Where is the January 2005 blog?

posted by Stu Savory on 32nd December 2004 at 25:61 Central European Time permalink Email

Gone to play. Bach in '05. Offenbach sooner.

Happy New Year tonight, everyone, despite the tragedy.
Now we can understand the effects of WMD = World Marine Disaster.

posted by Stu Savory on 31st December 2004 at 12:02 Central European Time permalink Email

Good News!

Also, I just got an Email from Sage, saying that Vajra and Gumz are doing fine in Sri Lanka. I quote her verbatim:-

"Hi, I blog over at http://thesleepritual.blogspot.com. 
Just wanted to let you know that Vajra and Gumz are doing fine. 
As far as I know, Gumz has been very busy organising medical supplies 
and such to be sent over the worse off areas.

I was hoping you could publish this link as well, since your site 
gets a lot of hits, hopefully it can help.

http://www.help-srilanka-tsunami-victims.org/. 

Thanks for your support.
Sage"

posted by Stu Savory on 30th December 2004 at 11:32 Central European Time permalink Email

Links to Phuket Hospital tsunami patient lists

Nothing from/of friends in Phuket either. If you are also looking for people who are/were in Thailand, try following these two text links given below, but be aware there are also lists of the dead there too.

http://www.phuket-inter-hospital.co.th/vstoday_Forien.htm

http://www.phukethospital.com/tsunami_patients.htm

posted by Stu Savory on 30th December 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink Email

Fortythree (43)

43 is (in your) prime and is interesting :-) eg: written to base 2, fortythree is 101011 which never becomes a palindrome by the reverse-and-add process. Want more? In the sequence 1,2,3,7,43 each number is the product of all the previous terms, + 1.

But 43 is also of interest to Alex Ellis, a bright lad reading Physics and Maths at Harvard. Alex saw my Test for divisibility by 43 on my page about Divisibility by prime numbers under 50. In the meantime he had come up with a different method of his own, which he shares with us.

Alex Ellis's Test for divisibility by 43 : "Chop off the last TWO digits, to get the right, leaving the left. Then consider abs(left - 3*right). This is basically the same as your test, but instead of +13 and one digit, it's -3=40mod43 and two digits. Using two-digit chopping should speed convergence, however, it only works for 3 or more digits. Of course, in this regime, the problem is trivial." To which he appends : "An alternative to a three-digit list of multiples of 43 is to give a second test for three-digit numbers. I worked out the following for the three-digit number abc: Consider 14*a + 10*b + c. This will converge to a two-digit number in no more than three iterations - and, of course, the two-digit case is trivial."

Numbers are magical, Luzi, especially 43. Want an example of 43's magic? You wanted to restart at 30, (leaves 13 :-) Isn't 13 magical since 11+2=12+1 ? Huh? you may ask, what's so magic about that? Write it out. ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE. See? It's an anagram. Magic!

Off Topic: traffic is back to normal now, ~180/day and ranking ~5000th. Oh well.

posted by Stu Savory on 29th December 2004 at 06:43 Central European Time permalink Email

Meanwhile elsewhere . . .

Meanwhile in cyber-space, search engines are sending me lots of traffic of people looking for news about the Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster. I blogged about it on Boxing Day (26th) in a personal way. First time this blog has got 1350+ hits/day; that must have put it in the top 200 blogs by traffic, unfairly profiting from the misfortunes of others, so I added a Caveat to Sunday's posting, hoping to shed some of the faux traffic, passing it back to the regular media.

Meanwhile in outer-space, it could be that Near-Earth Asteroid 2004 MN4 could hit Earth on 13 April 2029, provoking events at least as bad as the Boxing day tsunami. Bruce Willis call in, pls.

Meanwhile in inner space and/or Glasgow (Scotland) - Jimmy McCarthy being in Mexico and Gary Turner having returned home to England - my countrymen are failing me miserably . . .

Meanwhere - elsewhen in the space-time continuum - on this very day in 1908 an earthquake destroyed Messina (Italy), taking 100,000 lives.

posted by Stu Savory on 28th December 2004 at 00:42 Central European Time permalink Email

Indian Ocean Tsunami Disaster :-(

The tsunami swept across the Indian ocean, hitting Sri Lanka still 6 meters (20 feet) high, it is reported. I hope that blogger friends there, Vajra, Gumz et al survived it. None of the 12 Sri Lankan blogs I know of bear any news, presumably they have other worries right now. Correction: Indi.ca reports not being dead (datelined Sunday 26th). Others pls blog you're OK!

