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Stu Savory's Blog
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Wednesday, March 30, 2005
Sumer is icumen in - Lhudë sing, cuccu! Got a three requests to fulfill today. Your wishes are my command, so here they are :-)
P.S : Happy 60th birthday today, Eric Clapton, my #4 guitarissimo. Tuesday, March 29, 2005
Told you so!Well I didn't, originally, but Michael Moore did. So I'm reporting this second-hand from the German press for my American readers, in case their press suppress the story. CNN at least is NOT covering the story. BTW, the word "Pravda" translates as "Official Truth" :-)The German news magazine "Focus" reports that new secret FBI documents have surfaced which confirm that Bush helped the Bin-Laden clan to flee the US after 911. The article states that on White House orders high-ranking FBI agents escorted two high-ranking Saudi families to leave the US on private jets, despite there being a "100%" ban on flying just after 911. "Focus" reports that a civil rights group called "Judicial Watch" went to court to get the secret documents released, and has sent a copy to the NY Times. So Michael Moore is confirmed right and George 'Honest as Jesus' W. Bush is caught lying again. When Dubya was governor of Texas he signed a 'pull-the-plug' law for hopeless cases like that of the Schiavo body. Now he tries to effect the opposite. What a hypocrite the man is! But of course, Dubya is not the only hypocrite in DC. Tom DeLay who wants to keep the Schiavo body alive, pulled the plug on his own father! At least the Schiavo thing is backfiring on W & Co! Now I'm over 60, maybe it's time to replace my old biker tatoo (which reads O Rh+) by a chest-wide one saying Do not resuscitate, and avoid countries which disregard such instructions. Monday, March 28, 2005
Lent LinksEmpty-brained, today. Nothing creative inside for me to blog. So I'll just fall back on the links I borrowed from various others during the run-up to Easter. Since I borrowed them from their (sometimes unwitting) authors, they're called Lent Links ;-) Here are my top 10 for today.
Sunday, March 27, 2005
ANR : Airplane Noise Reduction One of my pleasures in this
life has been that of teaching people to fly.
Whether it be basic training, instruments, emergency rehearsals
or aerobatics, it's been a pleasant quarter-century plus, but a loud one.
An airplane cockpit is a less than ideal classroom, due to the noise levels.
Student pilots may not notice this at the time because they only do 45 minute
lessons usually. But as an instructor you're in this often hot and sweaty (summertime),
noisy, tight space for several hours a day.
The noise-level gets you :-(
So I always make a point of wearing a headset, preferably the ANR (automatic-noise-reduction) kind, which are worth the extra money. Regular headsets may manage about 22 dB noise reduction. ANR may give you up to 12 decibels more noise reduction :-) ANR uses a neat trick. Tiny microphones in each of the earpieces sample the impinging noise. Their external-noise sample signal is then amplified and phase-inverted before being fed to the headset membranes ("loudspeakers"). The phase-inversion cancels out the impinging external-noise quite a bit (i.e. those extra 12 dB). Speech signals from the radio and navigation gear (morse) signals are not attenuated, and so are more easily understood. ANR has been THE major improvement in headset design in all the decades I've been flying and it's worth protecting your hearing! Today's disco-kids with their loud, loud, loud techno-beat substitute-for-music will regret it later! But quality costs money. The Bose headset X, for example runs at € 1079 to &euro 1218. So I thought I'd recommend some cheaper ANR alternatives today to any pilots or wannabees reading this blog. The Lightspeed 20XLc or their 3G model cost about € 650. The Sennheiser HMEC 45 KA with ANR costs € 630. Going downscale again, the Flightcom Classic ANR only costs €398 . But by far and away the cheapest is Sky Traveller's ST250 ANR which goes for only €329 . Neverthless the ST250 has an extra socket for you to plug in e.g. a mobile phone; and it weighs in at only 420 gramms, not much more than the 340 gramms of the Bose X which costs thrice the money. You pays your money and you takes your choice. But I recommend all flyers (also passengers in small planes) to wear earplugs or a headset, preferably an ANR headset. Why did I mention the weight of the headsets as being important? Well lets say we're doing some sharp aerobatics and pulling upto 6g in a tight loop (any more and you'd black out). This means that a 1 lb. headset appears to weigh 6 lbs. That's in addition to the 6 times the weight of your own head. Get yourselves some strong neck muscles for those aerobatics, folks! Saturday, March 26, 2005
Ariadne's (absentmindedness) thread :-)Y.A.D.S = Yet Another David (Scotland), a schoolboy who has appeared often in this blog, enjoyed yesterday's story about absent-minded academics and wants more on ('moron', geddit?) the subject. I think David is just looking for something to tease his teachers!Well let me thread these together David. You may have heard of Ariadne's thread, used for finding your way through a maze. Basically it enabled Ariadne to do what is called a depth-first search of the whole maze. Go into the maze, always turning left at a new fork, trailing a thread of where you've been behind you. If at a fork you find your own thread (i.e. you've already been at this fork) take the right fork (or next-left if it is a multiway junction). This is for example how a PROLOG (an AI language) interpreter works. PROLOG stands for PROgramming in (first order predicate) LOGic. Stop reading now and try to work out when this algorithm fails. Being aware of this method, Norbert Wiener - the Father of Cybernetics - often used to wander around the corridors at MIT, deep in concentration, with his nose in a book. To avoid getting lost and to find his office (eventually!) he would keep one hand sliding along a wall of the corridor. However, during one hot summer day someone lecturing a class left the door open, so there would be a cooling breeze in the lecture hall. Stop reading now and try to guess what's coming. Norbert Wiener, nose deep in a book, fingers tracking the wall, turned from the corridor into the lecture room, walked all the way around the room's walls - smearing the equations on the blackboard with his wall-tracking fingers as he went - without once looking up, even whilst turning the page in his book, then drifted out of the same door again and continued down the corridor. You can just imagine the consternation of the lecturer and the laughs of the students! Friday, March 25, 2005
