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Yclept 'Ole Phat Stu'
I used to have an open mind, but then my brains kept falling out :-( | |
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Whence the name change, Ole Phat Stu ?S everal of you have asked why I changed the name of this old blog from "Stu Savory's Blog" to the present "Yclept 'Ole Phat Stu' " at the turn of the year. Indeed, Monica - who has never ever even seen me - has even cheekily asked "Should it perhaps be 'Old Fat Stu' ?" Now I will admit to being 63½ years old and 92 Kg (not vice versa), but it really does say "Ole Phat Stu", and thereby hangs a tale. Readers should realise that I'm talking about a change of moniker, and a blogreader called Monica, but not that Monica. The last (and only) time I bumped into that Monica was a couple of years ago. She was at LSE (London School of Economics) and studying for her Masters. The phrase 'bumped into' is to be taken literally and not understood as a euphemism ;-) She was still a bit on the upside of pleasantly-plump and she reminded me of a girl in a mile-high airliner toilet cabin ('loo-in-sky', geddit?). Be that as it may . . . "Yclept" is an English word which means 'My name is' or 'I am called'. But let's see if y'all can guess the rest. Assuming that the words relate to some of my past activities, choose between these acronyms suggest by past students in my classes :-
And the word "Phat" - as we are told by the American Heritage Dictionary - is an adjectival americanism for "great; wonderful; terrific." ;-) So there, Monica!  A nd if you believed all that acronym nonsense, let me tell you about one of the gods from the oceanic mythology of Micronesia. The prankster God son of Lugeilan is an eternal pest who won't grow up. He uses lightning flashes to slide down to Earth, and rides back up on columns of smoke (jets). Metaphorically, this means he sets fire to things. He plagues other Gods by upsetting cooking pots and distracting them with stupid tomfoolery; then tries to rape their daughters. When things get too hot in Heaven, it's out the window and back to Earth in a flash (sic!). Coincidentally His name is Olifat ;-) There's never a dull moment with him around and many folks would rather die than have to put up with him. So they do ;-)
Monday, January 28, 2008
Barsoomania
Ever since this tiny anthropomorphic image of a figure(?) was discovered on a NASA photo from Mars last week there have been the wildest (conspiracy) theories about what or who it really is. Let me add mine ;-) Some people have suggested it is a martian Yeti. Others suggested it is Steve Fossett, who did not disappear in a US desert but had volunteered for a secret one-way mission to Mars (financed by his friend, billionaire Richard Branson?). More realistic scientists claim it is merely a trick of the light and shadows playing on some martian rocks, rather in the way we once saw the face on Mars at Cydonia. However, there is no indication of scale on the photo. None of these theories are true. Let me advance my own ;-) We see none other than Dejah Thoris, Princess of Mars (=Barsoom). To those of you unfamiliar with classical Barsoomian science fiction, Dejah Thoris is a major character in Edgar Rice Burroughs's series of Martian novels. She first appeared in the initial Mars novel, A Princess of Mars (1917), in which she is the princess of the title. She reappeared in subsequent volumes of the series, most prominently in the second, The Gods of Mars (1918), the third, The Warlord of Mars (1919), the eighth, Swords of Mars (1936), and the eleventh, John Carter of Mars (1964). After writing Princess of Mars (in 1917, his first book) Edgar Rice Burroughs went on to write the tales of Tarzan, for which he perhaps better known, thanks to Hollywood. I could be wrong of course. It could be the naked Princess Thuvia of Ptarth instead ;-) Deodand Publishing, in Australia, have republished the classic Barsoom series, which is available via Amazon etc. Well worth reading if you like Burroughs' swashbuckling womanizing hero, John Carter. An easy read to while away your next flight perhaps?
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Bulldog Willi is gone :-( Our very good friends Chris (above) and Vari (below) lost their old bulldog Willi early this morning. He died peacefully in their arms at 1:30 CET this morning. Our condolences and sympathies go out to them both; we know how painful it is to lose a faithful old dog :-( Willi (going on 11) had a good life, much loved by all.  The reason a dog has so many friends is that he wags his tail instead of his tongue.
