Best of my blog 2003.

I scanned through my access logs to see which were the most popular articles in the opinion of the blog-readers. Only 17 blog-entries got above 200 readers, mostly due to links from George, Frank, Susan, Michelle and Yule. Thanks, all you linkers!

Peer judgement. These were the 17, should you want to re-read them:-

• Friday, April 18, 2003 = It's Good Friday! (Motorcycling)
• Tuesday, May 6, 2003 = Wrong decisions (Humour)
• Monday, June 2, 2003 = Jacques E. (Doc)'s Story (Humour)
• Wednesday, July 16, 2003 = True Lies (Bushwhacking)
• Wednesday, August 6, 2003 = It's the Economy, Stupid! (Politics)
• Thursday, August 28, 2003 = Prime Time (Multicolour Maths)
• Wednesday, September 10, 2003 = The longest day (a motorcycle trip)
• Tuesday, September 16, 2003 = Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise (Politics)
• Sunday, September 21, 2003 = Economics 101 (Politics)
• Tuesday, October 7, 2003 = Pocket Enigma®: The Review (Crypto)
• Sunday, October 19, 2003 = a lap of the Nurburgring (Motorcycling)
• Saturday, November 1, 2003 = Halloween Horror Stories (Dog story)
• Saturday, November 22, 2003 = the math-ouija board (Maths)
• Wednesday, December 3, 2003 = Secret codes to boost your career (Crypto)
• Thursday, December 11, 2003 = @fp : On losing your dog (Dog story)
• Sunday, December 14, 2003 = How big is yours? (History)
• Sunday, December 21, 2003 = How Saddam was REALLY captured (News) TOP ENTRY.

These 17 entries are concatenated below.

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Wrong decisions

When the Lord gave out ears
I thought he said beers
And I ordered two long ones

When the Lord gave out legs
I thought he said kegs
And I ordered two fat ones

When the Lord gave out chins
I thought he said gins
And I ordered a double

When the Lord gave out guts
I thought he said huts
And ordered a big round one

When the Lord gave out noses
I thought he said roses
And I ordered a big red one

When the Lord gave out wangs
I thought he said fangs
And I said "real short, please"

When the Lord gave out brains
I thought he said drains
So I skipped mine

O Lord, am I in a mess!

posted by Stu Savory on 6th May 2003 at 23:13 Central European Time

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Jacques E. (Doc)'s Story

R.I.P : Many years ago I worked for a while near West Sacramento in sunny California. That's not the peaceful, small village of California near Hamburg, here in Germany, but that fault line on which a number of nuclear reactors have been irresponsibly built by a CalPower (Prince of Darkness) Electric Corp. which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, and which is now governed by the eminently recallable Gray Davis :(

But back to the main story line. While I was there, living as a guest in a friend's house (Hi, Jane!) she decided to relay the wooden tiling on the floor, using marquetry patterns which I had brought over from Europe. We were helped by her Mexican gardener and jack of all trades, named, if I remember correctly, Jose' Requiez.

He was a very small, underset man. Even his pet tomcat "Jerry" (sic!) was small and mangy, too. He was a new immigrant at the time and very enthusiastic about the politeness of the Gringos to him (sic!). For example, he said that every time he went to a ball game, everybody politely stood up first for him and asked "Jose', can you see?" :)

But back to the main story line. First we laid the wooden tiles, then we copied the patterns (which I had brougt on large A0 sheets of paper) by pressing down with a pen onto the paper. Between the paper patterns and the wooden tiles we had placed sheets of carbon paper. But sometimes Jose' lifted the pen from the paper, and had used Kleenex instead of carbon paper, so it did not copy properly. Nevertheless, this was probably the first known example of Pen rose Tiling known to the world :)

Yes, Sir Roger, I do know that that was a terrible pun (and took you name in vain), but on Sunday morning Red Zora bet me that I couldn't work a mathematical joke into my Blog today. Hey Zora, you owe me a beer :)

But back to the main story line. On day 3 we had worked our way gradually up the staircase. The wooden tiles were stored precariously at the top of the stairs. On the third day (this is a traditional, christian, story, folks), Jose' rose again from the tread :) and carelessly leaned on the insecure pile of wooden flooring tiles.