Good Friday FeedbackBeni Buess added a belated entry to my Skyline Meme. It was the view from his flat in Zurich.Claude, who blogs over at Blogging in Paris, took a liking to our painted Easter eggs and wrote to me "On a different subject, I don't know a word of German , but I'll just make a guess ;) Would Show us your eggs*! in German refer to some unmentionable part of the male anatomy?" Bingo! Chemist Al Schwartz tells us how to remove the eggs' datestamp before painting. Geeky, Al! Keri also liked our painted Easter eggs, and as for the VW New Beetles wrote "I just saw one of the beautifully painted little floral designs zip through my little town the other night. It was impressive, and the first one I've seen!" Lucky Keri, the Arty-Beetles are relatively rare, it was a small series commissioned for a PR tour back when the New Beetles came out, AFAIK. Writing about maths-books, Keri recommends "The Number Devil", saying "It was a wonderful intro to Fibonacci and Pythagoras, Gauss, Euler, Cantor and on and on and on...." Young Keri also wrote "It isn't only old fogies who are absent-minded, I'll have you know..." and goes on to explain how absent-minded she and her spouse are. But that's nothing compared to the notoriously absent-minded professor Sir Neville Mott (1905-1998). Mott was Cavendish Professor of Physics in Cambridge. Prior to that he had been at Bristol University for a long time. After visiting London one day, Mott took the train back from Paddington to Bristol. Just before he got there, he remembered he was no longer Professor of Physics in Bristol, but Cavendish Professor of Physics in Cambridge. So he took the next train back to London. From there he took the next train leaving for Cambridge. Just before he got there, he remembered he had travelled up to London by car. So he took the next train back to London (again!), found his car and drove to Cambridge. Just before he got there, he remembered that he had been accompanied that morning by his wife ;-) Now THAT is what I call absent-minded, Keri! Graham Lawrence has an inspiring anecdote about Sir Roger Penrose, whose latest book I've been plugging here this last week. Graham wrote " Roger Penrose was a prime mover for me going back to studies. After his (Penrose's) brilliant keynote speech at MedInfo in Geneva some years back I decided that I had to sit for a degree and 5 years later I obtained my BSc Hons in Maths and Computing at the Open University (UK). " Well done, Graham, and all the best for your MBA in Technology Management later this year. Graham also asked me for any anagrams of his full name Graham Lawrence, so I suggested:-
Bob Fairnie (Scotland) wrote to me (in Scots as usual) asking us to
sign a petition:- Canadian blogger Doug McKay wrote "Excellent piece on Verne, which I've linked to (I've written a sort-of follow-on piece in my blog)". Doug tells us all about all those 'hungry-ones' from Mars ;-) He is the third Canadian I now know called Doug, is that a common name there? Similarly, of the people I know at the NSA, no less than four are called David. Is this merely a statistical aberration, or is there something I should know ;-)??? (please, no Zionist conspiracy emails, there was enough ranting hate mail when I knocked those three religions back on tuesday!). Thursday, March 24, 2005
In Memoriam : Jules Verne Centenary Today Jules Verne died 100 years ago today. He was remarkably successful at
extrapolating technical trends and embedding them into what has become
good literature (Sci-Fi).
Cinq semaines en ballon (Five Weeks in a Balloon) was published in 1863 by Hetzel ( a famous publisher, who also published Hugo). It is about the exploration of Africa in a balloon and introduced the readers to the technicalities of ballooning and to the strange world of Africa. This was one of the first non-textbooks containing material of a technical nature, a style of literature heretofore unknown, always assuming that we exclude Ezekiel's description of a nuclear-powered multi-rotor flying saucer in the Bible, sometimes classified as fiction ;-) This success was soon followed by Voyage au centre de la terre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth), which came out in 1864. In the following year (1865) De la terre à la lune (From the Earth to the Moon) appeared. The technology used (a giant gun) would have crushed the occupants of its shell, the spacecraft, but Verne got lots of other details right, e.g. air-supply issues etc. Four years later (1869) Vingt Mille Lieues sous les mers (20,000 Leagues Under the Seas) was published. Verne had been to the World Fair in 1867 and seen one of the first primitive submarines and had extrapolated from what he saw. When - in january of 1954 - the USA launched its first nuclear submarine, it was named - appropriately - Nautilus. Half a century later, Disney named an underwater hero Nemo, also the name of the captain of Verne's Nautilus. Le tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours (Around the World in Eighty Days) first appeared in "Le Temps" in 1872. Today we have rich people attempting Philias Fogg's journey in old-timer (1930-1965) cars in those same 80 days. I wonder what Verne would have thought of Steve Fosset flying around the world alone in just 3 days? Or yachtswoman Dame Ellen MacArthur? In 1863, he wrote a novel called "Paris in the 20th Century" with glass skyscrapers, high-speed trains (TGV?), gas-powered automobiles (the hydrogen car?), calculators (shades of HP?), and a worldwide communications network (WWW?). He hid it well though, and it was not found until 1989(!) by his great-grandson and did not appear until 1994. I still haven't read it :-( Jules Verne is the most translated novelist in the world (148 languages). Some of the early translations were terrible though. Whole passages were cut out to make the story fit the english publisher's format. Political stuff which might have insulted the British Empire(sic!) were removed wholesale. Really good translations did not appear in English until as late as 1965! If you have not yet read any Verne, surf over to the free Jules Verne Virtual Library please. Jules Verne died aged 77 at his home in Amiens where had lived for 18 years, at 44 Boulevard Longueville, (now Boulevard Jules-Verne) on 24th of march 1905. It is now a beautiful museum Maison/Musee Jules Verne which is well worth a visit, I can thoroughly recommend it. And in the unlikely case that I remember correctly, his gravestone (also in Amiens) says something rather inspiring, like "Raise your arm to the heavens, and reach for the stars". Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Show us your eggs*!Gods, am I glad I'm an atheist! I've just been looking at what some of those middle-eastern religions proclaim. Wash your genitals before bending over and showing all the rest of the lads you're prostrate! A traditional mohel sucks the blood from the penises of freshly mutilated children ( killing them in the process!). Virgin(?) priests celebrate barely disguised symbolic cannibalism. And indeed, all of them insisting on being The One True Church®!But this coming weekend we have the festival of the Chocolate Bunny Painting His Eggs and hiding them in the garden for gullible X-ians to find. Now that's a ceremony I could identify with! But I couldn't find it proscribed anywhere in ANY of the Good Books®, maybe it's fiction too? So here are some of our painting efforts, mouse-over for titles and click to see the eggs bigger.