Friday, January 25, 2008
'Tis Burns Nicht the Nicht ye ken.B ut I dinna hae a Haggis :-( Whit tae dae? So 'tis Black Puddin' wi thae Ham, Neeps an Tatties the noo.  The Uisges are/were: 1985 Auchentoshan, 1983 Laphroaig, and 1979 Lagavulin :-)
Just a wee doch'n doris
Just a wee dram that's a' Just a wee doch'n doris Afore ye gang awa' There's a wee wifey waitin' In a wee But 'n Ben And if ye can say "it's a braw bricht minlicht nicht the nicht" Then yer a' right, ye ken!!  An noo, ye maun stan fur oor florie pibroch National Anthem ;-)
For the Sassenachs, here's an understandable version with the words in English...
Thursday, January 24, 2008
George W. Bush makes me puke (again)!!!Is there NO depth to which this immoral, thieving, war-criminal would not stoop? Probably not? Definitely not! Take a look at this and puke along with me:-(
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Circle of Friends :-)After the blog article I did entitled Whither US politics quite a few of you regular blogreaders took the Political Compass test to see where your politics are centered and have sent me your results. Doug Alder even blogged his directly. And I've just seen that Ron-Anymity did so too. Welcome, new blog-reader Ron :-) So I now have enough data to announce anonymously my circle of blog commentator friends and am glad to see we are all 19 in the green quadrant of the political compass, the circle's centre being even slightly to the left of and below me (i.e. slightly more socialist and anti-authoritarian). Happiness is a circle of like minded friends :-)  Republican voter Bob (Illinois,US) wrote (for the first time) sarcastically "Admittedly, it was fair you reveal yourself as a lil' pink commie blob, but where would you stand as an American voter?". So I took the online test he sent and the results show to what extent my politics line up with the US presidential candidates' declared opinions.
Please note, Bob, that if the GOP wins (e.g. Romney/McCain) then I am only in 40% agreement and even if a Democrat (big D not little d) wins, I still only agree 60% of the time, so I will doubtless continue to bash American politicians beyond 2008 ;-) But BTW, Bob, at least one US GOP politician is coming around to my point of view and telling the US exactly what I posted here on January 4th (Dollar Dolor). Why so late?
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Sub-Prime Banking explained
B irgit is a banker, so I asked her to explain the US sub-prime mortgage scandal to me in the simplest terms. "Well, some US banks gave mortgages to poor people who couldn't really afford them. Think of a black man in a string vest sitting on the porch of his shack in Alabama, or someone in Flint, Michigan who lost their job at the steelworks. At the start of the mortgage they were paying maybe 2% amortization of capital and maybe 2% interest (a sub-prime rate), totalling 4% of their capital per year. Say $666(sic!) per month on a $200,000 home. When the fixed-rate period expired, they were charged maybe 6% interest, totalling 8%, thus doubling their payments. So they couldn't afford that, maybe not even the 6% needed to just pay the interest without any amortisation. This left the original bank sitting on a potentially bad debt. However, foreclosing the loan would mean the bank owned the house, but would only be able to sell it in a depressed area at a much lower price. And of course the newly homeless poor would still be billed for the difference :-( So the original banks preferred to sell off packages of bad debt at a discounted rate to investment banks who sold some of them on to other (greedier) banks who didn't realise how many of the debts in the package were bad (like nearly all of them!). The investment banks and the greedy banks (like Northern Rock in the UK) were caught with their pants down, and investment bankers worldwide ended up exposing their naked backsides, so to say ;-)" "At least some of those bankers were honest enough to name their bank after their predicament." I teased. "What?" She exclaimed : "There's no bank called 'Naked Backsides'!" "No", I grinned, "but there is one called Bare Sterns" ;-)
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Low and Slow :-(C
rash, Bang, Wallop!  So today I want to explain a little about the aerodynamics of slow flight and why flying low-and-slow is dangerous. But let's kick off with three eyewitness reports :- "It seemed to be flying fairly slow and it had a very high angle of attack. The nose was high up in the air, which is very unusual." said Martin Green, Heathrow worker. "The aircraft was banking to the left and it was coming in very low over the surrounding houses; the plane was significantly lower than it would normally be." "The wheels came out and went for touchdown, and the next moment we just dropped. I couldn't tell you how far. " said passenger Paul Venter.
