My year's best garden photos 2008

S everal of you responded to my blogreader survey by asking for less text and more visuals, e.g. photos.

So I've decided to wrap up this year's blog by showing you some seasonal garden photos. Understand that they are not up to the high standards of perfection that you would expect from good photobloggers like JR at Noded or Peter Harris (Sarchi), but I like them for their themes. Anyway, I they're the best I can do with a tiny pocket camera and without having to learn all the tricks of Photoshop. Take it or leave it ;-)

Here's wishing you all a happy, healthy and wealthy New Year. See you in 2009 !

Copyright ^© : Stu Savory on December 31, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Wait a second!

Concieved on Rosh Hashanah, I was born (a little early) on 17 Sivan 5704. Not being Jews, my family however used the Christian calender. Muslims would have used a different date altogether, they are still in the 15th century nowadays (1429 AH), I believe ;-) My point being that different calenders all have different and arbitrary starting points, depending on the particular mythology their users believe in.

Arbitrary? Not according to an Irish archbishop called James Ussher who most famously published a chronology that purported to time and date creation to the night preceding 23 October 4004 BC, according to the proleptic Julian calendar. See his "Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti" (1650 AD) ;-)

But it is not only calenders that are defined arbitrarily, even our times are! Not many people know that. The Egyptians subdivided daytime and nighttime into twelve hours each , thus their hours even varied seasonally. Around 1580 AD Taqi al-Din at the Istanbul observatory attempted to build the first observational clock displaying seconds. In 1670 AD William Clement added a 'seconds' pendulum to the original pendulum clock of Christian Huygens, defining it as 1/60th of a minute (86,400 seconds per 'day'). Not until 1956 was the second redefined in terms of the period of revolution of the Earth around the Sun for a particular epoch, because by then it had become recognized that the Earth's rotation on its own axis was not sufficiently uniform as a standard of time. In 1967, as demands for even more accuracy arose, atomic clocks were used and the second was defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. Phew!

However, using this definition, the rotation of Earth slows down continually, though at a slightly variable rate. And so arose the need to introduce leap seconds (like leap years, but much shorter ;-). A leap second is a one-second adjustment that keeps atomic broadcast standards for time of day close to mean solar time. When a leap second is added at 23:59:60 UTC, it delays the start of the following UTC day (which begins at 00:00:00 UTC) by one second, effectively slowing the UTC clock.

There will be such a leap second added tomorrow at midnight. If you are one of those (UK) people who count down into the new year, the countdown this year end goes

PS : Any programmers reading this may want to confirm that their input validation routines for timestamps do indeed accept a 60 in the seconds field, in a tabulated date-dependant manner.

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

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Winter Sun, breaking...

. . . in the crystal atop the Solstice Tree and turning the grey carpet into a rainbow :-)

This is for my photographer friends, and dedicated to Sir Isaac Newton of course :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 29, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Dust and Snow --> Snowflakes

Snowflakes / Snow crystals form when tiny supercooled cloud droplets (approx 10µm in diameter) freeze. Above -35°C an aerosol particle or dust must be present in (or in contact with) the droplet to act as a nucleus. The flakes can then grow to be uniquely[sic!] beautiful, fractally so.

Upon registering these three words 'dust', 'snow', and 'fractal', my mind went off at a mathematical associative tangent (as it is often wont to do ;-) Let me tell you the mathematical background to these thoughts:-

Draw a straight line with a pencil, say 27 cms long. Erase the centre third. After this one erasure you now have 2 shorter lines each 9 cms long to the left and right. Again, erase the centre third of these remaining lines. After these second erasures you now have 4 shorter lines each 3 cms long. Indeed, after N erasure steps, you have 2^N line segments of total length (2/3)^N , OK? Continue indefinitely (N going to infinity) and you have an infinite number of line segments of total length zero! This set of points goes by the name of Cantor Dust, after the man who first came up with the idea.

Done in two dimensions, we would get the Sierpinski carpet, a fractal figure too.

Done in three dimensions, we would get the Menger Sponge, a fractal figure three ;-)

So much for Dust, let us now turn to Snow(flakes).

