My favourite mugshots :-)

As regular readers will know, I'm both a fan of English Bulldogs (see photo of our bitch Frieda over on the right sidebar) and an avid motorcyclist (on a FJR1300 now).

So, fellow bloggers, how about showing us YOUR favourite mugshots?

BTW, this is a shot of my least favourite mug ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 28th January 2007 at 06:28 CET permalink Email

'Tis Burns Nicht the morn, ye ken :-)

As the haunds o the knock birl roond tae the 25t Januar an the celebrations o Robert Burns, ye can aw dae waur nor hae a keek at the Burns section o the SLC's wabsite. There ye can find oot aboot the Bard hissel, Burns sangs, Burns an the Scottish pairlament, Burns Supper poems an Burns Clubs.

Mind an keep yer lugs peened back for ony speaker giein the Immortal Memory an tryin tae tell ye that Rabbie's faither wis cried William Burnes (but pronouncin it as Burness insteid o Burns). William juist yaised an aulder spellin nor Rabbie did but shuirly naebody shuid be surprised that they baith shared the same surname "Burns" nae maitter hou it got spelt. It maks a body wunner if aw the fowk cried Barnes haes a similar problem the day.

Ach Bob, we dinna hae a supper at oor hoos the morn, nae Scots fowk blethrin :-(
But the ither year, Burns nicht : me a ree ray in ma waddinbraws. Twa faikin fums (agnats) shue laik scowpers. I lerb twa jutes, muckle manky jutes, an gledge a redhieded peronall. Ah skleush ower tae her, fer tae splunt thae loorach. Wi thae fower bask jutes, ah thrammle like a kenspeckle kensy, an partle tae rush instead o ma whaisk frae sculduddery ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24th January 2007 at 06:24 CET permalink Email

Become a research astronomer this Friday !

This is a wake-up call for those of you on a path from Delaware to northernmost California. During the early morning of Friday, January 26th you should be looking at the star called 32 Lyncis. Get a star map now (e.g. from the links listed below) and familiarise yourselves with where to look for 32 Lyncis (it's a 6.3 magnitude star and quite easy to see with binoculars, let alone a telescope). That star will wink out for up to 14 seconds then because of it being occulted by the asteroid 372 Palma. This will be the best single asteroid occultation since 23 years in the whole of the USA.

Record the duration of the occultation with 2 stopwatches and send this information together with the position from which you made the observation to the websites listed below. Even the fact that NO occultation was seen from your position is useful data. If a large number of people report these data, software can massage the numbers and can let us deduce the size and the shape of asteroid 372 Palma. Whereupon YOU can have the quiet satisfaction of knowing that you have contributed to cutting-edge (sic!) astronomical research. Sadly, WE can't see it from Europe :-(

Best timing methods are described by the International Occultation Timing Association.

Sky charts and path maps are to be found on Steve Preston's site.

During January there will be dedicated reports on David Dunham's 372 occultation page.

Please help if you can. And here's to clear skies for y'all : Twinkle, twinkle, little star...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 22nd January 2007 at 06:22 CET permalink Email

Blowin' in the Wind : Stormy Thursday

The insurance just wants photos and a bill. So we're cocking a snoot at the gale :-)

As the Great Bard wrote :-

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 20th January 2007 at 06:21 CET permalink Email

Pre-flighting with the BFI

I've always been a stickler for safety, so when I noticed club pilots skimping on their pre-flight checks just because it was raining, I decided it was time to give the whole flying club a wake-up prod. So I announced that on the following weekly club-night there was going to be a pre-flight-check quiz, all to attend ;-) Groans ensued.

S traight up, chaps, what is the most important part of a pre-flight check?" I asked innocently.

"Using the (whole) checklist" came the dutiful chorus.

"Rubbish, the most important part is using your eyes!" I then remonstrated to their surprise. "The purpose of the pre-flight check is to ensure that you can make the whole flight in safety, the checklist is merely a (minimal) memory-jogger to make sure you check for the most frequent problems. But aviation is unforgiving, even making a small mistake can kill you. So tonight you are going to do a pre-flight check looking for small things which may will not be on the checklist" I admonished them. Groans, based on my BFI reputation, ensued again ;-)

Over in the hanger I had prepared my own plane with a number of defects (20) which the club-pilots had to find within 5 minutes. We were pretending that the plane was standing on the threshold of runway 24 ready for a VFR (visual flight rules) night flight to Stuttgart. In reality the plane was standing cold in the hanger and the participants were told they were not allowed to turn the main switch on. They were to do an outside check and a cockpit check. Someone objected that you cannot do a pre-flight check in only 5 minutes. How very true! Why then had he been skimping his in two minutes just because it was raining? I asked sweetly ;-)

