Finding life hard :-(

A sad time. Welsh blogger Liz Hinds has had to put her old dog Harvey down. So I ask my blogreaders to share a little link-love, go visit, and console her in her grief.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 31st July 2007 at 10:11 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Six Easy Exam Questions : The Answers

On Saturday I asked you to answer six ostensibly easy exam questions.
Here are the answers; see for yourselves how you fared ;-)

1. In which country was the Panama-Hat invented?
   • Ecuador
2. The Canary Islands are named after a creature. Which one?
   • In its original Latin name Islas Canarias means Seal Islands.
     So the creature is the Seal.
3. How many years did the 100-year-war last?
   • The 100-year-war lasted 116 years (1337 - 1453).
4. In which month do the Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
   • On the 7th of November.
5. What was the first name of King George VI of GB? That's VI not IV, sorry.
   • His first name was Albert, which he changed in 1936 to George, which was thus his second given name. But I asked for the first one.
6. Where was Paris Hilton conceived?
   • In her own mother's womb, just as is true for everyone else.
     Nothing exceptional about Paris Hilton, you know ;-)

Winner is Kay, who got 4 right. So how many did YOU get right ? ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 30th July 2007 at 06:30 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Easiest exam question?

Back on Tuesday I asked you for the most trivial exam questions you've ever encountered. Just as an example, this is one from my O-level Maths (that must have been 1959/60-ish). This devilish one is especially for Sterling ;-)

Q: 102 is the smallest 3-distinct-digits number in any base N > 2.
Show that there is no base N for which 102_N = 666₁₀

The boy sitting at the next desk proceeded to enumerate all possible candidates (quickly now, how many^* are there?) without gaining any illumination^**. The quick answer (5 seconds) is :- Subtract 2 from both sides, getting 100_N = 664₁₀, another way of saying N²=664. And since the square root of 664 is not a whole number, we have just shown that there is no base N for which 102_N = 666₁₀. Quod erat demonstrandum. They don't come much easier than that, do they?

Now here are six more really simple questions :-) Answers by monday 6 a.m. please.
You have the weekend to try them for yourselves ;-) I'll blog the answers next week.

1. In which country was the Panama-Hat invented?
2. The Canary Islands are named after a creature. Which one?
3. How many years did the 100-year-war last?
4. In which month do the Russians celebrate the October Revolution?
5. What was the first name of King George IV VI of Great Britain?
6. Where was Paris Hilton conceived?

Let's see how well you were paying attention in geography and in history classes ;-)

^* : There are 23 candidates = floor(root(664))-2.
^** : And 23 is the number of the Illuminati ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 28th July 2007 at 06:28 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

No longer gruntled? Please help me.

Sadly, this blog is haemorrhaging^* readership. Down from 1800 to 800 daily :-(
Before you all run off elsewhere, I'd like my disgruntled readership to at least tell me WHY? What am I doing wrong?

• Have I pissed you off? What with?
• Am I no longer blogging stuff which interests you? (What?)
• Is the blog too highbrow?
• Or just not funny any more?
• What stuff would you like to read?
• Does it load too slowly, or what? I can't tell with DSL ;-)
• Do I need to change the mission statement? (See right sidebar).

It can only get better again if you help me improve, 'cos I'm so close to it that I can't see the wood for the trees :-( I'd appreciate feedback from you remaining readers . . .

^* Haemorrhaging means losing bloody readers.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 27th July 2007 at 06:27 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Thinking of moving? Head for the hills!

Friends in the UK affected by the flooding this week are thinking of moving. They ask "But where is a safe (high) place to move to, given that the global warming is likely to get worse, sea levels are on the rise etc etc?"

So here are two maps of the UK, present coastline in the left, future coastline on the right. Yes folks, that's all that's left of Albion when (not if) the sea rises 100 m.

Commiserations to all those affected this week by the flooding; I wish you dryness.

If I remember Cheltenham's geography correctly, GCHQ is down at a low end, so things might be pretty wet there too. So there's a possibility that the UK's SIGINT capability is getting washed out? Maybe an intelligence problem in the longer term? :-(

PS : A mere 10% of UK housing is on flood plains, but it is 70% in Japan and 100% in Holland :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 25th July 2007 at 06:25 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Education rant : your feedback etc.

Last friday I was inter alia ranting about the state (sic!) of education and asked for your feedback. Here it is.

Charles tells us that 'tis not just maths education that is poor, but that history is at best patchy. He points us to this BBC article. BTW, I can recommend Bill Bryson's fat book "A Short History of Nearly Everything", which is not at all like the history books you had at school :-) The ISBN number is 0-7679-0817-1. Great read!

