The Norton Songs

Art Sirota Feedback : Yesterday I mentioned Art Sirota's 1991 Norton Songs and immediately got a couple of Emails asking for more details. And again, Google turned up trumps, giving me over 30 hits for him. I really do like Google!

Well, Art Sirota must be about 54 now and is still living in Menlo Park and is still making music, here is his website. The Norton fans are still selling Art's Norton Songs, here is a link to the shop at the Bracebridge Street Depot, for you to go order your CD of Art Sirota's Norton Songs.

Typo of the Weak : Apologies to Yule Heibel (with a Y) for misspelling her name, mea culpa, currente calamo. That's latin, and means I wasn't trying harv 'ard enough ;)

Thanks go to Doug Alder for sending me a Java script to do Rageboy's picture swap idea. Generally I try to avoid using Java and Scripting, but a scan of my website turned up a dozen pages (of 300+) where there are still some scripts there, including a couple I can't remember putting there. Guess I need to go clean up.

posted by Stu Savory on 30th October 2003 at 05:51 Central European Time

---

High speed stuff

Bikerblogging : Several of you bikers blogged or mailed that you liked my description of a high speed lap of the Nurburgring North Loop (page now moved to here to let people enjoy the sounds too and to bookmark it, I ain't got no blog-permalinks yet).

Now an old E-quaintance, Blade Runner from Japan, mailed anonymously (wotcha got to hide, Blade-san?) asking for a description of the Isle of Man Mountain Course from a rider's point of view. On the same day, my friend Matthias Sander sent me a link to a new TT Museum page.

To answer Blade Runner, I would have to say my memory of the Mountain Course is too poor (last there in 2002 with Alex Prigge and then not since 1994 with Marion and Matthias Sander). So you will get a better description from a professional racer like Steve Hislop. Hizzy sadly died in a helicopter crash earlier this year, but his lap description is one of the best that's online.

Been mailing with Gary Williams about Half Moon Bay(CA). I remember that there is a lovely twisty road from Half Moon Bay up to the ridgeline in the direction of Palo Alto. And at the crossroads with the ridgeline there is/was a biker caff. When I was at Stanford (about 17 years ago) I used to borrow either Chrissie's RG500 or one of Art Sirota's many Nortons and howl/roar (respectively) up the hill from HMB, through the twisties in the woods. Ah happy memories. Art Sirota lived near Stanford then. Art is the singer who wrote "The Norton Songs", of which I still have a tape :-) Gary tells me the biker place was still there a couple of years back. Probably infested with Milwaukee Iron by now. Chrissie was one fast girl (on the Suzuki RG500 too ;)

Fast Pic Swop : I see that Rageboy has a photo upper right of himself that changes to one of Dali when you put the mouse on it. I don't know how to do that trick, but I'd like to. So I'll go ask our resident genius, Michelle.

Fast references : Yesterday I needed to know the minimal critical size of a planetoid/asteroid in order for it to be spherical rather than irregularly shaped. That is, above what mass or diameter does gravity pull it into shape? The internet was able to provide me with an answer to that question faster than it takes me to blog about it here! Thanks, Google, you're an excellent research tool! And for the curious, the diameter is about 200 kms (water/ice planetoid) to 350 km (silicate rock planetoid). Betcha didn't want to know junk like this, but you can use trivia like this at your next geek cocktail party, OK??? Yupp folks, the information content of Stu Savory's Blog today narrowly exceeded the albedo of a singularity. I don't reflect much, you see :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 29th October 2003 at 05:41 Central European Time

---

Curiosa

Curiouser : and curioser, said Alice. No, I'm not bullshittin' y'all. In the US they now require horses to wear nappies! And they have scares due to robot farting dogs too. Who needs a robot, if you own a bulldog. Still, here in Germany, the latest fad is Pawno Karaoke, wherein silent pawno spots are shown on the pub's video wall and talentless couples with microphones (volunteer pub customers) provide the sound track. It's in such poor taste that it's probably a Dieter Bohlen idea.

Justice : Over in Russia, the richest Russian man has been put in jail. Now there's something the US DOJ could do too, to the benefit of all mankind ;-)
And Microsoft have pushed up their profits yet again, to even more obscene levels. As did Intel too, of course. Are we being ripped off, or what?