Now why don't YOU paint some eggs too, and put a photo of them in your blog over Easter? * Today's blog-title should NOT be translated back into German! Monday, March 21, 2005
I'm being BUMPed by Sentential Ammo :-)Melanie Mattson, who blogs (usually political) news articles over at Just a Bump in the Beltway is trying out something new, the 5-Question meme. I am one of the 7 chosen to answer a set of 5 questions tailored individually for each of us by her, so here are her "5 questions for Stu" :
Is there one book you've read in the last year which so moved/convinced you that you are pressing it on your friends? Resisting the opportunity to plug any of the books I wrote myself ;-) , I want to cheat here and recommend two books, one fiction, one non-fiction. In the fiction category I can throughly recommend The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, a moving love story, made intricate by the hero leaping uncontrollably and randomly between time-zones. Well worth reading. My non-fiction recommendation, a convincing but difficult book, through which I am steadily working right now, is Roger Penrose's tour-de-force through the world of Physics, entitled The Road to Reality, it has over 1000 pages and weighs over 3 ½ pounds though, however it is not this fact alone which makes it heavy reading, it's doing the exercises ;-) If you could cure one social ill, what would it be? That's a hard question, because there are so many wrongs. I'm torn between writing "poverty" and "ignorance", the latter in the sense of widespread analphabetism and innumeracy. Finally I did indeed choose "ignorance", since fixing that would go quite a way toward fixing the poverty issue, but not necessarily vice versa. Fixing "iggeranz" might also lessen my Bushwhacking too ;-) Listing them from 1 to a maximum of 5, what are the things you want to do before you die? Apart from things I could not possibly finance (like getting off-planet with Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic) I'd go for these five, listed below by desirability, not by their achievability ;-)
The new departmental secretary asks you to recommend a Christmas gift for the new head of the department. What do you suggest? Given an IT career, a book called The Pragmatic Programmer. Or this book, which helped me. Your wife calls you at work and asks you to pick up 7 seven things
from the lebens-mittel-alter (Melanie means a Supermarket, maybe?) on the
way home. You forget 2. What to do? In case you missed it, dear blogreader, 'Sentential Ammo' is my anagram for 'Melanie Mattson'. Sunday, March 20, 2005
A Round Around
Because Sentential Ammo is having trouble distinguishing between homonyms
(e.g. affect/effect, naval/navel, round/around) I thought I'd use one as today's title,
just for clarification. In
Formula 1
the drivers do a single qualifying
lap (=a round) around the circuit. Some of them drive around a round faster than others, which decides
their starting positions in the race. Nevertheless, the race can provide
some surprises, as it did today : Räikkönen's lost tyre (valve defect), Honda
blowing both engines within 3 laps (after they 'cheated' in OZ so as to be
able to use new engines this time), unnecessary collisions (Fisi/Webber), Toyota
performing so well and Schumi sneaking into the points despite those terribly
'wooden' Bridgestone tyres. I hope Ferrari will have the new car and better
tyres for Bahrain, the next race. Mandarin-Rob must be very happy with today's race,
but I wonder how Meg feels,
with 'her' Schumi only 7th? :)
Using the same title "A Round Around", but with a considerable change of subject matter, let me tell you a little about Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) famous book, on the thin excuse that I've just finished re-reading his book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium , this time in the translation by C.G. Wallis (= On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres). Seems I always have to do some preliminary work when reading about the history of science, because when I was taught all that maths, physics,chemistry etc, I never really noted WHEN the facts were discovered. So I don't know which bits of my science knowledge I need to blank out temporarily because it was not known at the time. So I've made myself chronological lists of e.g. famous mathematicians (remembering what they were famous for). Now I can see readily that Copernicus overlapped from Da Vinci to Cardan, and can temporarily blank out anything discovered later. Copernicus was the guy who discovered the heliocentric (sun in the middle) system, with the Earth going around the sun. But he was still convinced that the orbits were round - i.e. circular rather than elliptical. It is interesting to read the painfully detailed step by step explanation of how he came to this mathematical model; he had to make excursions into spherical geometry along the way, even. Detailled tables of right ascensions (e.g. of the 5 naked-eye planets) are given and matches calculated for geocentric and heliocentric models. Precessions of the solstices & equinoxes are explained, as well as the conjunctions & oppositions of sun & moon. From all these observations Copernicus deduced that the heliocentric model makes for easier calculations and is the more accurate model (despite his having circular orbits instead of elliptical ones). However, being afraid of the power of the One True Church®, he kept his book a secret for 36 years until reaching old age. When he did release it, he sent a copy to Pope Paul III, together with a 4 page cover note, explaining that this was only a model to simplify the maths and in no way was he contesting the church's geo-centric view of the universe! Having now worked my way through the history of science up to 1543, my next read will be Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) on Dialogues concerning Two Sciences. All of this is in the name of this being Einstein-Year and my wanting to understand all the discovery steps leading to today and to put myself in a position to better understand Roger Penrose's book "The Road to reality" which I mentioned on 15/3/2005 as being rather (i.e. considerably) difficult to grasp :-( Finally, I'll wrap up with mnemonics for the other two homonyms mentioned :