If you are a Harry Potter fan and want to combine history, maths and magic , I'd point you to the new translation of the world's oldest magic textbook, De viribus quantitatis (On The Powers Of Numbers) by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk who shared lodgings with Da Vinci and who helped him paint The Last Supper. It was originally written in Italian between 1496 and 1508. The Grauniad did a review in april.

But back now to the miserable state of (maths) education in the UK and USA.

Specifically I asked Jax, an A-level pupil in the UK, for her comments. They are :-
" I think the only group of people who could answer whether the quality of maths education in this country is of a good standard would be those who are actually good at it! Personally I have no natural talent when it comes to mathematics! Those that are gifted in maths would be able to say if they are being pushed hard enough, learning correct techniques etc. I can tell you about my education though...

I had the same maths teacher all the way through secondary school. Now she really is a nice person, perhaps a good teacher, but we weren't a very nice set 1 class to teach. This probably didn't help the situation. At the time I was presumed to be an A-A* student across the board at GCSE level. In my maths mock exams I scraped a C - . Yay. In the space of six hours (an hour every saturday) with a private tutor (costing a fair bit) I learnt more than I had in the 5 years that were meant to be preparing me for GCSE exams. I graded at an A which is fine with me.

However, for sixth form, we have to complete an hour of community service every week. I ended up spending a lesson every friday with my old maths teacher. It was a year nine set 3 class. They were all 100% more clued up on maths than I ever was.

So I really think that the teaching of maths or the syllabus that the government give out every few years is not the reason for a decline in math standards. It's the pupils. My class never wanted to be taught maths; holding the same view as many many other people.

I would also like to say A LEVELS ARE NOT GETTING EASIER. How would these people know?? Are they taking them every year to compare grades then? I think not. Plus it is really unfair to suggest this to those who are studying or have studied at AS and A Level; it undermines any success or feelings of value."

Her dad, 4D, adds "Jax was the only white girl in maths to get an A. All the other A's and a couple of A*'s came from Asian, African and Far East girls. (Funnily enough Jax is the only white girl who gets invited around their houses too. Could there be an ethnic thing here? Discipline within the family unit and stuff?)"

Certainly Frank Chalk, an inner-city blogging teacher and author of an insightful book "It's your time you're wasting" (ISBN 0955285402) says that teachers spend more time trying (and failing) to maintain discipline than actually imparting knowledge :-(

On the other side, there is Taylor Mali telling a lawyer what teachers REALLY do :-)

Derek, 44, also from the UK, writes that some GCSE Physics O-level questions used to be ridiculously easy even back in the 1970s, and sends the example shown below. It should take a bright 12 year old under 5 minutes with pencil and paper. The average adult should be able to do it inside five seconds in their head! So what is such a trivial question doing in a GCSE exam, even at O-level? Gawd 'elp us!

"Question: A mineshaft is 22m deep. The cage, which holds ten persons, is hoisted over a headstock on a cable that is wound onto a motorized drum with a diameter of 0.7m. The drum rotates at a speed of 10 rpm. Assume that the cage travels up and down at the same speed, whether laden or light and that initial acceleration and deceleration of the cage have no effect on the overall speed of the cage. Also assume that it takes 10 seconds to load/unload the cage. If the cage is initially at the top of the shaft, how long would it take to evacuate 21 persons from the mine ?"

Counting the five seconds needed to solve it:-

1. 21 miners, 10 per cageful, therefore 3 round trips.
2. 3 cage-loads = 30 secs, 3 cage-unloads = another 30 secs.
3. Drum diameter 0.7m, so circumference 2.2m (using PI=22/7).
4. 10 rpm * 2.2 m = 22 m = depth of mine. So 1 minute travel time each way.
5. 3*1 minute (down) + 3* 1 minute (up) + 30 secs + 30 secs = 7 minutes.

I agree with Derek, this kind of question is far too trivial, but OK for the 11+ exam ;-)

Clive James recently said "Most of the unwitting victims of a permissive non-education will graduate, because there is no machinery by which they can fail :-("

Now, dear blogreaders, what is the most trivial exam question you ever encountered?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24th July 2007 at 06:24 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

You mark my words!

We have had to rearrange the structure of this website due to a capacity problem in the provider's FTP client. So please reset your bookmarks, folks.