The pile of wooden flooring tiles tipped over, cascaded down the stairs, landing on top of poor Jerry, killing him :(

. . . . . Requiez' cat in parquet :)

Thanks : Thanks go today to Mandarin Design, who blogged me at the weekend. Alleging too that I even look friendly, intelligent and (even) honest. Maybe I'll change my blogphoto to this one, and they'll reconsider :) In the meantime, I'll have to try to comb the honey from my beard, as we say here in Germany :)
BTW: The Palmtree banner at the top of the Blog today is one of theirs' too.

posted by Stu Savory on 2nd June 2003 at 22:05 Central European Time

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True Lies

Robotics : Scanning through today's newspaper (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) I saw an article about Steve Porter of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. He has cultivated rat-brain cells (it says here). Not sure where the verbs are in that sentence! And goes on to explain that these bionic components are the "brain" used to control remote waldoes at the University of Western Australia in Perth. The headline reads "Minature brain in US controls arms several thousand miles away". I read the article half way through, before I realised it was not talking about Dubya!

Politics : And whilst on the subject, it seems Bush-the-usurper was not really lying. He was told by Tenet just to ape (sic!) the video recording session and the CIA would add the audio channel later. Bush asked Tenet if that would work, and Tenet replied "Sure, we'll just dub ya!" :)
Now George may be anally retentive(?) but his short term memory is really short, so he only remembered the words "Just Dubya" and knew he was a righteous man, doing nothing wrong ;)

posted by Stu Savory on 16th July 2003 at 18:29 Central European Time

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It's the Economy, Stupid!

More Bush spin : Dubya, would you believe it, is now claiming that his politics are leading to an economic turnaround!. Fer Gawsakes, doesn't the dumbwit realise that he has ruined the US Economy and dragged down large parts of the world economy too? Look at this simple picture. On the left, the US economy improves (climbing trend, deficit decreases) and there is even a surplus (green columns) in the centre.
It's the Clinton era.

Then, post-2000 , the economy takes an abrupt downturn, the surplus disappears and there is every year an increasing deficit.
It's the Bush era.

And this is an official US government chart, as you will note. Need I spell it out even more? Even the simplest product of the zero-goal US education system should understand that he/she needs to elect someone else - anyone else - in 2004, even if it does mean that the rednecks need to change their pet-carriers!

posted by Stu Savory on 6th August 2003 at 06:07 Central European Time

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Prime Time

Math can be beautiful : This morning's particular posting is dedicated to the folks over at Mandarin Design. There, Meg has made a beautiful quilt pattern with little clickable images linked to various blogs. My quilt pattern is more mathematical instead.

What is it? It is the Sieve of Eratosthenes for finding the prime numbers.

Eratosthenes (276 -194 B.C.) was a librarian (Hallo Liz!) at the great library of Alexandria and was one of the bright guys of the ancient world. For example, he measured the radius of the Earth by comparing the lengths of flagpole-shadows in Syrene (Aswan) with those in Alexandria. And this was at a time when most people thought the Earth was flat (pace Terry Pratchett).

Here is how the Sieve pictured left works. The picture contains the odd numbers from 1 to 1049. Yes, I do know that 2 is also prime, but I wanted to keep the picture small and so the even numbers have been omitted. And it is 1049 instead of 999 because I wanted a rectangle!

All the numbers divisible by three are not prime and are coloured red. All divisible by 5 are green (so 15 is both, OK?). All the numbers divisible by 7 are dark blue, 11 turquoise, 13 lilac, and so on up to 31. Starting at 33 a pattern is used, 39, 51 etc. have different pattern. And so on and so on.

The numbers not divisible by any factor (except themselves and one) are called prime numbers. They are written into the quilt pattern with a little squared-off corner box around them. For small integers there are quite a lot of them, as you get up into the really big numbers (trillions etc) they get further and further apart. Math-geeks mail me their 3-line proof now pls.

Some think we mathematicians are boring old pharts, but I just thought today that Erastothenes Sieve makes a nice quilt pattern, complementing the one Meg made. So I decided to simply show it you today instead of doing my usual Bush-bashing. Plenty of time for that! I thought that maybe some of you could use the nice pattern to teach your kids elementary number-theory without using any equations, as equations tend to frighten people off maths.