Friday, March 18, 2005
Yet another Feedback-FridayBetsy Devine does a neat spoof of the book/movie "Powers of 10" by doing a logarithmic flashback from her (US)-billionth-second wedding anniversary. Congratulations Frank and Betsy! Punny things : Jane groaned punnily at my feminist liberal pun ("Hilary-US") yesterday. But I think I'm only a runner-up to Maria's punning excellence. I've always thought that I was a champi(gn)on (fun guy?) at making terrible puns, but over at Alembic, Maria has been telling us about her dentist's appointment with a terrible pun ("My appointment is at 2:30, I'll spell it, tooth hurty!") Groan!! So I'll point you to Pam Ayres gnashty poem Oh! I Wish I'd Looked After My Teeth..., and then ask are you really sure it's a f***ing dental clinic, Maria? Ivan read my post about American Values and refers me to Peter C. Whybrow's new book American Mania: When More Is Not Enough, thanking Rebecca's Pocket for the heads-up on it. "The POW"(?) thanked me for my Stamp of Approval and sent me an Italian cheese label. Jimmy (Scotland) tells me Wallace's Freedom Sword will be on display in New York this year. Referring to my sarcasm about America's gun culture : Joey de Ville (Accordion Guy) provides us with a photo of casual drunken gun use, a sad state of his affairs; Extending my list of 5 gun-downs, Anji Patchwork points out that I missed the story wherein a cat shot its owner! Someone calling himself Bill Gates(?) writes saying scarcely had I complained about the MS browser "I've upped my browser quality, Mr. Gates, so up yours!" than details of the improved IE7 (i.e. SP3?) were leaked onto the web, following the usual MS strategy of blocking market positions for others by claiming what nice things MS may do some day (May...Day, May...Day, May...Day). I'd like to think that was a direct response to my criticism Mr. Gates, but I doubt it ;-) But MS aren't the only people with dumb design errors, NASA is not far behind. I quote Reuters : "NASA hopes to resurrect the ISS gyroscope that shut down on Wednesday by remotely resetting the popped breaker, which is located OUTSIDE the space station" :-( An anonymous student writing from Chicago U. liked my
"Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling In mystic force and magic spelling Celestial sprites elucidate, All my own telling can't relate ....." Gumz, Sri Lanka, is looking for a simple prime-predicting function, I hope he "Fields" a Prize ;-) Robin Kirkey wants less maths and more history lessons and says she reads this blog to get a Yurpean perspective on the US. Well, Robin, you can imagine how pissed off we are at such eminently unsuitable appointments which Bush makes, such as Wolfowitz the Hawk and Bolton the Tactless! I expect both of them read Sam's pages on How to destroy the Earth :-( So far Robin has been the only person to send any polite suggestions for a new name for this blog, being "The Stu-pot : Where IDEAS simmer!" and "Stu-penned-us!". Thanks, Robin. Contrasting with this niceness, an anonymous contributor told me to piss off ! Thursday, March 17, 2005
Attack of the She-Bloggers ? Discrimination!
Discrimination! Just because I'm neither black,
nor female, nor young,
it seems that I'm being discriminated against ;-) Over at Allied, I see
that Jeneane Sessum thinks there may be a
conspiracy plot against black bloggers, female bloggers,
young bloggers etc. by us old white males ;-)
Poppycock! As I wrote in her comments, whether or not you appear in my deliberately short blogroll depends on whether you consistently write good stuff that interests me. It does not depend on the number of your years, or the shape of your chromosomes, or the colour of your skin. We're all pink inside, even if some of your politics aren't (Hiya BryMantra, TwoFlower, Jeb). Shelley Powers has made a sarcastic '50s social-drama Movie poster on the subject. Hilary-US! On a less sarcastic and more serious note, let me present to you extracts from the controversial proposals for a new anti-discrimination law here in Germany. I think it goes a step too far, far exceeding the sensible requirements of the EU anti-discrimination guidelines :-
BTW, My information source today is an article on page 12 of the F.A.Z dated 16/2/2005. Wednesday, March 16, 2005
Better Browsing"What we really want is for things to remain the same but get better" (Sydney J. Harris).An increasing number of people are using Firefox these days. Here is how to improve it :- 
Personally I prefer Opera, even if I don't get to benefit from Meg's Opacity ;-) Opera is fast! As on Monday, I only used 5 "bullets" because as every good cowboy knows, you leave the chamber under the hammer empty just in case the ride gets rough. Following this idea, if you use insecure MSIE, it's like playing Russian Roulette, but with a pistol instead of a revolver ;-) I've upped my browser quality, Mr. Gates, so up yours! Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Any excuse for a relatively PI-eyed party :-)
Yesterday we had two excuses for a party.