The (new) URL for Cornelia's Bulldog Blog is :-
http://home.egge.net/~savory/bdog/bulldog_blog.htm . Cornelia's Bulldog Blog is now self-contained in its own subdirectory, so that we can move it easily at short notice to another provider should the need arise. However, unidirectional 're-direct' pages have been provided to move you there if you are still using old bookmarks. Cornelia's Bulldog Blog is written in German (mostly). Translate (if you need to) using Babelfish. Occasional entries there are in English (or the limited improper subset known as American English). Translate (if you need to) using Babelfish ;-)

The new (and old) bookmarks for this blog (Stu Savory's Blog) are :-
http://home.egge.net/~savory/blog.htm , and http://www.savory.de/blog.htm . This blog, i.e. Stu Savory's Blog, is written in British English. Mostly. Sometimes I blog in Russian , sometimes in Latin , on Burns Night (25th January) usually in Scots. Sometimes I tell shaggy dog stories with their punchlines in French , or tell innocent anecdotes which turn out to be dirty puns in Chinese. Just because I can. I'm an evil little sod like that ;-) You mark my words!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 23rd July 2007 at 06:23 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Goodbye Vladimir. Hello again Nikita :-(

I apologise for using a .gif pic here, but this stupid blog editor won't let me type Cyrillic text, nor even import it from an editor that will. So I screengrab from the more capable editor. So much for multi-culti :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 22nd July 2007 at 06:22 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Go 4^th and multiply!

Yet again must I rant about the miserable command of elementary maths kids have these days. And it's not just kids. A recent UK survey has shown that one in fourteen (quick : how many percent is that?) young adults (18-25) are unable to answer the question "What is one eighth of 32?", a question any 8 year old should be able to answer. Quickly now : how many letters are there in CHAV?

And it's not just at this simple level either. The academic recruited by Gordon Brown to raise maths standards in the UK says A-levels are getting easier. Jax, you're studying for A-levels, give me some feedback ( a long comment) on this please. While we wait for Jax's reply, read this story comparing UK first-year students' abilities with a Chinese university pre-entry test question. Read it and weep. Then try it too.

But the same 'dumbing down' of maths education is happening in the US too. Please read all of the comments attached to that story please. Quickly now : What is the IQ of W?

So, now that I've let off steam, let me tell you a recent anecdote. My good friend Matthias (an engineer of no mean repute) was visiting us with his daughter (~12), so I took the opportunity to show them a different - possibly simpler - way to do multiplication. All you have to be able to do is draw some straight lines and count their intersections. What could be easier? Here's a simple example. Now let us multiply 23 by 34 (numbers which I had chosen to deliberately provoke a 'carry' situation).

First draw 2 lines at 45° L2R, move over an inch or so and draw 3 lines also at 45° L2R , these represent the 23. Now turn your paper through 90° and draw 3 lines crossing the first set at 90° and above, right, draw 4 lines. These lines represent the 34. Now turn the paper level and you will see that the intersection sets form three columns. In the left column there is one set of intersections with 6 intersections in it. In the right column there is one set of intersections with 12 intersections in it. In the centre column there are two sets of intersections with 8 and 9 intersections in them respectively, so the centre column totals 8+9=17 intersections. So we write the three columns sums as 6 - 17 - 12 respectively. Then we carry as necessary (here two ones) to get 7 - 8 - 2. Now you can check the result on your calculator if you like, but 23 * 34 = 782 as we just saw. With practice you can do this all in your head!

His daughter is a bright young lass, top of her class in physics and maths, and after some thought asked "What do you do if there's a zero in the numbers? Show me ten times ten please" Well, for a zero we just draw a dotted line, and anything crossing a dotted line has zero intersections. Thus 10 * 10 = 100 looks like the sketch shown here on the left.

Now Matthias is mistrustful of me, because I have pulled his leg so often, something you can only do with very good friends :-) He takes everything I say (rightly) with a pinch of salt. So he said "Ah, Stu, but you chose the numbers. Now I'll choose the numbers and we'll see if it still works". Fair do's. He chose 132 * 421 (so he needed 5 columns as well). And as we see on the left, his column totals were 4 - 14 - 15 - 7 - 2. Doing the carries, he got 55572 which is the correct answer :-) Try it with your choice of numbers too. It'll work :-)

They then both asked simultaneously "Does it always work? Can you prove it?"
So here's a proof for all of you blogreaders, not just Matthias and his 2 daughters :-

Assume we are multiplying two-digit numbers AB * CD as we did with 23 * 34. These numbers really represent (10*A + B) * (10*C + D). Multiplying out the terms, we get 100*A*C ( that's the left column) + B * D (that's the right column) + [(10*A*D) + (10*C*B)] which is the centre column. The algebra remains the same even when I choose any number of columns. It just gets harder to draw the (crowded) pictures. Mind you, 99*99 makes for a crowded sketch too, which is why I chose smaller digits for these examples. But yes, folks, it always works. Just be careful drawing the diagrams so that the columns line up correctly :-)

Bet they didn't teach you that in school ! (Except in traditional classes in India :-).