California : provides mixed news. The bad news is that the Santa Ana winds are feeding a huge fire, threatening LA suburbs even now. I hope all our blogging friends there are safe! The good news is that California has won a 2 Mio dollar case against a spamming company, who are also forbidden to spam ever again. Unfortunately, other spammers are now turning their attention to weblogs and leaving dangerous links in the comments blocks! Bummer! That's a bleak future. Like this, where IP4 addresses are due to run out in 2005. So we need to move to IP6 addresses soon! Bet Muckysoft ain't ready for that! And probably a lot of the existing HW devices are hardwired to IP4 and so will stop working in 2005 then!

E-Voting Machines : One E-Vote firm is now setting up a PR department, just to improve their corrupt image. David Dill, a computer science professor at Stanford University said: "The voting machine industry doesn't have a PR problem. It has a technology problem. It is impossible to determine whether their machines, in their current form, can be trusted with our elections. Instead of trying to convince people the machines are safe, the industry should fix the technology and restore public confidence by "making the voting process transparent, improving certification standards for the equipment and (ensuring) there is some way to do a recount if there is a question about an election" Dill said. And I might add, not having the DIEBold CEO promise to "deliver all the votes to the president" as HE said.

posted by Stu Savory on 26th October 2003 at 13:05 Central European Time

---

Coincidences?

Bolt from the Blue: Mel Gibson is currently making a controversial new film about Christ's Passion, during which the actor playing Jesus has been struck by lightning. Twice over! Maybe He read the script and didn't like it? So I wonder how long the server for this anti-creationist website can stay online?

Rageboy : Glad to see that Chris Locke is no longer cut off. I wish him well, as we all do. People out of the filthy lucre sometimes really do crazy things, let's hope Chris is not amongst them, we all prefer the uncut version!

Dubya and Bliar : have both said (at various times and in various circumstances) that they want to be seen as doing the right thing. So did they fund this project?

Vote Rigging : Gary Williams has blogged about the exposed DIEBold internal memos (whose publication they are trying their hardest legally to suppress), wherein DIEBold personnel discuss the miscounts in their crummy SW. Go read the details please, whilst I wait for my blood to come off the boil.

posted by Stu Savory on 25th October 2003 at 6:01 Central European Time

---

Things autobiographical

Proxy Revenge? : Yesterday I mocked the Beast. Today I'm black and blue, scratched and bleeding. Duh! Nothing hellish, just that I washed the hell-hound last night.

It is not easy to wash the dog. Especially when that dog is a Bulldog. Especially when that muscular bulldog does not want to be washed even a little. 'Unwilling' would be putting it mildly. Definitely unwilling in fact. Very definitely unwilling. Positively never, ever, wanting to be put within even two stories, a staircase, two halls and a cellar away from the cellar shower. Ever so furious at being dragged down those stairs into the cellar shower and ranting like Rageboy, at the thought of water. Water. H₂O.
H₂ as in Hell twice over and O as in my screams. Even tepid water. Let alone soap.
I will draw a veil over the ensuing struggle, be merciful unto the squeamish! Amnesia is a blessing. Suffice it to say that the son///daughter of a bitch is now bathed and sweet-smelling again, and I am nursing my wounds.

Autobiographical numbers: LooWho and a couple of others wrote that they liked the numbers blog-entry yesterday though, and how about some more number stories? Numbers? No, it was Revelations!

OK, will do. Have you heard of autobiographical numbers? An autobiographical number is an integer of less than 11 digits which describes itself. 6210001000 is an example. The first digit is a count of the Zeroes in the whole number. The second digit is a count of the Ones in the whole number. The third digit is a count of the Twos in the whole number. And so on. So 6210001000 contains 6 zeroes, 2 ones, 1 two, no threes, fours or fives, 1 six and no seven, eight or nine. And thus it is an autobiographical number. Given that definition, can you now work out what is the smallest autobiographical number? Mail me your answers, with the reasoning how you got your result. Best correct answers will be blogged at the weekend :-)

Half Moon Bay : Gary Williams is moving CA for a while. I wish you bonne chance with the jobhunting, Gary! I remember Half Moon Bay. Landed a Piper there once, back in the late 70s or early 80s; neat airfield on the Pacific shore, I seem to remember. Nice, friendly folks at the airfield too. Not like Carmel was back then. At Carmel I was lined up on final approach, headlights on, when I noticed (at the last minute) a guy wearing headphones jogging along the runway. So I did an overshoot, buzzing over him to warn him I was there, wanting to land. I went around, but on the next approach he was still obstinately jogging along the runway. So I had to orbit until he got to the end of the runway and continued his jogging around the perimeter track. After landing, I accosted him (mildly) and suggested it might have been polite to jog elsewhere and let me land the Piper. He replied that it was his airfield, he could jog where he liked, and suggested I go pound Pacific sand up the place where the sun don't shine! Shocked, I left for Half Moon Bay, which how I discovered that nice place :-)

