Summertime and the living is easy . . .

Today's blogpost is dedicated to all dog-lovers (like Frank Paynter) everywhere; and all those northern-hemisphere blogreaders enjoying this great summer weather! To the southern-hemisphere blogreaders : your turn will come, Gaia is that way inclined :-)

We just spent two weeks on the north Norfolk coast in England and it didn't rain for the whole fortnight, so maybe those allegations about the British weather are merely rumours put about by the Brits to keep foreign tourists away :-) Albeit, we brought the good weather back to Germany with us and are all enjoying the sunshine over this public-holiday weekend. It's probably raining cats and dogs in the UK now that we've left it!

On our way to and from our EXCELLENT holiday cottage we hit 2 bad and one good hotel, so here are our recommendations. Avoid Warren Cottage just off junction 10 of the UK's M20, it had undercooked food and the breakfast jam was mouldy on at least 3 tables; we shall not return there. The Abbott's Fireside Inn in Elham, Kent, is no sadly longer run by our friends Anton(left) and Rob, but by a private company who employ a couple of freelancers to operate it; the cooking has gone down from 5 to 2 star IMHO and Rob's attention to detail for the customers has sadly gone. No longer recommended.

Now for a really GOOD tip, The Swan Hotel in Lavenham is a 4 star hotel in a 600 year old (sic!) building in the pictoresque village of Lavenham (that's Constable country, Yule). Do go visit it! It's a large rambling building, as witnessed by the instructions on how to find Reception from our room (29), omitting the straight bits of corridor: "Turn right out of your hotel room door, go down the narrow corridor, turn left, up one step, left, 3 steps up, right, left, go through the fire door, right, right again, 1 step down, left, 2 steps down, right, 1 step down, right, right again, left, 3 steps up, right, left, down one floor of the staircase, left, 1 step down, left, right, up the steps, left, right, 1 step up, left, 1 step up, right, then left and you are there! Simple wasn't it!"

posted by Stu Savory on 31st May 2004 at 07:27 Central European Time permalink

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Where does all the oil go?

Supply and demand :
I think the whole world knows by now that Dubya did not go to war in Iraq because of those (fictitious) WMD. Nor to capture Osama bin Laden(El Kaida) who wasn't even there. He went there to grab control over their oil. Why should he want to do that (apart from greed and daddy being in the oil business)? Maybe it's a question of supply and demand? And fuel prices are high right now. So I'll research the question "Where does all the oil go?" today.

Which countries use how much oil?
Here is a list of the top 10 on the demand-side by country in megatons used in 2003.

1. USA used 895 megatons of oil in 2003 !
2. China used 263,
3. Japan used 252,
4. Russia used 125, as did Germany,
5. India used 105, as did South Korea,
6. Brasil, France and Canada each used 96,
7. Italy and Mexico used 89,
8. Britain and Spain used 75,
9. Saudi Arabia and Iran each used 67,
10. Indonesia and Holland each used 50.

The USA uses as much as next five countries put together, maybe that's why Dubya grabbed greedily for more? And maybe that's why he won't sign the Kyoto anti-pollution agreement?

N.B: Only 39% of the energy requirements of the USA are covered by oil, this is similar to Germany here, where the portion is 36%. Spain's portion is a whopping 55% for comparison and poor old Cuba needs 100% oil.

Since when has there been a demand?
Several (US) reference works relate that the first drilling (for petroleum, not petrol) was in Pennsylvania in 1854. However, local records show that 3 years earlier (in 1851) in Wieze(sp?) near Celle in Germany several companies started drilling, hit gushers and this led to some 2000 bore-towers being erected in an area which became known as "little Texas" during the following decades.

For what is the oil being used?
Here some trivial examples:

• A pair of womens' tights contains polyamid, consuming 40 milliliters of oil.
• That little yellow plastic duck in your (kid's?) bathtub uses 70 ml.
• The average blogger's laptop needed 4 liters in its construction.
• The plastic in your average car represents 260 liters of oil.
• An oil heated home here (F.R.G) consumes about 2000 liters per year.
• But the average car (here in Germany) uses 1200 liters per year. How many cars are there in your household? We share 1, our left neighbour has 2 and the family on the right have 4 ! Do you have a gas-guzzling SUV? Then you may be part of the problem. 56% of USA cars bought last year were SUVs we're told vs. 32% at the end of the 90s.