Draw an equilateral triangle of side length 1. On the centre third of each side, draw an equilateral triangle, erasing the original baseline. After this first step the length of the perimeter is 4/3. After N steps the length of the perimeter is (4/3)^N. As N goes to infinity, the length of the perimeter becomes infinite despite the snowflake still having a finite area, as you can see from the first four iterations shown below.

This curve is called the Koch snowflake, after the man who first came up with the idea. It too is a fractal. And that, folks, is why Dust and Snow share the same associations in my mind :-) But it is not the only the only reason, as any codebreakers reading this will know ;-) DUST is the acronym for Demonstrator Using Substitution and Transposition, a tool for teaching beginners' cryptography. And SNOW is the acronym for a pair of word-based synchronous stream ciphers developed by Thomas Johansson and Patrik Ekdahl at Lund University. Incidentally, SNOW was also the codename of the WW2 MI5 double agent Arthur Owens. Yes, associative memory is a wonderful thing :-)

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

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Feurio :-(

We had a fire!

Luckily minor, minimal damage, but our unpreparedness came as a shock.

What happened? About 3 weeks ago, the wife had lit one advent candle for dinner. After dinner, she had gone to the study to check for Emails. I was still at the table, enjoying the rest of the wine. Candle running low. The landline phone rang, I went into the hall and answered it, chatting awhile. Then I wandered into the sitting-room and sat down with an absorbing book, having forgot the candle (age, that's my excuse).

The candle gutted.

The hot burning wax set fire to the decorative fir branch it was standing on. That set fire to the tablecloth. At this the dogs must have smelled the fire because they jumped off the couch and ran through the hall into the dining room, saw the fire, and came dashing back barking excitedly. So, reluctantly, I put down my book and sauntered over to see what they were worried about.

Wow! About 3 inches of flame in the middle of the tablecloth! As I saw this, the flames reached the salt and pepper shakers. These were 1970s style clear acryl-plastic cylinders. They caught fire immediately as they melted, peppercorns going off like a machine gun. Melted acryl is highly infammable :-( The flames went from 3 inches to 3 feet before my very eyes, within seconds. Another 10? Likely uncontrollable!

Our fire extinguisher lives in the cellar under the stairs. Been there for 20 years, untouched. I realised I wouldn't have time to fetch it. Instead I grabbed the tablecloth by the corners, folding it in on itself to smother the flames. Which worked, I'm happy to say :-) OK, I got minor burns to hands and arms from the melted acryl, but the fire was out! I dashed outside with the tablecloth and dumped it in the wet snow there. Then I calmed the very excited dogs, giving them a big thankyou-very-much treat :-)

We had been unprepared. The shock sat deep.

So the very next day I went out and bought new fire extinguishers so that we have one on each floor, decreasing the time to grab one. The kitchen got a class F extinguisher, suitable for cooking-fat fires. Upstairs and the cellar got ABC-class ones also suitable for electrical fires. I also bought a fire-blanket for the kitchen, and arranged for a refill of the old extinguisher (which apparently should have been inspected every 3 years). Overkill? Maybe. Rather that than lose the house though!

Lessons learned? Never leave a candle unattended (Duh! But we get more forgetful with age). Only mount candles on surfaces which do not burn. Get one extinguisher per floor and at least one fire alarm per floor (but ours didn't have time to go off!). Get a fire blanket too (much less messy than e.g. a powder extinguisher). Oh, and for what it's worth, the new salt-and-peppers shakers are fireproof, made of ceramic :-)

I'm telling you this so that you can rethink your own fire situation! Do so!! Now!!!

Comments :
Doug Alder gives a tip : Glad your dogs warned you. Only mount candles on surfaces which do not burn. FYI - a really good solution for candles is a bowl of some sort filled with several inches of fine sand. The sand can be used to hold the candle in place, if using tapers, or as a fireproof base for votive style candles. Also good for holding incense sticks etc if so inclined.
Peter Harris wrote : ... home is the most dangerous place on earth :)
Jane asks : Do you have fire alarms in Germany? Ours (Ibiza) are smoke detectors. Checked that for you, Jane; the label says "Ionisation Detector". FWIW, I have a carbon monoxide detector for the oil-fired central heating too.
Decrepit Old Fool wrote : Wow! Glad you're OK. Quick thinking, that was. Another good fire extinguisher is grab a towel, soak and throw. Did that once. Worked like a charm.