Mind you, over on the East Coast, I once landed at Martha's Vinyard and was greeted by armed bodyguards! Over 20 years before 911.

posted by Stu Savory on 23rd October 2003 at 6:66 Central Hades Time :-(

---

Irrational stuff

Beastly Maths! : Yesterday I was helping a teenager with his 'math-catchup' revision and we were covering irrational numbers (not expressible as whole number fractions) like root(2), PI, e, etc. He didn't know the term and was calling them 'beastly' numbers, because they weren't on his pocket calculator. So we talked about rational approximations, which he could calculate and use instead.

Seems most schools teach only 22/7 as "the" approximation for PI. At my school we were taught 355/113, which gets you more significant digits (7 instead of 3). Useful to know if your calculator has no 'PI' button.

Of course, you could always remember Einstein's statement after he read a quantum-mechanics textbook. "How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics". Just count the number of letters per word to understand this mnemonic which gives you 15 significant digits.

I taught him the first verse of a long poem too:-

Sir, I bear a rhyme excelling
In mystic force and magic spelling
celestial sprites elucidate
all my own telling can't relate . . . 

Again, just count the number of letters per word to understand this poetical mnemonic, which gives you 21 significant digits.

Haven't got anything nearly as good for 'e' though. But will give you 8 significant digits, again useful if your calculator has no 'e' button.

Finally he asked what other 'beastly' or irrational things I knew about, so I told him about all that irrational spam for Viagra (that sort of thing interests teenagers :)

Honestly! Spam is terrible. We calculated that if he had taken up all the spam offers for penis-enlargement, then it would be some three and a half miles long by now. And so hard from all the Viagra offered, it could replace the Golden Gate bridge.

The "Pfizer riser", (written out as 1-[[3-(6,7-dihydro-1-methyl-7-oxo-3-propyl-1 H-pyrazolo[4,3-d]pyrimidin-5-yl)-4-ethoxyphenyl]-sulfonyl]-4-methylpiper azine citrate) is written shorthand as C₂₈H₃₈N₆O₁₁S. Huh? You mean, you didn't want to know that?
By using the usual whole number approximations for the atomic weights of N=nitrogen=14, O=oxygen=16, S=sulfur(sic!)=32 , C=carbon=12, and H=hydrogen=1, we calculate this approximation to the beastly number:
Viagra's molecular weight is 666 atomic mass units, folks!
Is that beastly enough for you? NO? Then read Revelations 13: 18.

posted by Stu Savory on 22nd October 2003 at 06:23 Central European Time ;)

---

One Ring to rule them all

Introduction : This is going to be a long blog entry today, but an exciting one!

Regular readers of this blog may remember that I promised to do any (reasonable) field trip request (christened Proxy Germanica). You may remember too, that I am a hard-riding old-style biker. And you may remember a lass called Petra, who wanted help getting into biking by asking this old rocker for experiences and tips. Well, now she wants to know what it's like to ride a performance bike (here a TL1000S) around a race track. The racetrack in Germany has to be the Nurburgring Nordschleife , generally known as the Green Hell.

The Nurburgring snakes its way through 20.832 kilometers (sic!) of the Eifel forest, winding through 72 corners and rising through 292 meters (about 1000 feet) through green pines around the Nurburg castle ruins. It is not one of those toy-boy 5 km circuits with wide safety-zones that F1 drivers use. This is real road-racing, second only to the Mountain Course on the Isle of Man.

In my mind there is an indelible film of my mental impressions of my laps of the Ring. Now I'm going to run my mental film, dictating the blog as I go. So get ready for your shot of adrenalin, because here are your instructions, to be read and followed in under nine minutes (Helmut Daehne's record is 7 mins 48 secs, I need 1 min more).

posted by Stu Savory on 19th October 2003 at 07:57 Central European Time ;)

---

Jobs for the Boys (and Girls :-)

Thankyou : Back on Wednesday, October 15th I wrote a blog entry asking you to help other bloggers (who are currently out of work) to find a job. Please scroll down and read it right now! I'll wait 'til you come back here :-) Gary thanked me. De Nada, Gary. Now my blog is not widely read (daily double digits only), so I wrote to more popular US-based bloggers, asking them to support this effort. Thanks here to Meg and to Jeneane who both linked back to my blogposting. Let's see what we bloggers can do to help other E-quaintances.