Please refer to the sketch on the left. The vertical axis is Lift and the horizontal axis is Drag. The C-shaped parametric curve shows lift and drag as the angle-of-attack parameter increases. The angle-of-attack is the angle between the direction of flight and the chord from front to rear of the wing. The wings are set at a slight (e.g. 2-4°) angle of incidence to the fuselage so that in cruising flight the wings give enough lift to keep the plane level while the fuselage offers the least wind resistance (not quite true, but near enough). If the pilot needs more lift he can raise the nose of the plane. Effectively he is moving up the C-Curve shown here from slightly above the horizontal. Eventually he (pace Aviatrix) reaches the tangent from the origin. This is the point of maximum lift/drag ratio, where he can glide the furthest with dead engines. If he raises the angle-of-attack some more to the top of the C-shaped curve, he reaches the point of maximum lift (Lmax = slowest sink rate), but a steeper glide. Increasing the angle of attack even more gives him less lift & more drag, this is known as being on the back of the power curve. Finally Lift disappears as the aircraft stalls :-( To recover from the stall the pilot needs to push the nose down and add power (if possible). Stuffing the nose down is counter-intuitive if you are close to the ground! It is a matter of trading potential energy to get kinetic energy. Eyewitness 1 reported a high angle of attack. Eyewitness 2 reported an unusually low altitude. Eyewitness 3 seems to indicate a stall. Furthermore, an unnamed airport worker interviewed by the BBC said that the captain had told him that the Boeing 777-200ER had lost all power after "all the electronics" failed while the plane came in to land. Jet engines take several (e.g. 10) seconds to spool up from idle so there is always some delay until thrust is delivered. This implies that the pilot had to glide the plane in at best glide speed (i.e. Lmax/Dmax). Then, at the last possible moment, lowering the landing gear (which adds Drag, thus slowing the plane, causing it to stall, dropping off the C-curve). The pilot appears to have done the best he could given the engine-out circumstances. The question remains : what caused the loss of power? On both engines simultaneously? And losing all the electronics too? What follows here is mere speculation!!! Multi-engine aircraft are built with dual generators, dual electrical busses etc etc to avoid any single-point-of-failure. Dual simultaneous engine failure could be caused by running out of fuel. But at this point a 777 should have had about 10 tons of fuel left (to cope with missed approaches, diversion to an alternate airport like Gatwick, 45 minutes on hold and a couple of missed approaches at the alternate). So fuel status needs to be checked. The 777-200ER has range capability between 6,000 and 7,700 nautical miles in still air. The great circle distance Peking to London is 5080 miles. Peking to London will usually have head winds (due to the Earth's rotation). 10 hours of 100 knot head winds would subtract 1000 NM from the 777's range. Initial reports indicate a large fuel spill at the crash site (but no fire) tho´, so there was fuel enough. But was it contaminated? Water collects at the bottom of the tanks BTW. Check that. Dual simultaneous engine failure might be caused by switching to a wrong (empty) tank for landing ??? Besides the wing tanks, AFAIK the 777-200ER has 3 tanks in the fuselage too. So fuel-flow status needs to be checked. A further witness has said that the engines were still turning on 'landing'. However, it takes a couple of minutes for jet engines to spool down to a stop, so this does not mean they still had an adequate fuelfeed. Captain Dave blogs "I saw some photos of the compressor section and it looks like number two was not turning at impact." Dual simultaneous engine failure might also be caused by flying into a flock of birds and ingesting a bird into both engines. Unlikely, but check for engine-fan damage too. But why was there a full failure of the electronics too? Now the 777 has a glass-cockpit (all electronic instruments) and is a fly-by-wire plane. Admittedly Boeings are built in Seattle, where Microschrott has its HQ. But AFAIK they don't use Windoze to run the 777 ;-) BAD JOKE! Sorry. There would be two independent throttle lever position sensors, and two separate pumps to each engine running off separate power busses. There would be two flight computers, perhaps even three for redundancy (2 out of 3 majority voting?). The only thing the computers would have in common would be the software, I suspect :-( We shall just have to wait for the official accident report. The main thing is that the pilot managed to put the crippled plane down on the airport, AND avoid any Hounslow houses and the main road traffic AND avoid all of the planes in the take-off queue, AND with all occupants left alive, AND just miss 4D ! Well done!