How will demand grow in the future?
China consumed 263 megatons of oil in 2003, as stated above. Average income per head in the European Union (pre May 1st) was 23,100 Euros per year; in China it was only 800. Have bicycle, want car. China has only 8.6 million cars growing at a rate of 2.5 million per year recently. That puts them at number 4 already, behind the USA, Japan and Germany. That 8.6 million cars represents only 8 per 1000 inhabitants (for comparison : USA = 940, Germany = 634, world average = 133). If China plays catch-up (unlikely, given the per capita incomes) then that's a 16% growth rate over the next 20 years. I'm ignoring their higher birthrate here. Nevertheless, I'll leave you to deduce what will likely happen to the demand for oil - and the prices at the pumps - in the mid-future :-(

Perhaps I may still live to see the end of the oil-based economy in my lifetime (and I'm 60 this year). Those of you who are younger might like to start alternative planning now! Start by dumping your gas-guzzling SUVs, folks! A bicycle would help the overweight people too!

posted by Stu Savory on 30th May 2004 at 08:00 Central European Time permalink

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My Googlewhacks

Just yesterday I got an Email out of the blue from a guy called Andy Dean. It read:-

Hi Stu, did you know you are a googlewhack? A googlewhack is where you 
put two random words into the google.com search engine and it searches over 
3 billion pages , if only one web page comes back then that is a googlewhack!

Andy had found a Googlewhack in my January 2004 blogpage. Now obviously I can't give you the exact spelling of the two words he used, because then this blogpage would be returned also, so Google would find 2 pages and thus the term would no longer be unique. So take the asterisks out of the following two-word expression :-

lawn*mower  ken*speck*le

Andy continued explaining the (new to me) concept for me :-

The Googlewhack is just two words put into google that are totally random . 
And if only one website is found then thats a googlewhack , it sounds easier 
than it is . For instance Polymorph Waistcoat gets 73 results and Cheesecake 
Ayatollah even gets 167 results. (Stu notes:  Bush Lies gets 1,670,000). 
It must be words that are in the dictionary and not names , places etc .
Don't embed both words in quotes and remember you are a one in 3 billion chance !

So I thought I'd try to find one myself; it turned out to be easier than I had expected. I found one on only my third try, it's : pag*inated whee*zes. (remember to remove the asterisks!). The Googlewhack fans can register their whacks with www.googlewhack.com , for what it's worth. Andy also pointed me to the site of an UK comedian Dave Gorman who does a standup skit on the subject.

Just to keep Elaine and all the other Terry Pratchett fans calm, this has nothing to do with Granny Weatherwax. Not to disillusion Meg , it has nothing to do with my usual Bushwhacking either. Apropos Bushwhacking, normal service will be restored in June, when I've caught up with all the news after my fortnight being voluntarily incommunicado ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 28th May 2004 at 00:03 Central European Time permalink

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Gloriously incommunicado for a fortnight

Just got back from a fortnight's holiday in England; I'll be blogging details of various curiosities (which only the spleenish Brits can produce) during the coming days. Fantastic being offline again, I'd almost forgotten what such a (real) life is like :-)

No phones - not even a mobile - no TV, no radio, no newspapers, no Email, no surfing, no blogging (did any of you notice? ;-) just a farmyard cottage in Norfolk - great - so peaceful.

