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Stu Savory's Blog | |
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Wednesday, June 30, 2004
Wheels of Fire . . . the Cream of Cars
 
Just a couple of like-minded friends' VW cars; all tuned-up by their
Beetle Fun drivers :-)
Am I curious yellow ? I never cease to be amazed at what people look for via Google and it (or another search engine) sends them to my site. Word combinations I didn't realise I had online. Here are some samples just from yesterday's Sitemeter logfile :-)
Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Present, but not votingCanada has voted : Despite the shining example of the incompetence of Neo-Cons given by their neighbours, Canadians tendentially voted NeoCon :-( One of my favourite canadian bloggers, Doug Alder, is keeping us all on tenterhooks with his minute-by-minute blogging of intermediate counts. It will be a sad day (for all) if Canada turns hard right. Let's hope their Liberals can lead a coalition government with the NDP, which would have the advantage of keeping them straight too. I wonder what our pert canadienne, Riri, thinks? Voter turnout could have been higher; why don't people exercise their voting rights? Personally, I believe that this was more a vote against the incumbents rather than a swing to the conservatives.In the USA in the forthcoming 2004 election there are two problems. Apathetically low voter turnout ("present, but not voting") and the much more dangerous vote-rigging, Diebold's paperless voting machines , hanging chads etc etc ("voting, but not present"). This once proud example of democracy demonstrated in 2000 the election-fixing characteristics of a banana-republic. Let us hope that the US electorate despises Bush's warmongering enough to reject him, even if not actively being pro-Kerry. University College, in London, England : was founded inter alia by one Jeremy Bentham (b.1748 - d.1831), who was a lawyer, economist and philosopher. Bentham bequeathed his body to the College for medical research. The College subsequently dressed his skeleton in his best suit and put it on display in a glass case, from which it always has presided over meetings of the College administrative committee. Bentham is always decribed in their minutes as "present, but not voting". Brits are eccentric, even recursively so! Monday, June 28, 2004
Some calculating remarks
The article which
I wrote last
thursday about mental arithmetic and
pocket calculators seems popular and caused a flurry of emailed comments,
questions etc.
Pietr (Moscow) was interested in the HP calculator I mentioned which works in RPN ( = Reverse Polish Notation) and wants to know where he can get one. Coincidentally, Al Schwartz (Orange County) wrote telling exactly that. Well, Pietr, Al tells us that the HP calculator was (note my use of the past tense) called the model HP15C, but there is an HP15c petition going in the Internet to try to persuade Hewlett Packard to start building it again. There is a great photo of the HP15C here. You can read more details about the HP15C here. Agnete (Stockholm) complains that her calculator (shown above, left) has only the basic four functions, plus square root for the engineers and percentage for the commercial types, neither PI nor e is on it, and asks bitterly how is she supposed to do any geeky stuff on that? You just need some higher precision mnemonics Agnete. You probably learnt in school to approximate PI by 22/7, but that's only 3 places of accuracy. Try 355/113, that's 6 or 7 places. For e you probably learnt the schoolgirl's approximation 19/7. To get the whole eight digits try e = 3 - sqrt(5/63) which you can do on your ungeeky calculator :-) Mandarin Meg and John P. (both also California) and Wang Hu (Singapore) all wanted more Maths. I'm not sure whether they wanted more articles about maths (like this one) or whether they wanted some higher maths. For the latter case, I asked them all for the six-line proof that PI is irrational. Irrational means that it cannot be expressed as a fraction like A/B. That's kinda hard work, so if any of you get stuck for 24 hours or more, you are allowed to cheat and take a peek at the proof that PI is irrational. That proof brings me to another point. Note that I had to print out the proof on paper and scan it in again as a JPG image. I find it VERY hard to typeset algebra, let alone calculus, in HTML. So I can use LateX or a WYSIWIG math tool to set my formulae and then screenshot them to get a GIF or JPG. But HTML appears to have no native support for mathematical formulae. Or am I missing something? Maybe our web-resident HTML genius Michelle can blog us all a few tips on how to do this. For starters, I'd like to see the HTML to typeset the proof I imaged above. In the meantime, I'm just enjoying her post on how to set stuff in a magazine style, via CSS. Go read it; way to go, lass! Saturday, June 26, 2004