Friday, January 18, 2008 ;-)
Whither US politics?Now that the US of A are going state by state through the long-winded and sometimes farcical process of selecting candidates for their next election - as if that were relevant to the outcome thereof ;-) - it is perhaps pertinent for the rest of the world to see what we can expect of a future USA president. There is a website called Political Compass which can help us here. It also enables us to see where we ourselves are politically. Take their anonymous test and see where YOU line up! The way they graph the results has two axes. The vertical axis is political and goes from anarchism at the bottom to fascism at the top. The horizontal axis is economic (re-distribution of wealth) and goes from communism on the left to neo-liberalism on the right. So, plugging in some well known names, it looks like this :-  And if we compare some 2007 world figures we get this picture below. George Bush (sabre rattler) is seen to be even more fascist than Ehud Olmert (Israeli PM) and almost on a par with Robert Mugabe, diametrically opposed to the Dalai Lama in fact.  The graph below shows us where the current crop of candidates for next US president are seen to be. Note that not even those Democrats with a real chance are seen to be left of centre and all serious candidates are on the fascist/authoritarian side of the political divide. This does not bode well for the future :-( Even Hillary Clinton is seen to be more authorative than our own Angela Merkel and certainly no more socialist. Republicans like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich are worse than Bush on both axes!  It is only fair to disclose where I stand, so you can see why I
often knock US politicians ("Bushwhacking"). Happily, many bloggers seem to be in the green quadrant too :-)  Quotation for today is from
Alexei Sayle (UK comedian): 
Thirsty, January 17, 2008 ;-)
Last of the fine white wines
When my father-in-law died last year we discovered half a dozen old bottles of white Frankenwein under the dust and the cobwebs of the cellar. Now white wines don't last as long as reds, so I inspected the old bottles with care. Those whose level had sunk a lot were discarded, the oxygen having got in through the cork and the angels' portion of the alcohol had upped its heels and evaporated. The 1969 Eschendorfer Lump - probably the best white Frankenwein ever when at its peak in the seventies - had too gone thin and vinegary, being too old by far :( However the last bottle of the 1983 Sommeracher Katzenkopf shown here had attained a beautiful honey colour and its flavour proved to be still good, although past its peak. So we drank it on Hogmanay with some friends :-) The general concensus was 'Pretty good for a 24 year old white wine'. So, cheers!
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Good at bashin' the Bible ?Religious blogreaders like Liz, Vic and Ria may have noticed that I haven't done any atheistic blogging for a while. In fact fellow Atheist Kevin wrote that "You're good at bashin the Bible, so let's hear some more!" Thy will be done. I won't bother discussing the fictional aspects this time, but I'll kick off by pointing out some of the blatant contradictions. Here are just three (there are hundreds) :-
However the Bible - in the old testament - can (inadvertently) give us some interesting historical facts.
Regular readers will know that I have some interest in cryptography (secret writing) and I'd like to point
you to some early use of secret writing in the old testament dating from about 600 BC.
The Hebrews at that time used a keyless substitution called the AtBash (after the first two & last two letters of their alphabet).
They folded their alphabet in the middle and then substituted letters opposite one another. So an
AtBash of our modern English alphabet would look like this :- A B C D E F G H I J K L M Z Y X W V U T S R Q P O N And so GOOD MORNING FOLKS would become TLLW NLIMRMT ULOPH and vice versa. Interestingly, HOLY atbashes into SLOB; Nomen est omen ;-) Be that as it may, if we look at the Book of Jeremiah (25:26; 51:41) we see that the city of Babel (BBL, there being no vowels in their alphabet) atbashes to SSK Sheshakh, an alternative naming which confused biblical scholars for many a year. Similarly, in Jeremiah 51:1 Lev Kamai is AtBash for the Chaldeans (Kasdim); so here we have historical evidence of the use of cryptography - albeit extremely weak cryptography - in 600 BC by the Hebrews. For comparison, the Greeks were using the Skytale (=baton) transposition method around this time in history (7th century BC) too. The diameter of the baton was the (simple) key. However a much more advanced secret writing was used by the Minoans as early as 1800 BC, see my article on The Disc of Phaistos; said disc remains unencoded today! Now reread today's headline with a slightly different spacing between the letters, it reads Good AtBash in the Bible ;-)
Monday, January 14, 2008
For Wendy : A Freemasons' LimerickJust before my previous computer finally died, several of you had made specific blog requests. Liz, Uli, and Four Dinners wanted something funny, so I did the limerick video. Janet and David wanted some science, so I did the piece on invisibility cloaks. Jane wanted impressions, so she got the Bukowski pastiche (blank verse) last friday. That leaves Kevin who wanted some Bible Bashing (later this week, OK?) and Wendy Templeton who wanted a piece about freemasons. Well Wendy, I know almost nothing about freemasonry, so I'm blogging from complete ignorance. No change there then! But, FWIW, here it is, a freemasonry limerick 4 U ;-)
A drunken freemason one day @Jane, @Kevin, I lost your eMail addresses in the PC's death, so send me mails pls.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Do you make notes ?