Tests for divisibility : Nowadays we just use pocket calculators or our PC to test integers to see if they are divisible by other integers (with remainder zero). Back in my childhood there were no pocket calculators or computers. So we had to learn the short-cut rules for divisibilty-testing by mental arithmetic or maybe pen-and-paper for the more complex rules. Even today I still know the mental arithmetic short-cuts for divisibilty tests up to 20 (i.e. 2,3,5,7,11,13,17 und 19). There is a page of the rules on this website, but I wrote it in German, sorry. If there is enough interest, I could translate it though.

posted by Stu Savory on 28th August 2003 at 07:19 Central European Time ;)

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The longest day :-)

Bike On! I like riding motorcycles, especially the longer tours. I currently have a Yamaha FJR1300. Thats a big (1300cc), comfortable, heavy(280 kg) but powerful (140 hp) tourer. Earlier this year I did the longest-day ride. This is a decentralised tour, with just five rules.

• Don't start before sunrise.
• Be home by sunset.
• Go at least 1000 kilometers.
• But you are not allowed to use the autobahn (=motorway).
• Document the ride.

This is the (b)log of the ride.

On the road again : So I choose a day [earlier this summer] (a Sunday, so there would be no lorries or trucks (HGVs) on the road) which the weather report predicts will be fine and not too hot and prepare the bike (but not fuelling it), equipment and myself and go to bed early. Up at four, light breakfast and on the road just after five am. 200 meters to the village's automated gas station, fuelling up and getting a timestamped (05:10am) receipt (documentation, geddit). The FJR has a 400+ km range, so I would need to refuel twice, so I had planned a triangular course. Leg 1 was Henglarn to Pottenstein in Bavaria, I know the roads in the area there from a previous trip to Pottenstein back in 2001.

Leg one : Roads empty at this time of day, so I am able to get a move on while cruising fast and watching the world wake up. Birds first, then cows, then paperboys, then dogs, then churchgoers driving sleepily to first mass. Leg 1 takes me 380 km before the reserve-warning bleeps at me and starts counting down. Just 4 km as it happens, to get to the pre-planned gas-station. Fuel at 9:31, having spent 4 hours 21 on the road. 88,6 km/h rolling average. Good going for roads with a speed-limit of 100, interspersed by villages (I avoid the towns).

Fill up the bike, getting the timestamped receipt and putting 23.4 liters in a 25 liter tank, so I had just 26 km reserve. That's cutting it too tight for a sunday morning usually. Next task is to empty me :) and drink a big bottle of water. Coffee or coke are NOT a good idea for long distance riding. Photograph the village name sign on the roadside with the bike (& its numberplate) in the photo too. Strip off a layer of clothing under the leathers. Nine whole minutes gone without moving! Take off 9:40 on leg 2.

The second leg is east to west, avoiding the sun in my eyes which had been annoying at the end of leg 1 which had been on a southeastern heading. Always plan your tours to keep the sun out of your eyes.

Leg two : is Pottenstein to Idar Oberstein. 355 km, 4 hours 22, rolling average is below 82, because the day-tripper traffic has built up during the morning. People going sightseeing and stopping for a sunday lunch. Sunday drivers, some of them. Yeough! Need to stay WIDE awake! But I am a bit tired, so I take a longer break, having a light salad for lunch and drinking another bottle of water.That's three liters of water so far, so I emptied me again too :) Have a short nap on the grass bank of the restauraunt parking lot too, having set my portable alarm to wake me after 45 minutes. Refuel, getting the timestamped receipt. Consumption on leg 2 only 5.8 l/h, probably due to the lower speed. Photograph the town limit sign, again with the bike in the pic. This time me too, thanks to a friendly pedestrian lady :)

Covered 385+355=740 km so far. Need 260 then, plus some (at least 50?) to account for the inevitable optimism that odometers always have. It's now 15:02. About six hours to sunset, so I'm well on track there, and about 300 km SSW of home, so the distance could be borderline. I decide to add a small detour. I'll go via Olpe and then to Korbach and home from there. That adds about 30 to 40 km. And besides, I know the road that way from Olpe on, so I'll pick up some speed if I need to, and can cut-across short if I'm on the safe side distance-wise.