Jeneane also suggested setting up a website where we could all deposit CVs etc in a database for prospective employers. Here in Germany, that would have me skating on thin ice. Here, you need a license to set up an employment agency (job-centre) and need certain government-specified qualifications. I have neither, so can't legally do the database/website thing Jeneane suggested. We are a crap burocracy! So stop sending me hopeful CVs etc. What I can and will do, is to provide named links back to the blogs of people looking for jobs.

Thankyou(NOT): Andy Borowitz writes an award-winning humour website which is often quite funny. Generally I like his sort of satire. Based on this I lashed out nearly 11 (eleven!) Euros on a book of his called "Who moved my Soap". What thin humour (84 pages only, large print). Basically, it's a 3 page website joke stretched out to 84 (little) pages. Eleven Euros are a ripoff in my opinion, and a waste of my money. Don't buy it. BTW: Witz is German for 'Joke'. So now I can understand Andy's surname. Andy, stick to the website, OK?

Got a slow puncture yesterday, bummer. Only the second in my whole life. Fixed it temporarily with 'Reifenpilot' which a kind of messy goo that you inject into the tyre via a spray can. Called my car-dealer/garage to ask him to swap me onto my winter tyres today. He refuses to work on a saturday, claiming he has an emergency service only! Sheesh! Guess where I won't be buying my next car! The name of the car dealer with the crappy service? VW-Diemel in Paderborn, should you want to boycott them too!

posted by Stu Savory on 18th October 2003 at 08:55 Central European Time ;)

---

Dark forces abroad : Paranoid!

Keeping us in the dark : The Evil One is now running monthly press conferences to admit to (some of) their latest security bungles. They have warned of seven security flaws in their programs, describing five of them as "critical". It's the ones they don't tell us about that are worrying me, because it means they haven't got a fix available for them. Donald Knuth had only 9 or 10 bugs in the whole of TeX and doubles his payouts to the first reporters of every bug found. This payout model should be applied to Mickeysoft too; at least that would solve the first world's economic problems (maybe not the second world's though) and rid the world of the Evil One in one fell swoop!

Israel stops Mickeysoft : Israel has shut out Microsoft! The Israeli Ministry of Commerce has suspended all governmental contracts with Microsoft, and indicated that the ban will last throughout 2004. China is getting a copy of the MS Windoze source code so that they don't shut out MS there, MS hopes.

Ozzy : has cancelled his European tour. Seems he gets the shakes, takes something for it, then gets a dry mouth and so can't sing. And here was I thinking it was the other way around: can't sing, has a dry throat, so goes down to the pub for a few beers, and gets the shakes as a result ;) But I'm just a dreamer.

posted by Stu Savory on 17th October 2003 at 05:55 Central European Time ;)

---

Can YOU help these fine people?

Social blog(ger)s needed : The economy is really way down, here in Germany. But it's bad in the USA too. I just read one of Meg's pages linking to Blogs-That-Rock and was surprised by the number of bloggers needing a job. So come on folks, if you live anywhere in the US near any of the following bloggers, see if you can arrange a job (interview) for them! That would be social software blogging at it's best, and I'd mention it to Liz and even Michael Moore next time I see him too! The following guys and gals say they need a job. Can you help?

• LooWho
• Michael O'Connor Clarke
• Plato Shrimp
• Justin Drawbaugh
• Gary Williams

And whilst we're ranting about the economy, have you ever wondered who is REALLY doing the driving and who is just a lightweight passenger?

Email for you? No, I don't mean that amusingly soppy Hollywood LOVE movie. But if you are looking for a Senor Suarez from Barboza in Uruguay, here is Email for you.

posted by Stu Savory on 15th October 2003 at 06:07 Central European Time ;)

---

Go forth and multiply!

Think about this : Recently, Yule and Jeneanne have been blogging about some deficits in the (US) education system. This is one of my regular rants too, which is why I enjoy reading Brian's Education Blog occasionally, to cool off. But then I realise I am responsible too, if I don't pass knowledge on. So here's a contribution to the fight against creeping loss of knowledge.

Last week, at a party down in Bavaria, it turned out that none of the children (or the adults) present knew more than one way to multiply numbers. They had only been taught the method of decimal-offsets, summing the resulting rows. Noone ever told them there is another way, a way which would make them think too (as in: WHY does Stu Savory's multiplication method work?)