Sometimes, when I get the big motorcycle
I meet old friends and biker-babes, Then Tina makes a pot of fresh coffee
Then we go for a ride, engines of thunder, Time to head home now, riding
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Invisible Dick : Virgins' Worst Nightmare ?
Many thanks to the punny anonymous blogreader who sent me the photo of the book cover as shown on the left. It is a comment on my tuesday blog about invisible cloaks. He/she writes " 'Invisible Dick' was a cartoon character in a boys' comic during the 1950s. I'm not sure whether Frank Topham's book (shown here) for schoolboys refers to the same character, but it does contain many innocent adventures." Ah, Nostalgia! Looking at the cover, the (adults' tall) bicycle appears to have passed between the policeman's legs; this by way of an explanation for the expression on his face. And since Dick's shoes and cap are visible, are we to assume that Dick himself has to be naked to remain invisible? Pedophile minds want to know ;-) Personally I had assumed that "Invisible Dick" referred to the way Dick Cheney runs his influentially scheming politics while keeping a very low profile in Washington DC. Either that or it refers to the passage in the Bible where the Holy Ghost impregnates the Virgin Mary. There are several porny bits in the Bible, so for the porn freaks whose searches brought them here via humourless search engines, here is a painting of a disgusting scene from the Bible (old testament): Judith gives Head (SFW) ;-)
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
Now you see it, now you don't!H arry Potter has one, as does Frodo in Lord of the Rings, when he dons the Ring. Hollywood even filmed one decades ago. What is it? An invisibility cloak. Now scientists are seeing (sic!) if they can actually build one. The japanese were first off with a quick and dirty approach (which doesn't really work). The wearer has a camera on the other side (say east=90°) from an observer (in the west=270°). Video taken by the camera is projected onto the material of the cloak at 270°, so the observer sees 'through' the wearer, thus making the wearer 'invisible'. Obviously this only works in 2 dimensions. If the observer ist at 300° or at 240° instead of 270° he will still see the projection from 90° thus spoiling the effect. To get full 3D invisibility he should see a 120° or 60° viewpoint respectively. Question is, how to achieve this ? Let me explain the physics of what we are trying to do, starting with Maxwell's four vector equations for electromagnetism . . .
Now the more maths-capable amongst you will (immediately?) see that if you can get the dielectric constant and the magnetic permeability to be simultaneously negative, then you would have a material with a negative refractive index. Unfortunately, no natural materials have this property. Therefore some ingenuity is required ;-) Materials with a negative refractive index would have some interesting properties. The Doppler effect would work the other way around. A convex lens would disperse light and a concave lens focus it, just the other way around to everyday lenses. If I wore a cloak of this material, I could bend light away from me in the front and back together again behind me, thus making myself invisible. If symmetric (= a cylindrical cloak) this would work for all directions, as I stipulated above that it must to be omnidirectional. In 2006, John Pendry, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College (London, UK), proposed the aforementioned cylinder. David Smith and Sheldon Schulz, engineers at UCSD, built Pendry's cylinder of very many 3mm slit copper rings. Sure enough, for 30mm (X-band) microwave radiation, the cylinder and its contents became all but invisible. So this is a radar-stealthy material of interest to the military, methinks. Getting Pendry's idea to work at optical wavelengths requires a material with nanometer dimensions. Karlsruhe university has built such a material with 70 nm posts between 100 nm holes which has a negative refractive index at 780 nm. Researcher Harald Giessen at Stuttgart university has a better meta-material made of 400nm gold horseshoes with 80 nm armwidth. Sheets of these are stackable, meaning he should be able to get the effect in three dimensions. So is an invisibility cloak within reach within the next few years? We shall see (sic ;-)! Oh by the way, there's one thing that Hollywood, Tolkien and Ms. Rowling forgot. If you are invisible, then no light gets reflected from - or even falls on - you or your eyeballs. So you are blind, blinded by the science indeed. A s(l)ight disadvantage :-( "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." A.C.Clarke :-)
Monday, January 7, 2008
How not to write limericks :-)
ADDENDUM January 8th : There is an old blogger called Frank Who went for a rather short #### on which he could sit whilst having a ### of a think about poets (low rank) ;-)
Sunday, January 6, 2008
Kay Jensen, Plagiarist :-(Kay
Jensen, Plagiarist,
who lives in Sandefjord, Norway, is ripping off content from my blog without my written permission.