Haven't heard anything about the east coast of India yet, nor about the Maledives, but they are all VERY low-lying; Bangla Desh is low too. I expect a lot of ferry- and fishing-boats lost :-(

Update 19:40 CET :
The emergency number for concerned relatives to call in Germany is 030-5000-1000.
If you wish to donate, send donations to the German Red Cross at :-

	DRK-Spendenkonto: 		Konto: 41 41 41
	Bank für Sozialwirtschaft	BLZ 370 205 00

Update 27/12 : At 12:31:09 pm CET (20 minutes ago) there was a hit on this blog entry from the SLT (Sri Lankan Telecoms) Server, so some SL friends there might be OK, but unable to update their blogs I presume. I'm interpreting that hit as good news, anyway!! :-) :-) :-)

Caveat Emptor: Folks, this is not a news site. Never has been, never will be. Whilst I really do appreciate the kilo-hits of your traffic, the regular media (e.g. BBC or Sky News) will serve you better elsewhere if you're only looking for news. I'm just using this blog to try to contact friends and E-quaintances in the disaster area. I'll post any appropriate progress therewith. That OK?

posted by Stu Savory on 26th December 2004 at 09:52 Central European Time permalink Email

"Them Changes"

There are both pleasing things and annoying things about the web, without even regarding the content thereof. The pie-chart above shows the percentage browser usage by my blogreaders. Over the past year the proportion of Opera users has increased from to 2 up to 8 percent. Even more significantly, the proportion of Firefox users has increased from 1 up to 16 percent. Both of these were at the expense of IE. So you people are making the right choices and are getting a safer browsing environment into the bargain! So, you 66% IE users, go change NOW!

On the other hand we had Orkut :-( After a promising start Orkut became slower and slower here and since 3 or 4 weeks I cannot even log on, getting a trite message "bad bad server!" every time instead. Orkut is a rude finish indeed :-) So this means that good folks like Eliza A. and Khurram Pirzada who both generously invited me to be on their Orkut friends list get no confirmation in Orkut. Apologies both and accept this blog-entry in lieu thereof please.

Khurram Pirzada is an MS CS student from Pakistan, now in Germany. His interests include working in quantum cryptography, so we share a common theme. Best of luck in 2005 with your studies, Khurram. If quantum cryptography ever delivers, then it's goodbye to my public-keys :)

On the associated subjects of privacy and secrecy, those of you who communicate with me - or with anyone else in Germany - via email, need to be aware of a change of the law here as of January 1st 2005. Copies of all Emails may go BCC to the (secret) police! Sure, they still need a judge's permission to snoop, but the providers have to have hardware installed to send them any BCC they ask for. By definition, encrypted stuff will be regarded as suspicious, I suspect.

As I already pointed out on 16th December 2003, what gets published about cryptography and what you can export are limited by the Wassenaar arrangement, which I respect. I just publish simple stuff, keeping the rest between my ears :-) And any terrorist coding, as it is taught in chapter 13 of the Jihad manual is pretty straightforward stuff to break. Personally, I recommend the AES Rijndael algorithm, and Twofish (with 5 loaves of bread, please, Jesus!)

Today's blogentry header "Them Changes" is also the title of a great CD by Buddy Miles, a superb drummer. Go buy yourself a copy or at least listen to a short take at Amazon.de :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 26th December 2004 at 06:26 Central European Time permalink Email

Your Bulldog Xmas cards

No doubt inspired by Bulldog Tyson skateboarding through the previous post, we got some more bulldoggy Xmas cards to show you today. In the left photo Doris and Klaus show us their dogs Willie(L) and Berta(R) having fun in the Alaskan snow. In the right photo Ilona (Germany) shows us her dog Henry guarding their Xmas tree. And here's Janine with Oscar the reindeer :-)

I was also sent a couple of UK ads that never made it to public display (except here and now).

posted by Stu Savory on 25th December 2004 at 06:23 Central European Time permalink Email

Tyson, the skateboarding Bulldog

More about sunday's Growling at the Badger : Thanks are due to Shreela and Jennybird who sent me their embarrassing stories after reading mine. Come on girls, give me permission to quote you! Jennybird also pointed me to Richard & Kitty's World of Sex Euphemisms.
Peter (sic!) pointed me to this (very short) Reuter's article and to a very funny page about The relative Joy of Sexual Physics.

posted by Stu Savory on 23rd December 2004 at 06:23 Central European Time permalink Email

How to solve Cryptograms

Stop reading now and try to solve it on your own.

