By my lief : the colours of Autumn

Pronounciation guide for real English, especially for my American readers :-

Cholmondely is pronounced 'chumly' ,
Featherstonehaugh is pronounced 'fanshaw' ,
Thames is pronounced 'Isis' , and
Fall is pronounced 'autumn' ;-)

And for what it's worth, Ghoti is pronounced 'fish'. Huh?
Sure :- gh as in 'enough', o as in 'women', and ti as in 'station'. Fish ;-)

PS: Also - but you knew this anyway - Bush is pronounced 'evil' ;-)

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

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A Dearth of Education :-(

A recent OECD PISA report shows that the standards of education are declining in Germany. This is not only an absolute decline over time, but also a decline relative to other nations. Specifically the report criticises the low number of people in tertiary education, low being relative to other nations. This will lead to a lack of engineers in the coming decades (a pinch we are feeling now as the economy slowly recovers) and a dearth of teachers. Is it just the tertiary level we should worry about?

It seems that secondary education is failing too. In the UK,more than half of employers say school leavers often cannot function in the workplace due to a lack of basic maths and literacy, a survey suggests. 52% of UK employers surveyed are dissatisfied with the basic literacy of school leavers, 59% with their basic numeracy. Last year 53% in England achieved less than grade C English and maths GCSEs. Now compare this...

"All skilled workers (from outside the EU) will have to learn English before they can enter Britain" prime minister Gordon Brown has said. Skilled workers will now be expected to understand English to a standard equal to GCSE grade A to C, it is understood. Albeit this is meant to ease integration, but is the corollary that Britain should exile the 47% of their own school-leavers who can't even manage a C ? ;-)

This is compounded by the criticism that GCSEs and A-levels are getting easier. To counter this, the UK education secretary (Balls, to you) has announced that the exam system in England is to be put in the hands of an independent watchdog to counter the aforementioned criticism that GCSEs and A-levels are getting a lot easier.

On a lighter tone, here are ten questions that school leavers might be expected to answer. And your job, dear blogreader, is to decide :-
A) do these questions support the 'dumbing down' theory mentioned above, and
B) which are the real exam questions and which ones did I just put in for laughs ;-)

1. What language is spoken in France?
2. What religion was the previous Pope?
   • Polish
   • Jewish
   • Catholic
   • Protestant
   • Agnostic (check only one)
3. Metric conversion. How many feet is 0.0 meters?
4. What time is it when the big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 6?
5. And when the little hand is on the 9 and the big hand is on the teacher's thigh?
6. Six kings of England have been called George, the last one being George the Sixth. Name the previous five.
7. Can you explain Einstein's Theory of Relativity?
   • yes
   • no
8. Spell 'dyslexia', in BLOCK LETTERS.
9. Insert some plus signs into the sequence 123456789 so that the sum is 666.
10. Whose number is that (666)?

At the other end of the spectrum there are rare over-achievers. People like Felix Geisler (20) whose exam results were 840 out of 840 questions right! Or Minu Dietlinde Tizabi who passed her university entrance exams with the maximal result of a 1.0 average (= at least 768 right) at age only 14, having jumped over 4 classes. Philipp Rauch dropped just two, scoring 838 out of 840 a couple of years ago.

Finally, here is some food for thought for you, if you are Thick as a Brick :-(

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

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Ignorance is bliss :-(

Tuning up for one of my regular rants about the miserable state (sic!) of education these days, I came across this photo of an ignorant student girl. Obviously her heart is in the right place, and she intended to fight for peace, etc. But did she really need to go the sponsorship route? Why else is she displaying an advertisement for Mercedes Benz on her cheek? Can't even get the logo right; sigh!

And then there is this biker! He has spent over €10,000 on this magnificent red streetfighter, a Triumph Speed Triple, one of the best British bikes (see photo left).