First off, March 14th was
Albert Einstein's birthday and this is, after all, Einstein year (which
will be the subject of a relatively mathematical blog-entry at some
later date). Since Einstein spent a considerable amount of his
life in the US, many write his birthdate american
style, i.e. 3.14 ; and so we celebrated
this with a round of drinks at precisely 33 ½
seconds before two a.m., thus getting the timestamp
3.14 1:59:26.5 ;-)
The second excuse was that yesterday
was Although Einstein is mostly remembered for the Theory of Relativity (leading inter alia to E=mc2), he was actually awarded his Nobel Prize for his contribution to Quantum Mechanics. He spent decades at Princeton trying to reconcile Quantum Mechanics with Relativity Theory to get a grand Unified Field Theory, but failed. It was not until the emergence of the 5 String Theories in the 1980s/90s, now combined into M-theory, that this goal appears to be nearing attainment. If you are interested in reading one single book which explains the current state of modern physics, the theory of everything so to say, then I have a tip for you. The newest mighty tome from Sir Roger Penrose (quite possibly nicknamed Mr. Tai Ling by his [chinese?] friends ;-) is called The Road to Reality, ISBN 0679454438. If Albert Einstein were alive, he would have a copy of The Road to Reality on his bookshelf, so would Sir Isaac Newton, it has been said. Having said that, please appreciate that this is NOT an easy book to read. The blurb claims "The number of people in the world who can understand everything in it could probably take a taxi together to Penrose's next lecture". Still, math-friendly readers looking for a substantial and possibly even thrillingly difficult intellectual experience should pick up a copy (carefully--it's over a thousand pages long and weighs nearly 4 pounds). €33.90 at www.amazon.de, folks. If he had been alive to read it, Einstein would have said "How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics" ;-) Now if you are wondering why I think he would have said exactly that, go decode the colours I used for each word using the electronics colour code (as used e.g. on resistors). If that's too much like work, you can just count and write down as a sequence the number of letters in each word of my quotation ;-) Monday, March 14, 2005
Only in America...
My newly unlurked blogreader "Mr.E" works on/near the
Beltway in the good ole US of A. With a pseudonym like that,
probably in this building, I surmise
from his IP.
"Mr.E" didn't take kindly to my
remarks on 'US values', and so
combined his 'position statement' with a reply to the
'Am I boring you'
question, and sent me this form (shown above/left) for my
future feedback questionnaires :-) So I thought I'd share it with the rest of you ;-)
He also suggested that I : a) get a life and b) rename this blog. He suggested I choose between this and this ;-) So please mail me your suggestions for a new name for this blog :-) On the other hand he did include a (copy of a) much more humourous list of objections to US lifestyles, as seen by an American (author unknown, to me). I quote it verbatim for y'all :- 1. Only in America......can a pizza get to your house faster than an ambulance. 2. Only in America......are there handicap parking places in front of a skating rink. 3. Only in America......do drugstores make the sick walk all the way to the back of the store to get their prescriptions while healthy people can buy cigarettes at the front. 4. Only in America......do people order double cheese burgers, large fries, and a diet Coke. 5. Only in America......do banks leave both doors to the vault open and then chain the pens to the counters. 6. Only in America......do we leave cars worth thousands of dollars in the driveway and put our useless junk in the garage. 7. Only in America......do we use answering machines to screen calls and then have call waiting so we won't miss a call from someone we didn't want to talk to in the first place. 8. Only in America......do we buy hot dogs in packages of ten and buns in packages of eight. 9. Only in America......do we use the word 'politics' to describe the process so well: Poli' in Latin meaning 'many' and 'tics' meaning 'bloodsucking creatures'. 10. Only in America......do they have drive-up ATM machines with Braille lettering.To which I might add, looking at JUST ONE DAY's news articles about America :-
Friday, March 11, 2005
Friday & time for your Feedback :-)Several of you wrote more condolences about the loss of our dog. Thankyou. Keri sent me a copy of Auden's dirge "Funeral Blues"; that's the one that Matthew read for Garreth in the film "Four Weddings And a Funeral". I replied by pointing her to Leo Marks' poem. Sherri, who blogs from Houston, Texas constructed this beautiful picture of the Rainbow Bridge, which had Cornelia and I weeping again. Thanks, Sherri for the work you put in for us. Doris sent a photo of her pup's first encounter with a young visitor :-) We have to stop moping and get a new pup, she says. Well the new pup is in the pipeline (aka womb) so should be here in July. I'm looking forward to that and will doubtless blog effusively about her. Forgive me in advance :-) Rachel(NY,NY) commented on my blog about Medieval Moneylending saying that surely the Magna Carta wasn't just about regulating Jewish debts, and would I quote the famous bits. OK. "Nullus liber homo capiatur, vel imprisonetur, aut disseisiatur, aut utlagetur, aut exuletur, aut aliquo modo destruatur, nec super eum ibimus, nec super eum mittemus, nisi per legal judicium parium suorum vel per legem terre. Nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus aut differemus rectum aut justiciam." But I suspect, Rachel, that you would prefer an English
translation :-) So I'll try that :- I wrote to "Dave", pseudonym for a UK policeman, asking him to blog about the new UK report on racialism there, and am looking forward to reading the opinions (and comments) in his blog. Mandarin Meg added her photos to the Dorian Gray Meme. Michael liked the stamp of approval, and sent his version of the Windsor wedding photo. Very little response to the question Am I boring you?. WTF? About 50:50 on people wanting more / wanting less maths. History lessons are boring to the non-UK contingent, but welcomed by the UK readers it seems. One prefers more stream-of-conciousness stuff. BTW, Carl sent me a scan of a letter I wrote to him some 33 years ago. Either it was my first attempt at stream-of-conciousness stuff, Carl, or I was high when I wrote it; it reads very embarrassingly nowadays, both ways ;-) Two of you pointed out that I used to be funnier and the last humourous posting was on Valentine's day. Yeah, I'm still getting over our dog's death. Sorry. In the meantime, please go read Doug Alder's Blog, Doug posts humourous drivel about every other day, OK? Five of you, all on dialup, complained about loading times of this blog. Especially the February 2005 blog contained too many photos, really slowing things down. So I'm going back to writing more text this month and to hiding any photos behind links, which also open a second window so you don't lose the blog-entry. Those using Firefox could also write a regular expression to stop loading the page at the first occurrence of the word "permalink"; that'd just get you the most recent entry. Any and all inline graphics/pix are equipped with height and width parameters so the text-loading doesn't have to wait for the pix. Let me know if these improvements work, please. I suppose blogging every other day instead of daily would help ;-) Thursday, March 10, 2005
Stamp of Approval
Well it seems that Len Cook (England's Registrar General)
has given his stamp of approval to the wedding of
Charles (Winsel) to Camilla (Porky-Bowels), as has H.M's post office,
who have issued a 30p inland-postage stamp (shown left) and another
stamp, for overseas mail, labelled 68 (at
their age, they couldn't quite manage 69, maybe? ;-) Mr. Cook
rejected 11 Caveats, it has been reported.