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

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Finding family :-)

Last month I got to play Sherlock Holmes a little and thus help a family find one another again. Gives me a warm glow :-)

Butch Rohren (61) of Lincoln, Nebraska is an American of German ancestry. Recently, he has been trying to reconstruct his family tree, and had got all the way back to 1831 to his great grandfather Henry (Heinrich) Rohren. That Henry (Heinrich) Rohren, he found out, was born in Henglarn (where I now live) on August 30, 1831 and immigrated to the USA when he was 19 or 20 years of age. So, presumably, Butch googled for English language pages containing the words "Henglarn, Germany". And good old Google found a cryptology paper by me which bears a current email address of mine. And thus did I get an Email out of the blue from Butch; 'out of the blue' being appropriate because Butch too is a pilot (a corporate pilot flying a Cessna 441).

And so I set about doing a little detective work. The telephone book showed there were no 'Rohrer's alive in our village, nor in any of the surrounding fifteen. So the next day I took a walk through the graveyard. Farmer Franz Rohrer had died childless within the last few years (another dead end, to coin a phrase). So I went to visit an older lady (Ria) in our neighbourhood who I know knows almost everyone in the village, having lived here all her married life. She could tell me that Franz had two surviving sisters, one in Bielefeld (a city about 50 miles north) and one who lives just a couple of hundred yards from me. I had only known her by her married name, Anna Duechting, but her maiden name was Roehrer, Ria told me. So I was able to call Anna and get her permission to give her Email and telephone number to Butch. Success! Now they are in direct contact with one another. I've been happy to contribute in my own little way to helping get this long-separated transatlantic extended family together !

All due to Google's search engine and my writing stuff on the web. Thanks, Google!

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

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SF : Fireworks on the Fourth of July

NB : All the facts in this story are correct, you can look them up if you don't believe me :-)

Many people don't know why we celebrate the 4th of July with fireworks; Americans have even been brainwashed into thinking they have some patriotic reason, but the tradition goes back nigh on 1000 years. Here's the story :-

The story starts over 171,000 years ago in a star system called athara kawkab, 25 times as massive as the sun. Stars convert hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei in a thermonuclear fusion reaction for billions of years. So too this one. The heat generated pushes back against the pressure of gravity which pulls the star together. Balance.

But the two helium nuclei are smaller than the four hydrogen nuclei, so the star shrank, raising temperature and pressure in the core of the star. Then it ran out of hydrogen. But the temperature and pressure were so high that helium nuclei fused into carbon nuclei. More compression and heating. Then the helium ran out. Carbon nuclei fused into neon nuclei. Temperature and pressure rose again as the star shrank even more. Then the carbon ran out. Neon nuclei fused into oxygen nuclei. The star got bluer and smaller as gravity caused it to contract more. Faster and faster, now oxygen nuclei fused into silicon nuclei. The core temperature now reached one billion degrees. Finally, silicon nuclei fused into iron nuclei, the conversion taking less than a day, it is going so fast. A day later, the iron nuclei need energy to fuse, but none is available! No more pressure to resist the inexorable pull of gravity. Gravity wins. The star collapsed within seconds. The core goes from the size of the Earth to the size of a city. All the outer layer elements unfused so far fall in and bounce back off the core in an explosion scattering into space as the stardust that we too are. Supernova!

A ten second burst of neutrinos escapes , carrying 99% of the energy. One percent of the energy is light, which starts a 170,000 light-year journey to Earth. The light of the dying star is seen in the daytime sky. Arab texts record an athara kawkab (spectacular star). A petroglyph in Navajo canyon, Arizona, depicts the dying star too. And Yang Wei T'e, imperial astronomer to the Sung dynasty, records in his astronomical diary :-
"I observed the phenomenon of a guest star, Its colour is slightly iridescent..."
After conversion to our modern calender, that diary entry is dated 1054 AD, July 4th!