There are a dozen rules (for cryptograms in English) we shall use:-

1. Single letter words are either "A" or "I".

2. A frequent 3-letter word is "THE". Note too, "HE" is a part of "THE".

3. If the penultimate character is an apostrophe, then the word is either a negated verb (like "DON’T" or "CAN’T" ) or the genitive form of a noun like "CAT’S TAIL" or "DOG’S PAW". Thus the letter behind the apostrophe is either a T or an S.

4. A question mark at the end implies that the first word is either WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, HOW or WHY.

5. Frequent consonant pairs are TH, WH, SH or CH.

6. Frequent word endings are "-TION", "-ENT", "-ANT", "-ING" "-ERS", "-ENS" and "-ED".

7. Short words to which "ING" or "ED" are appended, double up their last consonant.
Examples "BEGINNING" or "HOPPED".

8. In 2 letter words one is a vowel.

9. If you are able to guess the author's name (usually given at the end), then that is a help.

10. Certain word patterns are easy to guess, e.g. X??X is either THAT or ELSE or DEED etc.
THAT and ELSE crop up frequently. And ??X?X is usually THERE or WHERE.

11. The pattern X’Y implies X=I and Y=M or Y=D ist. D usually crops up more often than M.

12. If in doubt, guess, and test your guess for consistency elsewhere in the cryptogram.

Stop reading now and try to solve it on your own.

Using these 12 rules let's tackle the cryptogram puzzle given above :-

Rule 3 tells us that "OH’P" is either "IT’S" or "HE’S".

Rule 1 tells us that the "O" at the start of line 2 must be an A or an I.

Both rules together imply O=I, H=T and P=S . Writing the knowns over the code, we get :-

IT’S ??T T??T I ? ????I? ?T ?I?
OH’P YSH HLBH O’Z BCKBOF HS FOA.
I ??ST ???'T ???T T? ?? T???? ???? IT ??????S
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. ---

--- RSSFE BQQAY

Rule 10 tells us that word 3 is probably THAT. So let's substitute L=H and B=A.

IT’S ??T THAT I?? A??AI? T? ?I?
OH’P YSH HLBH O’Z BCKBOF HS FOA.
I T T A T T TH H IT HA
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. --- A

--- RSSFE BQQAY

Rule 8 tells us that word 6 must be TO, because no other vowels fits.
Rule 11 tells us that Z=M (since Z occurs only once, it is more likely to be M than D).
Rule 3 in word 3 of line 2 tells us that Y=N .

Using rule 10 we guess that the 7th word in the second line must be HLAKA= THERE, giving :-

IT’S NOT THAT I'M A RAI TO IE.
OH’P YSH HLBH O’Z BCKBOF HS FOA.
I T ON'T ANT TO E THERE HEN IT HA EN
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. -- OO A EN -- RSSFE BQQAY

Rule 8 tells us that in word 6 of line 2, we can write I=B. Words 4 and 8 of line 2 suggest that R=W . Thus line 2 now reads :-

I T ON'T WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT HA EN
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. -- WOO A E N -- RSSFE BQQAY

Now we use rule 9. A popular (american) first name is WOODY.

And a probable surname which would fit the pattern would be ALLEN . So now we have:-

IT’S NOT THAT I'M A RAID TO DIE.
OH’P YSH HLBH O’Z BCKBOF HS FOA.
I T DON'T WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT HA EN
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. -- WOODY ALLEN -- RSSFE BQQAY

Rule 6 confirms that P=S because T has already been assigned. So now we have :-

IT’S NOT THAT I'M A RAID TO DIE.
OH’P YSH HLBH O’Z BCKBOF HS FOA.
I ST DON'T WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT HA ENS.
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. -- WOODY ALLEN -- RSSFE BQQAY

Taking into account only those letters not yet assigned we now use rule 12 and get:-

IT’S NOT THAT I'M AFRAID TO DIE.
OH’P YSH HLBH O’Z BCKBOF HS FOA.
I JUST DON'T WANT TO BE THERE WHEN IT HAPPENS.
O NDPH FSY’H RBYH HS IA HLAKA RLAY OH LBMMAYP. -- WOODY ALLEN -- RSSFE BQQAY

There now, that wasn't difficult at all was it? Welcome to crypto-geek land!

Want more? Follow this link.

posted by Stu Savory on 22nd December 2004 at 06:34 Central European Time permalink Email

No Time! No Time!

In 1938 they made a bad choice; 1939 and 1942 also. Tyrants, both.

In 1971 they made a bad choice too; 1990 and 1995 also.