Here's an example, with just two 2-digit numbers, to keep it simple, but the method works for integers of any size. Let's assume we want to multiply 43 by 57. That's 2451, you can do that in your head or use a calculator to check it. Write two columns on a sheet of paper. In row one, write 43 in col 1 and 57 in col 2, as shown here. In row two, halve col 1 (throwing any remainder away) and double col 2. Repeat this step until you have a row with a "1" in col 1. Now copy column two into a third column, except that you write a zero in col 3 for the rows which have an even number in col 1. Now just add up col three, and voila there is the correct result, 2451 in this case! The method works for integers of any size. Try this on your friends and astound them!

Worked Example for 43*57=2451.

43	57	57
21	114	114
10	228	0
5	456	456
2	912	0
1	1824	1824
sum up column three		2451

The method above is also for Sascha Pfaller too, who read my (German) page about divisibilty shortcut rules and wrote asking for more! Some people are suckers for punishment - er, education, I guess :-)

Does DIEBold rig elections? :
Gary Williams read my rant about DIEBold - the vote thieves - of October 9th and pointed to more irregularities cropping up when DIEBold voting machines are used. Using a listing of which county uses the Diebold machines, it was found that those counties undercounted Arnold and Bustemonte and put the missing votes in some minor candidates totals (to keep the total vote count correct).

posted by Stu Savory on 14th October 2003 at 06:06 Central European Time ;)

---

Wozzat?

It's the pits : Well, Aah knee got elected by the good folks of Cay-liff-or-nyaaah ; Republican, eh? If he deals with the state debts like fellow Republican Bush has with the US national debt, then goodnight! Just so you know what it's like in the (arm)pits, here's a shot of the gubernatorial armpit. You may not recognise it. You may not recognise California after a few years either :-(

I'll GIF you Poetry : Back on October 7th Frank Paynter took a liking to my photo of a 45-year old Ace Triton entitled Naked English Lady and blogged

Stu Savory triumphs with this poetic offering...

You want poetry, Frank? I'll GIF you poetry! Here is a GIF scan of my mid-1960's rocker's poem, called ' Burn Up'. This naive but aggressive little ditty is one I had published in the 59 club magazine (even then called ' Link') back in 1965, when the Mods vs. Rockers wars were peaking in England. This is still my riding style folks, even after 44 years on motorcycles, so move over, willya? :-)

New blogs : Well, maybe not new, but new to me, and at first view rather interesting. So I'll be reading these for the rest of the month and then decide if they come off my blogroll or get to stay there. Here they are :-

• Lauren Wu, for mild-toned but none the less perfectly valid rants.
• Raised by Chaffinches, a little paranoid about a God and ESP (we did a telepathy/clairvoyance test across the net via his comments block on Tuesday 7th, and no, neither of us is either :-)
• Scary Duck, Winner of The Guardian Best British Weblog Competition 2002, who had a great article about the Goons on Saturday 11th, featuring my favourite Goon, Mr. Spike Milligna.
• and Yule Heibel, with a very nice blend of current news commentary and philosophy. A well-educated blog.

Regular blog scan : I can confirm to brykMantra that Luann is the worst comic on the web, and would like to claim that Dilbert is the best :-) Over at Mandarin Design Meg is still feeding us her great HTML tips daily. That is one creative woman! Finally, Mercurial is on a roll; scandalous indeed.

Schumi Rex Aeterna: Congratulations to Michael Schumacher, now World Champion Formula One driver for the 6th time, making him the all-time best :-) A nail-biting finale furioso. Barichello rex fecit.

posted by Stu Savory on 12th October 2003 at 09:01 Central European Time ;)

---

Ranting weakly(sic).

Week's rants : I'm just too exhausted right now to give you a full scale indignant rant, so I'll just point you to some things that have pissed me off recently, and leave you to fill in the righteous indignation yourselves. I'm too old and tired for all this partying that's been concentrated into this week.