Shame on him, content thief ! Plagiarism proof? He joined YouTube on May 10, 2007 as we can see from
his profile there.
He has made a YouTube video called
"By the Shore of Gitche Gumee", see
here, which features the first part of a poem written by me and a painting by my late American friend
Maggie M. Roe, for the first 1 minute 50 seconds of 'his' video. Proof that I'm the poem's author? See here in my blog dated 22nd September 2006. That's a whole 8 months prior to Kay Jensen stealing it. Look here folks, there is a Copyright notice at the foot of that and every post of mine which he has ignored :-( Although I am flattered when people use MY content, I would like them to
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Elsie corrects meElsie took issue with yesterday's blog entry, so - in the spirit of fairness - I reproduce her (valid) criticism in its entirety below :- Quote :- About the US dollar -- I'd have to agree with most of what you say. However, there are a few things with which I disagree. First, having spent ten years selling a US manufactured product around the world, I can tell you first hand that Americans are not the only people to play the exchange game. We often had clients (particularly in South Korea) who would delay payment (in USD) trying to get the best exchange rate. Unfortunately, most manufacturers are not able to wait indefinitely for payment which necessitated our requiring several clients to purchase product by Irrevocable Letter of Credit simply to receive on-time payments. Historically, the strength of the US dollar has certainly benefited Americans (the past few years notwithstanding). Currently that is not the situation, and now we're taking the heat for doing to others what has been done to us for years and years. Please understand, I'm not saying it's right, but is it my fault that "greedy European banks...bought a lot of bad debt from US banks?" It is simply not an American-only thing. It's the big boys with the big bucks playing the finance game. And we all pay. Secondly, I must correct you on your statement about Gisele. In New England we, unfortunately, know more about Gisele than most people should. Gisele is the girlfriend of New England Patriots' QB, Tom Brady. When word of her accepting payment only in Euros hit the news, she quickly denied those rumors. Feel free to look at her official website. Gisele, being the world's highest paid model, is not hurting for money and the value of the dollar probably doesn't impact her all that much. That her boyfriend currently earns $16 million USD per year certainly doesn't hurt either. That's all, Dr. Stu. I'm hoping that you might find it in yourself to go a little easier on Americans this year. It sucks that the whole world hates us. And, though we've only "chatted" briefly, I'd like to be able to consider you a friend.
