Coffee,coffee, gimme coffee!

Gimme Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
Needa Lot O' Frothy Coffee.

Gimme Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
Au lait, Ole´, wi'
Rum n' toffee :-)

Gimme Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
Much o' Macho Mocha!

Gimme Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
Gotta Have a
Cappuccino!

Gimme Coffee,
Coffee, Coffee,
"We're outa Coffee!
Have a tea, dear!"
"Oh f*ck-offy!"
Oh for Coffee...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 30. January 2006 at 06:30 CET permalink Email

The Year of the Dog begins . . .

The Chinese New Year (of the dog) begins today, here are Frieda's New Year greeting pix:

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 29. January 2006 at 06:29 CET permalink Email

WTF is going on here?

Please help me understand what is happening here.
Send a mail to using the title 'Blogrobbing?' if you can explain it to me.

Thanks to Eileen from Ireland for the heads up on this. She wrote to me as follows :

"Dear Stu, I'm an occasional blogreader and think you ought to know that someone, or someones, is/are stealing your good name! I'd forgotten the URL of your blog, so I looked up your name instead in Technorati, knowing I'd find people who have you on their blogroll and people who quote you. Sure enough, 110. As often happens - scatterbrained me - I followed eight of the links, and some of the alleged 'blogs' are most peculiar, but look for yourself, two URLs are X ('Best her info') and Y ('Short carmelo anthony information')."

For reasons which will become apparent, I have chosen not to reproduce those URLs here.

So made my firewalls as restrictive as possible and verified that I had no spyware on board before taking a look at them.

These 'blogs' just lift lines or paragraphs from my own blog and even attribute them to me. So far so good. But the links contained in the lifted paragraphs are changed. Also the link in the attribution does not point back to my blog; instead the links point off to all sorts of wierd places; needless to say, for safety's sake I didn't follow any of them. And these socalled 'blogs' consist only of paragraphs lifted from other people's blogs, always with the links set wrongly though. They are doing this to dozens of us it would seem :-(

I think what is happening is that these vultures are misusing us C-list bloggers (1000 readers per day) to pump up their own ratings and then link off to malware, spyware and/or advertising sites. Neither of the sites Eileen pointed me to contains an 'about' page such as honest bloggers have, nor is there an abuse address that I could find :-(

So, WTF is going on here? Can somebody illuminate me please?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 27. January 2006 at 10:00 CET permalink Email

Tribal wanderings in GB in the 20th century

You can have these maps for your own family, details follow. Make vanity maps too :-)

The two maps shown below detail the relative population density of people called "Savory" in the counties of Great Britain (not the UK) in 1881 (left) and 1998 (right). Purple is the highest density, descending through red, orange, yellow and 'eggshell' to transparent (lowest density). My father's ancestors came from Norfolk, the only purple coloured county in the 1881 distribution. Interesting that almost no "Savorys" lived just a few miles further south in Suffolk. Another branch lived more to the west, halfway to Wales (in the red areas). This is where a namesake blogreader, one Richard Savory, lives, I believe.

The rightside picture shows the situation in 1998. Wales has been 'invaded' and there is a stronger (orange) contingent just to the south of Hadrian's Wall (the border to Scotland).

Due to the vagaries of WW2, I was born in Edinburgh, one of few it seems. But what surprised me on this map was seeing the large "Savory" contingent in the Outer Hebrides! (Those are the islands in the Atlantic, shown top left, off the coast of mainland Scotland).

All of these data came from a website called Spatial-Literacy.org , which has an interactive interface to their database. UK readers can go there, plug in their family name, and get the 1881 and 1998 population distributions of their family names. Do your own 'Tribal Wandering' research :-) Canadians, Australians, sundry ex-pats and other Commonwealth readers can trace their family names too, given that they be not too rare.

And while we are on the subject of looking at Great Britain's population, I'd like to recommend an interesting book to all my blogreaders. It is called "Watching the English (the hidden rules of English behaviour)" by Kate Fox, published in 2005 by Hodder and Stoughton, ISBN 0-340-81886-7. I've shown the cover of my paperback edition over on my right sidebar, so you'll know what to look for.

Kate Fox, a social anthropologist, is Co-Director of the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford and a Fellow of the Institute for Cultural Research. Following an erratic education in England, America, Ireland and France, she studied anthropology and philosophy at Cambridge. Her book "Watching the English" will make you laugh out loud ("Oh God. I do that!") and cringe simultaneously ("Oh God. I do that as well"). This is a hilarious book which just shows us for what we are ... beautifully observed. A wonderful read for both the English and those who look at us and wonder why we do what we do. Now they'll know.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 26. January 2006 at 06:26 CET permalink Email

It'll be Burns Nicht the morn, ye ken...

. . . and Scots worldwide will be celebrating, either with a traditional Robbie Burns Supper or (more usual) a drunken party :-)

We got high quality Scottish Bands (e.g. Runrig) here when there was a Scottish regiment stationed in nearby Sennelager. The current alternatives, e.g. modern Scottish punk, can be just awful IMHO.