Mind you, we did meet up with some bloggers and blogreaders; I especially enjoyed meeting an old UK school friend Dr. Carl Rose again, who surprised us by rolling up at the cottage on his motorcycle. Thanks for dropping in Carl, such a great idea. We are still trying to work out who is insulted - or who is complimented - by the young lady who said we looked very much alike ;-)

Unfortunately several folks couldn't make the blogmeet, so we missed meeting our namesakes Linda and Richard Savory. Also Gary Turner didn't turn up either and now I'm back online I see that he's giving up blogging! What a pity. Maybe he feels like this piece of mechanical art (see photo on the left) which I picked up in the UK (told you the Brits were nutty!) and sees himself as a nuthead, on the mobile phone all the time, producing crap and with a b(l)ogroll threatening to engulf him ;-)

I can certainly sympathise with that: there were 1897 pieces of Email waiting when we got back to Germany and the telephone answering machine had overflowed. I DO miss being an offline person already! So good luck, Gary, if you want to try that too, go for it!

posted by Stu Savory on 27th May 2004 at 11:33 Central European Time permalink

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Unfortunately . . .

Background : Because today is the (unlucky) 13th I'll tell you an unlucky tale.
Four years ago I wrote a short story for an insurance company's internal employees' magazine, in German. Now the rights to the story have reverted to me, so today I've translated it and present it as today's blog-entry. The main character of my short stories is usually one Jock MacDonald, and it is he who appears in this tale too, as an inexperienced pilot who has just gotten his licence to fly floatplanes. The short story is written in the form of an insurance claim report to the aforesaid insurance company (who must remain nameless). My German blogreaders can read the (longer) original story by following this link. Let us join Jock as he writes his insurance claim

. . . - - - . . .

Insurance Claim : Dear Sirs or Madams,
Unfortunately, I have to make a report to you. I'd just got my floatplane rating and had chartered a high-wing Cessna 182 on floats for a joyride over the Everglades. Flying low, I spotted a fuel pump hut out on the end of a wooden pier in a canal, with a pretty bikini-clad gas-pump girl, and so decided to land////water to refuel. So I plopped down on the canal and slowly ploughed up to the pier, doing a sharp left turn at the last moment so that my right wingtip stopped just a yard short of the fuelpump hut. The beautiful blonde grabbed hold of my right wingtip until I could get out my rope and tie the plane to the pier. So I grabbed the rope lying behind my seat and leapt out of the left door to impress that fantastically curvy blonde with my athletic ability!

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that it was a floatplane and that the 'land' side was on the right. So promptly I fell into the smelly water of the canal.

Unfortunately, the rope I had grabbed had a heavy metal anchor on the other end, which dragged me rapidly beneath the surface. With great presence of mind, I let go of the rope and swam around the plane to climb up onto the pier. The very pretty but unsympathetic young lady was laughing herself silly. However, I am not writing to you to claim for the lost anchor; oh no, the sad tale goes on! As I said, I had let go of the rope.

Unfortunately, that was my only rope, and she had none (float pilots always carrying their own ropes). Of course planes have to be attached to the pier in case a wind springs up (seaplanes have no brakes). But to avoid any danger from sparks (static electricity) during the refuelling of the plane, it must be 'earthed' by a grounding wire too. So I grabbed the grounding wire in its spring-rewound roll on the side of the pump, smiled at the (still attractive) blonde and sprang over onto the right float of my plane.

Unfortunately, I had not unrolled enough wire from the spring-rewound roll on the side of the pump. Half way across, the cable went tight, jerking me to a stop, and causing my vertical descent into the murky waters once again. "Do it again" the bitch squealed, "all good things come in threes". She threw me the cable as I climbed onto my float. However the contact-claw had been torn off the end of the cable during my last escapade (I am not claiming for the lost claw), so I had to make do with tying the bare end of the wire securely into the tie-down ring on the underside of the right wing. Then I stepped over to the pier.

Unfortunately, Isaac Newton's third law of motion now came into action. The floatplane moved away from the pier a little and my legs not being long enough to bestride the increased distance, I fell into the canal again. The silly girl ran shrieking with laughter into the toilet hut, otherwise she would have wet her pants laughing, she cried. So I refuelled the plane myself, leaving a signed credit card slip in her fuel-pump hut. Meanwhile one of those sudden Florida rainsqualls had begun, so I wanted to get the plane off the water quickly and fly to a calmer place. This time I jumped across to the plane without incident, hurried into the cockpit, lit a cigarette to calm myself and turned the starter key. The engine fired at once.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that seaplanes have no brakes, so the Cessna lunged straight ahead. For about 2 feet. Then I remembered that I had forgotten to untie the wire I had used as a tie-down. The Cessna turned right, describing a semicircular decreasing spiral as the wire wound itself around the hut on the pier. 180 degrees later, the still-accelerating Cessna rammed the other side of the pier.