Most of the Caveats focussed on the 1836 and 1949 English Marriage Acts. These are alleged to ban members of the Royal Family from marrying in civil ceremonies. Len Cook deemed otherwise. It is instructive to look at marriage laws, beginning in the medieval timeframe which I used yesterday. 12th century church law required consent (freely given) of two over-twelves (not 16,18 or even 21 as variously used today). However couples should not be related nearer than 7 degrees (i.e. not share a great5-grandparent). This meant that almost all marriages were formally speaking, incestual, as people didn't move around much in those days. Incidentally, half of all Americans nowadays still live within 50 miles of their birthplace. So in the 13th century Pope Innocent III reduced the limit from 7 to just 4 degrees, as the definition of incest. In 1537 the then Pope reduced the limit to 2 (just for South American Indians). The reduction to 2 was introduced for blacks(sic!) in 1897. Indeed it was not until 1917 that the Pope reduced the limit to 2 (i.e. no shared grandparents) for all other Roman Catholics. Innocent III's papal interdiction (1208-1214) meant that the
clergy could not marry people in a church. Wily English priests got around this by marrying people outside
at the church gate :-) Still to this day many old English churches
have magnificent roofed gates, so that the wedding party
were kept dry :-) The church accepted a free exchange of vows, without needing a priest. The
husband merely gave his wife e.g. a knife as dower. In fact the
church's law (lover's charter) was still law in England until 1753.
In 1753 England's Parliament required a priest to perform the
ceremony, and the pair to be both over 21, and that the consent
of parents be given. However, the old law remained in force in
Scotland, which led to the tradition of juveniles (over sixteens) eloping
across the border, Gretna Green being the first
scottish village. Should Len Cook have prohibited the royal marriage by English law, the royal couple would have still had the Gretna Green option, marrying under ancient Scottish law, & screw the Caveats :-) Wednesday, March 9, 2005
Medieval Moneylending / Early English Anti-SemitismOver at Electrolite there has been considerable discussion about Vox Day's blog-article on the "mental pollution of feminism" and (somewhat less) on a Vox Day's blog-article entitled "The merits of anti-semitism", in which he wrote:- "I’d never understood how the medieval kings found it so easy to get the common people to hate the Jews in their midst."Vox Day is a nom-de-plume of the Christian author Theodor Beale, based on the latin words vox dei (the voice of God). Since I probably payed more attention in school history lessons (pace Geoff Partington) than Brother Beale did, I can tell you what I learned about early English anti-semitism and medieval moneylending, as I promised to do in the comments over at Electrolite. Jews first came to England in the wake of the Norman conquest (1066), AFAIK there were none in anglo-saxon Britain. Many settled in London, where there is still an area known as Old Jewry. Then, Old Jewry consisted of a synagogue and the Jews' houses, near to Cheapside, the busiest market of all England at that time. There were about 5,000 jews in England at the time of King John I (1215, the year of the Magna Carta), with small communities in Cambridge, Canterbury, Gloucester, Lincoln, Northampton, Winchester (the first English capital city) and York. However, the only Jewish cemetary was at Cripplegate, which was just outside the walls of the city of London. This meant that until 1177 the smelly decomposing bodies of dead Jews had to be carted all the way through England to Cripplegate. Since the cart-trains were the only means of 'public transport' (people travelled together for safety's sake), you can imagine the smell didn't make them very popular. This was given as one reason for early anti-semitism. However, in 1177 King Henry II allowed the Jews to build cemetaries outside every city in England. The site of the medieval Jewish cemetary at York is indeed still called Jewbury! Jews were basically restricted to only one profession, that of money-lending, which they almost monopolised. There were very few Christian money-lenders, there being a passage in the Bible which can be read as forbidding the taking of interest, rather similar to Islamic Banks nowadays. With their interest rate being a penny per pound per week (=22% per year), sometimes tuppence (=44% per year) and for very risky loans even three pence per pound per week (=66% !!!) they were rich very soon. And envied for it of course, because they didn't have any strenuous work to do like the English farmers or dirty work like many tradespeople. When Thomas of Monmouth (a monk) wrote a book accusing the Jews of the ritual murder of a Norwich lad called William, tempers rose. William became a martyr and saint, and the Jews needed protection, initially in the abbey at Bury-St-Edmunds which had a large jewish debt. Everyone had to enforce their own debts up to the 11th century. But the Jews, having lent much money to the kings' war-chests, negotiated to have royal officials/soldiers collect their debts for them. This was done with more force than an individual person could do, and led to even less popularity. Anyone who died with a debt to the Jews had it enforced immediately and the widow and children were turfed out of their property. There was an anti-semitic riot in London in 1189 because of this. In 1190 many Jews' places were plundered by the mob, who saw it a way of reclaiming the taxes raised to pay for the crusades. During John's reign he tripled the taxes! Feelings ran so high, that the issue of jewish debt collection is even regulated in the Magna Carta. Paragraph 10 reads (translated from the Latin) : "If anyone who has borrowed from the Jews ... dies before the debt is paid, it shall not carry interest as long as the heir is under age...". And paragraph 11 reads :- "And if a man dies owing a debt to the Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing of that debt ...", this to avoid the long-term compound interest squabbles. Just 75 years later (1290) King Edward I went even further; he expelled all the Jews from his country. They were not allowed to return until the times of Oliver Cromwell. It was not just in England that there was anti-semitism. Philip Augustus of France who came to the throne in 1180 immediately expelled the Jews from Paris. Returning from the Crusades (against the Muslim Saladin, AFAIK) he burned 80 at the stake and confiscated all their goods. That would have been in 1192. In the Magna Carta year (1215) Pope Innocent III decreed that Jews and Muslims were "to be distinguished by their dress". In 1218 in England it was ordered that Jews wear "two strips of white linen on their breast". 720 years later, Hitler insisted on the yellow star. The english king (Henry III ?) would however excuse Jews from wearing the papal white strips against payment of considerable monies, so the Jews got burnt both ways, both literally and financially. Is that enough background info, Mr. Beale? You understand now? A little goy's education helps. Tuesday, March 8, 2005