And he is so PROUD of his British Bike that he has bought a Union Jack sticker for the flyscreen and airbrushed a chequered flag over it (see photo right). But in his (duh!) ignorance he has spoiled the whole Brit-Bike effect by attaching the Union Jack sticker upside down :-( I saw the bike at Gut Albrock on sunday, but didn't have the courage heart to tell him of his mistake (besides which, he was much MUCH bigger than me ;-)

But ignorance extends even to the highest places. When the German chancellor Angela Merkel was visiting Tony Blair (UK Prime minister then), Number 10 Downing Street displayed the Belgian flag instead of the German one! Yes, both are black, red and gold. But the belgian one has vertical stripes in the sequence black-yellow-red whereas the German flag has horizontal stripes in the sequence black-red-gold. You'd think diplomats would know about such things.
One of the german press men noticed it and it was swapped in a great hurry. A hurry so great that no-one (except perhaps you eagle-eyed blogreaders today) noticed that Downing Street had even managed to fly the Union Jack upside down too. That just about sums up Blair's government to a T.

Microsoft SW Excels(sic!) at ignorance too. Seems Excel 2007 cannot multiply two numbers whose product equals 65,535 (e.g. 77.1 * 850). The result displayed by Excel 2007 is 100,000. Any amount of ignorance by MS doesn't surprise me at all :-(

Finally (at least for today) we have the time-travellers(?) at the FBI, whose website today redefines a century as having 101 years! Stupid feds can't even count :-(

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 26th September 2007 at 06:26 CEST permalink Comments Email

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There are no words

Marcel Marceau died at the weekend aged 84 :-(

Today's blog therefore has no Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension.

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

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A Personal Radar Pistol

Envious of those traffic cops out there? Curious how fast your dog can run? How about those downhill bicyclists, Tour-de-France riders etc? Help is on the way; you can now have your own radar gun! Become a speed-trapper, kids!

Yes, it's a toy. Yes, it has limited range (12 meters). But yes, it does work. It's a Hot Wheels accessory toy. I bought mine from Amazon.de for under 33 €, delivery was just 4 days. The blister pack is incredibly tough, it's safer if an adult opens it. Four AAA batteries are needed - but not included - and then you are set to go. As you see in the photo (right), it is slightly too small for an adult hand and too large for a small child's hand. I'd guess the optimal fit would be for a 12-year-old.

Using the two switches at the back [ see photo on the left], you can choose between '1:64 scale speed (for playing Hot Wheels)' and 1:1 speed. You can also choose between MPH and KPH. If you (rarely) need to re-boot it, there is a small hole into which one pokes a paper clip. I've never needed to do so. To measure a speed first click the trigger once to turn the gun on and set the readout to zero. Then point the gun at the person/thing whose speed is to be measured. The leaflet limits the maximum range to 12 meters, but I've successfully measured a lorry at 50 meters. Small objects (birds, a flying fist etc) are difficult to measure consistently. The to/from speed appears in the LED window, a whole number between 0 and 160 KPH (100 MPH). Crossing speeds are not measurable. Hold the trigger to measure current speed. Upon releasing the trigger the display shows (for 30 secs) the maximum speed measured. Click the trigger again to reset it to zero. The neighbourhood kids have great fun racing past on their bicycles, boards, roller skates, inliners etc. I also use it at our dog club meets to see which of the roly-poly bulldogs can haul ass fastest ;-)

In Europe, this device is legal in Germany, Austria and Switzerland; I don't know about other countries (it operates in the X-Band at 9.75 GHz at minimal power levels). The manufacturers recommend that you do not use it in traffic (!). Presumably some guilty driver might see the business end (photo right, above) and stomp on the brakes causing the following sleepy driver to hit him. The cops would then charge YOU for interfering dangerously in the flow of traffic and the insurance company would surely try to reclaim their losses from you :-( So don't use it on unsuspecting traffic!

Be that as it may, my biker mates and I went out onto a lonely straight stretch. Then they covered speedo and rev-counter with beer-mats and tried to drive past me at exactly 50 KPH (30 MPH). Repeated at 100 KPH. Rider with the smallest deviation wins ;-) We also did an acceleration test (Blast-Off) from a standing start over 100 meters; all with no other traffic about. It may be only a toy, but it works really well :-) Accuracy? Less than 1 km/h deviation from the GPS readouts ;-)

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

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On the average . . .

