We saw a Rasselbock at the weekend!

We saw a Rasselbock !

Why is it that you are never ready with your camera for that once in a lifetime photo? Last weekend we were up in the Erzgebirge mountains visiting some friends and we all went for a hike through the high moor national park between Eibenstock and Oberwiesenthal. That's in the thinly populated region along the Czeck border across from Karlovy Vary. The dark, dank moors are up to 30 feet deep, so we put the dogs on the leash and kept to the wooden walkways provided to let walkers hike through the high moors. Moors dogs can sink in and quickly drown :-(

But the moors have their own fauna, rare animals which can survive because the moors prevent any heavier predators from chasing them. One of these animals is the Rasselbock, which is actually native to the state of Thuringen but there is a small population now high in the hills of Saxony. Nowadays they are almost extinct, due to being a favourite target for hunters, who then take them to the taxidermist to have them mounted. The two photos at the top show examples of the taxidermists' art.

What is a Thuringian Rasselbock? Imagine seeing a hare with small antlers! Local naturalists claim that they are wild rabbits infected with the Shope papillomavirus, which causes the growth of antler-like tumors in various places on the rabbit's head. But if you tell the locals you saw a Rasselbock, they tell you to get stuffed yourself !

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 29th November 2006 at 06:29 CET permalink Email

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Glorious Autumn leaves :)

W hat a very mild autumn (fall) it is that we are having this year in Europe; the positive side of global warming I suppose. We even had 20°C in the Rhine valley yesterday. Some of the deciduous trees are still bearing their leaves, and the weather forecasters say it will be mid-december before winter comes.

This photo reminded me of that beautiful little poem by Joyce Kilmer, entitled 'Trees' :)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 27th November 2006 at 05:04 CET permalink Email

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Friday's Feedback Fustigation^*

I n which I summarise your several comments mailed this past week.

Paul has an addition to last saturday's piece about the gridlock :-

Cause 8 : Uncoordinated 1 day repairs. Paul writes "I am a salesman often stuck in BAB traffic jams. One cause is insufficient coordination of 1-day repairs. On that day these were at the sites shown here on the left. If they only blocked one North-South and one East-West on even dates and the other NS and other EW on odd dates, and told people in advance, then people could re-route onto the less blocked autobahns. Thus alternate A1 and A3 and alternate A46 and A40 each with their own 1-day repairs". Good idea, Paul, forwarded to the traffic ministry. BTW, a state Green Party politician read this blog (wow!) and tells me that the Minister of Transport is being called upon to report about the gridlock to the state (NRW) parliament and say how he proposes to prevent a repetition. I've mailed him the permalink to my gridlock blog article :-)

Sarchi (Peter Harris), currently into pole-photography, suggests beaming aerial CCTV pics into cars. I think this would be too distracting to drivers. Anyway, the existing CCTV pix go to police who use it to switch dynamic speed limits, display jam warnings suggesting alternate routes, and feed the data for the traffic data to cars' individual navigation systems (low-bandwidth - less distraction). So consider it done, Peter.

Merely two of you gals responded (to me) about Allan Wills Are You My Wife? blog. Liz said "A good call. Intriguing. Now if I were single and half my age...". And Mavis wrote that "... there used to be a tobacco company in the UK called Wills (its moved to India now). So I need first to know are we saying 'Wills whiffs' or 'Wills Good Shag' ;-) ??" Good Double Entendres, Mavis, but you should ask Allan yourself ;-)

Brisbane blogreader Anna Pashen read the Maths stuff and asked "Also I have a question from my male (Workerant). We all know that the more a female nags a male to do something, the less he is inclined to do said task, so we figured there has to be a mathematical explanation for it. He wants to know the mathematical equation used to graph men's proportionate resistance when pressure is increased. I suspect it works something like the grip on tyres." So I've mailed her a summary of the N-dimensional geometry of the inevitability of conflict and how to work around it. If that's of general interest I'll blog it here. Let me know, ladies.