I'm writing this in English, because when I blogged in Scots for the 2004 Burns Nicht, many of you complained you couldn't understand it. Even the review of Scots poetry across the centuries which I wrote for Burns Nicht last year was too hard to understand for some Sassenachs.

But this year we'll just be having a low-key celebration, no rock-music parties, nor pipes and drums. But I DO have some excellent whiskies, over a quarter century old, to take to the Supper :-) There is a 1981 Auchentoshan, which is a triple distilled pure single malt lowland whisky, mild and mellow. Then there is a 1980 Lagavulin, a rich dark peaty single Islay malt, the ruby gold of the islands :-) Got ye droolin' have I, the noo?

So to give you time to practice reciting a Burns' poem, I'm posting this one a day ahead of Burns Nicht (which is tomorrow). It's the Address to a Haggis, the celebrated Scottish foodstuff; these days he'd be writing one about fried mars bars, I suppose :-(

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face, 
Great chieftain o the puddin'-race! 
Aboon them a' ye tak your place, 
Painch, tripe, or thairm: 
Weel are ye wordy of a grace 
As lang's my arm. 

The groaning trencher there ye fill, 
Your hurdies like a distant hill, 
Your pin wad help to mend a mill 
In time o need, 
While thro your pores the dews distil 
Like amber bead. 

His knife see rustic Labour dight, 
An cut you up wi ready slight, 
Trenching your gushing entrails bright, 
Like onie ditch; 
And then, O what a glorious sight, 
Warm-reekin, rich! 

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an strive: 
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive, 
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve 
Are bent like drums; 
The auld Guidman, maist like to rive, 
'Bethankit' hums. 

Is there that owre his French ragout, 
Or olio that wad staw a sow, 
Or fricassee wad mak her spew 
Wi perfect sconner, 
Looks down wi sneering, scornfu view 
On sic a dinner? 

Poor devil! see him owre his trash, 
As feckless as a wither'd rash, 
His spindle shank a guid whip-lash, 
His nieve a nit: 
Thro bloody flood or field to dash, 
O how unfit! 

But mark the Rustic, haggis-fed, 
The trembling earth resounds his tread, 
Clap in his walie nieve a blade, 
He'll make it whissle; 
An legs an arms, an heads will sned, 
Like taps o thrissle. 

Ye Pow'rs, wha mak mankind your care, 
And dish them out their bill o fare, 
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware 
That jaups in luggies: 
But, if ye wish her gratefu prayer, 
Gie her a Haggis!

To listen to the pronunciation, here's an RM file of Peter Wright reciting the poem :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24. January 2006 at 06:22 CET permalink Email

Poisoning yourself with convenience foods

Such convenience foods come with additives. Here in Europe at least, the food companies are required to label the worst additives, because they can poison you! These additives will usually just be identified via an E-number (e.g. E250) and you'll be left to look up the side-effects for yourself. Let's look at just a few examples today, and you can think about this article when shopping next time.

Spray-on cream for cakes etc. contains carrageen (E407) to make it foam up better. But carrageen is damaging to the immune system and may even be cargogenic (cause breast-cancer). Recommendation: buy fresh cream and whip it yourself.

Bread : Packed (and maybe pre-sliced) bread often contains E282 (calcium propionide). It was forbidden in Germany until the stupid EU insisted we open our markets for inferior products. E282 is carcogenic. Recommendation : avoid prepacked bread and toast with E282 on the label. Buy only fresh bread.

To make salami keep better, sodium nitrite (E250) is added. E250 can cause migraine or constrain the flow of blood to the brain in children. Recommendation : Salami less than thrice a week for children.

Mustard may contain semicarbacides, which leeches in from those plastic twist-off caps. Recommendation : buy mustard in tubes, like toothpaste.

Dried fruit : Usually with sulfur dioxide (E220), which encourages the growth of dangerous bacteria in the gut.

Lemons : often sprayed with E230 (diphenyl) which kills fungi. It also causes kidney-damage and bladder-cancer. Recommendation : Only buy lemons marked as 'untreated' and wash your hands after pressing them. You don't really need a twist in that martini either!

Pesticides : a recent german Greenpeace study shows that merely 7% of imported fruits were free of pesticides :-( So wash all fruit and veg. The permissible EU contamination levels for e.g. celery has been quadrupled recently, so it's getting worse. Spanish and italian tomatoes may contain several pesticides. Recommendations : Grapes from Argentine. Buy local produce from the local market, especially from the green "bio"-stalls.

Tuna starts goings off as soon as you open the can, so eat it upon opening, don't keep any, even in the fridge. And avoid eating tuna in restaurants, you don't know how long its been lying around :-(

Melty-cheese (e.g. toast-cheese or grill-cheese) contains phosphates (E450). Too much phosphate can replace the calcium in your bones, especially bad for older persons.