And that's when the tradition of fireworks on the Fourth of July began ;-)

But that was not the only supernova. On the evening of november 11th, 1572 AD one appeared in Cassiopeia and was seen by Tycho Brahe, no less! In 1604 AD there was another one, seen and followed by Kepler and by Galileo. Recently, on February 23rd 1987, the star Sanduleak-69202 went supernova, and this time we were in a position to observe the neutrino burst (but that's another underground story, to be told later).

And there was another supernova, in the winter of 7 BC, whose light was visible even in the daytime sky above Bethlehem. Are the records wrong, or was His timing off ? ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 22, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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X-Plane 9 Flight Simulator ported to iPhone

First off, let me thank Peter Harris for the heads-up on this iPhone app. He also pointed me to the amateur demo video shown below. Peter - a flight-sim fan - wrote :-
"I got this iphone sim at the app store had it about 8 weeks or so and with the latest upgrades is getting pro ratings". So let's follow Peter's tip and take a look at it:-

FWIW, I am a certified flying instructor with commercial-, instrument, and multi-engine ratings. So let me make the following minor remarks. Jason - the gentleman who made this amateur demo video - had little experience of flying the flight simulator on his iPhone when he made this video. This shows up when he has problems 'flying' the simulator whilst Video-blogging what he is doing. Try to ignore this deficit and see the good quality of the simulation that is going on. The scenery display seems very good and even on the weak little iPhone chip, it is running in real time! I particularly like the idea of integrating the iPhone's accelerometer sensors as control inputs :-)

If I already had an iPhone (which I don't) I would buy this app as a realistic toy to while away rail-commuting (which I don't do either) hours etc. Well done, X-Plane :-)

But allow me a remark on priorities as a pilot. They are :-

1. Aviate. Which means first fly the plane stably and within control.
2. Fix any emergencies. Hopefully there aren't any, but practice them anyway :-)
3. Navigate. Get the plane (down) where you want it to go.
4. Communicate. Using the radio and/or teaching the student, comes last.

If flying close to terrain (e.g. in the Alps), you may want to interchange 2 and 3 ;-)

There appeared to be some minor inaccuracies^* in the simulation, but I would need to use it for a couple of hours before doing a serious critique. Perhaps Peter cares to do one? If so, mail your review to be appended here, Peter.

* : I didn't see a flaps-in-transit warning light. Nor a gear-in-transit one. When Jason dropped the flaps without correcting his angle of attack, the 'plane' didn't balloon up. No warning when he dropped those flaps while going too fast. No air-brake control visible. None of the usual myriad of switches visible. Etc . etc.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 21, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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The Dragonfly of Chaos

I was gesticulating wildly on the terrace this summer when this little fella (actually, quite big!) flew into my finger. Dazed him and bent his rear wing a while, but he recovered and buzzed off after about 10 minutes. If you've been having blizzards this month, it may be my fault for temporarily hurting the Butterfly Dragonfly of Chaos back then :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 19, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Heartfelt Awards : runner-up ;-)

Sadly, Time magazine chickened out on producing this cover, chose Obama instead ;-)

Thanks to Jane for the the heads-up on this timely persiflage.
Taken from elsewhere on December 18, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Xmas present tips, but not for the children ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 17, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Xmas prezzy for Dubya-the-loser : shoo out!

Iraqi TV-journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi threw his shoes at Bush-the-lesser on sunday :-) The ultimate insult in Arabia, where you should not even show people the soles of your feet/shoes :-) Man, if I had done that (thrown MY shoes), Dubya would doubtless have thought claimed it was an unprovoked chemical/biological warfare WMD attack^* ;-)

Just hope Muntadar al-Zaidi gets off lightly; his TV station is standing up for him, he'll be the hero of his country :-)

Addendum : The Pentagon, always quick to assign military acronyms, is referring to the incident as Shoe-Hurling Iraqi Terrorism ;-)

* : Hydrogen telluride would be a good rotten comparison ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 16, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Winter Crop :-)

Photoblogging for a while :-

Time for the winter soltice harvest soon. Deeeeeeeeeeeeelicious! :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 15, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Charlotte(2) gets a birthday 'laptop' already

Apology in advance . Not much time to compose textual blog articles at the moment, so I'll just be posting photos for a while. Bear with me, please. Normal service etc...