• Irish PM Bertie Ahern is accused of leaving taxpayers to pick up the bill for compensating victims of catholic clergy abuse.
• I hate being constantly spied upon by CCTV cameras. So here's how to zap 'em with yer own little laser! And here is a Canadian article about the development of laser and similar weapons.
• A former UN arms inspector who has been searching for Iraq's secret weapons has briefed US politicians on his findings. There were none. No WMD! Bush lied to the world. We all knew that already, but US bullying still disgusts me.
• A report ordered by the Bush administration finds 'shocking' levels of distrust towards America in Muslim states. Just how stupid must the Bush administration be, not to have expected this. Recall Dubya! And for comparison purposes remember: Nobody Died When Clinton Lied!
• There are really good satirical articles at The Borowitz Report, but it seems he has no permalinks, so I can't just point you to the particular one I just enjoyed. Why can't these guys use permalinks? The same is true of the politically active pawn-king Larry Flynt. Sheesh!

posted by Stu Savory on 10th October 2003 at 11:11 Central European Time ;)

---

Total recall

Our Knee : Look out, California! the gray one got recalled and now the Terminator gets to play with more than a SUV. Is that a bird or a plane or a Hummer? It's a Bummer!

As the photo shows, Ahneeee is practising pulling strings, first thing he did was call Dubya for an economic bailout. As the photo shows, he's a real plucker. But the Terminator is a machine of coarse(sic!), maybe it's a pheasant plucker machine that we're talking about?

Despite the modern guitar, we've all heard that Ahhneee prefers classical pieces. I heard he likes Air from Orchestral Suite No 3 in D BWV1068 by Johann Sebastian Bach, (very) commonly known as (H)Air on a G-string" ;-)

I wonder if that CA election used the kind of known-to-be-insecure election machines approved by Dubya and made by a company (owned by guess-who?) called DIEBold ?

But even manual systems can be fixed. For example, last week here in Germany (in the State of Bavaria), the members of parliament (MP) elected Edmund Stoiber as the Bavarian leader. Embarassingly, there were more votes submitted than there were MPs present! So did they revote? Nah! they just declared the excess votes to be invalid, claiming Stoiber would have won a recount anyway! Do you know the German word for thief? It is DIEB. Nice coincidence huh. C.G.Jung would have liked that.

posted by Stu Savory on 9th October 2003 at 15:02 Central European Time ;)

---

Pocket Enigma®: The Review

Background: Many of my readers know me (Stu Savory) as a crypto-geek. That is, I am a cryptographer, interested in old coding machines. In fact I have the number one website in German on the subject [ look up "Chiffriergeräte" worldwide in Google]. But I'm going to write this review in English as well, to better serve the international community (and an E-quaintance, Frank Paynter :-)

Bletchley Park: During WW2 the German armed forces' top secret codes were broken at Bletchley Park (UK), providing the allies with vital information towards their war effort. The link is to their official website. Actually, dear readers, here is a much better website about Codes and Ciphers in the Second World War written by Tony Sale, the original founder and curator of the Bletchley Park Museum. The Enigma was probably the most famous coding machine widely used by the Germans.

Weeks ago I asked Gary Turner to visit the B.P. museum (just down the road from his house) and blog it for us, but he's too busy to do anything, I guess :-(

Brian Hargrave has designed (in association with The Bletchley Park Trust) a really well thought out toy which is like a single-rotor Enigma machine and beautifully demonstrates one of the three working principles of the Enigma. The toy is fairly well-produced (details below), cheap, well-explained and can be used in a simplified mode by six to ten year-olds. The toy is designed for children from 8 to 80 years of age who have an interest in secret writing and ciphers.

The Toy is available from the Bletchley Park Shop. However I ordered mine (for only five pounds sterling (UK) + post and packing) from

Mark Baldwin,
24 High Street, Cleobury Mortimer, KIDDERMINSTER  DY14 8BY, England
phone/fax: 01299 270110 (international +44 1299 270110); 
email: enigma@mbaldwin.free-online.co.uk

Delivery was prompt (as usual!) and the goods arrived in Germany undamaged.

The Pocket Enigma® is like a one-rotor Enigma machine in a compact disk case. The stator is a cheap-to-produce compact disk case (photolink). The serious downside of this design is that the "ears" of the disk case will probably break off quite quickly if the toy is actually used by children :-( The rotor is a simple cardboard disk (photolink) printed on its two faces with two different "wirings", which you are required to trace through manually. Despite the warnings on the instruction leaflet, some idiot may put the cardboard disk into his/her CD-player, DVD or PC CDROM drive. Probably the same US woman who tried to dry her poodle in a microwave oven. [I refrain from my usual rant about the US education system, Jeneane Sessum covered that on 4th October.]

The instructions supplied explain how to trace through the "wirings". I could code/decode at 20 to 30 characters per minute after some practice, i.e. about half real Enigma speeds.

