Clipped Wings
Flying: Sadly
Walter Extra's company had to file for bankruptcy today. The Extra is the
best aerobatic aircraft I have ever flown, better even than a
Sukhoi. He should have stuck to
building aerobatic planes and not tried to branch into the light plane market with the 400.
Having non-aviation stakeholders in the management was not a good idea either, IMHO.
I just hope he can resurrect the aerobatic part of the company.
Writing: Yes, I am attracted to intelligent women (so beware Nicky, Sarah, Liz, Halley, Carola etc! ;)
who can write well too, so it was good to see authoress
Claire Tomalin beat her equally
famous author husband Michael Frayn (best novel:
Spies
) to the Whitbread prize this year.
Quotations: Halley blogs today "Yes, it's bikini weather again".
Probably looks great on her :) .
Unfortunately, Andrew Card thinks its Bikini time again, too.
'We are what we repeatedly do.' (Aristoteles). Many thanks to
Carola Heine for this line :)
posted by Stu Savory on 29th Jan 2003 at 21:50:10 Central European Time
Tuesday, January 28, 2003
Flowers for Algernon
Math: Having received plenty of mail saying how trivial the Math exercise dated 12th
January was - from people who had
not gotten the message - , I finally got an Email (from
a bloke in Strine-land) who realised it was actually an exercise in steganography.
Well done Pete mate! Well done
Liz Lane Lawley, too
, who probably consumed lotsa donuts (Ja? Nein!) solving
the puzzle dated January 15th ;) It is also suggested in Liz's Blog (& comments) that
academic standards are decreasing. I would agree with that, daytime TV here demonstrates
the point! But I also read that Bush's IQ was measured as 95, when arrested for drunken
driving (sic!). The header for today is the title of a book on the theme. Go read it.
ObJoke: Dumbledore sent Harry Potter into the storeroom at Hogwarts to fetch
some invisibility-capes. But he couldn't find any ;) . . . Now there's a thought! In his latest
movie, James Bond drives around in an invisible car. But if you are invisible, you are
also blind at the same optical wavelengths, because your retina cannot absorb any light,
lest it thereby become visible. Q.E.D ;) Ah well, Hollywood never was credible anyway (sigh!).
Politics: Now the ugly face of war - in the form of Andrew Card 
, who
wants to start tossing Nukes, - rears itself again. Too many hawks in the Bush junta for
my taste; however, since we live in a democracy in Germany (democracy = where the guy with
the most votes wins ;) , it is probably my duty to let one of the pro-war
faction air his views too. So here is
Proteus .
posted by Stu Savory on 28th Jan 2003 at 18:30:50 Central European Time
Sunday, January 26, 2003
The Cyberwar has begun
Internet: Since about midnight saturday EST almost every host on the USA internet has been receiving a 376 byte
UDP payload on port ms-sql-m (1434) from a random infected server. Reports of some hosts
receiving 10 per minute or more. internetpulse.net is reporting UUNet and Internap are
being hit very hard. This is the cause of major connectivity problems being experienced
worldwide. It is believed this worm leverages a vulnerability published in June 2002.
Several core routers have taken to blocking port 1434 outright. If you run
Microsoft SQL Server, you are part of the problem, so make sure the public internet can't
access it. If you manage a
gateway, consider dropping UDP packets sent to port 1434. BTW: This has effectively
disabled 5 of the 13 root nameservers.
Politics: Frank Paynter has a good
anti-war blog, Frank
is more eloquant than I.
Math: Just worked out the checksum rule for our Euro notes. Convert the first letter
into its position in the alphabet, for Germany the first letter is X, so replace it by 24.
Now add to that all the digits of the number on the Euro-note; repeat to get to a single
digit, which must be eight (8) for the note to be valid, OK? More
info here (in german) from my website.
posted by Stu Savory on 26rd Jan 2003 at 11:00:50 Central European Time
Wednesday, January 23, 2003
Who IS the Problem?
Politics: The US Minister for War, Rumsfeld, claims Europe is a "problem" for not joining in the
war plans of the Oil-Baron Bush family. Looking back to WW
One (1914-1918), it was the Americans who did not join in until 1916, when provoked by the
Zimmermann telegram claiming an impending attack on USA.
Looking back to WW
Two (1939-1945), it was the Americans again who did not join in, until provoked by
an attack on USA in 1941. Maybe Rumsfeld regards it as inconvenient to remember this.