Half a dozen of you had problems with the maths of the square root of minus one. You seem to have only been taught about 1-dimensional numbers (the natural numbers). But look, you use two dimensional numbers on a daily basis, they are called vectors. Even Liz in her car called Betty. Betty has a velocity, that is speed and direction. Those are the polar coordinates R and θ which I wrote about in the article on complex numbers. If Betty changes only her speed R you call that braking or acceleration. If Betty changes only her direction θ while keeping her speed, she has a radial acceleration (cornering). Betty's velocity vector is a 2-dimensional number (a complex number (R,θ)). And if you know where you are, that's a 3-dimensional number (lat, long, altitude). Once you have made the giant mental leap to accept 2-D numbers, it is but a small step to go on to 3,4,5 and N-dimensional numbers. And nowadays we even have fractional dimensions too. Did you see my subtle use of the Mandelbrot sets in the "Numerator" banners I put in that article about complex numbers? Just think about the trick question "How long is the coastline of Britain?". The answer depends on the size (and granularity) of your ..... er, ...... ruler ;-)
Fractal dimensions blew my mind the first time I really encountered them ;-)

FourDinners wrote "My brain has just exploded. [My teenage daughter] Jax said "Excellent". The Postman has a degree. They don't look alike, but......" ;-)

Don't be frightened by maths, folks. Maths merely lets you choose your mappings of reality to get something useful, don't worry whether the mapping is "real" in some arbitrary sense. Consider the following : Einstein 'merely' asked himself "Given that I measure the same value for the speed of light in all directions and regardless of how fast I am going myself, what kind of mathematical nature(sic!) must space-time have, to account for this?" And voila! Relativity!! Whence E=mc², nuclear power, GPS and the navigation systems in your cars (Betty excluded, I suspect ;-)

Just because you can't imagine something (like the square root of minus one), doesn't mean it doesn't exist :-) The same applies to all of us. For example, I'm pretty sure that 4/N can always be expressed as the sum of at most 3 reciprocals, but my mathematical muscles are too weak to prove it (i.e. I can't imagine the proof). Computer experiments confirm my suspicion is true for all N up to N = 10¹⁴ but I can't find (=imagine) a proof for all N up to infinity. All of our imaginations fail us, just at different places along the path. Maths is just a toolkit. Use it if it works; it doesn't have to be "real" in some/any (restricted) sense. Just use the right tools, folks ;-)

Teenager Barbara wants to know "why do old farts like you blog?" How very polite! I'm only 62½, milady, but I couldn't fix my brakes, so I just made my horn louder ;-)

Jacky writes from Bath, a UK spa with some restored roman ruins of archeological value, that she liked the photos from Xanten (here in Germany), but asks "Why have you changed the name of your blog from 'Stu Savory's Blog' to 'Ole Phat Stu'? BTW, in England we write 'Fat' with an F not a PH. Ah well Jacky, much of the stuff in this blog is Old Hat, so I called it that. The P is silent, as in Bath ;-) . Geddit? ;-)
Actually, the word 'Phat' is an adjective in African American slang used to express approval. Hence, someone or something that is Phat could be cool, rich, entertaining, intelligent, attractive or otherwise to be admired. The word first surfaced in the 1960s, when I was a student, and I've found it phat ever since :-)

Gnarled Copper tells me he's blogrolled me :-) Sam Vimes reads my blog? Way out!

Anonymous asked "What is cryptography and what does a cryptographer do?". It means code-breaking, so a cryptographer (makes and) breaks codes. For example, in 2003 Brian Hargrave produced a simple single-rotor coding machine as a toy for children (the 'Pocket Enigma'). I wrote a trivial paper^** (unusually for me, in English) showing how to break the codes it produced. I broke the code with only pencil and paper within minutes, the article I wrote will teach you to do that too. The single-rotor Hebern machines were a 1920s design, they are not safe to use any longer. Breaking code is maths, not rocket surgery or brain science, as Dubya would (enn ess) say ;-)

^* Fustigation = an official court sentence to a beating (ie corporal punishment).
^** Published by the United States Military Academy ( otherwise known as West Point ) in 'Cryptologia', Volume XXVIII, Number 1, January 2004, Pages 55-60.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24th November 2006 at 06:24 CET permalink Email

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Colonia Ulpia Traiana

H ave no fear, folks, I promised Liz not to blog in Latin (except if necessary) ;-)

Colonia Ulpia Traiana was the name of the Roman colony town in what is now Xanten, in Germany. We got a chance to visit it recently, so I'm just logging some of my photos. The Roman town was about a kilometer square and (in those days) bordered on the Rhine, it was a harbour town for trade and shipping. Now it is an archeological park; it is well worth spending time tramping around to see everything.