Now, in 2004, it's George.W.Bush, what rough beast indeed?

posted by Stu Savory on 21st December 2004 at 06:34 Central European Time permalink Email

Growling at the badger :-)

First of all, in the US, there was Kerik, who was Bush's choice to head up the Department of Jackboot Security. Kerik stumbled first over the use of a 911 R&R apartment to screw his varous mistresses. Kerik's career is a string of scandals, unethical behavior, self-dealing and various other sorts of soft or hard corruption, contact to mafiosi or sundry mob rackets to which he happened to be in close proximity. Kerik shared Bush's family values, he said. Sounds reasonable. Grounds for being offered the job, anyway. Manus manu lavatur. When the press uncovered all of this - the White(wash) House hadn't done any background vetting - it was time for a premature withdrawal, to avoid getting the Bush into trouble. Coitus interruptus, so to say :-)

In the UK the equivalent job - Home Secretary - was occupied by "Blind Willy" Blunkett. He stumbled over an allegedly accelerated visa for his mistress's nanny. Seems his mistress was definitely not what Anne Pashen calls serially monogamous. Barely(sic!) two months into wedlock, she was screwing Blunkett and a perhaps third man on the side. Blunkett claims the child is his. Who knows? Anyway, Blunkett's position became intolerable and he stepped down.

Make's you wonder what embarrassing moments everyone else has, doesn't it? Here's mine:

First of all, you need to know that Scotland has some especially strong regional dialects with lots of local idioms, this is particulary true of Glasgow. Back in the days of my innocent teens - yes, they existed, don't laugh - I was once going out with a lass from Glasgow. We were snogging away on the living room couch at my parent's place when I asked her what she fancied doing next :-) She replied "How aboot growling at the badger?" I didn't recognise the idiom, but just then my mother came into the room. We sprang apart and mother asked "What do you two plan on doing this afternoon?" Embarrassed and confused, I innocently replied "Growling at the badger". The girl turned bright pink and ran - squeaking with laughter - out of the room. Mother replied breezily "Well, I'll be driving past the zoo, so I'll drop you both off there". So I took the disappointed lass to the zoo. She dropped me soon afterwards. Why?

Several years later I was with another girlfriend at a show by the (rather forthright) Scottish comedian Billy Connolly, when he explained the aforesaid glaswegian idiom. Put down your drink and go listen to Billy Connolly explain "Growling at the badger". Oh my gaawwwd! How really embarrassing, I got hot flushes just remembering the scene a few years previously!

I haven't finished yet! Just another couple of years later I met the first young lady by accident at a friend's party and told the funny anecdote. Only to get punched out by the Irish fella she had married in the meantime! Well, that was my embarrassing story, let's hear yours!

posted by Stu Savory on 19th December 2004 at 12:34 Central European Time permalink Email

Fans' Friday Feedback

Yussef, a blogreader from Pakistan, corrects me by writing that the very first toilets with water flushing were built in Mohenjo-Daro (ancient towns along the Indus in what is now Pakistan) around 3000 B.C.

An unmentionable friend who is a research chemist (no, folks, I mean neither Carl nor Al) mailed the molecular structure shown above left. The molecule is the arsenic equivalent of pyrrole, and although it is rarely found in its pure form, it is occasionally seen as a sidegroup. It is named Arsole! He points us to the best title of any scientific paper he has seen: "Studies on the Chemistry of the Arsoles", G. Markl and H. Hauptmann, J. Organomet. Chem., 248 (1983) 269. BTW: Arsoles are really not aromatic ;-)

Wan, mailing from Hong Kong (China), tells me that the first mention of the use of toilet paper was in 851 AD. He asserts that the Chinese have been manufacturing toilet paper since 500 AD. The records of the Emperor's palace dated 1393 AD show it stockpiling 720,000 sheets of 2 ft by 3 ft ( 60*90 cms) for the staff and 15,000 perfumed sheets in 3*3 feet for the Emperor's family use. Hence the HK idiom "He's a big shit". Should we believe that? Or is it just a Chinese urban legend? Or is he just pulling my leg?

An American friend (also left nameless) suggested I take down the list of ABC-stores, lest it be seen as encouraging the wrong type of people. So I've pulled that day's blog entry. Sorry folks.

David liked the maths limerick of mine posted Wednesday and asks for more. Well, young David, the best math limerick I know was written by US bloggeress Betsy Devine many years ago :-

   Integral z-squared dz
   from 1 to the cube root of 3
   times the cosine
   of three pi over 9
   equals log of the cube root of 'e'.