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 20th July 2007 at 06:20 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Whence money?

Several blogreaders sent questions about the previous posting (monday), so here are my attempts at answering them. Stop reading if you get bored.

Liz wants to know if the same probabilistic argument applies to anyone, e.g. John Lennon? Well no, because the arbitrary person (X) has to have lived long enough ago for The Cosmic Butterfly Of Chaos to have mixed up the atmosphere THOROUGHLY. I guess this is not the case for John Lennon, nor Hitler, maybe Rasputin, more likely Vlad the Impaler or Ghengis Khan, and as we saw 99% for JC ( or any contemporary, like say, Judas Iscariot). Conversely, anyone alive today could be at the receiving end; ALL have the same 99% chance of inhaling such a molecule.

Young blogreader Janet, who will soon be 12 she tells me, asks "So Judas had $$$s in about 33 A.D. What is the oldest money? Who invented the very first money?" As it happens, Janet, we were in Crete in May and learned there that Greeks had the first money, in the form of iron and copper sticks. Why that? Because they could be melted down to make e.g. bronze and iron weapons, and so the money was made of valuable metals. Needing these metals for practical use, Phaidon (King of Argos) introduced silver coins around 700 B.C. And oh yes, he just happened to own a silver mine ;-) Terry Pratchett fans will be delighted to know that these silver coins were cast with a tortoise/turtle picture on them :-) Gold coins did not make an appearance until around 560 B.C. when they were introduced by King Croesus of Lydia (guess which kind of mine HE owned, Janet ;-)

Another young blogreader, Thorsten (14), asks "Why do we have money, why not just swap things like we do in the school playground?" Oh, wow, Thorsten, that is a deep question and there are a lot of facets to answer. I'll try to keep it simple :-)

Money enables (swap) transactions to be made independent of space and time. If you want to swap A for B you have to find (space) someone with a B who is willing to swap at time T exactly when you want to part with A which your swap-partner wants. You can then haggle about perceived values of A and B. But if you sell A for an amount of money M_a at time T_a, you can then buy B for an amount of money M_b at time T_b independent of the first transaction. OK, so you have to haggle over values twice, but you have the benefit of the transactions being separated in time. And now the two transactions can be with different people and so don't even have to be in the same place (spatially independent).

And if we had X things potentially to swap for Y other things, then we would need to keep a table of size X * Y of swap-pair values. But with money, we only need to know the vales of X and Y things and so have to know X + Y buying/selling values. Let X = Y = 1000, then this is 2000 compared with 1,000,000 for swapping. So money is more efficient in this sense. But if money makes you independent of time it must retain its value. This is why money was initially based on commodity values (e.g. the gold standard). But if the commodity turns out to have more value than the face value of the coins, people will just melt down the coins. This is happening in India now!

It took a long while for people to trust Fiat rather than commodity money. Fiat doesn't mean the car maker here, it comes from the Latin and means "Let there be". Fiat money is e.g. paper money issued by governments and only retains its value as long as the government is stable. Which is why the money in Zimbabwe is inflating at an incredible rate these very days. Inflation is a bad thing, it means you get less value for your money in the future than you did in the past, so you're losing out :-( Also coins and paper money need to be durable to retain value, I forgot to mention that.

To make money independent of space (distance) it needs to be portable, so coins should be small and light, as should paper money. Coins and paper need to be fungible, that means all have the same value and are interchangeable ( so you don't get ripped off by exchange rates). This was one reason for introducing the Euro in Europe. Money has to be durable while you are transporting it too, some countries (e.g. Australia) are now making their money out of plastic to make it more durable!

And because this standardised money now has a value, it has to be made difficult to counterfeit. This is why higher value coins have rippled edges, so crooks can't shave a little bit off each and recast the shavings into counterfeit coins. Similarly, detailed patterns are stamped into the coins - and watermarks etc into the notes - to make them harder to copy. I refer you to my blog article about the Mint in Stolberg.

These are the kinds of money referred to as legal tender. There is another kind too, credit money. Credit is a claim against someone that he/she pay for something. It's different in that it is not payable on demand and indeed people may default on it :-( Widespread defaults and/or foreclosures cause us to distrust banks (and vice versa). Abuse of credit arrangements caused the Great Depression in the 1930's, I learned.