The pointy-haired Überboss - capo di tutti capi - marched into the employees' union meeting and point blank stated "Half of you are under average!" . This got the union guys protesting and spluttering before they'd had time to think (i.e. their usual mode is protest then think later about what they're saying ;-)

So I butted in with "Correct, that's one definition of average ;-)" and then went on to point out "But what's worse is that the pay of the average employee is less than the average pay! You're not paying us fairly!" This of course got the shop stewards and unionised mob into more of a misty red rage. But it's true, here's an example :-

The company has 8 blue-collar workers on 10€/hour and 7 white-collar guys on 20€/hour and 5 bosses on 100€/hour. So the average salary is (8*10 + 7*20 + 5*100)/(8+7+5) = 720/20 = 36€ per hour. This kind of average is called the mean.
Note that most people (15 out of 20) earn less than the mean.

Now certainly the 5 bosses wouldn't (want to) be described as an average employee, and since there are 8 blue-collar workers as opposed to 7 white-collar ones, the average employee is a blue-collar worker. And 10€ are less than 36€. This kind of average is called the mode, i.e. the class of employees having the most members.

Another way of finding the average employee is to sort the employees by pay, first the eight 10€/hour guys, then the seven 20€/hour guys, and finally the five 100€/hour bosses. That's twenty people in total. So the average guy - the one in the middle - is the 10th one, a 20€/hour white-collar guy. And 20€ are still less than 36€. This type of average, the middle member of an ordered set, is called the median.

So all I'd said was that the median and/or the mode were less than the mean. And this is always so when the distribution is skewed like this; it's nothing for the union guys or the pointy-haired boss to get heated about. In fact if you look at a company like Microsoft, the distribution is almost L-shaped, due to Bill Gates earning an obscene amount of money by seriously overcharging us for his distinctly average products :-(

And the moral of today's tale? When someone says "average" make sure you know which one he means: median, mode, or mean. And why he chose to use that one!

Today's blog is a maths lesson for Madame Lévy's daughter and a dig at my favourite union guy, 4D :-)

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

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Northern Rock bank run, a +ve coincidence :)

It is a small world! The photo on the left shows L2R yours truly supping a pint with good friends Beryl and Mick. We always stayed at John and Maureen's Waldick hotel in Peel, Isle of Man for the TT and Manx Grand Prix races until our hosts too recently went into retirement. This is my most recent photo of 'em, taken in the downstairs bar at the 2002 MGP.

Since then I have lost contact, since I no longer have Mick's address or Email after they too retired. But now, even bad news brings good news :-) Because you see, the BBC did interviews with people queueing to withdraw their life savings from the UK bank Northern Rock. It seems Northern Rock is a solid bank, which means it's not liquid :-(

Here's the BBC article with a live photo of Mick and Beryl, so I know now they are still alive and well, even if I still have no contact (biker Mick must be 70 now ;-) A fortuitous coincidence indeed. Thankyou, unknown BBC reporter, you have made my day :-)

So I contacted the Beeb, but their reporter had no contact address for Mick :-( So if any of Beryl and Mick's other friends read this, get them to mail me please :-)

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

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The dog ate my homework eyeglasses, miss!

Probably the most canonic excuse of schoolchildren who fail to turn in their homework assignments is "The dog ate my homework!" . In the blogosphere too, even JR used that very excuse on sunday for not blogging properly ;-)

My excuse is similar but clearly (sic!) different, our irresponsible but lovable pup Kosmo ate my glasses, and thereby hangs a tail tale; let me tell you the sickening details ;-)

I'm upstairs, out of earshot. Kosmo is in the TV room where I had just been watching sunday's MotoGP M/C racing. The wife is in the hall, where the landline phone lives. As ever, on the phone. I know it's long distance, 'cos she deems it necessary to shout ;-)

After some silent chewing, Kosmo is going "Munchety, Munch! Yes, even Crunchety Crunch! CRUNCH !! CRUNCH !!!" . So the wife takes a look since the noise level is interrupting even HER monologue. Scream! SCREAM!!. So I have to run downstairs and see what is going on? Has the cellar flooded again :-( ?? Prepare for PANIC mode.