We kicked off at 19:00, after 5 minutes the first team of two pilots came back looking glazed. At 5 minute intervals teams came back and handed in their results sheet. Suffice it to say, no-one found ALL 20 problems within their 5 minutes (it had taken me 15 minutes to insert the problems). Some only got 6/20. This is how they did :-

1. The locking pin was still in the control column! Happily, every team found this problem. Taking off with the locking pin in the control column would have caused a crash on take-off. The locking pin is there to stop the wind blowing rudder and ailerons around when the plane is parked outdoors.
2. The dipstick was loose. During pre-flight you check the oil level and then screw the dipstick back into its guide tube. If loose, you could lose the engine oil out of the guide tube, resulting in engine failure and thus an emergency landing somewhere out in the country (at night!). However, 82% found this problem.
3. The cap of the brake fluid reservoir was missing. Imagine arriving on a short runway and being unable to brake because all your brake fluid has bled off! 82% found this one.
4. The left fuel cap was at 90° off the locked position. And so it could have vibrated off, leaving a large filler hole through which all the fuel on that side could have been sucked out by the airflow, giving a very asymmetric control load, let alone reduced range. So again, an emergency landing at night over unknown terrain when the fuel ran out? Only 73% found it.
5. The fire valve was OFF! So shortly after takeoff the engine would have run out of fuel. That valve is only there to be turned off if you have a fire on board, otherwise it should be ON at all times. 73%.
6. The radar transponder had been left ON and the code was set to 7700C (indicating a MayDay situation). If anyone had turned on the main switch that would have at least cost a large fine for unneccessarily alerting the SAR (search and rescue services). 55% found it. It should have been set to 1200C (=VFR).
7. The microphone plug was in the earphone socket. So you wouldn't have been able to talk to anyone on the radio. 36%.
8. The right magneto earthing-wire was not grounded. So no redundant ignition :-(
9. The plane's flight manual was not on board. This book contains the emergency procedure checklists, amongst other stuff like load-and-balance charts. So if you had had any of the other 19 problems, you wouldn't have had the emergency checklists telling you what to do! Only 18% noticed that.
10. The clock was set wrongly. So your ETA (Expected Time of Arrival) reports would have confused the radar controllers. 18%.
11. The hard metal tie-down hooks and the sharp-edged oil-cooler cover plate were stacked loose on the hat-rack (which is clearly labelled 'soft wear only'). In turbulence these could have been thrown around the cabin causing perhaps injury to passengers and crew. 18%.
12. Cable to the EGT (Exhaust Gas Temperature gauge) was disconnected. So you can't lean the engine properly at altitude, resulting in an inefficient and excessive fuel burn, with all the consequences which that has. 12%.
13. The approach plates for your alternate destination were not on board. If Stuttgart closed due to bad weather, where would you have gone? 10%.
14. The middle map was missing. Flying from Paderborn to Stuttgart VFR takes 3 maps. The map for threading yourself through the crowded airspace around Frankfurt was not on board, which would have made you VERY unpopular with their very busy radar controllers! A mere 10% would not have gotten lost.
15. The emergency axe was jammed under the co-pilot's pedals. So no directional control during and after takeoff :-( The axe lives in a holster under the co-pilots seat. The holster has to be clipped shut. (The axe is to get yourselves out after any crash). 5%
16. The aircraft number given on the flight plan was not the number of the plane. So you would have not gotten a takeoff clearance anyway ;-). Half an hour delay while you re-file. 5%.

    And NOBODY found the remaining four :-(

17. No plane's log-book on board (illegal).
18. No fire extinguisher in its clipholder.
19. No compass-correction plate on the compass. Off-course anyone?
20. And the BFI special, no sick-bags on board [evil grin].

None of these 20 items are on Piper's standard pre-flight checklist; they require that you use your eyes and brain. Nevertheless, half of them could have been fatal :-( Nothing prevents you making an additional checklist of your own.

Much sober discussion followed the announcement of the results outlined above and in the following weeks pre-flight checking times more than doubled. So the night's admonitory education had had its effect. Which is what BFI instruction is about :-)

Translating this for car-driving^* non-pilots : when did you last check your car's fluids (oil, spray-water, radiator, brake-fluid?). When did you last check if ALL lights work? Or the state of your tyre tread, or tyre pressure etc etc. Remember, it's YOUR safety!