• Detail of one of the temple's columns. (Zoomed to the max :-)
• Aquaduct bringing water into the city from upriver,
• and a sewer taking the sewage out downriver. Also an escape tunnel?
• Carving of a squatting angel with a 10-pack rather than a 6-pack. A decatitta ?
• Rulers of the city, ancient and modern ;-) The statues are carved into the blocks.
• A collection of interestingly carved gravestones (no crosses, you notice).
• Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant. Gladiators' view of the (restored) amphitheatre.
• Side view of the Roman crane used for building the amphitheatre.
• Crane front view, note the capstan in the foreground. BTW, the huge church in Xanten, seen here in the background, is also worth a visit. So make some time.

And yes, Liz, if you go in their restaurant/pub, the menu is in Latin. Tough shit, babe!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 22nd November 2006 at 06:22 CET permalink Email

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Last week's maths blog received a mixed reception. Doug and Irene sent me some fun maths links, however Liz gets put off by maths, but made a couple of good points:
There was this one(.) And this one too(.) But then she came to a full stop(.) ;-)

Catching me out after reading last tuesday's piece on prime numbers, Cathy wrote:-

"... I like it when you make Math so easy that even I can understand it :-)
But I've been reading your blog long enough to know that you're setting 
us up to blow us all away with some much harder stuff, go on, admit it ;-)"

Ok, Ok, Cathy, you caught me out. This is going to be a three part maths thingy, designed to blow your minds^* with something they didn't teach you at school. They didn't teach me it either, I had to work it out for myself (aged 16 at the time) :-(

This is part two, just here to give you enough background to be able to understand part three, when I eventually get there. And it's not harder, it's just more complex ;-)

On tuesday, I wrote "you can think of the real numbers as points along a line". Today I want to talk about complex numbers, which you can think of as points in a plane.

Complex numbers have a real number part and a socalled "imaginary" part. The real part is shown as the position along a horizontal axis. The imaginary part is shown as the position along a vertical axis. The unit on the vertical axis is called 'i' and is the square root of minus one. I'll show you why in just a minute. I've drawn two examples of complex numbers here, point A is at 3+4i and point B is at 4+3i. In polar coordinates both are at radius 5 from the origin (remember Pythagoras theorem with 3²+4²=5² ?), however their respective angular coordinates are θ_A and θ_B. BTW, θ is pronounced theta. All clear so far, everybody ?
In this example the angle θ_A=arctan(4/3) and the angle θ_B=arctan(3/4), as you see. Values inside the arctan expression are the Imaginary part divided by the Real part.

Now let's look at doing arithmetic with complex numbers. We use shifts for addition and twirls for multiplication (your school may have taught this differently, so what?). In this illustration we start at the origin with the complex number K. Adding 1 to K just shifts the starting point of the vector right by one unit, the other end of the vector is now at (1+K). Adding i (the square root of -1) to K just shifts the starting point of the vector up by one unit, the other end of the vector is now at (i+K). So if we want to add the complex number K to the complex number Z, it is just shifting the vector end-point from Z to (Z+K). This is done by just adding the real and imaginary components respectively. So (3+4i) + (5+9i) = (8+13i). That clear so far?

Now let's take a twirl through the multiplication of complex numbers :-) Let's say we want to multiply the complex number Q by -1. So we can just put a minus sign in front of both the real (R) and imaginary(I) components of Q, thus we get -1*Q= (-R, -I). In polar coordinates Q=(r,θ_Q), and we can get from Q to -Q just by twirling around through 180° along the path which I have marked B in my diagram.

Now let's look at path A. It takes us from 1 to -1 via i. We see that if we turn twice through a right angle we turn a total of 180°. θ_i * θ_i = θ_-1. i.e. i*i=-1, so i is the square root of -1 as I stated above. All clear now?