Turns out the stupid pup thinks my specs are edible. Let's face it, if his meal-interval has extended beyond 6 hours he thinks ANTHING is edible, even my slippers, despite their built-in olfactory defense! So we carefully move him over onto the tiled area of the hall floor and search his mouth for pieces of glass, removing those we find. Then stick a finger down his throat, alas to no effect. Meanwhile I'm examining the couch covers and the carpet but find nothing. Unfortunately, the bits we have extracted from him don't add up to the whole pair of glasses. So, it's call the vets' emergency number as we bundle him [the dog, not the vet] into the car and take off at a slightly subsonic speed , carving through the traffic as if my middle names were Michael Schumacher.

Our friend Peter the vet rolls up too, just as we pull in to his lot and in no time at all poor Kosmo - who is now feeling sorry for himself - gets a make-you-vomit injection. To speed the process I show him pictures of George Bush, Britney Spears and Tony Bliar ;-) Within minutes he is feeling VERY sorry for himself, finally regurgitating the contents of his stomach onto the tiled floor. Dinner, grass, leaves, bits of stick (those last three being trophies collected whilst going walkies in the afternoon), and the ghost of the neighbour's missing cat. Donning rubber gloves - and suppressing the urge to throw up ourselves - we feel carefully through the regurgitated heaps of sick (gross!), finding the odd piece of glass. Like needle/haystack, but MUCH MUCH soggier!

When we can find no more, we place them on the brightly lit tabletop, together with the frame and the pieces of glass I had had the foresight to bring from home. Peter drew an inside perimeter of my glasses' frames and we started playing jigsaw puzzles. After about 20 minutes - interspersed with the sounds of retching coming from beneath the table ( wretched dog!) - we managed to complete both left and right glasses, and stuck them down on the paper with sticky tape (see photo above).

Only now, with all glass accounted for, did we wipe up the vomit and dispose of it. Thanking Peter, we walked Kosmo to the car. He appeared to be grateful for the fresh air ;-) Milliseconds before getting into the car I remembered to peel off the rubber gloves, turning them inside out before knotting the open end. Nearly forgot! Ooops!

We let Kosmo sleep in our bed, so we would hear if he had any retching problems etc. Sadly, the make-you-vomit injection silently reached the other end during the night :(

Kosmo has now recovered from his dog-astrophe, and I'm shopping for new specs :-)

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

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My panoramic photos framed

Just last month I told you how to make panoramic photos using a freeware called Autostitch. One of the panoramas I constructed was this view of our village. The photo below is to show you what it looks like when printed out and framed. The next problem is to find a free bit of wall in the house large enough for it to reside ;-)

PS: Local readers may like to know about the copy shop who can do such large photos reasonably priced.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 17th September 2007 at 06:17 CEST permalink Comments Email

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Whit saen ye?

Blog-archive reader Natalie recently wrote to thank for the book tip I gave y'all back in March of 2005 recommending The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, a moving love story, made intricate by the hero leaping uncontrollably and randomly between time-zones in the heroine's lifetime. This got me thinking inter alia about the language problems time travellers might have, depending on the range of their time-travels. This lead to an interesting discussion down at the pub the other night. Here's a summary.

Even over the short term languages change. I've been away from the UK almost 40 years and on my last visit (a year ago) even I noticed the changes in colloquially spoken English. And visiting Namibia - which used to be German South-West Africa a century ago - we were amused by the locals' German 'dialect' until we realised it was K-and-K German as spoken 100 years ago. How much more of a language problem must there be for time-travellers hopping across centuries or even several millenia.