Saturday Update : As the poetry of chance would have it, Betsy Devine blogged a new sonnet by her husband, 2004 Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek today. Apparently, Frank's Nobel prize is for Physics, not Literature ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 17th December 2004 at 06:17 Central European Time permalink Email

A Strange Google Anomaly

Why does this happen? Can anyone tell me? OK, both "Frank Paynter" and "Mandarin Design" are on my blogroll in the right sidebar together with a link to the aforementioned map, but "Halley Suitt" is not on my blogroll (because she's popular enough without a link from me). I don't understand why/how Google does this. In contrast, Google does not do it when searching for e.g. "Doug Alder" or "Pen-Elayne" or sundry other bloggers' names from my blogroll. WTF?

And now a little anomaly and maths limerick (which I wrote about thirty years ago), dedicated this time around and here in this blog to Joel Sax, the Orange County poetry fan : -

			Mathematics is really no fun!
			While coaching my nine year old son,
			I nearly got caught,
			While thinking of naught,
			but 0! = 1

posted by Stu Savory on 15th December 2004 at 21:36 Central European Time permalink Email

On Target : feedback from the surtch injun :)

I collect the search statistics and - on a regular basis - look for failed searches, to see what I need to index better. Example follows:

Some recent failed queries
--------------------------
1) Mon Dec 06 04:10:47 2004 playfair code
2) Sat Dec 04 13:33:59 2004 harlee davitson
3) Thu Dec 02 23:53:58 2004 Chiffriergerät Koralle
4) Mon Nov 29 07:33:17 2004 rowald darl
5) Mon Nov 29 07:28:28 2004 william shakesphere
6) Sun Nov 28 09:11:35 2004 what is the smallest composite number 
                            divisible by no prime numbers
7) Sat Nov 27 19:04:56 2004 commen on the pome "daffidils"

Number 6 was found correctly, but is a conceptual error by the young lady who made the search. Obviously I need to modify the divisibility page found in order to explain that the definition of a composite number is that it is divisible by primes; they all are.

Number 3 is a genuine miss, because my cipher pages (which are in German) do not describe a Koralle cipher machine. However the reader did not then take the (obvious?) step of extending the scope of the search to the whole WWWeb or of leaving to Google for it.

Number 1 - playfair code - was found correctly too, but the reader left it after a few seconds. Presumably he could not read German. So I need to blog in English about the Playfair cipher some day soon. I guess that's a problem with any asymmetric multilingual website, but other than translating everything to make the site language-symmetrical, I have no solution. There is way too much stuff (2500 objects?) to translate anyway, so I won't :-(

There is a minor conceptual flaw in the way page-internal search works too, at least in Opera. Assume that you use the site-search in the sidebar to look for the word seatwarming. This was used only in the title and alt texts for the photo of the cat on december 4th. So the site search returns the correct page (this month's blog). However it is a long page, so you may then decide to use your browser's internal page-search feature to look for the word (here : seatwarming). The browser (mine is Opera) will however, fail to find it, because it is not in the text of the page, but is 'hidden' in a photo-descriptor. If this happens, the workaround is to get the browser to pull up the page's source code and then search that. Then the photo-descriptors are included in (not excluded from ) the search and seatwarming will be found. What happens in this situation with IE and with Firefox? Meg / Doug / Gary / anyone-else, tell me please?

posted by Stu Savory on 14th December 2004 at 06:04 Central European Time permalink Email

Flour for Algernon

Without wishing to sound patronising, let me tell you about some of the issues. As a customer, you need to bring time and patience; be considerate and grateful. Don't wave at or distract a waitress already serving someone else, wait until she goes into her idle-mode behind the counter. Don't be indecisive about your order, order one person after another and order one item at a time, waiting until the waitress has written the item's reference number down. She may be unable to read or write, so point at the reference number/letter on the menu rather than saying the name of the item you want. That way they can copy the single reference character by sight. Clever menues have no similar-looking characters there; e.g. an 8 but no 3, an E but no F; this lessens potential confusion. Funny prices though.

Do not change positions at your table if one of your party needs to visit the rest-room. Do not try to change your order. Be polite, no arguments with or criticism of the staff; you can always go see the regular manager/ess if you have a problem, avoiding any emotional scenes.

You will be given a printed check, try to have the exact change for the check. Thank/complement the waitress and give her the tip separately, saying "This is for you". Photos not appreciated BTW. Bear all this advice in mind and the experience will a pleasure for ALL concerned.

The food was great by the way, and the shyer persons who work in the bakery at the back of the counter had baked the fresh crisply rolls etc just for you. My wife had a tomato soup served in a hollowed-out freshly baked crispy bread made in the shape of a little edible soup-tureen. Cleanliness and hygiene were A1-excellent and the precision with which the table was laid would put many a machine-shop (let alone my usual motorcycle store) to shame :-)

Let me explain today's blogheader, if you don't recognise the reference which is to Daniel Keyes poignant book "Flowers for Algernon", but punning with Flour because of the bakery.