Charlotte (2) made it perfectly clear she wanted a 'laptop' for her recent birthday :-)

Charlotte is a lovable English Bulldog bitch belonging to our blogreading friends Uschi and Hans-Peter :-)

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

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Shawn's Xmas letter. OOPS!! ;-)

As posted by Olli on the BeetleFun Forum. And here on Dec 12, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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I have Piles^* . . .

. . . of books waiting to be read ! This pile is just the popular-science heap. So dear friends, please don't give me any books for Xmas! There is one exception to this rule : if it is a book you wrote yourself, then yes, I would love to get a signed copy :-)

I also have at least three books waiting to be written; but they are still all jumbled up somewhere between my ears. However , that's another story ;-) So, in view of the short time remaining on this mortal coil, please no computer games for Xmas either, I don't waste my time on them. Come to that, I hardly watch TV either. I'd rather be a creative scatterbrain, still learning, than a passive junk timewaster. How about you?

Christian asked (on 26/11) for more book tips. So, besides the ones shown in the photo above, let me show you what I am currently reading. It was a present from Hans-Peter, a good friend of mine. Thanks, Hans-Peter, a good piece of history!!! The book, first published in 1841 (sic!) may well be the best book ever written about market(ing) psychology. If you only know about the current sub-prime mortgage crisis, read this book! It will tell you about three historical economic bubbles, viz :-

1. John Law's Mississippi Scheme,
2. The South Sea Bubble,
3. and Tulipomania.

You don't need to be a student of economics to understand this book, but it may prevent you getting your sticky little fingers burned! The ISBN is 1-897597-32-0.

^* : No, not that kind of piles ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 11, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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When O'Bama commands or does say ...

..... his countrymen jump to o'bey,

To o'mit any harm,

They o'ppugned the farm,

Beg o'rrah! Now have a nice day!!! ;-)

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

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I Mecca bad pun today! ;-)

Friend Muhammed, who is of the Islam persuasion, is currently attending the Hajj (held in Mecca), which this year runs from the 6th to the 10th of december (in our scheme of dating things), 8th to 12th day of Dhu al-Hijjah (in his). While there, he and all the other men will wear only 2 pieces of plain white cloth. I think they are called Muslins ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 9, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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PISA : What does 'well educated' mean?

The regular PISA report came out over a fortnight ago (yes, I'm a slow reader ;-) PISA is a triennial world-wide test of 15-year-old pupils' scholastic performance with a view to improving educational methods and their outcomes.

PISA measures whether schoolchildren are getting any better at whatever it is that schools teach them (which may not be the same as an education, nor what is needed for successful careers). Differential analysis of the statistics let us make deductions about the efficacy of different school-types, syllabi, etc. and the influence of the social make-up of the school-classes (size, %age of non-native-tongue immigrants, gender, etc). German states can now tweak these factors.

Independant of such individual results, I found two of the public-opinion tables to be interesting. A representative sample of the public was surveyed on these two issues :-

1) "What is important and how do German schools perform on these 11 factors?"
The results are percentages of the replies who thought the subject was important and who thought the schools performed up to expectations on each of the 11 subjects :-

Important	Perf.		Subject			
88		80	Spelling and Grammar		
54		50	Performance Orientation		
60		73	Good Knowledge of Maths		
58		72	Good Knowledge of English	
57		39	Discipline, Self-discipline	
31		21	Sensible use of Multimedia	
32		29	Understanding of Politics	
28		26	Understanding of Economics	
22		36	Good Knowledge of German Literature
11		23	Musical abilities			
 4		15	Ancient Languages (e.g Latin or Greek)	

2) "How would you describe someone you see as being well educated?"
The results are percentages of the replies who thought the attribute applied :-

Has broad knowledge		87
Expresses himself well		66
Has good manners		58
Reads a lot			56
Fluent in foreign tongue(s)	46
Good knowledge of History	38
Interested in Politics		35
Understands the Economy	well	26
Understands Computers well	21
Interested in the Environment	20
Interested in Philosophy	18
Interest in Technology/Science	11
Interested in Art, Painting	10
Understands Music well		 7

I find it disturbing that "A good grasp of Mathematics" does not crop up in this list :-( Nor does "Can quote poetry" :-( On the other (more secular) hand, I find it good that "Ability to quote large pieces of religious tracts verbatim" does not either.