Now lets do the complex multiplication by algebra :
(A+Bi) * (C+Di) = AC + BCi + ADi * BDi² = ((AC-BD)) + (BC+AD)i), so (3+4i)*(4+3i) = 0 + 25i or, in polar coordinates (r,θ)=(25,90°)
The radii have been multiplied as real numbers are (R₁ shifted R₂ times) and the angles θ₁, θ₂ have been added (twirled). That is all there is to complex multiplication.

OK folks, that's enough for today and parts 1 and 2 together give you enough background to understand part 3 which I'll be blogging in a couple of daze days. Any dancers amongst you will have already known how to twirl in their shifts, I guess ;-)

^* It'll blow your mind. Excepting Dubya, where the necessary pre-condition fails ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 20th November 2006 at 06:20 CET permalink Email

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Gridlock in Germany :-(

G ridlock in the rush hours :-(

At 8:24 on monday 13th november we had a gridlock (which means intersecting traffic jams) on the autobahn system of the Kohlenpott area of Germany. It covered an area about 40 by 60 miles, as shown by the redlined stretches of autobahn in the sketch on the left. Once on the German autobahn, exits are few and quite far between, so you get stuck in the traffic.

316 kms of jam, plus all the slow stuff. The record is 423 kms on 19/1/2004.

Let's look at the causes of these jams. Yesterday a lorry carrying a heavy load of paper hit a car, jack-knifed and fell on its side, blocking all lanes. The back-up began, increasingly covering entry and exit-ramps. Some of these were usual autobahn intersections (clover-leaves). So people trying to get on an east-west autobahn could not even get off the north-south one. So that had a traffic jam too, which backed up over its own preceeding intersection, etc. etc. etc.... Gridlock! But that lorry crash was just the trigger, the causes run a bit deeper.

Cause 1 : too many cars (duh!). A solution? More car-sharing. Good public transport.

Cause 2 : inadequate roads. These autobahns run through built up areas and are often only 2 lanes wide in each direction. Solution : Widen where possible. Gov't budget has been increased to 890 Mio €. They're doing the best they can afford (?).

Cause 3 : Roadworks:-( This is the major problem. Major roadworks were deliberately delayed this year so that traffic could flow well for the Football World Championships held here this summer. So there are now more roadworks than usual, all taking weeks or months to fix. Solution : Don't accept the cheapest bid, but the fastest one. Pay the road construction companies premiums for getting done faster than planned. Six 24hr-day weeks not 5 of 8hrs (churches + trade-unions still inhibit them working 7!).

Cause 4 : Daytime roadworks. Solution : more repair work at night [currently only 42% of the road maintenance jobs (like mowing the verges, trimming verge trees, clearing rubbish from the verges) is done at night]. Gives better flow in rush hours.

Cause 5 : Long roadworks where no-one appears to be working. Solution : Block only a days-worth ( 50 meters) of work at a time and move the block along each day. This is presently not being done; instead the whole length of the job (eg 3 kms) is blocked even if the job will take 2 months. Needs to be part of the job-lot requirements docs.

Cause 6 : Inadequate information. If people knew precisely about the positions and lengths of the jams early enough, they could plan/take alternate routes. Solution : Widespread use of (cheap?) navigation systems which include 1) timely traffic-jam digital warning services for jam avoidance and 2) dynamic re-routing AHEAD of the autobahn exit before the jam's end. Part 1 is implemented. Part 2 still needs further development work. Devices are cheap enough (300 € and up) for everyone to be able to afford them. Traffic jams cost each and every one of us (not just the drivers) €500 to €1250 per year, so the ROI period for a navigation system is well under a year).

Cause 7 : Inadequate driver preparation. People run out fuel in jams, having failed to plan ahead. Then they have no adequate clothing in inclement weather to go get help (yes, that means you, Liz's Younger Son!). Balding summer tyres used in the teeth of winter's snows. So they spin out and block both lanes, or cause a dumb accident. Solutions ? Draconian fines for such stupidities, better training in driving schools.

I'm going to stop this rant before I have a heart attack ;-) No seriously, there are 2000 heart attacks to drivers in German traffic jams each year, each of which causes a further traffic jam. What you might call a hearty gridlock :-( Drive safely now!