Unfortunately, the left wingtip decapitated the fuel-pump, causing a fountain of 100 octane low-lead aviation gas to spray out into the water of the canal. The situation was getting serious! So I needed to concentrate, and so threw my cigarette out of the window.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten that the gas fountain had landed in the water too. There was a huge explosion, the Cessna was blown backwards several yards and the hut on the pier began to burn too as the stupid ugly bitch ran for safety. Wow! I needed to get out of there quickly, and so restarted the Cessna's engine.

Unfortunately, what I hadn't seen was that as a result of the collision with the left side of the pier, the lower half of the propeller had been broken off (to my defense, you cannot see the lower half of the propeller from the cockpit). I am not claiming for the propeller!

Unfortunately, when I now gave full throttle to get away from the fire, the resulting propeller imbalance caused the propeller to disintegrate competely. The broken pieces speared both floats at the front, leaving gaping holes.

Unfortunately, the plane's forward motion thus drove water into the gaping holes in the floats and the Cessna tipped nose down into the water and sank titanically rapidly.

I respectfully request compensation for what was obviously an accident.

. . . - - - . . .

PS: This blog entry is fiction, not autobiographical, despite the photo !!!

posted by Stu Savory on 13th May 2004 at 6:33 Central European Time permalink

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Nice, but surreal. Surreal, but nice.

Salvador Dali's 100th anniversary is tomorrow, 11th of May, so let's look at some surrealism.

Surrealism via my blogreading namesake: Richard Savory's favlink, the "Deathlist".

Surreal that words censored out of a de-classified CIA memo to Bush could be resurrected by David Naccache and Clair Whelan in a neat bit of cryptanalysis. Well done Clair!

Surreal too, that the UK man who inflated the Iraq report for Tony B.Liar and was involved in the Hutton Inquiry into the death of WMD weapons expert Dr David Kelly, John Scarlett has been appointed the new head of MI6. Most inappropriate, I'd say!

Even more horrific and surreal, the Dali inspired 1928 movie by Luis Buñuel (and do NOT click the link if you're at all squeamish) Un Chien Andalou. Staying with the razorblade meme, Uncle Al Schwartz tells us of another surreal use for stacked single-edge razorblades.

Today's headline sound familiar? I quote it from the Grant/Roberts movie Notting Hill.

posted by Stu Savory on 10th May 2004 at 6:06 Central European Time permalink

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Our first time as bit-part TV actors

I was an actor for a day yesterday, as was my wife Cornelia.
My dog Wilma had the lead (sic!) role; I had just a bit-
Part in a short television quasi-documentary
Episode about dog-friendly hotels here in Germany.
A call from a TV-director got us instantly wide awake and
Crashing out of bed early, then spending a fascinating whole five
Hours filming on the set for just a five minute spot (Monday at 10pm).

Dogs are allowed in hotels here in Germany, they are even welcome
Upstairs in the bedrooms too, but sometimes not down in the restaurant.
Bulldogs are the most photogenic dogs (sorry, fp), it's all those wrinkles!, as
You can see in the photo of Wilma here on the right. Bush fans should
Also read the first letters of each line of this post vertically please :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 7th May 2004 at 10:01 Central European Time permalink

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A little Bushwhackin'

I see that Dubya has doubled and redoubled the despicable american use of torture in Iraq and now aims to torture ALL Iraqis. Huh? Wozzat? Sure! 'Strue! Both he and Kindasleazy are due to appear live on Iraqi TV ;-)

Freedom of Speech is no longer a right in the US, it seems. Corporate censorship is taking its place. Howzat? Disney are refusing to distribute Michael Moore's new film "Fahrenheit 9/11" in the US. So a short documentary film made in america by an american may not be seen by americans. Because it is critical of the Bush clan maybe (we know our MM). And because the Disney CEO doesn't want to risk his tax cuts from Dubya's bruvva Jeb in Florida? How does one spell KRUPPsHUN? But at least we peons in free, old Yurp (we Yurp-peons) will get to see it, as will the rest of the world.