^* I am not even going to ask if you know where the gears are ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 19th January 2007 at 06:19 CET permalink Email

Book tips 4 U : Most enjoyable reads of 2006

The nearest librarian was Karin from just 60 miles away, so she visited and we did dinner on Sunday :-) Sadly, Karin tells me that the Sauerland county council has scrapped their mobile library, some damned illiterate beancounter 'saving' money at the cost of a thousand childrens' educations :-( May he burn in the pit forever! Karin also did some rapid mental arithmetic and told us that with our 7000 books we must have spent over 100,000 € on books. No wonder I could never afford a Ferrari ;-) And that we must have been reading 2.8 books per week over our lifetimes so far. Not quite true, though. There are a couple of lexica and quite a few reference books, none (designed to be) read from cover to cover. And assuming half the books are my wife's and the other half mine, that means I get through ca. 1¼ books per week. That is probably true. Good fiction is light reading; I'll read a Terry Pratchett book in one long evening session. On the other hand, Sir Roger Penrose's masterpiece "The Road to Reality" probably took me a month off-and-on; it's really quite hard to digest :-(

Young Hamish (12) from Scotland wants to know "how libraries worked before they had computers?" (I'll blog about that at a later date Hamish) and like several others asked what books I can recommend from recent reading (e.g. in 2006)? So, Hamish, these were the top 12 books I most enjoyed (Dan Keyes for the 4^th time) in 2006 :-

Now, folks, if you found this post boring just cut and paste this piece of Javascript into the URL address line of your browser and enjoy the giddy flight of some of the pics in this month's blog :-) BTW, you can stop the madness by pressing F5, OK?

javascript:R=0; x1=.1; y1=.05; x2=.25; y2=.24; x3=1.6; y3=.24; x4=300; y4=200; x5=300; y5=200; DI=document.images; DIL=DI.length; function A(){for(i=0; i-DIL; i++){DIS=DI[ i ].style; DIS.position='absolute'; DIS.left=Math.sin(R*x1+i*x2+x3)*x4+x5; DIS.top=Math.cos(R*y1+i*y2+y3)*y4+y5}R++}setInterval('A()',5); void(0);

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 17th January 2007 at 06:017 CET permalink Email

Elementary? Are they stringing us along?

Or are we all just made of a non-commutative geometry, as Alain Connes suggests ???

Follow (all) the links to find out for yourselves. It's elementary, my dear Watson :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 15th January 2007 at 06:015 CET permalink Email

The Book Bus comes to visit our village :-)

The library has access to over 40,000 media (books, DVDs,CDs,tapes etc). About 7000 fit in the bus, lining its walls as shown below. Additionally there are about 11,000 books etc out on loan at any one time, librarian Günter told me. The bus visits 44 villages, stopping at 71 places for 15-20 minutes. It visits our village once every 3 weeks, other places are visited every 2 weeks (we're slower readers here perhaps? ;-)

Last wednesday I hopped aboard and interviewed the travelling librarians, the young Carolin Voss and Günter Siedhoff. They have a stop about every 20 minutes. As soon as the central doors open a horde of customers (60% children, 20% housewives, 20% pensioners) jumps aboard, rocking the bus with their enthusiasm and excited chatter. They queue in front of Carolin, who takes back all the returns (20 seconds per customer, so she's working hard while I talk to Günter). Then they 'disperse' within the tight confines of the bus, as shown in the photo above, looking for something new to read. The fiction section - sorted alphabetically by author - is the most popular. Reference books and non-fiction works are sorted according to the so-called Duisberger scheme, one unsorted shelf per subject was my impression. During this 'peaceful' phase I was able to get the photo shown below of the two patient and hard-working librarians (cum bus-drivers!), their laptops and the barcode scanners.

Then, choices made, the customers queue on Günter's side to check out their books etc. Meanwhile Carolin is sorting the returned ones and putting them back on the shelves. If a wanted book is not on the bus, Günter will record a request and you can (usually) get it next stop in the village. Both staff can give customers tips on what is a good read suitable for their age group. I told Carolin that she might like to read The Time Traveller's Wife which I enjoyed reading myself last year - I confessed I bought it because I thought it would be SF, but it turned out to be a good love-story :-)

I think this book bus is a great institution. The primary-schoolchildren are introduced to it at an early age, as you can see from the photo above. Can you imagine the noisy busy-bee-buzz for 20 minutes with this horde on board. There are 34 kids, all squabbling for the 'best' books! I admire Carolin's patience, I must admit. This is a really social service, borrowing books is free! Of course there are the usual minor fines (€1 per 3 weeks) to discourage the kids from not bringing the books back on time, but basically it's a free service to the countryside community which is well accepted (130,000 books loaned per year). I have about 7000 books myself lining the walls of several rooms in our house (6993 actually read and 7 written ;-) and have decided to bequeath them to the county's travelling library when I shuffle off this mortal coil. Mind you, only about 50% are in German, 45% in English and a few in other tongues (French, Latin, Russian, Scots etc), so they may want to discard some of these :-( However, some of my most prized possessions are signed copies of first editions, eg: written by David Kahn, Terry Pratchett, Don Knuth, to name but three.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 13th January 2007 at 06:013 CET permalink Email

More Cannon Fodder, W ? Shame on you!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 11th January 2007 at 06:011 CET permalink Email

Pulling Six Gees . . . .