The hawkish strategy of "Condole-easy" Rice and Bush the Lesser trying to justify preemptive
strikes although Blix has found no significant evidence, I regard as being very dangerous, and
in direct contradiction to the Human Rights charter which the US also signed.
Indeed, the US is becoming the number one "problem" in the world today, and has lost all the
sympathy it gained for its (failed!) Al Quaida chase after 9-11 :(
BTW, the name 'Rumsfeld' comes from the german 'Ruhmesfeld' = 'field of fame',
which meant 'battlefield & graveyard' in the 1800s.
And I'm not sure who Ms. Condole-Easy Rice
is going to find it easy to condole :(
Reading:
Stupid White Men, by Michael Moore, published by Piper, ISBN 3-492-04517-0 (in German).
And also
Goethe für Gestreßte, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ISBN 3-458-33600-1 (also in German).
posted by Stu Savory on 23rd Jan 2003 at 18:00:50 Central European Time
Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Non Cogito - ergo no sums !
Math : Ever noticed that (young) people these days don't seem to be able to do
mental arithmetic? Here's a tale for you, of an attempted ripoff :(
I'm at a petstore, buying my usual 4 weeks worth of dogfood for Wilma.
The sullen teenager-cashier keys in each tin individually whilst I'm talking to the guy
behind me in the line. Finally he says "47,52".
About two seconds later I
say "Wrong! add 'em up again."
He says truculently "I added them all in the cash register,
how come you think it's wrong smartass?(sic!)".
I start to get mad "Because I always buy four weeks
worth of identical tins, so whatever they cost each, the total must be divisible by seven,
because there are 7 days a week. And 4752 cents are not
divisible by seven!" I'm getting loud now.
"How'd you get that? In yer head?" he asks aggressively.
"Yes, kid, in my head, I don't need
a calculator for that! To see if a number is divisible by seven, you just chop off the last
digit, double it and subtract it from the rest. So that's 475-2*2=471.
Doing the same again gives me 47-2*1=45. And 45 is not divisible by 7. So you're wrong!
Don't they teach you kids anything at school these days?"
Kid turns grey and red alternating! "Hurry up", shouts a woman from the back of the queue.
"The dogfood tins cost 1,34 this week" she adds.
Kid pulls out his calculator again. "Lessee, 28 * 1,34 = 37,52" he says.
I add "Just saved myself a 10 Euro ripoff by staying awake in school, kid.
Don't try it again!"
Then the guy next to me pipes up. "Actually I teach kids math and I didn't know that
rule to divide by 7, and we certainly don't teach it."
"You defending his ripoff?" I'm aggrieved now.
"No, just saying I need to relearn some basic arithmetic", he demurs.
See folks, mental arithmetic can save you money! Just saved me ten Euros :)
And for my local German readers, I've added a page to my site giving the
divisibility tests
for 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12 and 13, OK :)
posted by Stu Savory on 22nd Jan 2003 at 19:09:53 Central European Time
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
I'm a BIG star now !
End of the world: No, I'm not writing from Notting Hill
about
Julia Roberts and even
less
Hugh Grant.
Pulled out the old 8 inch *****/reflector telescope ;) and had a good look at
Eta Carinae. Awesomely big now.
Just about the maximum size possible for a star. Might just
go POP
(Supernova) anyday now (that's
astronomers' talk for :
'sometime in the next million years'.
Just as well its a lot further
away than the 100 light-years generally regarded as being
'a safe distance'
(who calculates stuff like that? Inquiring minds wanna know! ;)
Still, probably be about magnitude -20 or more when it does pop; no more dark-sky nights for a
few years thereafter! Mind you, the neutrino-pulse should stir up the sea (and put some Argon in us) somewhat,
not to mention the positrons and gamma storm :(
Of course Betelgeuse is a candidate to pop too, and is closer.
Betelgeuse is the left shoulder
of Orion, OK? Here is a great article - abrasively funny as usual - by
Al Schwartz
on the subject. Just 10 years left, folks, so shop early ;)
posted by Stu Savory on 21st Jan 2003 at 08:22:21 Central European Time
Sunday, January 19, 2003
Hear here!
Lectures: Went to a couple of interesting lectures this week. Professor Beutelspacher,
who runs the
Mathematikum in Giessen, filled the
main hall at
HNF, which is the largest computer museum in the whole world !