PS : Any and all additional suggestions are welcome, feel free to mail your comments.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 18th November 2006 at 06:18 CET permalink Email

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World Wide Wooing :-)

I nnovation, thy name is Allan Wills !

Back on October 3rd I told you about the 40th reunion of our B.Sc(Hons) physics university class. One of my bright and focussed classmates was Derek Wills. At the reunion I got to meet him again and meet his pleasant Viking wife Hjørdis. I learned they had married in Denmark in 1968 before emigrating to Montreal (Canada). Ever the adventurers, they took to the road during 1970/71, living in a VW van, driving the length and breadth of North, Central and South America, taking 18 months to drive from Montreal and Rio Janeiro and back through 18 countries. I am envious :-) Then they settled down and had 2 sons, Simon(25) and Allan(28). It is Allan's purposeful blog that I want to point you to today.

Allan has obviously inherited the dedicated sense of purpose and physical fitness of his father, but has inherited a DOUBLE portion of adventure for travel from both of his parents. His innovative idea? Leapfrog all those Orkut-like vague conglomerations of 'friends' and set up a web-page dedicated to finding himself a wife, wherever she may be in the world. He blogs that he will go anywhere in the world for the right date! He will leave no stone unturned and no avenue unexplored, he adds. Now he has even taken November off work to pursue his wife-to-be, whoever she may be :-) Now that's what I call focussed!

16 international dates at the last count, and Allan blogs them all, anonymising the blog-entry if his date so requires. But rather than me tell you any more about all this, why don't you go and read Allan's blog Are You My Wife?. Perhaps the more adventurous single girls amongst my readership will take up his quest and make a date with him? I'd be happy to have contributed :-)

For what it's worth, Thomas Hobbes once said : "Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair" ;-) Go, Allan, go!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory (new pic) on 16th November 2006 at 06:16 CET permalink Email

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Proof of the Unique Factorisation Theorem

S o we were eating out at the pub for a geek booze-up and dinner, where Schorsch^* had ordered a prime rib for dinner. So we got to talking about prime numbers - as geeks are prone to do - and ended up drawing a large Sieve of Archimedes all over the paper tablecloth, just to show Jen^* how it works :-) Prime numbers are divisible only by themselves and one, there are no other factors. Composite numbers are the product of prime factors (see below). Examples are :-

• 30 = 2*3*5
• 31 = 1*31, so 31 is prime
• 32 = 2*2*2*2*2 = 2⁵ ; High five, Borat!
• 33 = 3*11
• 34 = 2*17
• etc etc.

Between drinks, I mentioned that EVERY natural number N can be written as a unique product of prime numbers , this is known as the Unique Factorisation Theorem (if there are only two factors, namely N and one, then N is called prime).

Jen asked "Can you prove that?". Which I duly did, and now I'm reproducing my (actually Euclid's) proof here today for the edification of y'all, dear blogreaders :-)

This is a proof by contradiction, so let us assume that there might indeed be positive non-prime (=composite) integers that you CAN'T write as the product of primes. Let's arbitrarily call the smallest such integer S. Now S can't be prime or one, by our definition, so we can write S as the composite S = A * B. Because S has been defined as the smallest number which cannot be written as a product of primes , both A and B CAN be written as products of primes. It now follows that S = A * B can be written as a product of primes as well, which leads to a contradiction. Therefore the assumption is wrong and every natural number N can be written as a unique product of prime numbers, which is the Unique Factorisation Theorem. Since multiplication is commutative^**, the order of the factors doesn't matter. So conventionally we sort the factors in increasing order, as in the examples above, hence the unique factorisation.

Q.E.D.

BTW: It is because of the Unique Factorisation Theorem that you only need to look for divisibility by primes when checking to see if a number is composite or prime.