Leg three : starts out fast, because all the day trippers are now in the cafes for coffee and cake :) But then they head for home, blocking the roads. I'm tiring too, so I accept a pace slower than leg 1 , more like leg 2. Reckon five hours maybe? However, the traffic thins out as I get into the hills north of Montabaur, and the pace picks up. Near Betzdorf I need to take a leak (all that water!) and allow myself a quick roadside coffee. No need for fuel. 3 Minute total! After Olpe I know the road well, the day trippers are mostly gone, and I can really whistle along. Whoops! Approaching cars flashing me, so I slow down in time to avoid the cops' radar trap. Thanks, you anonymous tin-can drivers :) Through the twisties and the hills back from Korbach which I know so well I can really get flying. Leg three takes only 3 hours fiftyone minutes after all. 329 km and an 85,8 km/h rolling average. 20.5 liters means a consumption of 6.2 l/h on leg three. Get the timestamped fuel receipt (18:52) and photograph the bike at the Henglarn village signpost.

Summary : So 385+355+329=1069 by my reckoning. The odometer says 1091. Should be on the safe side though, it's unlikely to go 10% fast. Departure 05:10, arrival 18:53 makes 13:43 for 1069 calculated kms makes 78 km/h average including all stops. Rolling average 82,5 km/h. Pretty good for country roads and a guy approaching 60 himself :) I'm tired but happy. Bike ran like clockwork; thanks Yamaha.

Take a relaxing bath. I'll clean the bike and submit the paperwork tomorrow. End of a really good day out :) Aching muscles the next morning though!

Megameter confirmed : That was the day's log. And why am I only blogging it now? Well the confirmation arrived yesterday, crediting only 1031 km (so my odometer goes 6% fast and my map program goes 3% faster than theirs. But I made it. Next target is an Iron Butt Saddlesore award, 1000 miles in 24 hours (or maybe the BunBurner Gold, 1500 miles in 24 hours), but autobahn is permitted, should be a piece of cake getting around ;-)

MAIL DOWN :( Just opened my Email box. Over 600 in the queue instead of the usual daily 30. So my mail is down due to a DDOSA (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) by SoBig.F ! I'll get my provider to just throw everything away, there's no way I'm going to plow through 600+ mails to find maybe 5 real (non-infected, non-spam) ones. So I'm incommunicado Email-wise until further notice.

posted by Stu Savory on 10th September 2003 at 06:14 Central European Time ;)

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Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise

Politics : I've been getting some Flak due to my Nine Eleven blog entry, and have been asked - in very rude language - where I stand politically.

Let me point out that I sympathize in every way with those who lost loved ones in the 9-11-2001 terrorist attack. And with those (also 3000+) who lost loved ones in the terrorist attack of 9-11-1973. The point of the Nine Eleven blog entry was (is) to make us think about where anti-americanism arises. Because the 9-11-2001 attack was attributable to anti-americanism; Islam is merely incidental.

Everything has a cause. Let's take anti-semitism as an example. This has been going on since the middle ages - Shakespeare had his Shylock. Due to the New Testament episode where Jesus cast the money-lenders out of the temple, Christians were not allowed to lend money (or rather, take interest for doing so) during the middle ages. And so that task was left to the Jews who were despised for it. Hence Shylock and anti-semitism.

Back to anti-americanism. This is a post-WW2 phenomenon, in no small part due to the US invading countries and grabbing power, regardless of the inhabitants wishes. Allende's Chile was a case in point - thirty years ago to the day, as I pointed out. The US (CIA) assassination of Allende - they put the much despised right-wing Pinochet into power - caused widespread anti-americanism. Mercurial has some additional info. I mention this stuff because many bloggers are too young to remember the incident and I think they should understand the background. Bullying is never popular.

I was asked - obscenely - where I stand politically. If you look over on the left sidebar you can see three lines reading :-
Political Compass , Economic L/R: -1.62, Liberty/Authority: -2.56 . The horizontal axis is a scale -5 to +5 showing economic standpoints (left vs. right). The vertical axis is a scale -5 to +5 showing authoritarian (upper half) vs. libertarian (lower half) standpoints. So Hitler would have been top centre (fascism), Stalin top and leftmost, Ghandi lower left. Dubya is in the top right quadrant - far right, about half way up. If you follow the link Polit ical Compass you can take the test yourselves, to see where you stand politically. Now I'm kind of a pretty up-front guy, so I posted my Political Compass coordinates on the left sidebar. The picture today shows you where current world leaders stand. My numbers put me in more or less the same position as the Canadian Prime Minister Monsieur Jean Chretien. Where do you stand?