As is obvious from the elementary explanation given above, I am NOT an economist. Those of you who are economists (Hans-Georg, Gudrun, Stefan etc) are welcome to mail me their comments and explanations; but remember to pitch them at a teenager (Thorsten). I will then add them as appendices to this posting.

BTW: Thanks to all of you who told me that my blog was not reachable on monday. The hiatus is over now; I had to rearrange our website to get around a file-count and volume limitation on the server. It took me several hours just to upload the 300 MB that is this website. Thankyou for your patience :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 18th July 2007 at 06:18 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Those 30 pieces of silver

Jewish acquaintance Ehud loves money. You could say he's a new miser no, a numisma..., he collects old coins ;-) He has some like the one shown here. It is from Jerusalem and dates from the first century B.C. - the lettering says it is from the reign of King Herod - & they were found in Herod's grave. Worth $50 now.

Given that there was a limited number of coins in circulation in Jerusalem around 33 A.D. there is a small but non-negligible chance that this coin was one of the 30 pieces of silver to pass through the sticky little hands of Judas Iscariot. How about that?

Ehud, this reminds me of a magnificent skit in one of the Black Adder TV series. Lord Percy pulls out a velvet pouch containing a piece of religious memorabilia - I forget which - while Baldrick and Black Adder are whittling pieces of wood to sell off as Relics of The One True Cross™ ;-) Combining history, maths and religious lessons at school, and given the amount of religious memorabilia in circulation in the middle ages, as schoolboys we once estimated that The One True Cross™ must have weighed well over 20,000 tons (upper estimate). Our lower estimate was of course 666 tons ;-)

But Ehud may indeed have a genuine religious relict. It is possible. And while we are on the subject of probabilities, have you ever asked yourselves the question "What are the odds that one of the molecules in your lungs right now was once in the lungs of Jesus Christ Himself (assuming he existed, of course)?". You too may still have some religious memorabilia on your person; just don't inhale again though, Bill ;-)

Let's do the number crunching. There are around W = 10⁴⁴ molecules of air in the world. Jesus may have exhaled J = 2.2 * 10²² of them in His Lifetime™. The probability that any given molecule once was in His lungs is thus J/W. And the probability that it wasn't is 1 - J/W. Let us further assume that over the last 2000 years all the molecules of the air have been thoroughly mixed up (thanks here are due to The Cosmic Butterfly Of Chaos™ ). If L (for lungful) is the number of air molecules you inhale with each breath, then the probability that none of those were ever in His lungs would be [1-J/W]^L. You - or indeed atheist I - inhale about L = J = 2.2 * 10²² too. Thus the probability of one of your inhaled air molecules actually having been in Jesus' lungs is the complement of the above: 1 - [1-J/W]^L. Plugging in the numbers, we see the chances are about 99% ! How about that Liz? Just don't breathe out!

Meanwhile, the local RC city of Paderborn is tuning up for the festival of St. Liborius, celebrated by parading his old bones through the city; Relic of the Middle Ages :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 16th July 2007 at 06:16 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Caution : Low Ceilings

Having spent a quarter century as an instructor for a local flying club, let me say something to all you fair-weather flyers. When you are standing on the ground looking up, this low scud probably looks VFR-flyable to you optimists.

But when you are in the crud, shooting an approach to minima - maybe WITHOUT the help of an NDB at the outer marker 4 miles behind you - the weather will not be the only thing that is damp. So do NOT go scud-running, lass! You know who you are!

Whilst on the subject of low ceilings : this site has been experiencing intermittant FTP upload problems. We appear to be nearing some (the provider's?) ceiling, either on the number of objects on the site (almost 8192) or on the volume of those objects (about 300 MB). My provider has just stated (friday) that the server for my domain is not actually near capacity, but blogging may be light whilst I try to solve the problem. I've compressed some big JPGs more and taken some videos offline to post this...

'Normal' service may then be resumed etc etc (don't hold your breath) ...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 15th July 2007 at 06:15 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

A Prototype Steampunk Deep-Time Clock

My very good friend Norbert - curator of the world's largest computer museum - sent me this photo of their steampunk eternity machine (in spe). There are 12 shafts, each bearing a worm gear and a 50-tooth cogwheel. The little electric motor at lower right turns the first wormgear. The cogwheel below it thus turns but once for each 50 revolution of the worm (and the electric motor). The lower cog is on the same shaft as a (hidden) wormgear which thus turns the second cogwheel. Following these twelve 50:1 reductions we get the following list of slowly turning shafts, intended to give us a feeling for geological timespans (i.e. deep-time).