The instructions (the CD-cover sheet) are really good! They explain how the Pocket Enigma® works (starting with the traditional naming of parts :-) and take the user step-by-step through the processes of coding and decoding. Worked examples and carefully annotated figures illustrate how the Key and Message Setting are used, and there is a trouble-shooting table to help with common errors.

All in all, I can recommend this toy! Well done, Brian Hargrave!

Criticism : But now for the caveats.

• The mechanical weaknesses (CD case ears and floppy cardboard rotor) I mentioned. Used with care (by an adult) these should be no great problem.
• The use of the name Enigma is good marketing by B.P. The toy illustrates only one of the Enigma principles though. There is no plugboard (Steckerbrett) and of course no turnover-pawl mechanism for other rotors, let alone a "mirror" Umkehrwalze. Nor is there a "daily setup" table included in the leaflet. Including this would add to realism, as would a selection of rotors (see below). Including a reusable semi-pre-printed sheet to simulate a plugboard would be a simple improvement too.
• So the toy is really a single-rotor Hebern machine from the early 1920s.
• There is only one (dual sided) rotor included, so sadly the toy has only 52 possible keys. The bright side of this is that I can show a class of schoolchildren how to do a parallel brute-force attack within minutes, even teaching them the concept of unicity distance in the process :)
• It would be an improvement if BP included 5 rotors instead of just one, and preprinted them with the original 5 Enigma rotor wirings.
• The instruction leaflet should then be modified to explain why 5 rotors, and reference their historical wirings. If Brian doesn't know them, I can tell him.
• The importance of session keys is not well explained. The instruction leaflet should be modified to explain better why they are used.
• The leaflet gives no hints on how to break an Enigma message. I recommend that the leaflet point to Tony Sale's website ( which is in English, my own less-good explanations are in German).
• BP should provide alternative explanatory leaflets in German (at least), Polish, French etc. All these nations had Enigma code-breaking teams and there are crypto-geeks like me in all these countries, let alone thousands of interested children (and adults) too.

With the improvements I suggest above, the toy could advance to be suitable historical instructional material too. My ideas are free for you, BP and Brian, so go ahead implementing them ASAP, please. :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 7th October 2003 at 06:02 Central European Time ;)

---

What the Dickens?

Boredom : Charles Dickens is said to have invented the word boredom in 1852 , in his novel Bleak House, using it in the phrase "[his] chronic malady of boredom". Having once read this Dickens' work, I can believe that! Scanning new blogs with the purpose of extending my blogroll of good quality blogs, I found (sadly) that many blogs follow this Dickensian tradition :-(

Coincidence ? C.G.Jung wrote about synchronicity, the long arm of coincidence, Fate instead of the 1 in 1,000,000 chances I blogged about last friday. Now we have all heard about the homo rape that happens in men's prisons. And of course about "the english disease" in UK boys' schools. Is it therefore mere coincidence that the Inspector of Her Majesty's Prisons is called Sir David Rams-Bottom? (Actually, he spells it Ramsbotham, which is phonetically similar). Boring, huh?

posted by Stu Savory on 6th October 2003 at 19:22 Central European Time ;)

---

One in a million : chancy news

Lotto : Last saturday's draw in the lotto (6 from 49) in Germany was :-
7, 17, 35, 39, 40, 44.
Last sunday's draw in the lotto (6 from 45) in Austria was :-
3, 17, 35, 39, 40, 44.
Five out of six numbers identical. Wow! That's highly unlikely! Just as highly unlikely as having five other numbers of course (about 1 in 1,000,000), but more worthwhile reporting to you.

Drought : Due to the very dry summer here in Germany we have a drought and VERY low water levels (1 meter), e.g. of the Rhine river near Bonn. River police recently inspected the dried up portion of the river bottom there, finding two cracked safes, besides the usual bicycles, furniture and refrigerators. But not only those! No less than SIX cars were found, ALL of which had been reported as allegedly stolen to the respective insurance companies ;-)

Public Holiday : Today will be a public holiday here, celebrating Germany's Reunion on 3rd October 1990, that was a one in a million chance, too. We get a long weekend. Mr. Spike Milligna - the wellknown typing mistake - once wrote that he approved of pubic(sic!) holidays, it gave the ladies of ill repute a chance to put their feet up//er, down ;-)

Political cabaret: Dieter Hildebrandt (76) is retiring. His last live TV show "Scheibenwischer" was performed in Berlin last night. It has been running for 23 years. We will miss him, a one in a million man.