My friend Josef, who is for his sins a devout Christian, said he would like to time travel back two millenia to talk to Jesus during His lifetime. So Josef would have to learn a whole new old language (West Aramaic) just to understand the Lord's prayer as He would have spoken it (no, Virginia, Jesus didn't speak born-again American).

On this sort of timescale - two millenia - you could probably get by in Latin. Of course you would make yourself highly suspicious by being able to read and write. Spoken Latin - with regional dialects - would be a whole different kettle of fish. Even in school I was pretty bad at Latin dictation, even when the teacher took great care to speak slowly and enunciate clearly. Imagine excited Romans gabbling at you! Alea jacta est.

After mentioning that I can barely read a Sutterlin typeface even in a language I know well (High German), the conversation turned to English and how far we could go back through the centuries and still understand the temporally-local variant thereof.

Of course, the examples I will give here are written not spoken, so are much easier.

Going back a mere 270 years we read "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech...." a text which we can easily read today, even if some folks in Washington seem to have a problem understanding it.

Stepping back 450 years is a bit harder to understand : "Inglis men ar humil quhen thai ar subjeckit be forse and violens...". We should also note that the standardisation of spelling came about as a result of the printing press. Even The Bard ( William Shakespeare) spelt his own name in four different ways on different folios ;-)

870 years ago King David I of Scotland introduced the first homeland security laws, here is the start of §81 :- "It is for to wyt of ilke hoos wythin the burgh in the quhilk that wonnys ony that in the tym of waking aw of resoun to cum vorth..."

That's about as far back as I can go and still understand. Here's a bit of the 7th century poem "Dream of the Rood" :- "Ongeredae hinae god almiehtig, tha he walde on galgu gistiga, modig fore alle menn, ahof ic ricnae kyninge, haelda ic ni dorstae."

I also own a copy of Beowulf (7th century) with the left side pages in the original and the modern translation on the right side pages. It is only with the help of the latter that I can even attempt to understand the left sides. Here is a sample :- "Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon."

Now given the agricultural and feudal/warring 'civilisation' that was encountered in the middle and dark ages, their vocabulary was fairly stable (yes, Virginia, that is a HUGE simplification). Even so we can only understand the English of the last thousand years at most (unless we are graduate students of ancient languages). And now look at the speed with which things are changing in our modern world and consider all the additions to our vocabulary from the last century alone. (NB. My own grandmother was born before men first flew aeroplanes, yet lived to see the first moon landing). We can thus expect even more rapid vocabulary growth in the future and so our time-traveller would be lost language-wise with a couple of hundred years into the future.

The four past variants of English are :-
450-1100 Old English (Anglo-Saxon) ; The language of Beowulf.
1100-1500 Middle English ; The language of Chaucer.
1500-1650 Early Modern English (or Renaissance English) ; as used by Shakespeare.
1650-present Modern English (or Present-Day English) ; as spoken today.

And so, after a few beers, the consensus of opinion at the pub was that we could only travel between 1100 AD and 2300 AD and still be able to cope with the language.

Whit saen ye?

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

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Eyesight test online, especially for you Oldies

Over 60s should go to their eye-doctor twice a year for a vision check. Not particularly because their eye-glasses prescription may have changed, but because of their susceptability to an eye problem called Macular Degeneration, the main cause of central vision loss (blindness) nowadays for those over the age of 60 years. 10% of patients 66 to 74 years old have it, increasing to 30% in patients of 75 to 85. Smokers have twice the risk, as do the obese and hypertensive patients.

Symptoms are blurred vision, central shadows or missing areas in your field of vision, trouble discerning colours and distorted vision, so it's important to catch these.

The Amsler Test is designed to do this. Please look at the sketch shown below.

Closing each eye in turn, look at the central spot. You should see it in a rectangular grid. Repeat with the other eye. If you see wavy lines or curved lines you have a problem. If you see the lines looking distorted also. And if there are parts of the grid which grey out (are invisible) too. If so, please go to your eye-doctor immediately.

