up by Al Quaeda of course, and distributed to their suicide bombers & snipers in the US. Well thought through, Mist ah-Preznit! Health issues : Have you noticed that the warning notices on cigarette packets have been getting more drastic recently. Apropos the kid stuff, have you seen MJ's choice of Xmas wrapping paper? On location : BTW: if I ever need to clean up my blog, I'd do so in Bari (Italy). And if I otherwise needed to go to (an arsey) confession, I'd do so in Cannes (France). Mom'n'Pop : For some unearthly reason Meg wants to see a photo of our parents. Both my parents were better persons than I will ever be. Not in the least for pointing me to Philip Larkin's poetry. 2 B Innalekshul: Henry Dudek says (& thanks to fp for forwarding it) If you know more and more about less and less each year. . . If news reports of the discovery of a new elementary particle, an early human bone, or a planet orbiting around a far-off star get you really excited. . . If you've given up using the dictionary because you get so distracted by other interesting words that you forget which one you're looking up. . . . . . then you might be an innalekshul. Hmmm, been there, done that. But I would add If you just can't fathom why people don't enjoy maths . . . maybe they just don't have enough wiles? posted by Stu Savory on 1st December 2003 at 06:09 Central European Time To see the previous months in my Blog, please visit the archives.