Daniel Keyes wrote little SF but is highly regarded for one classic, Flowers for Algernon. As a 1959 novella it won a Hugo Award; the 1966 novel-length expansion won a Nebula. The Oscar-winning movie adaptation Charly (1968) also spawned a 1980 Broadway musical.

Storyline : Following his doctor's instructions, engaging simpleton Charlie Gordon tells his own story in semi-literate "progris riports." He dimly wants to better himself, but with an IQ of 68 can't even beat the laboratory mouse Algernon at maze-solving:

"I dint feel bad because I watched Algernon and I lernd how to finish the amaze even if it takes me along time I dint know mice were so smart."

Algernon is extra-clever thanks to an experimental brain operation so far tried only on animals. Charlie eagerly volunteers as the first human subject. After frustrating delays and agonies of concentration, the effects begin to show and the "progris riports" steadily improve: "Punctuation, is? fun!" But getting smarter brings cruel shocks, as Charlie realizes that his merry "friends" at the bakery where he swept the floor have all along been laughing at him, never with him. His IQ rise continues, taking him steadily past the human average to genius level and beyond, until he's as intellectually alone as the old, foolish Charlie ever was--and now painfully aware of it. Then, ominously, the smart mouse Algernon begins to deteriorate...

If you have never read this classic SF tale, please do so. Clicking on the book-cover shown at upper-left should take you to Amazon.DE where you can order it if you so desire.

Let me wrap up with a suitable anagram for today : "A masquerade can cover a sense of what is real to deceive us; to be unjaded and not lost, we must, then, determine truth." which of course (sic!) is an anagram for a quotation taken from Vonnegut : "Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe."
Actually, I'm sure the folks working at that bakery/cafe´ - whose skylights leak a little - have a greater sense of achievement on a daily basis than many of us do with our humdrum lives.

posted by Stu Savory on 12th December 2004 at 06:12 Central European Time permalink Email

Firsts

F red Hoyle was not - as Siegfried claimed (continuing yesterday's blog theme) the first to come up with the Big-Bang theory for the start of the universe. A greek philosopher called Empedokles (495-435 BC) wrote a poem "On Nature" including what he calls the 'cosmic vortex' (my lousy translation). Therein everything is compressed into a homogenous ball, explodes, expands to form our universe then collapses back into the ball before repeating the cycle endlessly. Did Cambridge-educated Hoyle read Greek?

This hotly contested astro-night discussion lead to a conversation exploring "firsts". Some of them I actually remember - despite the beers - and reiterate them for you here. Leukippos (450 BC), a greek born in Milet (which now is in Turkey), was the first with the idea of atoms; his student Demokrit came up with the idea of molecules.

Empedokles also sketches the first ideas about evolution in that same poem. Abu Rayhan Muhammed Ibn Ahmed al-Biruni (973-1048 AD) in his book Kitab al-jamahir wrote that men are descended from primates. And in the chinese Huai Nan Zi written in the 2nd century BC five steps in that evolution are decribed. So you creationists don't have just Charles Darwin to attack :-) Nor is this blog today the first sceptical article. Actually, Pyrrhon of Elis (360-270 BC) founded the first school of sceptics :-)

Finally, a "Mr.E" writer, tells me Bhopal was not the first environmental disaster and points me to a big environmental disaster in New York state (US), a few years prior to the Union Carbide disaster. He gives me three links about the Hooker Chemical corp disaster at Love Canal claiming that the EPA Hides behind the Myths of Love Canal and telling us about the activist Lois Gibbs. Thanks sir, I'd not known about that, but then I don't have a First :-(

posted by Stu Savory on 11th December 2004 at 06:11 Central European Time permalink Email

Astronomy Domine

When the conversation turned to Mars, I learned that the biggest martian volcano Olympus Mons is so huge that it would barely fit within all of Germany here. The photoshopped superimposition on the left is clickable, so you can see what they meant. We also looked at some other great photos, for example Eta Carina, an artists impression of Jupiter as seen from Io, this year's lunar eclipse, Apollo 11's Earthrise, and even - just for Dubya - the creationists' view of Earth ;-)

The photo I liked best was an Orion shot, I award it an honorary place in my skyline meme :-

These good folks are still trying to get me to invest in a first telescope. I've been getting lots of good advice, especially to avoid cheap department store junk, but anything good still sounds expensive new. So I'll wait for the second-hand astro-fair in Essen and try to pick up a used 6 or 8 inch Newton reflector in a Dobsonian mount. And forget about astro-photography at first.

posted by Stu Savory on 10th December 2004 at 06:10 Central European Time permalink Email

How do you doo? No Bog-Standard answer

There is no bog standard answer. Toilets are a part of our national cultures and vary across the world. International travellers will very certainly suffer from culture shock the first time they encounter a toilet where they actually have to think about how to use it ;-) Not the best situation when combined with Montezuma's revenge.