I hate having to wait . . .Just went to the bookstore here in Germany yesterday evening to pick up a copy of "Imperial Hubris" by Anonymous (a CIA agent). It's about why the US is losing the war on terrorism. No, they didn't have it on stock, so they'll "try" to order it for me from the USA, hoping Dubya is not prohibiting its export. Sheesh, it's not as if they have to translate it, why can't the publisher imagine international interest and ship some hundreds of copies to foreign distributors on the (unlikely? no, very likely) chance they'd be sold out overnight?Wanted to go to the cinema yesterday too, to see Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11". No can do there either, we will have to wait until 27th July to see it (presumably then in a German translation). Again, I imagine it would have been perfectly feasible to show NOW an english language original here, after all 25% of Moore's book sales are made here in Germany. Wanted to read Clinton's memoirs over the weekend. Also no can do. We have to wait until 8th July for the German translation. Why? The French were sharper off the mark and have a translation available today. I think German importers need a sharp kick up the backside to wake them up! Mandarin Rob probably would like to help me, huh Meg? Why read/watch this stuff? Well, as you know - I'll rephrase that - as the more widely read of you may know, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostojevsky wrote "While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer, nothing is more difficult than to understand him". So in the meantime I'm reading Nobel prizewinner Seamus Heaney's excellent new translation of Beowulf, which is inter alia about Grendel, another infamous monster and evildoer ;-) Perhaps I'll just run a test to see what the Orkut friendship of John Kerry is worth; maybe his team can Fedex (or UPS) a copy of all three overnight :-) Don't hold your breath. Friday, June 25, 2004
Tornado ally
Well Frank Paynter is not just an E-quaintance, he seems to be a tornado ally too :-) On the very day that he posted a magnificent photo of a tornado forming in his area (near Chicago), we had some pretty severe weather here in Germany too. In fact, just 100 miles from here they even had a tornado (see left photo). Please understand that tornados are a pretty rare occurrence here in Germany, in fact I've only ever seen two personally in the 35 years I've lived here. This one ripped through the village of Micheln, destroying 250 of the 275 or so houses (see right photo). Six people died in yesterday's storms and ten were seriously injured. One woman was dragged through the broken window and slammed hard into her garage wall. Three youngsters sheltering under a tree were killed when the tree was uprooted. A guy caught in his sailboat on the Chiemsee didn't make it back to harbour in time. Several local roads were blocked by branches or cars shoved into ditches or into one another. Let's hope the people whose houses were destroyed at least had storm insurance! More details for my German readers here. Update 21:05 CET : Jeneane Sessum writes that her daughter Jenna is suffering from Lilapsophobia , an intense fear of tornados. Don't let her see THIS blogentry then, Jeneane! Thursday, June 24, 2004
What day was that? / Mental arithmeticSo yesterday I was telling a neighbor that our dog Wilma was born on 23/6/1994 and he asked teasingly (he often teases me) "What day was that?" and after thinking 5 or 6 seconds, I said "It was a Thursday". He whipped out his PDA with its perpetual calender to check and disbelievingly said "That's right, you must have known already!"I replied "No, I worked it out in my head". He didn't believe that, and asked me what day his birthdate was on. I answered before he'd clicked through the menues on his PDA :-) "Just luck", he said, and gave me his granma's birthdate. Again, I was faster than his PDA. "What's up, don't they teach you youngsters mental arithmetic any more?" I teased him. "No", he admitted, "Please show me the trick!". I could tell he had every intention of betting for a pint at the pub. So folks, here's how to calculate the day for a given date. Let the date be DD/MM/CCYY (european format), where DD is the day of the month, MM is the month, CC the century and YY the year within the century. So Wilma's birthday was 23/06/1994. Starting with the century CC, calculate CC/4 - 2*CC-1 and remember the result. With all divisions in this exercise, discard any remainder and just keep the whole part. So, in our example, this is 19/4=4 minus 2*19=38 minus 1, giving minus 35. Now, using the year YY, calculate 5*YY/4. In this example that's 5*94 = 470/4 = 117, discarding the remainder. Adding this to our existing result gives 117-35 = 82. Using the month MM, calculate 26*(MM+1)/10. In our example this is 26*7 = 182 / 10 = 18, again discarding the remainder. Add this to our running total giving 82+18 = 100. Finally just add the day DD. Here 100 + 23 = 123. Now divide the result by 7, just keeping the remainder; here 123(mod 7) = 4. Counting Sunday as zero, Monday = 1 etc, we get 4 = Thursday. Easy, when you know how :-) The algorithm is attributed to Gauss. Yes, I do know that Jews and Muslims etc have different calenders and I do know about the various calender reforms, so this only applies to the modern Christian-based standardised