What can you do about it? Take vitamin pills! A combination of high-dose beta-carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E, and zinc can reduce the risk about 25%. Lutein, zeaxanthine, and fish oil (Omega-3) help too. That means eating coldwater fish twice a week, eggs, spinach and other green vegetables such as kale, turnip greens, collard greens, romaine lettuce, broccoli, zucchini, corn, garden peas and Brussels sprouts. At the same time avoid red meat and excessive milk products. Keep a keen eye, folks!

Bookmark the permalink of this test (given below) so that you can come back every couple of months for a self-reevaluation. Keeping an eye on it, so to say ;-)

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

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Favourite Flyers :-)

Been conversing with a couple of fellow pilots recently. Aviatrix who writes an interesting and instructional blog is one; it turns out we have similar experience (4200+ hours, mostly on singles) even though we're half a world apart. Her flights sound more exciting than mine (CPL/IFR, and a lot as CFI) though.

Recently an old swiss friend Gian paused on his way home from Berlin/Tempelhof in his PA28 Arrow, unloaded his dogs and we went walkies and chatted about the little island where we'd first met, Aero (in Denmark) where we'd both also landed to walk the dogs ;-) Small world, shared interests! Good to see you again, Gian!

Then I got an Email from Graham (UK) who is just starting in aviation and asked Which planes have you liked to fly most? , an excuse for me to share my answers :-)

After my first year of flying, analysis of my logbook showed that my average trip was only 130 NM, typically up to the North Sea island of Juist, our favourite day-trip. So I didn't need a complex (retractable gear, variable pitch prop) plane for such a short trip, and bought a simple single (a PA28-140 ) which I owned for over a quarter of a century. It served us well. Sadly the next owner didn't understand its limitations :-(

The comments on my log-book showed that I really enjoyed flying a couple of really hot ships. The hot single was a Mooney . Fast cruise at over 190 knots, 1300 fpm climb rate, 20,000 ft ceiling all on a single 310HP engine. Pass airliners on finals ;-)

My favourite twin was an Aerostar. Fast cruise at 285 knots (250@65% power), 1875 fpm climb rate (383 on one engine) 30,000 ft ceiling (16,000 on one engine) on two 350hp reciprocating engines. That's Piper Cheyenne I performance at 2/3 of the fuel!

But at the other end of the spectrum I also enjoyed aerobatting Mike-Mike, an old pre-WW2 biplane, a Bücker 131 Jungmann. Max 99 knots, 500 fpm climb, max 13,000 feet on just 100HP :-) But - due to its tailwheel and light weight - only a 5 knot sidewind component on landing. So you always had to land it into the wind, regardless of the direction of the runway. It was much nicer to aerobat than (say) an Extra 300 whose G-capabilities far exceeded mine, leaving me grunting and panting. Good Lomcevaks tho' !

PS: this photo is for the lady who wanted to know why airlines lose her luggage :-/

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 12th September 2007 at 06:12 CEST permalink Comments Email

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"Well I'll be buggered!"....

... and you may well be if you are a child in a catholic church, this time in San Diego, USA.

In July, the Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles agreed a record $660m deal to settle 508 abuse cases, some going back to the 1940s. Barely(sic!) two months later the Roman Catholic Church in San Diego, in the US state of California, has agreed to pay $198m to settle 144 claims of sexual abuse by clergy. "Bugger me!" said the choirboy, "Oh yes please " squealed the clergy.

Disgustingly trying to avoid their moral (and legal) responsibilities, the diocese of San Diego filed for bankruptcy protection six months ago, just before the first of 42 cases alleging sex abuse was due to come to trial in a civil court. Seems the Vatican was not prepared to pick up the tab either :-( The settlement of $198m is the second largest agreed by any diocese in the Roman Catholic Church. It works out at an average pay-out of $1.4m to each claimant. At least some monetary compensation.

However, I think it's reprehensible to put stained glass windows in your churches in confirmation of your paedophilic predilections. The sins of the Fathers, indeed! The givaway is at the top of the window , where an inverted (fallen) angel is shown :-(

The One True Church™ caught with its pants down again; how very disgusting :-(

And you still ask why I am a convinced Atheist?