Slavoj(sic!) Zizek wrote in the London Review of Books a while ago :-
"So, as a supplement to Levi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose that shit can also serve as a matiere-a-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Levi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw, the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit disappears after we flush is right at the front, so that shit is first laid out for us to sniff and inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the back: i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is full of water, so that the shit floats in it, visible, but not to be inspected."

The invention of the flush toilet goes at least back to the time of King Minos on the Island of Crete sometime around 1700 BC. Ancient Romans built latrines over running water to carry off wastes to the Tiber River. They developed the art of plumbing and constructed underground sewers made of lead, earthenware, or stone. Dark-age shitizens chucked it out the window : "Gardez l'eau!" (french for 'Mind the water!') is the origin of the Brit euphemism for toilet : "Loo".

Probably the best known name associated with toilets in the bogosphere (sic!) is that of Thomas Crapper, a British plumber who developed a type of flushing toilet in 1872. He perfected the cistern - the tank that holds the water for flushing and made flushing quieter. The American soldiers stationed in England during World War I who returned to the US used his name as a euphemism for the toilet. He is honoured in the London borough of Bromley (UK) by a blue plaque on his house wall, as shown in today's lead-in photo, top-left.

Alas it seems almost certain that Thomas Crapper did not invent the siphonic flush; he certainly did not patent it, as he implied in his advertising. So writes expert Adam Hart-Davis.

Several decades ago Ted Simon made a four-year journey around the world on a Triumph motorcycle. He wrote a very good book about his trip called Jupiter's Travels. Please go read it. I remember splitting my sides upon reading a passage which said something like "I knew you were only supposed to use your left hand in Arabia and Africa for wiping your backside. But I had always assumed they had toilet paper there too!"

When I was in Namibia and South Africa about 20 years ago myself, I got talking to a civil engineer building cheap housing for the local tribesmen. To keep the price down, his team only poured a concrete baseplate and then let the locals build their own houses on the baseplate. BUT, and it was a big BUTT he joked, there was a WC pre-fitted and connected up from the start on each baseplate. And a water tap for washing hands. This was his contribution to hygiene in Africa, he claimed.

When you leave the Science Museum in the borough of Kensington in London (UK) there is a large notice at the exit "Please use the toilet BEFORE you leave!". Not because the nearest public toilet outside is a long way away, but because they re-cycle the visitor's crap, using it to heat the building. There's progress for you! Shades of Winnie-the-POOH ;-)

Back on Nov. 17-19, 2004, in Beijing, China, there was a conference: The World Toilet Summit, a s(h)it-down event, I presume; Dave Barry wrote it up in his usual humourous style. Nevertheless it was interesting to read about national styles for toilet design, certainly there is no one standard (yet).

I would invite YOU, gentle blogreader, to send both photos and/or functional descriptions of the (perhaps more unusual) facilities in YOUR country, that I may blog an overview here.

To end on a light note, we have a poetry anthology hanging in our toilet at home for any constipated visitor to read at his/her leisure. It carries a neat dedication on the flyleaf :-

This is the book,
That hangs on the hook,
To be read in the loo,
When visiting Stu ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 6th December 2004 at 06:23 Central European Time permalink Email

Your feedback this week

Melanie of Just a Bump in the Beltway didn't like my previous attempt at cat-blogging, so here's a genuine cat-photo this time. Peace, Melanie? (until fp clicks the pic for the SOUND ;-)

That photo should get ex-bikers Frank Paynter and Mike Golby excited too, not because of the pussy, but because the motorcycle is a rare Münch Mammut TTS, one of only 457 Mammuts handbuilt by Friedel Münch, belonging to my friend Bernd Gehrken, and worth a small fortune.

Paul Mansfield says my post this week was a cockup, so I thought he was referring to Thursday's post, but actually he claims that the IQ voting pattern I blogged on Tuesday is a well-known hoax, so disregard that posting please. However, as NSW's Tim Lambert (Deltoid, AUS) points out, the top US universities bar one are all in blue states.

Jane googled for The measure of man (Thursday's post-header) and tells me that Techbabe has a neat poem entitled The measure of man! Totally different subject matter. Just as well ;-) She also asks me for a photogallery with my blog's personal flavour. OK Jane, I've put a link on the sidebar now, above my photo, and labelled it Mini-Gallery. Thumbnails there are clickable.