dates, don't go using it to check the day of Christ's crucifixion (-fiction?) or even Chaucer's birth. Anyway, it turned out that he couldn't do this algorithm as mental arithmetic (so much for his winning beers in the pub). Feel free to use pencil and paper (or a pocket calculator or PDA); but then you'll be slower than me doing it in my head. We got to talking about the fact that young folks nowadays are bad at mental arithmetic. You see, when I grew up there were no pocket calculators, so were taught a lot of mental arithmetic. I was introduced to the sliderule at 14 and then, for more precision, to a Brunsviga mechanical calculator at 16. Electronic desktop calculators appeared much later. HP even had one which worked in Reverse Polish Notation(RPN), so you parsed the infix terms into RPN in your head first, using the "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" mnemonic. Generally, I can only evaluate one intermediate term at a time in my head and keep two running totals in store there also. Anything more complex, I revert to pencil and paper too :-) When I learned about the HP RPN method I taught myself to do it in my head, but found that I would suffer from stack-overflow, being only able to remember the stack reliably in my short term memory to a depth of eight. BTW, most people have a short term memory capacity of 5 to 9 items, 7 is the modal average. Knowing RPN at an early age was an advantage when I became a SW compiler-writer in the late 1960s, because I could parse LR(1) grammars in my head to check that my compiler parser was working correctly. All gone now, alas :-( Was that of general interest? Or was it too geeky? Win any pub bets? (You owe me a beer!) No responsibility is accepted if I just blew your mind ;-) Wednesday, June 23, 2004
Happy Birthday Bulldog Wilma, ten today!
Floral Garden Quality Queen who answers to the name of Wilma is ten years old today. That's 70 in terms of human years. Happy Birthday Wilma and thankyou. Thankyou for ten years of faithful companionship. Thankyou for a decade of love, fun and joy. Thankyou for showing lazy old me what wonderful walks we have in our local countryside. Thanks for defending house and garden too; if you had been a character in a discworld novel by Terry Pratchett, you would have been Death of Cats. Or Supreme Snorer, or Pursuer of Postmen :-) Thanks here too to Peter Söhl, Wilma's vet, for helping when needed. He's a good medicine man. And thanks to Tarja, a Finnish friend who has a rather funny webpage explaining the Basic Rules for Dogs Who Have a House to Run; sure fits Wilma to a T. Monday, June 21, 2004
Improving your blogMany fellow bloggers were affected by that W(h)iner, Dave Asshole, when he pulled the plug on weblogs.com without due notice. Some 3142 people (just guessing that, but it's a nice round number, PI mal Daum as we say here in Germany) no longer had a blog-hoster. Many did not have a local backup of their blog. Bummer!What can you do to avoid dependency on your blog hoster? Make your blog easily relocatable; here is what I do. True, my blog also has a provider-dependant address, http://home.egge.net/~savory/blog.htm but the goal is to avoid being provider-dependant. So first of all, I registered my own domain, http://www.savory.de which I can move to another hoster any time I want and/or should my provider fold. (NB: Neither is likely, I'm happy with my existing provider and they seem to be doing OK). So now my blog is reachable via the preferred address http://www.savory.de/blog.htm which redirects you to the current month's blog (I archive monthly). I just have to remember, when posting comments in others' blogs, to use the relocatable URL. There remains another little problem : twenty or so regular readers have listed me in their blogrolls and according to Technorati they use the older provider-dependent link form. So I need to ask them to change those links to the newer, provider-independent relocatable form http://www.savory.de/blog.htm . So if any of you on my Technorati list read this, could you please make the change? Meg has done so already, even if she now regards me as a 'high-maintenance' person; thanks Meg, Gaspar, and Doug, who made the change already. The others I would like to make this one-time change are :- Punk Clown Daze, peter_c_harris, Mike Golby, Painting to stay sane, Ronincyberpunk, Riri's Brain Dump, Alister's perspective, Mercurial, Art Machine, Digital Common sense, Frank Paynter, graham@lias.wyn, swimPC (Justin D.), and last but by no means least, Theophany. Now what about permalinks? The way I've been doing this so far is to use HTML's NAME feature using the date as the name (I blog at max once a day) then reference it via the '#' reference. This is non-relocatable however. So I'll need to write out future permalinks in their full relocatable form. Let me give you an example. For yesterday's blog-entry this would be http://www.savory.de/blog_jun_04.htm#20040620 , then future permalinks would be relocatable (is that a contradiction in terms?). However, I am not going to ask all those who have previously set a permalink to go back and change them :-) That would REALLY be high maintenance, Meg. If we all did this or similar actions, and backed up our blogs locally daily, we could avoid the W(h)iner chaos in future. Keep on blogging, folks! (That means you too, Yule and Gary T. and Gary W). Interactive sunday feedback : 58 of you reading my blog-post yesterday were curious enough to go read the two archive pages I referenced. I'll be interested to see what your suggestions are, go ahead and mail them to me :-)