I would like to point you to Burning Bird's blog entries for September 9 and 10 for some current political commentary worth reading. And while you are about it, please read Michael Moore's book Downsize this! That is a position with which I can identify.

Note too, that the US has also been quite popular, depending on the particular administration. Kennedy was loved worldwide, and Carter was well-liked. Even - to a lesser extent - Clinton. However, other administrations were distrusted (Nixon) and disliked (Reagan). But Bush is really unpopular - even in the US.

This Bush administration annoys me daily. It's not just the bullying, the dog-wagging and the screwed-up US & world economy. Every single day they screw up anew. So what annoys me about the Bush administration today? The fact that they don't walk like they talk! Apparently it is not OK for Israel to want to assassinate the terrorist Arafat; of course the Israelis are Old Testament believers (an eye for an eye). But it is OK for the US to want to assassinate Saddam; but Bush is a New Testament believer (turn the other cheek). And it's the same guy saying both things. Hypocritter!

P.S.If you didn't recognise today's headline, it is the title of the famous speech at Worms by Martin Luther Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders!

posted by Stu Savory on 16th September 2003 at 06:06 Central European Time ;)

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Economics 101

Social systems explained, with simple examples :-)

Socialism : You have 2 cows. You must give one to your neighbour.

Communism : You have 2 cows. The government takes them from you and sells you the milk.

Fascism : You have 2 cows. The government takes them from you and shoots you.

EU-Burocracy : You have 2 cows. The government takes them from you, and kills one of them. The other is kept for its milk, which is destroyed.

An american corporation : They have 2 cows, so they sell one and force the other to work so hard, that it gives (at least) twice the milk. They are really, honestly, incredibly surprised when the cow dies of exhaustion.

A french corporation : They have 2 cows, so they go on strike to force the EU to give them a third.

A japanese corporation : They have 2 cows, so they redesign them. They are now 10 times smaller and give 20 times as much milk. They invent a clever milk-carton, call it "Cowkimon" and sell it successfully worldwide.

A german corporation : They have 2 cows, so they redesign them to last 1000 years (actually only 12), eat only once a month, and milk themselves. Then they pay the EU to destroy the milk and support the 3rd french cow instead.

A british corporation : They have 2 cows, both are mad.

An italian corporation : They have 2 cows, so they cut off their heads to put in someone's bed when they run out of horses. Then they milk the EU.

A russian corporation : They have 2 cows, so they decide to count them. Five. Do a recount. Forty two (pace Douglas Adams). Count again. Twentythree, ah, illumination. So give up and open a new bottle of vodka.

A swiss corporation : They have 2 thousand cows, none of which actually belong to them. So they take money from the owners for looking after them.

Traditional Capitalism : You have 2 cows. So you swap one for a bull. The herd grows and you retire on the interest.

Blogging : You have 2 cows. So you swap both for bulls. You produce only bullshit ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 21st September 2003 at 06:17 Central European Time ;)

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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 ;)

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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 ;)

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Halloween Horror Stories.

Witch Bitch : "Oooooh Hoooooo! Aeiiiiiii! Aaaaaargh!" Have you ever wondered how the whole Halloween hullabaloo affects your pets?

It started off with all those fascinating activities in the kitchen. Could be that something edible falls off the worktable, so the dog gets underfoot whilst you're carving out the pumpkin. You can put some antlers on the pumpkin, this is called making pumpkin mousse :)
Stand the result on the floor, insert candle, light up and stand well back. Dog waddles over, sticks his nose in for a sniff, and promptly gets his whiskers singed! Rapid leap backwards, nearly knocking a hole in the floor length glass window!

When it got dark, trick-or-treat children rang incessantly at the door, wailing and moaning in their hollywoodesque versions of ghostlike noises, not realising that there was a territorially assertive bulldog on the other side of the door! "Open up!". So I did. Rapid and confused retreats, accompanied by much more realistic wailing, followed by the triumphant return of the Hellhound, exceedingly proud of having chased the poor kids off down the road! We still seem to have a lot of candies left this saturday morning, I wonder why?