posted by Stu Savory on 3rd October 2003 at 06:02 Central European Time ;)

---

The way is the goal

"The way is the goal" is a Zen Buddhist proverb meaning the means are the end. It is particularly true for those of us who ride motorcycles. On some trips (see Sept. 10th blog entry) we don't particularly want to GET anywhere, but we do want nice motorcycling roads along the way. Those are the twisties and the hills, winding river-valley roads and canyons. Meandering through forests, woods and down meadow-bordered lanes. No boring long straights, autobahn or motorways. We want to wear the tyres down at the edge, not in the middle. Maybe that's why I don't reckon Milwaukee iron (and choppers of that ilk) are REAL motorcycles, OK, Liesl? :-)

But as Petra asked yesterday, you need to be able to navigate well to find such routes. So let's talk about bike-vs-car navigation, since I promised her an answer. In her car she has a navigation system to get her from A to B, it always knows where she is (via GPS). Others may have a passenger reading a map. The finger on the map keep track of current position. The map is protected from wind & weather. None of this applies on the motorcycle, which is why I make and use road-books.

Road Books : First, look at the area in which you wish to ride on a suitable map. But remember, as Alford Korzybski, the father of general semantics, stated The map is not the territory! It will contain superflous detail you don't need and may omit things you want to know. A Road Book is an extract of the essential routing information only. You can write it after reading the map or using a motorcyclist-specific route planner SW on your PC. Living in Germany, I use a route-planning software called Motorrad Routenplaner Deutschland Version 4.03.

The Road Book has 6 columns. Column 1 is the totalised mileage for the tour. Set your odometer to zero when you start and this will tell you where the turn-off points are. Col 2 are the mileage differences from the previous checkpoint, so you know mentally when to expect the next turn-off. Col 3 names the turnoff point, except if this on the open road somewhere. Col 4 is just an arrowhead, telling you to turn left, right, or go straight ahead. Col 5 names the direction in which you should be headed, usually the next town name. It may include the road-number (as can Col 3 too). Finally col 6 optionally contains any useful other info.

This table gets printed out in A5 landscape format and put in the transparent top of your tank rucksack (A4 is too big to fit). Protect it from the rain, if the ink runs you can get lost easily :-) Print in big letters, so that you can read it easily from 3ft away in the saddle. Do not try to study it while riding! (Understood, Norbert? :-). With big letters, only about 10 lines will be visible, then you need to stop and turn over the page. To avoid this, you can buy special scroll holders. Then you print out on endless paper and scroll it into the perspex box. As you pass each checkpoint, just turn the knob on the left of the scroll holder to scroll down to the next few entries.

Pros & Cons : Pro : You don't have to find your position on the map each time. You only have one or two lines in your short term memory. Con: If there are roadworks with diversions, you need to have the map with you too, for dynamic re-routing :-(

That's how I do it, Petra, but our club's best navigator is Andreas, so you may want to ask him too. I'll forward any mail. Ciao4now.

PS : On the bike, as in life in general: along the way, take time to smell the flowers!

posted by Stu Savory on 2nd October 2003 at 06:22 Central European Time ;)

---

On the road again

Bikers' mail : Kicking off this month's blog, a triple of biker friends wrote recently. An old school friend - Carl - (Debby and he ride a BMW flying brick these days) sent a great photo of one of his 3 cats. Knowing that Carl is an organic chemist, I wonder how he got the cat's eyes that super colour. Or is it natural? Anyway, the wife and I still prefer Bulldogs.

Another biker e-quaintance - Steffen Koschker - who had read and most likely been seriously infected by my trip-report on last year's Manx Grand Prix, went this year himself and sent me a photo of himself and that grand old Manx landmark waterwheel in Laxey, Lady Isabella. Thanks, Steffen, looking forward to reading your trip report and seeing the rest of your photos. He camped near Hillberry which is where I do TT/MGP marshalling.

The third biker mail was from a young lass - Petra - just getting into biking, who wrote that she very much enjoyed my blog entry of 10th September about the 1000 km day trip on country roads only. She asks how I "navigate whilst riding, it's not as if you have a navi-system on the bike like I do in my car". Well lass, I use home-made road-books. Too long to describe today, but I'll write up how to make your very own road-books and put it online sometime this month, OK?

Finally, for those blog-readers who always wondered what we old bikers still have (wet) dreams about, its things like this 45 year old naked English Lady :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 1st October 2003 at 07:02 Central European Time ;)

---