1. cogshaft turns once every 15 Seconds 
2. cogshaft turns once every 12.5 Minutes
3. cogshaft turns once every 10.4 Hours
4. cogshaft turns once every 21.7 Days
5. cogshaft turns once every 2.97 Years
6. cogshaft turns once every 148.5 Years
7. cogshaft turns once every 7427 Years
8. cogshaft turns once every 371,000 Years
9. cogshaft turns once every 18.5 Million Years
10. cogshaft turns once every 928 Million Years
11. cogshaft turns once every 46.4 (US-)Billion (109) Years
12. cogshaft turns once every 2.3 (UK-)Billion (1012)Years

But is it Steampunk? No, because it uses an electric motor. Be that as it may, will it even fulfill its intended calender function? No. And not just because today is Friday the Thirteenth. Over such long periods of time, we must consider failure modes. Look, we already have multi-thousand year calenders (not the 7th cogshaft), think Stonehenge or similar, all - for very good reasons - without any moving parts. The mains electricity here fails 1.2 times per year (MTBF) for 22 minutes (MTTR). And so you would need a battery-supported UPS to bridge over those dropouts. Someone would need to change half those UPS batteries every couple of years. And it seems no provision has been made to lubricate the bearings automatically over those 2+ billion years, so someone is going to have to be tasked to do this lest the gearbox seize up. Have they budgeted for a 2.3 billion year payroll for this person? What a sinecure!

In summary, I would believe a six-shaft version of this, but not this twelve-shaft reduction gearbox with an overall ratio of 50¹² = 244,140,625,000,000,000,000 : 1. The idea of building a deep-time clock is wierdnice, but not thought through properly.

Friday the 13th : and still, the Worm (Níðhöggr) turns, turns, turns . . .

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 13th July 2007 at 06:13 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

RIP Donald Michie

Sadly, I report the death of Donald Michie at age 84.

Although he and I worked in the same fields - albeit a generation apart - we met but twice. He too worked in cryptography, in fact he was one of the team that broke Tunny at Bletchley Park. Tunny was their name for the Lorenz XOR (Vernam) machine used by Hitler for his staff messages. It would have been secure if it had used One Time Pads for the keystring as originally intended. But they ran into the problem of OTP key-management (as you always do with traffic of any considerable volume) and used a pseudo-random keystring instead; the weak point that let Bletchley Park break into Tunny.

Later Donald wrote a handful of books about Artificial Intelligence, as did I. In fact at one stage we even had the same UK publisher (Ellis Horwood); small world, isn't it. We met again as panellists at an AI conference in the 1980's and got to talking shop backstage. We talked about heuristics for pruning search-trees and I asked if he knew of anything better than alpha-beta for pruning trees. I remember he said "Big trees will be the death of us", meaning of course the AI search problem. But just a few days ago - in another sense - a big tree has been the death of him when his car ran off the road and hit a tree. His ex-wife Dame Anne McLaren (80) - herself a leading geneticist - died in the same accident. Two very fruitful lives. May they rest in peace.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 11th July 2007 at 06:11 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

F f F(4) : Weathercock-welders' dilemma

Sunday afternoon, and I was lazing in the garden hammock when my subconscious broke into my dreamy haze saying "There's something not quite right with the weathercock". Look at the photos and try to spot it too.

My Form follows Function warn signal alarm had gone off again. I must presume that the welder who built the weathercock welded the four arms of the compass directions onto the vertical pole first. Then he/she welded on the letter O (Ost is German for East), turned the arms 90° around the vertical axis, welded on the letter N, turned again, welded on the letter W, turned again and finally welded on the letter S.

Be that as it may, the result of these 90° turns is that when looked at from the easterly side (left photo), the letter N is mounted correctly but the letter S is welded on back-to-front :-( However, that when looked at from the west side (right photo), the letter S is mounted correctly but the letter N is welded on back-to-front :-(

But a moment's thought showed that if the welder had deliberately mounted one letter (say the N) back-to-front, then he/she would have welded a weathercock compass which reads correctly only from the western side, but has both the letter N and S back-to-front when seen from the east. Equally inacceptable, methinks . . .

Having seen there was no way out of this wrought-iron dilemma other than using two-sided boards with letters painted separately on each side, I dozed off again, gentle blog-readers, and will try to come up with a better example of misbegotten design for you next time. Ah well, back to dozing peacefully in the hammock . . .

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 10th July 2007 at 06:10 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Form follows function(3)

Today's example is one of counter-intuitive, piss-poor design which is obviously just wrong. It should really be entitled "Form follows Function (NOT)"!!!