Addendum (Monday 10th) : A new blogreader Vanessa (Florida, USA) points out that it's not just the Catholics who get up to this sort of thing ;-)

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

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Improve your Web experiences

125 % of everything I knew about using the web (up until yestreen) is in this paperback book, which is why I can thoroughly recommend it :-)

The author - Mark Frauenfelder - is known well in the blogosphere as the originator of BoingBoing, and thus is well qualified to write such an easy-to-understand collection of neat tips and tricks^*.

Chapter 1 is for us bloggers, 23 pages about blogs,16 on podcasting, etc etc. Chapter 3 (24 pages) covers shopping, auctions and selling. Chapter 8 is about communications (70 pages), and covers such issues as connecting on the road, wireless computing, mobile email etc etc. Chapter 10 covers security, privacy and maintenance issues in a 28 page summary style. Total 392 pages of text plus a detailed 8-page index make it IMHO $14.95 well spent. The ISBN number for the paperback is 0-312-36333-8. Buy it, read it and go Rule the Web!

^* Sample neat tip (on page 51) explains how to listen to a podcast in 2/3 of the time and still understand it. Listen with QuickTime and set the Playback Speed to 150%. That'll keep those loquacious wafflers short ;-)

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

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Your numbers are up (solutions)

Last week I asked you to guess in which languages these numbers are written with their digits in alphabetical order. Answers varied from two right up to four answers right. Here are the solutions:-

• 854917632 English : Eight,Five,Four,Nine,One,Seven,Six,Three,Two.
• 528947631 French : Cinq,Deux,Huit,Neuf,Quattre,Sept,Six,Trois,Un.
• 831596742 German : Acht,Drei,Eins,Fünf,Neun,Sechs,Sieben,Vier,Zwei.
• 829673451 Mandarin : Ba,Er,Jiu,Liu,Qi,San,Si,Wu,Yi.
• 298457631 Latin : Due,Novem,Octo,Quattua,Quinqi,Septem,Sex,Tres,Unus.
• 542986731 Spanish : Cinco,Cuatro,Dos,Nueve,Ocho,Seis,Siete,Tres,Uno.
• 149257638 Russian : A'deen,Chetyre,Devyat,Dva,Pyat,Sem,Shest,Tri,Vosem.

In addition, Liz Hinds contributed the sequence in Welsh :-
629457318 Welsh : Chwech,Dau,Naw,Pedwar,Pump,Saith,Tri,Un,Wyth

Canadian blogger Doug Alder decided to nip 'pon the bandwagon with this sequence :-
581926347 Japanese : Go,Hati,Iti,Ku,Ni,Roku,San,Si,Siti.

UK blogreader Paul Clayson expands on this with some more detail, viz :- "The original japanese numbers are: hitotsu, futatsu, mittsu, yottsu, itsutsu, muttsu, nanatsu, yattsu, kokonotsu - which gives 215936784. However, they also use japanized versions of the chinese words: ichi, ni, san, shi, go, roku, shichi, hachi, kyu - 581926347. Just to confuse things, their "normal" set of numbers is actually a mixture of the two: ichi, ni, san, yon, go, roku, nana, hachi, kyu - 581972364."

Meanwhile, "Mrs. Fatima Ali, of Repulic(sic!) of Togo, bereeved window(sic!) of Late Mr. Usman Ali" etc. etc. ad nauseum, 419 lines of spam in total, missed the point completely and headlined her boring old spam with :- "Inherit 123456789 US$!" :-(