Pilot readers Charles, Peter, Sarah and Dieter have been asking at various times for more anecdotes in my BFI (Bastard Flying Instructor) series, since I haven't done any for a long time. So today was just to tide you four over until I write up the next BFI anecdote sometime this month. In the meantime - albeit a totally different kind of flying - I can recommend you go read Dave's blog. Dave is a blogging airline pilot with a fantastic feel for words. And some unique pictures taken from his high flight cockpit.

Or - if you want to stay with some hairy aerobatics - go read about Elena Klimovich.

If you are a more visual person, go watch Patty Wagstaff's video. That girl sure can fly!

If I have convinced you, UK readers can go take a ride themselves (about £180). Liz?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 9th January 2007 at 06:09 CET permalink Email

A sunday sermon

There are in fact(?) somewhere between 2 and 3000 gods, ALL imagined by some poor people who couldn't get through life without the mental crutch of superstition. Here's Chas Saunder's encyclopaedic site describing them all [his site may be down again after one of the (presumably 666) annual DOS attacks].

But - as studies show - religion does more harm than go(o)d. Indeed, the god of the Old Testament is "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty, ethnic cleanser; a homophobic, mysogynistic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniac downright bully". And this is the guy from whom Dubya gets his marching orders(sic!). Do you really want this proxy bully running the planet?

Walt Whitman (1819-1892) once wrote this neat 3-liner, called "A Child's Amaze" :-

Silent and amazed even when a little boy, 
I remember I heard the preacher every Sunday put God in his statements, 
As contending against some being or influence.

Now, because it's sunday, here's a 10 minute video of an atheist sermon for you hexakosioihexekontahexaphobiac (that's people who fear the number 666) Xians.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 7th January 2007 at 06:07 CET permalink Email

Getting to 'Yes!' But how long does it take?

The (clickable) picture on the left is of the oldest known papyrus with some of Euclid's work. It is proposition 5 from the 'Elements', Book II. Translated into English, we get "If a straight line be cut into equal and unequal segments, the rectangle contained by the unequal segments of the whole together with the square on the straight line between the points of section is equal to the square on the half.", which is the algebraic identity : ab + (a-b)²/4 = (a+b)²/4 . It's from about 75 AD.

Back on friday 29th december 2006 I showed you a cuneiform tablet containing some pythagorean triples but dating from about 1250 years BEFORE Pythagoras. This prompted three of you (Jane, Ivan, Sterling) to ask some very similar questions :-
"How long does it usually take to get from a few examples to a general proof?".

The development cycle nowadays is : collect examples, postulate a pattern, look for counterexamples, make a (final?) conjecture, prove it. The Babylonians were at the pragmatic stage of merely collecting examples; the concept of proofs did not come until the ancient g(r)eeks (e.g. famous mathematicians like Pythagoras in 540 BC, Euclid in 300 BC, Diophantus 100 AD etc.). At that time (1800 BC) the Egyptians were collecting examples too; a contemporary egyptian papyrus (the Rhind papyrus for example, contains a list of reciprocals - unit fractions - to help them do division. And so the 1250 years from that Babylonian cuneiform to Pythagoras' proof is quite long.

But lets look at the question again : "How long does it usually take to get from a few examples to a general proof?". I have a problem with "usually", so I'll give you some of the more famous long-lasting problems which took > a hundred years to prove.

The Four Colour Theorem (You only need 4 colours to colour a map) was conjectured by Francis Guthrie in 1852. It was not until 1976 that the four-colour conjecture was finally proven by Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken. So that's 124 years. (BTW, the 4 colours are only for a plane surface. On a Klein Bottle you would need 6 colours and, indeed, seven on a teapot, if there are any Mad Hatters reading this ;-)

Probably the next most famous long-lasting problem was Fermat's last theorem : "there are no positive integers A,B,C,N for which A^N + B^N = C^N with N>2." History has it that Fermat conjectured this in 1637, writing in the margin "Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet." (which means "I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.") Be that as it may, it took until 1995 until Andrew Wiles proved it. That's 358 long, long years :-) Wiles' first attempt in 1993 proved to be flawed (It's all way beyond me, anyway!)