Proudly, I now number John Kerry amongst my Orkut friends, and vice versa, so now I'm even more persona non grata in the egg-shaped chimp-pen of the usurper's DC zoo. Especially when/if they notice how today's timestamp refers to Michael Moore's film.

posted by Stu Savory on 6th May 2004 at 09:11 Central European Time permalink

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Clearing out my 'Sundry-Links' Blog-Bin

Good News :

• California finally bans Diebold E-Vote Machines; other states may follow.
• Republican candidate loses vote after his cross-dressing photos surface.
• I wonder if his dresses bore that Pissed-off-with-Bush clothes label (via Orcinus).
• Do-it-yourself Nightmare Construction Kit. You'll laugh yourself silly at this one!

Bad news :

• Bush-Mob Lysenkoism. How Dubya bends science to his fundamentalist will :-(
• The NSA holds the patent for 3rd party access (their access) to cryptokeys (yours).
• The Deaf(sic!) Ray is here. Shades of Flash Gordon! Marines' weapon now being deployed in Irak deafens targeted persons permanently :-(
• Chief EEjit Dubya can't think of one single mistake he's made, nor what he learned from them. So here is a list of 100 major Dubya mistakes that Dubya can't see :-(

Some interesting Swedish blogs (inter alia for Agnethe) :

• Medoue : Some of those nice 'Swedish photos' , taken by Ulrika, who lives there. May not be quite what you expected.
• Silent Lucidity : Weblog of the Evil Queen Aine; Oops, I just noticed that Pamela is Irish, so what was was she doing in my 'swedish blogs' list?
• How to learn Swedish in 1000 difficult lessons : an educative blog by Francis, an american 'drottningen' in Stockholm (Sweden).

Cold war memories : Today is May 5th. On May 5th 1961 the US lobbed its first astronaut into space as a suborbital payload. I remember thinking then that they chose that exact date just to piss off the Russkies, who were celebrating the 80th birthday of Karl Marx (born 1881) on that very same day, May 5th. Marx's grave is in Highgate Cemetary in London (UK).

posted by Stu Savory on 5th May 2004 at 06:41 Central European Time permalink

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Homer : the ORIGINAL Rageboy

Most of you bloggers will be familiar with Chris Locke's nom-de-blog "Rageboy". Many however, when hearing the name Homer may only think of Homer Simpson. O tempora, O mores! So I thought I'd tell you about the original rage-boy today, adding a little classical education to an otherwise Dubya-esque world ;-)

The very first word in Homer's Iliad is "Menin". Not to disappoint the followers of the Norse God Odin, but this has nothing to do with his ravens (one of whom was called Munin, of blessed memory). "Menin" is the accusative form of "menis", which means Rage. In fact the Iliad contains eleven thousand verses of pure red rage! 15693 verses cover just 51 days of the 10 year Trojan war, and 13444 thereof focus on just 4 days in the ninth and tenth years of that war. "Menin" is regarded also as the entry key to the whole of European literature.

Homer also introduced the concept of starting at the end and working back to earlier dates, an idea the blogfathers adopted when defining the blog-framework. There is nothing new under the sun, Horatio (to mix metaphors :-)

Back in 522 BC, Hipparchos introduced the complete reading of the Iliad at the Athens festival every 4 years. The blogfathers also use repetition, in a form we now call memes.

There are 1500 papyri comprising the Iliad, but the most beautifully transcribed version is from the middle ages : Codex Venetus A in the Marciana museum in Venice. The first printed version is dated 1488, in Florence. When visiting Italy, go to see them both!

The Rage announced with the very first word of the (original Greek version of the Iliad) starts in verse 247 and reverberates on through verse 75 of the 19th song (of 24). Actually, simple Rage as a translation doesn't bear justice to Menin, but I can't think of a more suitable English word right now. In German I'd be torn between Zorn and Groll and Wut.