Very good and very
understandable Math talk as usual. On friday we went to listen to
Erich von Daeniken, a widely-read author with the theory that Earth was visited by
ancient astronauts several millenia B.C. Non-believers and sceptics I refer to
this website for repudiatory arguments.
Politics: Before Bush the Lesser goes to war in Iraq, I would recommend that he read the poem
DULCE ET DECORUM EST by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). Owen actually fought in a war whereas
Bush's war record shows that he did not.
Reading: A further amusing book in the series edited by Esther Friesner,
this one bears the title
The Chick is in the Mail
, published by Baen, 2000. ISBN 0-671-31950-7.
Chocolate: You've heard about AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) surely, but now there is a special website
by Nicole Luck for
Chocolate Addicts in Germany:
.
In Memoriam: Janis Joplin 
would have been 60 today, had she not died at 27. Wonder
what she would be singing nowadays? - and what it would sound like?
I'm gonna spend the afternoon listening to my old Janis discs :)
posted by Stu Savory on 19th Jan 2003 at 08:22:21 Central European Time
Wednesday, January 15, 2003
Re(a)d Rage
Math: Tuesday 14th was the 25th anniversary of the death of
Kurt Gödel.
Because his life contained contradictions, it was finite. Had lunch at an excellent Italian restauraunt,
Pizza with a donut shaped cake as dessert. So folks, a puzzle for you: given that you can cut a
pizza into seven pieces with just three straight strokes of the knife, into how many pieces can
you cut a donut with 3 straight cuts? Mail me your answers, OK!
Politics: Wednesday 15th was the 84th anniversary of the murder of
Rosa Luxembourg and Karl
Liebknecht; wreaths were laid in Berlin-Lichtenfelde Cementery.
In the US, for the first time, two pilots are in command of their respective political parties.
Senate majority leader Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and minority leader Sen. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.)
are both active pilots and like to
go flying, as I do too. Of course Dubya was also once a pilot,
here is his
service record :(
Reading: Another really good book by Terry Pratchett entitled
The Amazing Maurice and his
Educated Rodents , published by Corgi Books, 2002. ISBN 0-552-54693-3.
Ethically challenging, very amusing and well plotted. Pterry tells the (discworld) story
of the Pied Piper from the rats' point of view ;)
posted by Stu Savory on 15th Jan 2003 at 19:24:24 Central European Time
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Snow Crash
Blogtalk: This week
Halley
had a nice article about the names for snow, to which I
was able contribute
18 Inuit (Eskimo) words for snow.
It has been around -12 Celsius
here (51.5981 N, 8.7761 E) in Germany the past week, but now it is warming up
and we expect rain, not snow, on monday. However, the rain will fall onto
frozen ground, so the roads will be like a skating rink :( Guess we'll need some kind of
stabiliser,
Allan Karl enthuses too about the Segway human
transporter. Probably illegal on a public road here in Germany. Shame though, they look
like fun :)
Reading: BTW, I can recommend
Neal Stephensons cyberpunk book
Snow
Crash (Mac users will recognise the phrase ;) )
, which is nearly as good as his novel
Cryptonomicon
which is a time-flip story about Crypto, digital money, Enigma and Solitaire.
Phil Gyford has started a 10 year project of putting
Samuel Pepys' Diary online
as a weblog (see my bloglink list). Heroic, man! That's going to be a lot of work.
Poetry: As
Halley writes about alpha males,
there is a good poem on the subject (written from
the point of view of an Omega Female ;) ) by an Englishwoman
Wendy Cope.
Math: This week I was again amazed at the innumeracy of children today.
Even the PISA Report confirms this. I doubt if some (in USA too) can manage to work this out:-
12+24+11+33=???
45+43+42+22=???
43+11+32+15=???
23+52+34+42=???
Get the message kids?
posted by Stu Savory on 12th Jan 2003 at 11:54:54 Central European Time
Wednesday, January 1, 2003
In the Beginning was the Word...
Beginning 2003
I (Stu Savory)
have decided to try my hand at
Blogging
, initially on a weekly (Sundays) basis to avoid too much effort :)
Most of the stuff I write is in German, since that is
where I live;
however this blog will be kept in
English. Sometimes a link will go to
a german language page; just ignore it if you cannot read German.
This Blog will (probably) concern itself with my major interests:
Cryptography,
Math,
Books,
Music,
New Beetle Cars,
Motorcycles,
and all the other
(Alpha?) male junk :)
posted by Stu Savory on 1st Jan 2003 at 09:01:58 Central European Time