It is the door to the drug store in a neighbouring village. The left side door bears NO handle and this is the optical hint for you to PUSH that half to open it. Some similar doors bear a metal plate, which gives the same hint. The right side door bears a hook shaped handle and this is the optical hint for you to PULL that half to open it. But look at the doors' respective labelling. The left door reads Ziehen, which means PULL and the right door reads Drücken, which means PUSH. What stupid person designed this misbegotten entrance? Sheesh!! What an idiot!

Now if they just moved the handle over to the left door and put a plate on the right door, there would be no need to label them Push or Pull, the optical clues would be sufficient. So I suggested this to the store manageress, and after DEEP cogitation she said words to the effect "But that's a right door handle, it wouldn't fit on a left door.". Sigh!! I couldn't help but burst out "So just turn it upside down", which prompted the reply "The door or the handle?". Sheesh, some mothers do have 'em!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 9th July 2007 at 06:09 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Oh, Crap! :-(

Me (ironically) : "Guaranteed the best way to find any puppy-poo deposited in the house is to walk around in the house barefoot :-("
Neighbour (sympathetically) : "Oh dear, poo(r) you. And how often has this shit happened?"
Me (adopting a fake Irish accent) : "Turd time now, bejasus ;-)"

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 8th July 2007 at 06:08 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Why we NEED Artificial Intelligence ;-)

Regular readers of this blog will know that I often despair for the mental powers of much of the human race. Not just Dubya, but ordinary folks too. Here's a photo sent to me by my friend Olaf. Look at it and sigh with me!

These construction workers really take the biscuit. They drove up to the site with the instructions to put in pollards to stop cars parking in this corner next to the pedestrian zone. And since absolutely no parking is allowed either on the street (at the bottom of the photo) nor in the pedestrian precinct (on the left) they parked their van out of the way. They they cast the pollards in concrete set in the paving stones, and took a break whilst waiting for the concrete to set. Then they cleared up the site before they said "Oh, damn, we've parked ourselves in!"

And the next day a dozen motorcycles and scooters parked there anyway. Sigh!

. . . Not to forget the 'experts' from the village fire brigade . . .

This post was written using MS Word for Blondes 1.0 ;-)

American girls may prefer to buy the Brit version, advertised as "Rubber included" ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 7th July 2007 at 06:07 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Form follows function(2)

Last month's piece about 'How the TARDIS works' brought me lots of flak that it was too difficult to understand, and why don't I do some simpler stuff in July? OK, off we go!

So this month I'm doing several simple pieces with examples of excellent design, viz. 'form follows function'. Back on July 2nd I showed you some well-designed motorcyclists' gloves. Today a simple but functional chair. It was made for us by an Alaskan Red Indian in the nomadic tradition of his people. Basically it's just a 7 foot plank cut into two, three bits cut out, and the bottom edges chamfered to be level. There are no nails used and no glue, it's simply just one halved plank of wood. The piece with the narrower tongue (the rear leg) is then stuck through the hole cut out in the 'back' piece. And behold, you have a (surprisingly stable and comfortable) chair! And the nomadic tradition? Just pull out the 'seat' part and you have just two plank halves for easy transport! Oh, and the design on the back was sandblasted in, they are wolf's footprints :-) Now isn't that a genially simple and functional design?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 6th July 2007 at 06:06 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

The UK Jihadists' demo dilemma

My eFriend 4D, a UK blogging original, recently had a very good post about one UK muslim woman's (pro-jihad!) reaction to the Glasgow bombings. He (4D) asks a very good question : why don't we see UK Muslims protesting against jihadic terror in the UK? Could it be they are for it? Or just cowards?

Are there any of the so-called 'moderate' muslim Brits in the UK? If so, they are in a dilemma. Assume that a demo against islamic terror was organised (e.g. by an MP or a christian). Would any UK muslims attend? Many so-called 'moderates' would be too scared of the radicalised islamics in their own ranks to attend. And those who did attend would be marked men. But still, assume there was a large moslem attendance. Then those who did NOT attend would be seen (by MI5 etc) as potential jihadist sympathisers, and put on a watch list. And for this reason - to avoid being put on a watch list - the jihadists would attend the protest demo. And/Or hit it with an IED :-(

I'm with 4D on this one. The UK moslem community need to demonstrate en masse against islamic terrorism and put their country above their religion now, even if it does mean giving up on the chance of getting 72 virgins (rather like moving to Essex ;-)

Update 7/7/7: I am pleased to see that the Muslim Council of Scotland DID organise an anti-islamic-terror demo, as reported here, which [only :-( ] 1500 people attended.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 5th July 2007 at 06:05 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Why celebrate the 4th of July?