Onions : to stop their onions sprouting, Italy, US, France and Belgium irradiate them. Recommendation : German onions, where the use of radioactivity on foods is prohibited.

And it's not just pesticides. What was in/on the fields before? Example : the americans used Agent Orange indiscriminately in Vietnam to defoliate the jungle. The poor locals (and many GIs) inhaled the stuff. It caused genetic defects in the new-born children of those people; that's where today's photo came from. Fruit and veg growing in the once defoliated regions of Vietnam (and Amazon areas) are contaminated to this day :-(

America's indiscriminate use of ABC weapons (=WMD) on innocent people and their own soldiers, is a separate rant, I won't get into that inethical despicable behaviour today.

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 22. January 2006 at 06:22 CET permalink Email

Your Mails and Comments...

Peter C. Harris points me some remotely bullish photos, whereas Anna Pashen points us to photos from her holiday in North Queensland, Oz (Cairns etc). The Cairns panorama below is a small sample, also a great addition to the skyline meme, methinks!

Black American biker Matthew read my Martin Luther King piece, but says I can't write decent Ebonics. Of course not, Matthew, I'm a honkey! But I share your dream, man :-)

Of course there were non-photo mails too. Kenji Nguyen (from Vietnam) wants a predictor function P(N) for the Nth prime number. Sorry sir, there is no such function. If you find one, you'll go down in history and may get the Fields prize (that's like a Nobel prize for Maths).

Crypto-fan Dirk Rijmenants(Belgium) gives us a heads-up on dirt-cheap quantum security and on graphical passwords. In a previous post he's been reading Markus Wolf.

DJ Kunar (Germany) has told me how to blog in Esperanto on a German keyboard (which does not contain all the letters nor necessary accents); I quote :-

There are several ways to type Esperanto letters, but
I always use the most primitive one: I really type the
Unicode (like "&265;" for ĉ). This 
isn't the most sophisticated method, but it works on different
computers without installing makros or extra software (like "Ek!"). 

See 'Unikodo - numeraj skriboj' 
for the list of all letters. You only have to remember
six, as the capital letters always precede the others
ones ("&264;" being "Ĉ" etc.).

Bertilo Wennergren offers some very interesting pages
for further reading:
- Esperantaj literoj en TTT
- Signokodoj
- Esperanto en la komputilo

I hope this helps!

Jane says I'm getting too technical, less maths please and more e.g. flying reports please? OK, Jane, will do. But on the other hand, young David replied "Thanks for the Fitzgerald-Lorenz Contraction piece, can you now show us how to derive E=mc²?" Is that sarcasm or do you really want me to blog the derivation? Wendy (Peking), what do you think?

Carl(UK) writes "your blogs are interesting, I just wonder how you have enough time to fill them with such a variety of stuff?". Writing in the same vein, Jack (US) asks "why do you write all that stuff?". I'll let Jack's namesake reply. This is a signed book flyleaf page :-

Carol (UK) writes to me with a wake-up call :- "Your blogroll seems to have fallen asleep, it's so very static. Point us to some of the other blogs (which you may only sometimes read) please". OK, Carol, here's this week's handful :-

• Here in the Bonny Glen, about homeschooling.
• Living the Scientific Life
• Tales of a Post-Grad Nothing
• This is not a ham sandwich.
• Not a blog, but still curiously neat, Vicipaedia, in Latin no less. Help us extend it!
  Vicipaedia cooperandi opus est ut Libera Encyclopaedia creatur. Omnes ad participandum invitati sunt. Nunc MMMMCCXXXII articuli sunt . And, given the current legal hassles with www.wikipedia.de (forwarding links forbidden on 17/1/6 by a German court), maybe an alternative to de.wikipedia.org ?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 20. January 2006 at 06:20 CET permalink Email

The Tri-Centennial Man

Bifocal glasses : Fed up with changing spectacles all the time, Franklin built the first bifocals that you could peer through both far away and close up. He had some friends try them out too, and incorporated their suggestions before releasing the idea to the market. Probably the first recorded instance of "peer review" ;-)

Improved street lighting, energy-saving ovens, loan-libraries for schools, the first public hospital in the US, etc.

But I especially liked his 1762 invention of the glass harmonica, for which even Mozart composed! The two pieces are Quintett KV617 and Adagio KV356. Go listen to them and think of Ben Franklin too. Also, I can recommend Walter Isaacson's book "Benjamin Franklin; an american life" as shown on upper left here.

BTW, did you know that King Louis XVI of France had such an ardent dislike of Ben Franklin (so Stendhal tells us) that he had his visage painted in the bottom of the royal night potty, just so that he could "shit on his face" regularly ;-) ? Kings are human too ;-)

BTW: You see, I'll bet there IS a market for Dubya-potties with the painting on the inside!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 18. January 2006 at 10:18 CET permalink Email

On the Fitzgerald-Lorenz contraction

Sometime around 1700 Sir Isaac Newton had the world view that time and space were absolute and the speed of light was infinite. But in 1676 Ole Romer had observed delays in the eclipses of the jovian moons which he explained by calculating a finite speed for light. Newton even accepted these results in his book "Opticks". Not until 1849 were earthbound experiments made. Fizeau used a rotating cogwheel and calculated 313,000 km/sec. Foucault (he of the long pendulum) used a rotating mirror and a tuning fork to calculate 298,000 km/sec, a very accurate result. Around 1870 Maxwell showed that the speed of light was the same as seen by all observers regardless of their relative motion.