Irritating American "Values"
At friday's SNI'ce Riders motorcycle
club night, a Triumph rider said
"Lot of bright people here tonight", and quick as a flash I replied
"Yeah, no Harley guys!" ;-) When the laughter subsided, I was
accused of being latently anti-american, it being well known how Dubya pisses me off.
Friends demanded I give one or two examples of everything I kvetch about,
so here is a short list for you to reflect on your personal values.
I suppose I could classify these points according to whether
And yet many good friends of mine are US Americans, noble exceptions to the 'values' above :-) E.G. Many of the beautiful condolence mails about my late dog were from the USA (Hi, Sherri). "There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong." (G.K.Chesterton) Monday, March 7, 2005
Am I boring you?
First the good news. Back on
January 18th 2004 this blog was stumbling
along at 23 hits/day. Nowadays it rolls along at just over 300/day.
The bad news is that then people were spending about 1 ½
minutes per visit, nowadays the average has dropped to just 35 seconds,
Sitemeter reports.
Just for comparison : readers of the top 10 blogs spend only 37
seconds per visit on average.
According to Sitemeter, people only visit 1.2 pages per visit here even if
I do provide on average about 3 links per blog-entry. So I need to ask the
obvious - but possibly painful - question:
Am I boring you?
Generally - and apart from my Bushwhacking rants - I try to write blog-entries which are humourous and educational. The latter will usually be about languages, mathematics and/or history. The entries are designed to be easily digestible snippets, and should take an average reader about 1 minute to read. Given the statistical distribution of reading speeds (UK, 1996), 90% of my readers should be able to complete the average blog-entry in under 88 seconds. The size of these snippets (or bytes(sic!)) has not changed a great deal, so has the subject matter become less interesting? Please Email me to give your opinions; tell me what you want to read more and what you want to see less. Then praps I can make the blog appealing again. However, I am not the Borg, so not everything you suggest will neccessarily be assimilated :-) Average reading time for today's entry should have been only 37 seconds, an improvement? OTOH, if you prefer to read something better, try any or all of the neat blogs in my blogroll :-) Friday, March 4, 2005
The Hallunaq and his QuamotiqSteve Fossett is one very tired man and a happy one too. He set out to be the first man to fly non-stop around the world solo without refuelling from Salina (Kansas, USA) just over 3 days ago. His aircraft N277SF, the Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer (sponsored/financed by Sir Richard Branson) was built by Burt Rutan, the engineer who built Spaceship One, the first private spacecraft to make a lob above 100 km high (the official definition of where space begins). It is basically just a very large fuel tank :-)The Virgin Atlantic Global Flyer has registration number N277SF because his distance flown should be 27,700 miles. BTW, the aircraft registration number of Spaceship One is N328KF, because 100 km is 328 KiloFeet :-) Despite worries about running out of fuel, he made it back to Salina on Thursday. Congratulations on what must have been an exhausting mission, Steve. To be picky, you weren't first man to fly non-stop around the world solo without refuelling though. That was comrade Juri Gagarin, flying in a Vostok spacecraft, who took the long way around, 44 years ago, even if he was flying a little higher and faster;-) Salina is near a corner of Kansas I know personally. Drive about 80 miles south from Salina on I-135 and you reach the city of Wichita. Turn east along Route 54 for about 50 miles until you get to Eureka (Greek for "I found it!", as all Archimedes fans will know). The next town 10 miles south was founded by a remote branch of my family tree! The town is even named Severy :-) 20 other pilots, the Formula 1 circus, are kicking off their new season this weekend, with a whole new set of rules to load the dice against my favourite, Michael Schumacher. My dear blogfriends, Mandarin Rob and Mandarin Meg are F1 fans too; Meg favours Schumi also, but Rob would prefer to see ' a change to the monotony'. This Ferrari-red generous couple sent me a CAR(e) package all the way from Hawaii, containing a racetrack-coloured surf T-shirt, a red Ferrari cap, a pewter Ferrari keyring and binoculars to look back down the track to see if Schumi is lagging behind :-) Thanks! So this photo shows me equipped to watch the race on Sunday :-) Watching the training sessions, it appears that Rob may have his wish come true; certainly Mercedes appeared to have the better package, and Ferrari will have to improve quite a bit if Schumi is to be competetive with the M-M 'Iceman' Raikkonen and 'hot' Montoya (both fast men). In case you don't read Inuit (the Eskimo tongue), let me translate today's header for you : A Hallunaq is a 'white man' and his Quamotiq is one 'hot sled'. It's a title fitting for both Steve and Schumi ;-) Should you be hot for more Inuit words, here are 18 Eskimo words for 'icy snow' ;-) Thursday, March 3, 2005
Jobless in Germany5 216 434 men and women are currently registered as unemployed in Germany. Pravda, the official truth. To which I would add those who are in re-training, in subsidised work-programs (ABM) and those who have given up on finding a job and those who are trying to start their own 1-man/woman businesses. 'Tis not a rosy prospect, the economy, nor does it show signs of improvement :-( Actually, this is the highest number here since WW2. There is no magic solution. Having paid into the unemployment-insurance scheme in the name of solidarity for 43 years in the hope of never needing it, I too am now grateful that such a socialist scheme is in place.How does Germany line up unemploymentwise with its neighbouring countries? Badly! Poland 18.3% Germany 12.6% France 9.7% Czech repl. 8.3% Belgium 8.0% Denmark 5.1% Holland 4.7% Austria 4.5% Luxembourg 4.4% Switzerland 4.1%The unacceptable face of capitalism - global corporatism - shows its ugly visage too :-
I think I'm going to have to try to read my friend Bettina Monissen's recent book again ;-) Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Chicken Dinner Reloaded
Fifty-odd years ago granny went out to the hen-run, grabbed
a hen, wrung its neck, plucked it and put it in the pot for dinner.