US readers may care to tick off table-two attributes for Obama versus Palin or Bush ;-)

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

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Copyright ^© : Stu Savory on December 7, 2008 permalink Comments Email
Now click here ^^^^^^^^

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Atheism : a Primer for Xmas? ;-)

Xmas is coming and the geese are getting ..... Atheism ;-)

Now is the time of year when religious visitors who (with the exception of the catholics) have forgotten about arse'oles our souls for the rest of the year, start turning up on the doorstep and begging for money. So I usually ask them if their god(s) is/are omnipotent, and if so, why he can't make his own money? Always seems short of it, he does, so even atheist me is made in his image in that regard ;-)

They come along in pairs (why?), some Baptists, some Morons Mormons, some Jehovah's Witnesses, all clutching their little leatherbound masochism manual book in their hot, sweaty, little hands; this because they need to read to you out of it, their god having forgotten to provide them with adequate memories to quote it ad lib.

Not so yours truly, who has read three versions (King James, Gideon, and the catholic version in German). So, depending on the turn their conversation takes I can ask them about a variety of things in their belief scheme, getting them to read out chapter and verse if they don't know it off by heart (and they usually don't). Stuff like this :-

• Thou shalt not kill ? In their book, satan kills ~10 people , but god kills millions!
  So who is more evil?
• Women should keep their mouths shut! 1 Corinthians 14:34-35
• What to do when your neighbours' religion is wrong ? See 1 Kings 18:40
• god approves of chemical and biological warfare! See Exodus 9:6-11
• When marital fertility fails, use a slave girl! See Genesis 30:1-22
• Kill the bastards! See III Samuel 12: 13-19
• Pimp your wife! See Genesis 12: 10-20
• Kill Gays! Leviticus 20:13, (also Leviticus 18:22-24, & Romans 1:26-27).
• god's threat is "Your money or your life" (Exodus 30:11-15),
  which is where the door-to-door Xmas beggers came in ;-)

Fun aside, they also want you to read their book; I offer to do so, provided they read the one I'll lend them for a week (it's a much shorter 149 page book). And I tell them I'll be quizzing them on it after the week, to make sure they do read it ;-)

Like I said, Xmas is coming, so consider this book for your friends in good faith ;-)

PS: Papacy fans will note that the aforementioned book is authored by one John Paul. Coincidence?

PPS :

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 5, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Out of print

The textbooks I wrote in the eighties went into three editions but have now been out of print for well over a decade. First hand copies go - inexplicably - for exorbitant prices (not my fault!). Now my early 90s motorcycling novel Howl of the Mountain King has just gone out of print. A biker enthusiast from the UK has just ordered what turns out to be the very last copy on sale. Thank you, Albert, I hope you enjoy reading it :-)

Of course, this should motivate me to sit down and write yet another book. There are three still squashed in here somewhere between my ears, I allege ; they just need to be sorted out and put on paper ;-) But that implies spending less time blogging, I only have a finite amount of creativity. Let's see if I can make the effort this coming year...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 4, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Talkin' 'bout Teutolab

Regular readers of this blog will know that I deplore the current state (sic!) of Maths education in our schools. Thus, when I read in the paper there would an exhibition/lectures on educational toys at the HNF last sunday, I felt obliged to pop in. A good decision, because I got the chance to talk to Professor Beyn (University of Bielefeld, Maths faculty) about their Teutolab program for 10-13 year olds in local area schools.

The Teutolab idea is to awake/raise children's interest im maths by letting them play games, avoiding dry formulae and proofs. They provide a half day of edutainment on their uni site a whole school-class at a time. The classes are rotated ¼ of the pupils at a time through 4 'stations' in parallel, where they do the following "work" :-

• By angling two mirrors, build multi-image kalaidoscope images and discover the relationship between intra-mirror angle and the number of images. Geometry.
• Given a 3D figure made of coloured blocks, draw a frontal 2D and a top-down 2D view thereof. Then, harder, given another pair of top-down and frontal 2D views, arrange the toy blocks in 3D to correspond to the 2D views. Spatial relations.
• Coding with a numbered cipher disc. Leads them to learn modulo arithmetic.
• Generating bell-curves by dropping marbles into a Galton board. Probability.
• Learn how to generate an ellipse by knowing that the sum of the distances (of a point on the ellipse) from the two foci is a constant. Geometry, Algebra.
• Build the five platonic solids. Prof. Beyn also shows them an inductive proof of Euler's polyeder formula by adding pieces to a tetraeder. Geometry, Algebra.