However, victorian scientists still believed that light (and everything else) moved through a "luminiferous aether", because light is waves and this aether was the stuff that got waved about. So Michelson and Morley set up an experiment to measure the speed with which our Earth moved through this aether. They sent a beam of light across to a mirror, splitting the beam and sending each part along a different path at right angles. Later the beams were recombined so that differences in the path lengths could be detected. The whole apparatus was on a revolving table, so that one path could be set parallel to the "aether flow" and one across it. Michael Fowler has a long lecture with the details, and a superb flashlet showing the apparatus. Please go play with his flashlet, David!

To cut a long story short, the speed of the Earth through the aether was zero! So they tried again 6 months later when earth was on the other side of its orbit around the sun. Still zero!! They even tried again at the top of a mountain in case the earth was 'dragging the aether along with it'. Still zero!!!

Now scientists do not give up theories easily, unless there is another waiting in the wings. But Einstein wasn't quite there yet, with his theory of relativity. So in 1904 Fitzgerald and Lorentz independently proposed that when a body moves through space it experiences a compression in the direction of the motion. This is called the Fitzgerald-Lorenz contraction. It is given by this formula : . This rather ad-hoc suggestion was an attempt to save the aether-theory. You can perhaps understand how Lorentz got that formula by thinking of the analogy of you (a beam of light) swimming across a moving river(the aether), as shown in the diagram below. Using Pythagoras theory (remember that?) you can calculate the euclidian distances travelled. Now if the diagonal and the line straight across the river are to be the same length (as implied by the zero result of the Michaelson Morley experiment), then you get the Lorentz contraction formula shown above.

Sorry, David, but that's about as simple as I could make it, but it's still heavy going, huh?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 17. January 2006 at 06:17 CET permalink Email

I gots uh dream ...

I be happy ta join wiff ya taday in what will jet down in history as da greatest demonstration fo' freedom in da history o' our nation.

Five score years ago, uh great American, in whose symbolic shadow we's stand taday, signed da Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as uh great beacon light o' hope ta millions o' Negro slaves who had been seared in da flames o' withering injustice. It came as uh joyous daybreak ta end da long night o' they captivity. brace yourself foo'!

But one hundred years later, da Negro still iz not free. One hundred years later, da life o' da Negro iz still sadly crippled by da manacles o' segregation an' da chains o' discrimination. One hundred years later, da Negro lives on uh lonely island o' poverty in da midst o' uh vast ocean o' material prosperity. One hundred years later, da Negro iz still languished in da corners o' American society an' finds himself an exile in his own land. And so we've come here taday ta dramatize uh shameful condition. slap mah fro!

In uh sense we've come ta our nation'scapital ta cash uh check. When da architects o' our republic wrote da magnificent werdz o' da Constitution an' da Declaration o' Independence, dey wuz signing uh promissory note ta which every American wuz ta fall heir. This note wuz uh promise dat all men, yeea , negroid men as well as crackers, would be guaranteed da "unalienable Rights" o' "Life, Liberty an' da pursuit o' Happiness." It iz obvious taday dat America has defaulted on dis here promissory note, insofar as her citizens o' color iz concerned. Instead o' honoring dis here sacred obligation, America has given da Negro peeps uh bad check, uh check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." what 'chew thinking man?

But we's refuse ta believe dat da bank o' justice iz bankrupt. We refuse ta believe dat dere iz insufficient funds in da great vaults o' opportunity o' dis here nation. And so, we've come ta cash dis here check, uh check dat will give us upon demand da riches o' freedom an' da security o' justice.

We gots also come ta dis here hallowed spot ta remind America o' da fierce urgency o' Now. This iz nahh tyme ta engage in da luxury o' cooling off or ta take da tranquilizing drug o' gradualism. Now iz da tyme ta make real da promises o' democracy. Now iz da tyme ta rise from da dark an' desolate valley o' segregation ta da sunlit path o' racial justice. Now iz da tyme ta lift our nation from da quicksands o' racial injustice ta da solid rock o' brotherhood. Now iz da tyme ta make justice uh reality fo' all o' God'schil'ns.

It would be fatal fo' da nation ta overlook da urgency o' da moment. This sweltering summer o' da Negro'slegitimate discontent will not pass until dere iz an invigorating autumn o' freedom an' equality. Nineteen sixty-three iz not an end, but uh beginning. And those who hope dat da Negro needed ta blow off steam an' will now be content will gots uh rude awakening if da nation returns ta bidness as usual. And dere will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until da Negro iz granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds o' revolt will continue ta shake da foundations o' our nation until da bright day o' justice emerges. Ya' dig?