Warmest regards, P.S. Any thoughts about Iowa last night? Rudy took a big hit, Hillary got what she deserved. I think that we're due for a change and that Obama may just be the man for the job. I reserve the right to change my mind between now and November, however. Unquote
Friday, January 4, 2008
De Dollar Dolour'T is amazing how the USA cheats the rest of the world moneywise and has so far gotten away with it. But it looks like that may well change soon in 2008. Cheat? How? Order lots of import goods to be paid in dollars, then when the US national debt is in the trillions! (thankyou Dubya), and the bills start rolling in, lower the exchange rate so that the goods cost less. Lower the dollar exchange rate at a percentage faster than the interest rate too, so that even with interest we lose :-( But other countries - and even individuals - are getting wise to this lousy deal and are insisting on billing in stronger currencies, like the Euro. The Taj Mahal in India now no longer accepts dollars for the entrance tickets (2.3 million per year) but only the Rupee. Supermodel Gisela Bündchen (Brazil) now accepts only contracts in Euros. Kuwait no longer ties its currency to the dollar. Even South Korean shipbuilders now bill in Won. China freed the Yuan from the dollar in 2005 already; a wise move. In 5 of the last 6 years the dollar exchange rate lost against the Euro. A whole 13% in 2007. Asian economies are expanding. China by 10.4% p.a. over the last four years, the Yuan gaining 12% against the dollar. In India the Rupee gained 12% against the dollar in 2007 alone. And shopping in NY is the new European society ladies' fad. Indeed, the US Federal Reserve's dollar index - which was at 107 points back in January of 2007 - has now dropped to 98.5 points, symptom of ongoing $-weakness. Of course the strong Euro makes it more difficult for us to export to the US, so Bush's weak dollar policy is even costing us jobs here in Europe as corporations move production to weaker dollar areas (short-sighted unacceptable face of globalisation). And then there is the US sub-prime mortgage problem which causes a deep distrust of the american banking system. Greedy european banks, hoping to make a quick kill, bought a lot of bad debt from US banks. This is what caused the run on Northern Rock in the UK, destabilised UBS & shook some other major European banks. So our pension funds over here end up having to pay for US foreclosures. Makes me puke! The trillion dollar US national debt means that other countries paid this to the US who have still to pay it back. So were we stupid enough to finance Bush's war? Shame on us. If we demand our money back, the US might not be able to afford to fight :-) So what can we expect in 2008? Well, countries with large dollar cash reserves (e.g. the Middle East and Asia) will move out of the dollar into harder currencies to the tune of 1.2 BILLION dollars. And if this happens quickly rather than slowly, we can expect to see the dollar drop even further. So folks, shed your US investments now and invest in the Euro area before it gets any worse! Let Bush sink his own damn dollar! Correspondingly, we can expect a recession in the USA, let's just hope they don't drag everyone else down into the dirt too . The 2008 dour dollar dolor indeed :-( Just my two (Euro-)cents worth . . . 
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Lemme concentrate, willya ?G oddamn interruptions are the death of creativity! Here, if it's not the damn telephone, it's the doorbell. Or the mobile (at least I can turn that OFF!). In my old working environment (SW developer) it was freakin' eMails about most trivial twaddle (cc the rest of the world) & boring meetings, meetings, meetings :-( Excuse me, I have to answer the phone . . . But now at least the larger corporations have understood what productivity-killers eMails etc are, and are taking countermeasures to increase the productivity of their SW developers etc. Intel and PBD have introduced "No eMail fridays", forbidding internal eMails then. Office workers have to get off their fat asses, walk a few yards to their collegues' desks and actually talk face to face! Shock! Horror! Lose a few pounds too? Excuse me again, but the wife says it's my turn to walk the dog, who needs to go right NOW . . . Radicati Research (CA,USA) report that their employees were sending an average of 47 eMails daily (let alone all those received cc which still were read). That's one every 10 minutes, which needs to be composed,sent, and archived. When are those poor sods supposed to be able to concentrate and actually think? (which is what they are paid for after all). Glasgow University reports people voluntarily(sic!) calling their eMail programm 40 times per hour! Intel claims 30% of their internal eMails are superfluous (when at Siemens, I would have said over 75%!). PBD even fined their (275) people a quarter (=25 cent (US)) per Mail for using internal eMails! Sorry about that, yet another oh-so-urgent IM . . . Intel has now introduced "Quiet Time" for 300 engineers. Tuesdays there are no meetings, the phones go to answering machines, IM is blocked, and eMail delivery is delayed until the next day. The increase in productivity has been noticable. And if you want shorter meetings, just make everybody stand instead of sitting ;-) Fifteen eMails just came (on the hour as usual), 13 of them spam . . . Looking in my own mirror : since I've been blogging I haven't written a single book and only 3 scientific papers. If I wanted to write another book, I'd have to stop blogging 'cos that too eats into my creativity, even if it is fun. And you'll see I've split my blogroll into a few I read daily and others only weekly, besides shortening the blogroll. Bloggers who do write (popular) books seem to do so by extracting from their blogs, adding a logical structure etc. But writing textbooks needs far more concentration, as do novels and even short stories. How do you creative folks cope ? Just a moment, someone is leaning insistently on the doorbell, probably the man from Porlock . . .
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