Sri Lanka blogger Gumz writes that he has found a different way of solving for square roots using only ruler and compasses, which I challenged y'all to do back on November 23rd.

Christian Berg goes phishing with CNN : Bush arrested in Canada for war crimes.

Finally, and I use the word advisedly, Matthew (Iowa), having read wednesday's nukulah post, wants to know what depleted uranium is. Well, after you have finished enriching a uranium isotope mix to concentrate the U₂₃₅ (e.g by gas-centrifuging uranium fluoride) you are left with the U₂₃₈ isotope, depleted of any U₂₃₅ isotope. The concentrated U₂₃₅ is used to build atomic bombs. Depleted uranium (U₂₃₈) is still radioactive, with such a long half-life that its radiation effectively does not decrease during our lifetimes. It's filthy stuff, causing cancer and the birth of misbegotten mutant children. Dubya is using armour-piercing depleted-uranium shells to fight what is effectively a nuclear war with U₂₃₈-dust "dirty bombs" in Iraq right now!

In fact, Erik Blumrich has an explicit explanatory 1MB flash movie online. If you are at all squeamish do not watch it! But Yanks should, it's what they chose when they elected Dubya!

posted by Stu Savory on 4th December 2004 at 06:23 Central European Time permalink Email

The measure of man

And on a not-unrelated topic, the US company Andromedical, a manufacturer of penis-enlargement devices (and probable spammer judging by my male box /////// mailbox ) reports on their international survey of penis measurements, which confirms the numbers reported by a local condom manufacturer.

Average size by country (measured along the erect topside), sample-size about 2000 men/country. Korea 9.6 cms, India 10.1 cms, Greece 12.2, Saudi Arabia 12.4, Venezuela 12.7, USA 12.9, Japan 13.0, Spain 13.6, Columbia 13.9, Chile 14.0, Brasil 14.5, Germany 14.7, Mexico 14.9, Russia 15.0, Italy 15.0, and France 16.0. No numbers were reported for Holland, probably due to the number of dykes there ;-)

France 16 cms and USA only 12.9 cms? That would explain why little Dubya is pissed off at the French; nothing to do with Chirac's refusal to go to war in Iraq!

And of coarse(sic!) we free-swinging, bare-bummed, kilted Scots ran out of ruler.

If you need to do a self-check right now, you can click in the photo to get an enlargement ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 2nd December 2004 at 10:23 Central European Time permalink Email

The Mother of all Geysirs

U₂₃₈ alone is not enough, you need about 3% of U₂₃₅ to maintain a nuclear reaction, and a suitable moderator to slow the neutrons down so that they can knock other neutrons (>=1) out of the nuclei.

So how do natural nuclear reactors work, without all the modern paraphenalia in nuclear power stations? Firstly there was a natural mix of uranium with >= 3% of U₂₃₅ in the ore. Gradually groundwater seeped into the ore, the water acting as the moderator. The ore then heated up as the fission began, producing about 100 kilowatts of thermal energy. After about 30 minutes the ore was hot enough to boil the water, blowing off a mighty steam geysir. As the geysir blew off the water there was no moderator any more and the fission reaction could not be sustained. But then groundwater seeped back into the cooling ore and the cycle began again, going on about every 2 ½ hours for some 150 million years.

"Old faithful" had nothing on these seventeen!

How do we know all this? By a neat piece of detective work reported by Dr. Alex Meshik & coworkers last year in Geophysical Research Abstracts, 5, 14271 (I only read it just now, sorry).

U₂₃₈ has a half-life of 4,500 million years, U₂₃₅ has only 700 million years. Worldwide uranium ore has a ratio of 0.7202 % U₂₃₅ nowadays. Except? Except in the mines of Okla (Gabun) where it is 0.717 % U₂₃₅. The only way for this to happen was if the U₂₃₅ had been depleted by a nuclear reaction. Using the half-lives, we can work back through time to calculate when these natural nuclear reactors ran (needing > 3% U₂₃₅ ). See the numbers I gave above. The Xenon (fission byproduct) released was trapped in the aluminium phosphate of the ores. For more details, read Meshik's paper (dry, academic, but fascinating physics).

Once upon a time - to be more precise, about two thousand million years ago - in a land far, far away - to be more precise, in what is now Oklo in Gabun - there were naturally occurring nuclear reactors. According to Meshik's theory. Erik von Däniken doubtless has a different theory ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 1st December 2004 at 06:12 Central European Time permalink Email