But dere iz somethin' dat I mus' say ta muh ma fuckin peeps, who stand on da warm threshold which leads into da palace o' justice: In da process o' gaining our rightful place, we's mus' not be guilty o' wrongful deeds. Let us not seek ta satisfy our thirst fo' freedom by drinking from da cup o' bitterness an' hatred. We mus' forever conduct our struggle on da high plane o' dignity an' discipline. We mus' not allow our creative protest ta degenerate into physical violence. Again an' ag'in, we's mus' rise ta da majestic heights o' meeting physical force wiff soul force. an don't make me pull mah gat!

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed da Negro community mus' not lead us ta uh distrust o' all whitey peeps, fo' many o' our whitey brothers, as evidenced by they presence here taday, gots come ta realize dat they destiny iz tied up wiff our destiny. And dey gots come ta realize dat they freedom iz inextricably bound ta our freedom. Don't make me come ovah there bitch...

We cannot walk alone. what 'chew trippin foo'

And as we's walk, we's mus' make da pledge dat we's shall always march ahead. w0rd!

We cannot turn back. in the hood.

There iz those who iz asking da devotees o' civil rights, "When will ya be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as da Negro iz da victim o' da unspeakable horrors o' po-po brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy wiff da fatigue o' travel, cannot gain lodging in da motels o' da highways an' da hotels o' da cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as uh Negro in Mississippi cannot vote an' uh Negro in New York believes he has nuttin' fo' which ta vote. No, nahh, we's iz not satisfied, an' we's will not be satisfied until "justice rolls down like waters, an' righteousness like uh mighty stream." sho 'nuff!

I be not unmindful dat some o' ya gots come here out o' great trials an' tribulations. Some o' ya gots come fresh from narrow jail cells. And some o' ya gots come from areas where yo' quest -- quest fo' freedom left ya battered by da storms o' persecution an' staggered by da winds o' po-po brutality. You gots been da veterans o' creative suffering. Continue ta werk wiff da faith dat unearned suffering iz redemptive. Go back ta Mississippi, jet back ta Alabama, jet back ta South Carolina, jet back ta Georgia, jet back ta Louisiana, jet back ta da slums an' ghettos o' our northern cities, knowing dat somehow dis here shit can an' will be changed. and git Sheniquah's ass back ova' heeah.

Let us not wallow in da valley o' despair, I say ta ya taday, muh ma fuckin niggas. Ya' dig?

And so even though we's face da difficulties o' taday an' tomorrow, I still gots uh dream. It iz uh dream deeply rooted in da American dream. w0rd!

I gots uh dream dat one day dis here nation will rise up an' live out da true meaning o' its creed: "We hold deez truths ta be self-evident, dat all men iz created equal." an dat boil on mah ass.

I gots uh dream dat one day on da red hills o' Georgia, da sons o' former slaves an' da sons o' former slave owners will be able ta sit down together at da table o' brotherhood. Ya' dig?

I gots uh dream dat one day even da state o' Mississippi, uh state sweltering wiff da heat o' injustice, sweltering wiff da heat o' oppression, will be transformed into an oasis o' freedom an' justice. sho 'nuff!

I gots uh dream dat muh ma fuckin four little chil'ns will one day live in uh nation where dey will not be judged by da color o' they skin but by da content o' they character. what 'chew trippin foo'

I gots uh dream taday! ya'll is mad stupid.

I gots uh dream dat one day, down in Alabama, wiff its vicious racists, wiff its governor havin' his lips dripping wiff da werdz o' "interposition" an' "nullification" -- one day right dere in Alabama little negroid nigs an' negroid ho's will be able ta join hands wiff little whitey nigs an' whitey ho's as sisters an' brothers. In da hood.

I gots uh dream taday! sho 'nuff!

I gots uh dream dat one day every valley shall be exalted, an' every hill an' mountain shall be made low, da rough places will be made plain, an' da crooked places will be made straight; "and da glory o' da Lord shall be revealed an' all flesh shall see it together." all ye damn hood ratz..

Dis iz our hope, an' dis here iz da faith dat I jet back ta da South wiff. w0rd!

With dis here faith, we's will be able ta hew out o' da mountain o' despair uh stone o' hope. With dis here faith, we's will be able ta transform da jangling discords o' our nation into uh fine symphony o' brotherhood. With dis here faith, we's will be able ta werk together, ta pray together, ta struggle together, ta jet ta jail together, ta stand up fo' freedom together, knowing dat we's will be free one day. Jus' like Orenthawl James.

And dis here will be da day -- dis here will be da day when all o' God'schil'ns will be able ta sing wiff new meaning: w0rd!

My country 'tis o' thee, sweet land o' liberty, o' thee I sing. no shee-it!

Land where muh ma fuckin fathers died, land o' da Pilgrim'spride, all ye damn hood ratz..