Unfortunately, if you publish a flawed proof you often get mocked by less capable people, who even sometimes descend to ad hominem attacks. This is what happened to poor Penny Smith last year :-( Penny Smith is a very talented mathematician who thought she had made a breakthrough on the Navier-Stokes equations. She pre-published online. But the results proved to be faulty. It can - and often does - happen to the best (which is why I have been spared ;-). But the responses she provoked were vile and mean, I thought; demeaning and despicable criticism :-(

On a more positive note we have the story of George Danzig. When he was a student ( at UC Berkeley) in 1939 Danzig mistook an example of a long unsolved statistical problem written on the classroom blackboard for a homework assignment and went ahead and proved it, not realising the Prof. had said it was unprovable ;-) More details here. This legend was used as the intro to the great 1997 film "Good Will Hunting". But Don Knuth confirmed it to me when he visited us in Paderborn about 2 decades ago and he knew Danzig directly, so I choose to believe the legend :-)

However, in 1931, Kurt Gödel came up with Gödel's incompleteness theorems and since then we know that there are things which are undecidable (can neither be proven nor disproven [pace Donny!]). Which makes today's original question "How long does it usually take to get from a few examples to a general proof?" a mute moot point :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 5th January 2007 at 06:05 CET permalink Email

Five things you didn't know about me?

1. I once swam across Lake Constance (definitely illegal). Don't ask!
2. I can't snowboard or write poetry decently, even NOT chewing gum.
3. Over the past 40 years I am on (the bug-tracking) record as having made ALL the major programming mistakes; mea culpa for
   • not checking for stack underflow
   • not checking for buffer overflow
   • implementing atomic locking wrongly for multi-threaded database-updates
   • forgetting to filter out above the Nyquist frequency with a Fourier transform
   • using a two-digit year in a date format (Y2K problem)
   • etc, etc.
4. Spent 5 months in hospital after stalling my hang glider about 30 feet up :-( However, after a series of 3 or 4 operations the doctors patched me up successfully. You can still see the 30 year old scars though, even nowadays.
5. I have forgotten pretty much all the cold-war Russian I ever learned. Spacebo.
6. I usually don't know when to stop . . . ;-)

And now here's Sir John Davies (1569-1626) on this meme , much better than me :-)

I KNOW my soul hath power to know all things, 
Yet she is blind and ignorant in all: 
I know I'm one of Nature's little kings, 
Yet to the least and vilest things am thrall. 

I know my life 's a pain and but a span; 
I know my sense is mock'd in everything; 
And, to conclude, I know myself a Man-- 
Which is a proud and yet a wretched thing.

I'll just stop now while I'm ahead, since my operating system says it has detected that I'm too stupid to use this computer ;-) And the five bloggers I'm tagging are :-

• Surly Girl, in all her gory (sic!) ;-)
• Pilot Dave (flying at FL390)
• the inimitable Greavsie
• the effable Liz Hinds
• and the often effed Frank Chalk.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 3rd January 2007 at 06:03 CET permalink Email

Killing us softly? Hardly!

However, as it turns out - shades of Mrs. Malaprop - he meant to say that his government was spending to much on their socalled 'War on Terror' . Shame - I thought I'd made a political conversion ;-)

We agreed though, that governments should concentrate more on increasing our lifespans and making them happier and healthier. So I promised him to blog about where the real 'killers' are, not the Hollywood scenarios of the jackbooted DHS (Department of Homeland Security). Here are our fatality statistics here in Germany.

And, just for comparison, here is the end of the long tail . . .

Terrorism had ZERO in 2006, we note. So if our governments re-allocated their (our!) resources according to these actual statistics, investing in - say - (stem cell) research on fighting (only) the top five killers, our money would be much better invested. Yours too! So talk to your politicians.

Note too, some of the common misconceptions about what is dangerous. Car accidents kill 7 times as many as motorcycle accidents (and ¾ of motorcycle accidents are the car drivers' fault!), yet local politicians close (some) roads for motorcycles and leave them open for cars. Falling down stairs kills twice as many people as AIDS, yet we never see Ad campaigns for safer staircases -> Bee stings cause NINE times as many deaths as dog attacks, yet we don't see a heightened tax on dangerous bees! Bee-ing(sic!) struck by lightning is 318 times LESS likely to kill you than being overweight, yet lightning conductors get you an insurance premium rebate whereas any dieting does not ! Anaemia is diagnosed over 370 times more often than dog-bites as the cause of death, yet dogs have to be licenced and vampires don't ;-) Double-DUH!

To quote Lord Tennyson : "Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do and die."

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2nd January 2007 at 06:02 CET permalink Email