L ast year I emailed eleven of my US friends and asked (innocently) why they celebrated the 4th of July. Seven of the 11 replies I got were an indictment of the US educational system. Let me share some of their misconceptions :-

• "because that's the day Jeffersen(sic!) declared independance(sic!) off(sic!) England" : Not true. The Lee Resolution was an act of the Second Continental Congress declaring the Thirteen Colonies to be independent of the Kingdom of Great Britain (NB, NOT just England). It was proposed by Richard Henry Lee (NOT General Robert E. Lee, NOR Thomas Jefferson) of Virginia on June 7, 1776 and passed by Congress on July 2nd (NOT July 4th).
• "because that's the day the 13 states' delegates signed Jefferson's Declaration of Independance" : Not true. That is merely the date agreement on the text was reached. Most of the delegates actually signed it on August 2nd. Although the polymath Jefferson was mainly instrumental in providing input, the actual text was proposed by a 5 man committee. And the delegates were from the 13 colonies (not yet states) until the declaration was signed.
• "that's when we became independent of England(sic) as you can see in Turnbull's famous painting." : Actually he was called Trumbull, John Trumbull. And even though the painting was named 'Declaration of Independence' what it shows is a fiction. The set of people shown in the painting never actually came together. What it actually shows is the five-man drafting committee (Sherman, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Livingston) presenting their proposed text.
• "because that's when we wrang(sic!) the Liberty Bell to become free." : The Liberty Bell was not certainly NOT rung to celebrate Independence Day for the simple reason that the belltower had fallen into disrepair. Nor did it crack upon the reading of the Declaration on July 8; that story comes from a children's book of fiction, 'Legends of the American Revolution', by George Lippard. Anyway, the Liberty Bell was not so named until the nineteenth century.
• "that's when the Prez shot down the Marshans(sic!)" : You can't be serious!
• "because that's when we became the United States" : Rubbish. You became the United States (i.e. a single republic) on September 17th 1787 (the current name was finalized on November 15th 1777, when the Second Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation) , when a federal convention adopted the Constitution (actually the following year, when it was ratified).
• "'cos we were the first to stand up and declare ourselves independent of England!" : Also not true. We Scots did this on April 6th 1320, over 450 years before you did and over 170 years before Columbus even found the place! The latin document - still extant - is known as The Declaration of Arbroath. So there!

Well that's what I learned in my (UK) school's history classes anyway. YMMV.
Myth America strikes again ;-) But to be fair, the other four of you got it right.
Educational comments are welcome; hate-mails will simply be discarded ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 4th July 2007 at 06:04 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Goodbye US Justice, you are no more :-(

Presnit Bush - world champion asshole - has arbitrarily commuted Libby's sentence so that he no longer has to go to prison, CNN reports. These turds in the White House no longer have any respect for the justice system - if they ever did. And I fully expect all the Democraps to lay down and do nothing in response as usual. What is it that makes them so spineless? I am speechless with rage!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 3rd July 2007 at 06:03 CEST permalink Comments Email

---

Form follows function(1)

R ecently my thin summer motorcycle gloves gave up the ghost, so I went out and bought a new pair. They are an excellent example of form-follows-function, having been designed with extra features. Look at the photos here.

In both photos you can see that the gloves are constructed pre-curved for holding a handlebar. This makes for less creases and folds on the inside, making for a smooth grip. Then there is tough resistant leather on the outside (black) and soft kangaroo leather on the palms, making for a hapticly pleasant grip. Along the side of the index finger on the left glove is a strip of rubber, it is the wiper for cleaning rain, insects etc from the visor of your helmet; a neat additional feature. Not there of course on the right glove, since this stays on the bar holding the throttle open ;-)

Should you fall off - as I have done once every decade - you instinctively spread your hands palm down. This is NOT a good idea on asphalt, since the hand could stick there, breaking bones in the hand etc. And so the outer ball of each palm is fitted with slippery studs so that your hand is not stopped by the asphalt but slides along instead. The studs are carbon (non-metallic) so that the frictional heat of sliding is not conducted through the glove to your skin.

An internal rubber band around the wrist prevents (most) rain getting in. However, these are thin summer gloves without the insulating membrane of my rain-gloves. They are not intended to be storm/rain-proof. So I sprayed them with silicon so that they can resist a light shower. There is also a little transparent pocket, intended methinks for a small card giving your blood-group and home phone number, just in case. All in all, a well-designed product for just €79 the pair. Value for money! :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2nd July 2007 at 06:02 CEST permalink Comments Email

---