From every mountainside, let freedom ring! sho 'nuff!

And if America iz ta be uh great nation, dis here mus' become true. peep this shit

And so let freedom ring from da prodigious hilltops o' New Hampshire. sho 'nuff!

Let freedom ring from da mighty mountains o' New York.

Let freedom ring from da heightening Alleghenies o' Pennsylvania. otay buh-weet

Let freedom ring from da snow-capped Rockies o' Colorado. W0rd!

Let freedom ring from da curvaceous slopes o' California. sho 'nuff!

But knot only dat:

Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain o' Georgia.

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain o' Tennessee. otay buh-weet

Let freedom ring from every hill an' molehill o' Mississippi.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring. in da hood

And when dis here happens, when we's allow freedom ring, when we's let it ring from every village an' every hamlet, from every state an' every city, we's will be able ta speed up dat day when all o' God'schil'ns, negroid men an' crackers, Jews an' Gentiles, Protestants an' Catholics, will be able ta join hands an' sing in da werdz o' da old Negro spiritual: an dat boil on mah ass.

Free at last! Free at last! just like mammy.

Thank God Almighty, we's iz free at last! In da hood!

And before anybody gets upset and thinks this was not politically correct (it IS after all, a PC translation ;-) ) , let me point out that I am - and always have been - very much in favour of Dr. MLK jr, and I think this speech is worth translating into ANY tongue. Mind you, certain concepts do not translate easily into Klingon ;-)

It was Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (1564-1642), politically incorrect in the view if the Vatican's inquisition, who once said "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe" ; so maybe I should get back to posting maths stuff ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 15. January 2006 at 06:15 CET permalink Email

On Friday, the Thirteenth...

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 13. January 2006 at 16:56 CET permalink Email

More on , from India

Sadly, that gives = 3.1464466... and not = 3.141592653589793238462643383279...

So, sir, I have a little poem for you. Just count the number of letters in each word :

And elsewhere on this site you can find a short history of the approximations to :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 12. January 2006 at 06:12 CET permalink Email

A pilots' slide rule : the Aristo-Aviat 617

There were also more specialised ones too. As a pilot I (still) own an Aristo Aviat 617, the european equivalent of an american E6B. The Aviat 617 is a three-sided rule! It has a circular slide rule on one side and a large oblong central flippable slide to enable the pilot to do vector calculations on the reverse. Clickable thumbnails are shown below.

The photo on the left shows the circular slide rule, with four special windows, conversion constants and specific gravity scales. The conversion constants are in blue for liquid measures (Litres, imperial gallons and US gallons); in red for long distances (Kilometers, statute miles, nautical miles); and in black for short distances (Meters, yards, feet). Around the outer ring are two fuel specific gravity scales, for lbs and kgs respectively. The innermost ring lets you convert temperatures between °F and °C. At the 6 o'clock position you can see the scale to calculate temperature corrections caused by friction due to the speed of your plane's travel. You can then plug the COAT (corrected outside air temperature) into the left, upper and right windows inside the main scale to get the true altitude as a function of pressure altitude (blue window), air speed and pressure altitude and COAT use the red window, and the COAT gets you the density altitude in the right window, which you need to know for takeoffs and rate of climb calculations. All of this to be done single-handedly whilst flying the plane with your other hand :-)

Flying an airplane is, after all, quite a bit more complex than driving a car, and has a difficult user-interface about as barbative as driving a steam locomotive. But it's cooler ;-)

The centre photo shows the oblong slider set up to let me calculate wind offsets. As set up, I'm flying a Mooney at 158 knots (see the central point), and want to track 337° (see true index, in the right of the photo). Since the wind is coming from 318° with 20 knots, I can read off a ground speed of 140 knots and the heading correction I need to hold in order to track the desired course. A regular slide rule does not enable vector addition.

The photo on the right shows the oblong slider flipped to let me do vector dead reckoning. As shown, I want to track 333° but have to divert left onto 318° for (say) 15 miles, due to a thunderhead or traffic zones or whatever. So I'd mark this point ( and perhaps several others if I'm diverting around a thunderstorm) along the transparent scale and then calculate what track I'd need to get to my destination in the remaining distance. Then I'd flip the slider and calculate the heading needed to achieve this track in the remaining distance, depending on the winds I'm getting. The E6B doesn't have all of the 617's features, which is why I lashed out on the Aristo-Aviat 617 back in 1976 :-)

So what's the difference between a scientist's slide rule and a pilot's, apart from the vector capability of the latter? Well, engineering/scientific slide rules are used during the design phase, offline so to say. The pilots' slide rules are used in real time, very much online to the process of flying. Of course the pilots' slide rules are used for flight planning, but also - especially the vector part - during flight in the cockpit. So if you are alone, you have to be able to operate them with one hand in maybe turbulent conditions. Which is why I still prefer the 617 sliderule to the 70's pocket calculator which was supposed to replace it, but didn't, 'cos you can't hit the buttons in turbulence :-(

Like I said earlier here, all of this to be done single-handedly whilst flying the plane, perhaps over water or featureless terrain in thunderstorm weather. Well, that's why pilots need to be trained :-) Yes, I have enjoyed being a flying instructor all these years :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 10. January 2006 at 06:10 CET permalink Email

Pet Food Emergency Warning !!!