A Toe Curler : That stupid evil bastard, Les Jenkins, has written an excellent horror short story. Just what you needed to scare yourselves for Halloween. Please, please do go read it ! I never cease to be amazed at the sheer amount of writing-talent that there is on the web, particularly in the blogs!

Cybercrimes : It's not just DIEBold who are tring to cover up their E-Voting messup tracks (read more about anti-DIEBold civil disobediance via Gary Williams' blog last thursday). Now another company's E-Vote software has been leaked online. Ultimately, all these leaks are good though. It gives us the chance to inspect their stuff for weaknesses, maybe getting it changed before the usual vote thieves use the exploits (no names here, I'm beating about the bush as usual). To end on a positive note, the UK is planning to extradite spammers. That's a move in the right direction. Go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect 200 pounds.

posted by Stu Savory on 1st November 2003 at 05:59 Central European Time

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Positive News

Happy Birthday Meg: Belatedly, I would like to congratulate Michelle over at Mandarin Design on her birthday yesterday; all the best, lass! On her birthday posting in her always great blog, she shares her Ouija board of favicon-links to the blogs she reads; it makes a nice quilt too.

I don't have anything nearly as pretty to give her, but I would like to dedicate this mathematically magical ouija board.

Here's how to use the math-ouija board:
Choose any NUMBER on the board.
Spell it out, using the LETTERS on the board.
You should ADD the numbers on the white squares as you spell.
And you should SUBTRACT the numbers on the black squares as you spell.

Neat huh? Michelle, this one is for you! Enjoy.

E-Voting : Despite the screws-up by DIEBold and others of that ilk, there are countries that do indeed get E-Voting right. Here, the Aussies show us how to do E-Voting properly.

Micro soft-headed : Instead of flaming MS today I'm gonna show you a neat freebie. I just hope it works in your language-version of Word, and not just in German. Let me know if it works in your language too, please. Open a new, empty Word-document and type in :
= rand (200,99)
then press "enter" and wait about 3 seconds . . .

Why this sudden positive attitutude and improved self-esteem? Well I just read in a GB report that low self-esteem and negativism turn you stupid! So please all look one bright side of life!

posted by Stu Savory on 22nd November 2003 at 01:05 Central European Time

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Secret codes to boost your career.

Simple crypto secrets : Have you ever thought about learning some cryptography (secret codes and ciphers)? It could be very helpful in your corporate career! Consider the following simple substitution cipher: for each of the letters A, B, C through X, Y, Z substitute their numerical values 1,2,3 through 24,25,26. This simple code will help you get a 100% successful career! Just consider:-

First you study to get knowledge.
K N O W L E D G E = 11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%.
So study itself was not enough. Now you need to work hard.
H A R D   W O R K = 8+1+18+4  +23+15+18+11 = 98%.
Even this is not enough, you need to get the right attitude towards your career.
A T T I T U D E = 1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%.
So now you have a 100% career lined up!

But after a while you notice that others have better careers because
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%. 
So you move over into the marketing department too, for a better career,
only to find out that 
1+19+19  +11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 127%.  Bummer, Bummer :-(

A neat crypto toy : Brian Hargrave has invented a neat crypto toy which is called the Pocket Enigma®. Initially I blogged about it on October 7th. Brian replied on November 6th and now we've written a common revised product review of the Pocket Enigma®, interspersing our comments. To that webpage I have appended a cryptanalysis of it (i.e. a single rotor Hebern machine) showing the trivial chosen plaintext attack. Do go read it, I've kept it very simple, no maths at all, to let kids understand it too.

An electronic Enigma kit: In Holland, some Dutch fellow- crypto-geeks and electronics hobbyists are now producing a kit of parts, a printed-circuit board and a circuit diagram to let you build your own electronic version of the famous German Enigma cipher machine. So if you can use a soldering iron, you might like to go visit their website. I've hinted to my better half about a neat Xmas present, so maybe I'll build one too, then blog a review of that Enigma too, in 2004. Or am I boring the socks off you?

Apropos Xmas prezzies : here's Camilla's prezzy for Prince Charles.

posted by Stu Savory on 3rd December 2003 at 06:22 Central European Time

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