And my childhood self happily collected the feathers and made himself
a red-indian head-dress. How! :-)
Nowadays, I do the weekly 25 km drive to the city hypermarket. Get a wire trolley and push it into the market. Pick up the frozen chicken and put it in the trolley. Ditto with lots of other stuff. Push the trolley to the cash register. Take the chicken from the wire trolley and put it on the conveyer belt. Pay. Take the chicken from the conveyer belt and put it in the wire trolley. Push the trolley to the car. Take the chicken from the wire trolley and put it in the car boot/trunk. Ditto the other stuff. Put the wire trolley back in the wire trolley queue, collecting my token. Drive home. Get a basket from the house. Take the chicken from the car boot and put it in the basket. Ditto the other stuff; three trips to the car 'cos it's a small basket. Take the chicken from the basket and put it in the fridge. A day later take the chicken from the fridge and put it in the defroster. Take the chicken from the defroster and put it in the pot for dinner. Chicken reloaded, seven times, just to get it to the same pot granny used. Seven-step logistics, just for one chicken dinner! And no fancy native-american head-dress for free either :-( Four thoughts / forethoughts for the day :-
Tuesday, March 1, 2005
Scots/English Homonyms
cots and English languages share some words
which are pronounced the same but have different meanings (=homonyms).
This confuses inter alia Jane, e.g. in
the dirge I wrote last week in Scots. She wants clarification.
But first of all, let me thank all of you who wrote with condolences on the death of our dog. First - and hopefully the last - time I got more moving condolences than spam! Jane and some others had some problems just understanding the Scots dirge. So here are 20 homonyms, as promised. Of course, this homonym list is by no means complete. It is just meant to give you an inkling of the differences between the two tongues. There is in fact a highly recommendable 820 page dictionary of Scots, obviously written for the Sassenachs since it goes in one direction only (Scots to English), available from Aberdeen University Press. "The concise Scots dictionary", ISBN 0-08-028491-4. SCOTS ENGLISH burn (=stream) burn (=consume by fire) cauld (=cold) called (= is named) cry (=name) cry (=weep) daen (=doing) dane (=from Denmark) greet (=cry tears) greet (=to welcome) gey (=very) guy (=chap, fellow, man) hale (=whole) hail (=frozen raindrops) hog (=young sheep) hog (=grown pig) hoo (=how) who (=that, pertaining to a person) loe (=love) loo (=WC, toilet) mair (=more) mare (=female horse) moose (=mouse) moose (=elk) ower (=over) our (=yours and mine) rake (=thin person) rake (=dissolute man) snaw (=snow) snore (= loud sleeping noise) spier (=to question) spear (=long pointed weapon) tee (=a fairy) tea (=a UK drink) wait on (=wait for) wait on (=to serve) waur (=worse) war (=fight between nations) yucky (=itchy) yucky (=disgusting) |
Dr. Stuart Savory, who is an overeducated, grumpy multilingual ex-pat Scot,
blatently opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist,
computer consultant, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Beetle-driver,
textbook-writer, long-distance biker, blogger and webmaster living
in the foothills south of the northern German plains. Not too shy to
reveal his true name or even whereabouts, he blogs his opinions, and
humour and rants irregularly. Stubbornly he clings to his beliefs,
e.g. that he's not really evil, or even anti-american, in spite of
Dubya's efforts to convince him that he should be.
He sorely misses his late dog :-(
Political compass Economic L/R: -1.62 Liberty/Authority: -2.56 Blogs that I read Alembic Betsy Devine Blogging in Paris Counterpunch Doug Alder Easy Bake Coven Elaine Kalilily Frank Paynter Jeneane Sessum Jesus' General Joel Sax Jonny B's secret diary Just My Opinion La Vache Qui Lit Mad Kane Making Light Mandarin Design Mercurial Noded Not Enough Who In The What? Old fash. patriot People's Republic of Seabrook Rude Pundit Shelley Powers TFS Reluctant The (UK) Policeman Wilson's Blogmanac Yule Heibel Now Reading 
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