• Diamond Low Fat Dog Food
• Diamond Hi-Energy Dog Food
• Diamond Maintenance Dog Food
• Diamond Performance Dog Food
• Diamond Premium Adult Dog Food
• Diamond Puppy Food
• Diamond Maintenance Cat Food
• Diamond Professional Cat Food
• Country Value Puppy
• Country Value Adult Dog
• Country Value High Energy Dog
• Country Value Adult Cat Food
• Professional Chicken & Rice Senior Dog Food
• Professional Reduced Fat Chicken & Rice Dog Food
• Professional Adult Dog Food
• Professional Large-Breed Puppy Food
• Professional Puppy Food
• Professional Reduced Fat Cat Food
• Professional Adult Cat Food

Here is a link to the FDA recall advisory.
Here is a link to the news story.

Blogreaders, spread the word please!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 8. January 2006 at 06:08 CET permalink Email

Humour in yesterday's Scientific American

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 7. January 2006 at 06:07 CET permalink Email

Feedback Friday (= your comment mails)

Surprising feedback this week, mail from India. Not eMail, but a real airmail; but it still took a fortnight to get here :-( Unfortunately, whoever wrote from India didn't sign the letter in a script legible to me nor provide a return address. So let this be my way of saying thankyou, Anon, somewhere in India :-)

Whover it was must have read about my good approximation to squaring the circle with Euclid's toolkit, because he (or she?) included a paper copy of Nguyen Tan Tai's paper 'The rational new Pi accurate value resolution'. Judging by the name, Nguyen Tan Tai is not Indian but is Vietnamese (and he writes mostly in French). I'm sorry, but this German keyboard won't let me put the three accents over your name. Thanks Anon for your letter, but of course squaring the circle using only straightedge and compasses (Euclid's toolkit) IS impossible, because is transcendental {see the proof by Lindemann from 1882}. The stamp is cancelled by SETI. Nice touch!!

Another maths-geek (Babsy) looked at the sidebar and saw me reading a maths book (Flatterland) for entertainment and thinks I must have a single-track head. She therefore suggests I get myself a single-sided hat :-) I'm always amazed at the links you folks find!

University of Manitoba (Canada) CS student Dario Schor wants to understand how my alternative multiplication method works; here's a tip, Dario, go through my worked base-10 example in base-2 and think about how a shift-register works, all clear now?

Over at Today's Homework, teachers Graycie, Awkward Silence, Bloom and Old math and yours truly are having a discussion about the assignment of limited teaching resources. Should we be pushing the talented students to their limits? Or should we be dragging the untalented up to a government decreed minimal standard? Go there and add your views.

Writing from Austria, new blogreader Schorsch tells me that I too had my 15 milliseconds of fame, since a science fiction short story of mine which I wrote in 1984 is now mentioned in the German Wikipaedia, here. Thanks, Schorsch, I didn't even know that myself.

Scott Williams (Palo Alto) tells me there is even a novel of mine online too, which he has just finished reading. He then googled me and discovered we are both into motorcycles and bulldogs. Way to go, Scott! He is a BMW fan and has a request to help find some rare bikes, so the least I can do is help him by blogging his request here : "I am currently looking for R5SS, R51SS, R51RS or RS54. These are all production sport or race bikes. Hard to find. But if you happen to know of any, please pass along the info." Can anybody help?

George Mitropoulos who is with Sun in Greece (so that's where the sun goes in winter) read my Crash helmet review of the Schuberth C2 but is looking for a cheaper price than in Greece. Sadly, both of the German MC chains of shops currently want the list price (€400), no special deal right now :-( Can anyone else help George? I'll pass your mails on.

Commenting on the GPS post I wrote for her on monday, Mary points me to a brazilian website which uses Google maps to show the antipodes of any point you click on . Or, as they anally put it "If I dig a very deep hole, where do I stop? Find the end of your hole."

Apropos assholes, do you know where the spambots come from? I found this entry in my logfiles and now I guess that the daily spambot comes from Bot-Hell, Washington ;-)

Jock, who is - yes, you guessed correctly - an exiled Scot like myself, points me to the Isle of Arran Food Producers' website. Yes, there are Scottish food producers on the Isle of Arran. Scottish foods produced there include Arran Blue Cheese, Scottish Oatcakes and Scottish Beef. Order by eMail for airmail delivery worldwide :-) A wee caduac, mon!

Carol(UK) points me to a BBC site telling us about 100 things we didn't know a year ago. Edinburgh schoolboy blogreader David wants me to explain about the Fitzgerald-Lorenz contraction that I mentioned on monday. David, explaining relativity theory to a 13/14 year-old might be difficult; what Mandarin Meg calls "a heavy read" so I need to think about how to keep that simple; gimme a couple of days before I respond, OK?