In a geometrical analogy, you can think of the real numbers as points along a line, conventionally drawn horizontally. The integers are the points at unit distance from their predecessor. And the primes are the points not overlapped by multiples of any other (prime) integers, except 1. There now, that wasn't too hard, was it ? :-)

^* Names changed to protect them from the charge of ungeekiness ;-)
^** Yes I do know that there are certain algebraic rings for which the Unique Factorisation Theorem does not hold, but that's too deep for this blog.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory (new pic) on 14th November 2006 at 06:14 CET permalink Email

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US midterms election result confirmed ;-)

That's what you get, George, for lying until you're blue in the face...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory (new pic) on 13th November 2006 at 15:45 CET permalink Email

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Anti-Americanisms ;-)

US Republican and occasional(?) but fixated reader of this blog, Jeb, whom I like to think of as some kind of Tennesee-born Borat, has sent me a tirade about my October 13th and November 4th postings, which - once the invective has been stripped out - boils down to the accusation that both these postings and indeed I - are anti-american. This is not the case, Jeb, as I explained on november 4th. I quote myself from november 4th "We all loved America under the administrations of Kennedy, Carter and yes, even Clinton. But now the USA is ..." . Recently the majority of American voters cast their votes FOR America but AGAINST the present BushCo administration. Try to think of me, blog-ranter Jeb (and any others of your ilk), as one of those people, who just happens to be a 'dem furriner'.

Anyway, even if I were anti-american, I would be in good company: there are many people throughout history - much more famous than you or I - who have come up with some great anti-americanisms. These are my favourite ten which I memorised after reading them. For your delectation, and - no doubt - incendiary rage ;-)

1. "The American has no language. He has dialect, slang, provincialism, accent, and so forth." (Rudyard Kipling)
2. "Of course, America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up." (Oscar Wilde)
3. "The 100% American is 99% an idiot." (George Bernhard Shaw)
   "... America is one long expectoration ." (Oscar Wilde)
4. "The thing that impresses me most about America is the way parents obey their children." (The Duke of Windsor)
5. "If I owned Texas and Hell, I would rent out Texas and live in Hell." (General Philip H. Sheridan)
6. "They know only one word of more than one syllable in Hollywood, and that is fillum." (Louis Sherwin)
7. "It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it." (Mark Twain)
8. "The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces . . . surrounded by teeth." (Charles Luckman)
9. "America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual intervention of civilisation." (Georges Clemenceau)
10. "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." (H.L. Mencken)

Can you see the difference now, Jeb?

May my American friends forgive me for quoting this (for you, educational) list , Jeb.

PS: Now go read Winston Rand, blogging about recovering from his election shock.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 12th November 2006 at 06:12 CET permalink Email

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Bits and Bobs

 "This was the unkindest cut of all;
 For, when the noble Caesar saw him stab,
 Ingratitude, more strong than traitors' arms,
 Quite vanquish'd him." ( William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, III, ii, 187).

Rummy was fired immediately after Bush the lesser lost the US's mid-term elections.

Bill Gates owns Microsoft. MS wants to catch and punish all people using pirated copies of their SW. The new US defense minister, in charge of all that military might, is also a member of the Gates' clan. Be afraid, be very afraid ;-)

Markus Wolf, East Germany's answer to MI6's 'M', died yesterday, 9/11/2006. This was just a day after the US saw Mercury Rising ;-) [NB: There was a transit of Mercury before the disc of the sun, visible from the US, but not from here]. BTW, if I remember correctly, the first observation of a transit of Mercury was on November 7, 1631; but I've forgotten who the observer was; some Italian, I think?

There are a triple of new links on my blogroll; people I now read regularly :-
Chase me ladies, Liz Hinds, Inspector Gadget. Why don't you give them a try too? :-)

And there's a new feature down at the bottom of my right sidebar, called "YouTube Highlights", which consists of a few links to short videos I like. The links will be rotated in and out on a regular basis. The first video is one of my own. Go watch + enjoy :-)

Finally, yesterday was Guinness world record day, on which people tried to break or establish new world records and thus get in the Guinness Book of World Records. For the record (sic!), Halley Suitt tried not to blog for a whole day. But failed^* :-(

^*Satire must not only be done, it must be seen to be done ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 10th November 2006 at 06:10 CET permalink Email

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Bush whacked, in three easy steps :-)

Step 1 has been taken :-)

Thankyou to all of you true, upright, honest, decent, voting (D/d)emocrats of America, you have restored my faith in your country. Let us hope all the newly elected Dems can do something to change Dubya's policies. Hoping.....

Step 1 was taken on tuesday, when, thanks to the protesting voters of America, the Dems regained the House and perhaps even the Senate. Recounting.....