An interesting approach taken by Beyn et al. By playing explorative games instead of learning dry formulae by rote, much of any latent 'fear of Maths' is taken away :-) :-)

I had just two minor quibbles on sunday : 1) In our discussion, it was not made clear to me WHY THESE particular exercises had been chosen (I showed him a couple of other possibilites), and 2) there was no quality control feedback loop (to verify whether the kids' subsequent maths scores had improved) as required by e.g. ISO 9000ff.
Nor does their website (see link above) go into either of these aspects. Pity, that :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 3, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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Pareidolia psychosis again :-(

The term pareidolia describes a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing iconic religious images, or faces in clouds, the man in the moon, and hearing (satanic?) hidden messages on records played in reverse. The word comes from the Greek para- ("beside", "with" or "alongside") meaning, in this context, something faulty or wrong (as in paraphasia, disordered speech)-and eidolon-"image" (the diminutive of eidos-"image", "form", "shape"). Pareidolia is a type of Apophenia, which is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data. In statistics, apophenia would be classed as a Type I error (false positive, false alarm, caused by an excess in sensitivity). Apophenia is often used as an explanation of some paranormal and religious claims, and can also be used to explain the tendency of humans to believe pseudoscience. Apophenia may be linked to psychosis. [Emphases here are mine].

Detlef Albrecht(50), who hails from the nearby town of Menden, has found a Catholic prayer book (rather worn, dating from 1870) which - he claims - bears an image of Christ on the cover, remiscent of the Shroud of Turin. He is putting the prayer book up for auction on Ebay on friday. I suggest a starting price of 30 pieces of silver ;-)

In all fairness, Prof. Althaus, a theologian appointed by the local archbishop's investigation commitee, says there is no evidence of a supernatural origin, attributing the structure on the cover to "wear and tear and some scratching". A voice of reason crying out in the wilderness? Didn't He say "make no image of me" or summat similar?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on December 2, 2008 permalink Comments Email

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As I get older, my memory deteriorates. Although I think that I owned a NorVin back in the 1960s, the memories are very fragmented, as suggested by the collage above. It may just be mis-remembered, seeing as I can't find a photo, but there is my poem which was in the 59 club magazine in 1965, of which I still have a copy. Getting old :-(

Back in the 60's the best-handling motorcycle frame was Norton's featherbed frame. Many people transplanted the more reliable and slightly more powerful T120R Triumph motor into the Featherbed frame, to get the very desirable Cafe´ Racer, the Triton. But some - very few - went the whole hog and shoe-horned in a Vincent motor. This was a long stroke, flywheeled, V-twin with 998 cc instead of the Norton's 650 cc. So more torque and more power; the NorVin, the ideal Cafe´ Racer. Phil Vincent's engine was well ahead of its time; in fact a Vincent based bike won the AMHRA Daytona 200 in 2008 !

So why am I telling you all this?

Because my memory was jogged by an Email and a couple of phone calls out of the blue from Terence Kirk, who - it turns out - lives barely 60 miles from here near the river Weser. And Terence owns a magnificently shiny 1200cc NorVin. Just seeing the photos took me back those 40+ years :-) Terence C. Kirk (Called Haggis at School) born & bred around the Swindon (Wilts) area, member of the 59 club since 1960 (rode a "tea" Triumph T100a at that time ... which he still has :-) was in the British Army in Hameln, came over 23 July 1962, got out 1969 & stayed here ever since.

Terence rode his NorVin in the 1999 HRD Vincent International Rally, a Classic Race over the Isle of Man TT Mountain course, coming 6th out of 225 starters.

So, when the weather improves again, I shall be giving Terence a shout, and will pop over to re-acquaint myself with The NorVin of hallowed (but piecemeal) memory :-)

Comment : Yvonne tells me that Blueberries 'reverse memory loss'.

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

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