Well, I thought I'd point you to a literature classic today. It's all Greek to me, you may think. So if that's too heavy for you, go read the inimitable, effable EGR Blog, last post I saw there was dated April 8, but maybe THIS blogentry will motivate Rageboy to write something new.

If however, you want to learn more about Homer and the Iliad, here is a short list of links:-

• Iliad, the Mythological Background, Univ. of Saskatchewan
• Outline of Homer's ILIAD, if you don't have the time to read it all.
• Study Guide for Reading Homer's Iliad; via Temple University
• The Iliad by Homer (full text in English translation)
• Finally, The Iliad Game, to test your knowledge of the Iliad.

By the way, if either of these options sounds too exhausting, there is a movie just coming out, called "Troy" starring Brad Pitt. The movie gives us most of the Iliad and tries to stick to Homer's version. So much so that Brad Pitt complained he found the dialogues "challenging" (they are to Homer's high standard of language). Go see it please.

posted by Stu Savory on 4th May 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink

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May Day m'aidez Mayday!

For those of you without any French, May Day is not only the first of May celebrating "workers of the world unite" (read Marx, learn and inwardly digest), but also a call for help. "M'aidez" is french for "Help me!", but was misunderstood by the Brits in WW1 and written as Mayday.

HUGHES is one of those profit-seeking corporations which outsourced IT jobs to India, since 13 years now. One of the Hughes Software Systems employees in India is a tester called Abhijit Dhar, who came to my blog via Google, looking for the article on "number of bugs per KLOC" which I wrote back on the 25th November 2003 (before I had permalinks). We've been corresponding, because he needs help with the question "When do I stop testing?". I promised to blog a reply, so here it is.

The Mickeysoft reply would be "You stop testing when the marketing dept decide to release the product, ready or not." But I guess you wanted a serious answer. We discussed parallel testing, bug insertion and Bayesian statistics, none of which he knew about; here is how to combine them to answer your question "When do I stop testing?", Abhijit.

• Parallel testing : two testers work wholly independently. Then you compare their results. Tester A catches A errors as shown by the left-side vertical stripe in the Venn diagram sketch above. Tester B catches B errors as shown by the lower horizontal stripe in the set sketch. In common, they catch C errors. What Abhijit wants to estimate is the size of D, the set of errors undiscovered by either tester A or B.
• Bug insertion : The programmer deliberately inserts some number of bugs (BE-bugging) he knows about (B). The single tester catches A errors, there are C errors thereof also in the set B deliberately inserted by the programmer.
• Bayesian statistics : Recapitulating : Tester A finds A errors and tester/BE-bugger B has B errors, C of which were also found by A. Assume there are a total of E errors, so tester A finds a fraction A/E of all errors, and also a fraction C/B of the errors found by tester B. Assuming these fractions are both the same, i.e. both testers are equally good, then solving for E (the total number of errors) gives E=A*B/C. If past statistics show that testers A and B are not equally good, then you will need to weight their efficacies.

Value E is now your estimate of when to stop testing. I've used this method with my proofreaders when I was running the handbook department at SNI. I've used it too with programmers at NCAG and CSI. When using historically weighted efficacies it is seriously better than the guideline numbers I gave in my original blog article that you referenced, Abhijit.

Hope this is of help to more readers than just Abhijit, which is why I'm blogging it today rather than just mailing it to India.

Now lets do a worked example. Back on the 27th or 28th of April, Joel Sax had a list of the top 101 books, of which he had read 53 (=A), he wrote. I had read just 52 of them (=B). Comparing my list with his, we had both read just 27 of them in common (=C). Using this to estimate E, my formula predicts E=102, which compares pretty well with the known size (101) of the original list, and is certainly within the rounding tolerance of the small whole numbers used. If we had both read one book more in common (i.e C=28) then the estimate for E would have been 98. One common book less (C=26) changes the estimate to E=106. So with C=27, E should be between 100 and 104, rounding errors prohibit a better estimate for E.

Remember : it's only an estimate. Your mileage will vary, especially when C is small.

Maybe this article is of use to Doc Searl's IT Garage? If so Doc, please feel free to link to it or quote it verbatim.

posted by Stu Savory on 1st May 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink

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