Next is step 2 : (Double?) Impeachment. Will the Dems have the courage? I doubt it :-(

And then on to step 3 : putting BushCo (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice) on trial at the international war crimes tribunal. Same charges as Nuremberg? That'll do nicely.

So why did I wait until November 9th to blog this 'news'? Because in Germany we have a significant history of things turning from bad to good as time goes by :-

• 1923 : March on the Feldherrenhalle :-(
• 1938 : Reichskristallnacht :-(
• 1989 : Fall of the Berlin Wall :-)
• and now, Bush whacked :-)

So you see, totalitarian regimes CAN be defeated :-)
And BTW, the way we write dates in Europe, THIS is 9/11. But a much better one :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 9th November 2006 at 06:09 CET permalink Email

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Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 8th November 2006 at 10:51 CET permalink Email

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It'll be long uphill fight back . . .

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country. The aforesaid sentence was proposed as a typing drill by Charles E. Weller, a teacher. It fills out a 70-space typewriter line exactly if you put a full stop at the end of the line. Such historical trivia aside, my message today is a political one.

Mid-term elections in the USA are looming up this coming week. I would ask all my american readers to vote Democrat, because we need to curb the neo-fascist powers of BushCo. I realise some of you may want to vote Green because e.g. the USA has not signed the Kyoto agreement and is the world's most profligate consumer and producer of environmental waste. Admirable though this intention is, I think it would be a wasted vote this time around. As would a vote for any of the other american minor parties. For this time around, America needs to restore the system of checks and balances for which the now virtually defunct constitution so admirably provided. So please put BushCo into a small minority in both the Senate and the House.

We all loved America under the administrations of Kennedy, Carter and yes, even Clinton. But now the USA is descending into a fascist banana republic. You don't believe me? Let us look at some of the typical characteristics of fascist banana republics and compare them with the USA under Dubya's iron jackboot junta :- Questionable elections? Check. One-party rule? Check. Rubber-stamp parliament? Check. Crackdowns on dissent? Check. State propaganda? Check. Corruption? Check. Perverted party officials? Check. Mounting debt? Check. Widening chasm between the underclass and the rich? Check. Domestic spying? Check. Curtailed civil rights? Check. Imprisonment without trial? Check. Secret prisons? Check. Concentration Camps? Check. Torture? Check. Etc. etc.
If you can't see the incipient fascism in that list, please go read this 14-point article.

Many of you will have to use a voting machine, e.g. Diebold. These are highly suspect. The vote may well be rigged in these machines. That's not the only GOP dirty trick though. Here's another. Voting lists will have been pruned in advance; coincidentally, only known and demographically likely Democrats will have been pruned out. The only chance of defeating these immoral tactics is to get the Democrats in by a landslide. So get in there on the 7th, my US friends, and vote Democrat. Vote early. Vote often ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 4th November 2006 at 06:04 CET permalink Email

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In the beginning was the Blog...

And it was in Latin, of course ;-)

Background : the monastery at St. Gallen (Switzerland) was founded in 719 and named after the Irish hermit Gallus who established the church in the area in 612 AD. The state monastery did the record-keeping for the area and still has 728 private (i.e. non-government) records dating from 700-1000. Now they have put these on display and there is a large well-illustrated catalogue available (it costs 30 Swiss Franks, but is worth it).

While the 6th century scripts are written in best roman Capitalis Quadrata, the 8th century entries are in merowingan cursive script (there are two originals of Charlmagne (780) included). Between 816 and 822 the scripts are in allemagnian miniscule. It was just after 800 that the blog style came in; the Profeβbook being a collection of all the personal data of the monastry. I like entry number 579 "Learn to write, young man, so that you do not remain lacking.".

Sometimes the blogging monk complains about his tools, e.g. "New vellum, bad ink, bad light. Need I say more?". Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose ;-)

The exhibition is open through november 12th; the catalogue alone is worth the 30 Sfr it costs. Should you be in the Lake Constance area go take a look^* and enjoy :-)

^* Oh, BTW, it will triple your enjoyment if you can read Latin fluently ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2nd November 2006 at 06:02 CET permalink Email

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