Writing from Hong Kong my blogreading friend there Wendy Templeton wrote a long and hilarious missive (Wendy, you should be blogging!), of which the relevant portion is :- "Cantonese is 879653412 (in my book). This is a tricky one, because some bright spark way-back-when decided to translate Cantonese into the English alphabet (for road signs etc) using the most illogical spelling ever (yes, he was English. And, if I can just go off on a tangent here, there's a small place in Hong Kong which I used to live near called Rednaxela Terrace. The sign writer was Chinese, and it just stuck. Most people are quite enamoured by the anecdote and don't believe it's true until they see it for themselves). But I digress; this crazy "let's try to make the language just that little bit harder to fathom" way of thinking is why you'll look for, say, Tsim Sha Tsui on the map, and -- not unreasonably -- expect it to be spelt like, oh I don't know, Chim Sar Choy, which is roughly how it's pronounced (I think you've been there). And "Mr Chair" spells his name Mr Sze. I mean, for god's sake!! So, flying in the face of tradition, I've done the number sequence as phonetically as I can: Yat, Yee, Saam (like Saab), Say, Mm, Lok, Chat, Bat, Gow." That'd be 123456789, so Bat,Chat,Gow,Lok,Mm,Saam,Say,Yat,Yee gives us 879653412 for Cantonese. And Zero is Ling, so a Lingual pun is no pun at all? ;-)

Addendum 9/9/07 : Aviatrix takes issue with my Russian and commented : "The Russian numbers should properly be sorted in Russian alphabetical order, because there are plenty of ways to respell them in English.
vosyem, dva, devyat, odin, pyat, syem, tree, cheterye, shest
8 2 9 1 5 7 3 6 4
V is the third letter of the Russian alphabet, and Sh is a separate letter from S, and comes later in the alphabet, right after Ch."

PS: For any bible fans, but especially for my friend Liz :- three plus signs (crosses) can be inserted within the sequence 123456789 to make the sum 666. Where ?

PPS: Oh and "Hrabqdweflmnsxigjkopctvyuz" is the alphabet in phonetical order, viz :- Aitch, Are, Ay, Bee, Cue, Dee, Double yu, Ee, Ef, El, Em, En, Ess, Ex, Eye, Gee, Jay, Kay, Oh, Pea, Sea, Tee, Vee, Wy, Yu, Zed :-)

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

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Höger-day , 40 years ago

On this very day exactly 40 years ago, Sweden switched from driving on the left to driving on the right. This is a short account of how it was done. BTW, Höger = Right.

Suggestions had varied from the ridiculous "Lorries and busses change on the first of September, pedestrians on the second and cars & bikes on the third" to the unrealistic "Everybody just moves over at midnight, the traffic does not need to stop flowing" to a do-able actual plan.

The remaining left-driving countries in Europe are Great-Britain, Ireland, Malta, Man and Cyprus. Sweden changed over 40 years ago today. Calenders were ringed, special stamps produced in advance, the radio played a special song "Keep right, Svennson" sung to the tune of the then popular Telstar and signs like this one lined the roads.

On Höger day at 1 a.m. all private traffic was stopped, only busses and taxis and road-change lorries were allowed to drive. At 5 a.m. ALL traffic was stopped and at 6 a.m. started again on the other side of the road. During the night pre-prepared road-signs were uncovered and the old ones covered up. Special care was taken with directional arrows and signs at roundabouts, T-junctions, traffic lights etc. Old signs were then removed in the ensuing weeks.

Most swedish cars and lorries had their steering wheels on the left already, and thus overtaking became simpler for them. However, the (public transport) busses had their steering on the right and so 7500 busses had to be changed, an expensive effort. And so the swedish goverment introduced a Right-traffic-tax ( motorcycles (which are symmetrical!) 20 Kroner, light cars 45 and all other vehicles 75 Kroner (about 28€ at the time). In total it cost the Swedes 400 million Kroner, of which 200 was for the busses and 60 for trams. In fact Stockholm's city centre trams were scrapped completely, only some in the suburbs being retained. Trams lost out on H-day :-(

There were surprisingly few accidents in the following days and weeks, even less than usual, because people were concentrating. All in all, a successful changeover.

BTW, 58 of 221 independent countries still drive on the left. The British Empire lives!

Audio-book in the car stereo : Jack Kerouac's On the road, published 50 years ago and still iconic :-)

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

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