Jeneane Sessum wants to Skype with us, but Skype don't have a service here in Germany yet. There are some other VolIP service providers, but my sister-in-law is not at all happy with hers, so we're waiting until things improve before we change over, Jeneane.

Irene Wood has a copy of Dubya's mid-september schedule (via Peter C. Harris).

Jane noticed my "nice new 2006 photo" over in the right sidebar, but bets I look at lot worse in the morning ;-) Not at all, Jane, I always look vain, especially in PJs at breakfast. Anna Pashen did choose to leave Darwin and - by intelligent design - is back home in Brisbane, so we can expect her to start blogging again soon :-)

Marshall uses a photo from my skyline meme as his blog-header. Looks great, man :-)

Brykmantra shares a blogiversary with me; keep on blogging, Bryk!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 6. January 2006 at 06:06 CET permalink Email

The names not chosen . . .

About whom am I talking?

On a more general note, have you ever considered the psychology of the blognames chosen by those writing (perhaps anonymous) blogs? Sometimes revealing, isn't it :-)

Finally, for dog-lover Cowpatt Townie, here's an anonymous poem on Choosing Names :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 4. January 2006 at 06:04 CET permalink Email

Another Blogiversary, how time flies :-)

Of the eight people on my first blogroll only Frank Paynter survived as someone whom I read regularly. Thankyou for being so entertaining, Frank! Occasionally I still read Allan Karl's Digital Tavern, because I envy him his long-distance motorcycling trips (see also his other blog World Rider :-) Ms. Suitt was too coquettish for my taste. I lost the other 5.

Bushwhacking™ has been a theme here from the start, see January 23rd 2003. Maths too.

On January 3rd 2004 I reported reaching some 30 daily readers on average. A year later (Feb. 4th 2005) I reported averaging 200 and peaking at 330 in January 2005. During 2005 the upward trend continued, peaking at over 1000 daily readers. Thankyou, all of you!

Aside from this egocentric obsession, today we remember another - more famous - anniversary. On January 2nd 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin got married. While they lived in Geneva, the Shelleys and their friend Lord Byron challenged each other to write a frightening horror tale. Only Mary Shelley finished her book and later published it as "Frankenstein". Don't we all wish we could write as well as Mary?

But most of us can't :-( Instead we end up writing B-movie science-fiction double features, in a rather rocky style, a horror show indeed, leaving us in a time-warp ;-)

Notable exceptions are Mike Golby whose perennial tirades against Dubya's unjust war are always inspiring, Rageboy (on those days when he's having a good rant), and the subtle humour of Jonny Billericay writing about the minutae of their daily Norfolk life. I ad lib :-

"I had a fit once. It was a good fit, the LTLP said; and a better fit than Short Tony or Narcoleptic Dave, she sighed happily. Sighs matter . . . "

Makes you curious what he's actually writing about doesn't it ;-)

But most of us just have our little niches, often rather good. Meg's niche is teaching us HTML and CSS. Haggiswurst's niche is hacking away at council burocracy. And mine? I dunno. Maybe it's just passing on short educational snippets? It's a niche I'm happy in :-)

And how short can these snippets be? Would you believe a leap-second? We just had one, a 61-second minute, at the New year. When Roman emperor Julius introduced his calender in 46 B.C. he included leap-years every 4 years because the Earth's rotational period is nearly 365 days 6 hours and so he needed an extra day every 4 years to get synchronised again. Actually it was only 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 45.25 seconds which meant that by the end of the 16th century an 11 day discrepancy had accumulated. So in 1582 Pope Gregory 13th introduced his calender reform, omitting 11 days to get back into sync, but also introducing the 100-year and 400-year rules for leap-years. And that was good enough until 1967 AD.

In 1967 the second was redefined as 9192631770 vibration cycles of the Caesium-133 isotope. With this precision, we could see how length of a day varies, be it due to the leaves falling off the trees in autumn (sic!) or the 2004 Sumatra sea-quake. But also we see how the moon (=tides) slow us down, so that the days get longer, about 20 microseconds per year as it happens. All of these effects led to the need to resynchronise atomic and astronomic clocks every so often. Which is why we have those leap-seconds. The previous one, I remember, was at midnight on 1st January 1999. And 22 since 1972.

We need the high precision of the atomic clocks so that navigation systems like GPS and the new european 'Galileo' remain accurate. So you only know where you are due to knowing when you are. Relatively speaking. Thankyou Albert Einstein and the Fitzgerald-Lorentz contraction. That'd be a great name for a band covering Pink Floyd's 'Time' !

Coincidentally, this blog-entry was prompted by someone who needs to know where they are, because they're interested in rambling. And high-precision navigation systems like GPS phones are things that help Mary get to the point, any point, on time ;-) But not me . . .
So Mary, was that enough rambling for you here today?

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 2. January 2006 at 06:02 CET permalink Email