Sunday, June 20, 2004
Site Meter results analysed
Ever asked yourself the following : Is my writing popular? Who are my audience anyway? What does that audience like to read? Or should I just shut up and go offline? Trend : End of september 2003 I instrumented this blog with the free version of Site Meter to try to answer those questions. The left graphic shows the number of 'visits' each month, increasing until february 2004 and then dropping off somewhat. BTW: the june numbers are wrong, since we are only 2/3 of the way through june; that's an artefact of the way they count, IMHO. Have I been doing something wrong/else since february ? Or did Site Meter change the way they counted 'visits'? Inquiring minds (e.g. mine) want to know. Correlations : I looked at the correlation between 2004 'visits' (whatever Site Meter measures) with blogsize (bytes at end of the month), with entry count (number of blog-entries per month), and with month number (date). Date is least relevant. Blogging frequency is slightly better correlated with visits than is the size of the entries. That means that it is better (for me) to blog regularly than occasionally but for longer. This is the Halley Suitt strategy versus the Mike Golby strategy ;-) but personally I prefer Mike to Halley. Time Zone : The right graphic shows the distribution of readership according to timezone (assuming you set your clocks correctly). About 46% of the readers come from the US and another 46% from Europe. Of the latter 46%, 12% come from the UK and 34% from central Europe. The other 8% are scattered around the world. I was surprised that 34% came from central Europe, because the blog is English language only (OK, OK, little bits of Latin, French, Scots and German maybe). Since Site Meter seems to track these numbers on an hourly basis, this graphic's statistical modal peak wanders around the world, so I can see (from the weekday analysis too) that most readers are reading the blog during (their) office hours.
What does my audience like to read ? 75% of the blog-visits are to just 4 pages.
29% to the
current month's blog page,
and 10% to the previous month
(may '04)
which may be an artefact of the period Site Meter uses to
count the visits, I don't know. But 21% were to
march 2003, and 15% to
august 2003. Now I need to work out why these two older blog-month
archives are so popular. Any suggestions? Mail them to me
at Spectral analysis : By taking the visitor-lists and doing a Fourier Transform I get to see who the strictly periodic readers are. Unsurprisingly, they are various bots, mostly search engines updating their indices; and a despicable spambot. But there are a number of humans too :-) Thanks for reading me regularly, folks, you know who you are. Postscript, added at 12:51 CET :
Doug Alder mailed me a
trend hint. At the end of january 2004 I had added
an RSS feed, so folks
can subscribe to the RSS feed to see if there is a new blog-entry and judge if it's worth reading.
Thus no 'superfluous' visits to the blog are needed by those
accessing the RSS feed; the statistics may reflect this fact.
Friday, June 18, 2004
Remembering . . ."Yesterday" : Well, today actually, 18th June. Happy Birthday Paul McCartney, 62 today. Many thanks for all those great songs, down the years. I remember playing your records for youthful snogging sessions with various girlfriends of the day (and night). These progressed from Can't buy me love and You can't do that to Another Girl and the grassed-out mutually groping sing-along versions of I wanna hole your gland ;-) Actually, I was more of a Rocker in those days, a Stones fan with the black leather jacket, knuckles hanging perilously near the ground, into fast motorcycles. Put a coin in the jukebox at the Busy Bee (a transport cafe´on the Watford Bypass), play a song - usually the Animals' House of the Rising Sun, dash out to the bike , tear down the bypass to the roundabout and back before the song finished. Did I listen much to the Beatles then? No, I had more Sympathy for the Devil, but it's not Sir Mick's birthday today, so happy hippy birthday, Sir Paul. Yesterday : Well, 17th June 1953 actually. The day of the workers' uprising here in Germany in the soviet occupation zone (DDR), which was brutally and bloodily put down by order of Moscow. The Kremlin's order was simply shoot the ringleader and his 12 disciples. Sound traditional? Fiftyfive people were killed, on the 17th and in the aftermath. Let us not forget them, we remember a nasty piece of the cold war. A peace of the cold war : Even after the Gipper and Gorby had done their bits to end the cold war, there were still various nefarious activities being done by MI6 and MI5. Richard Tomlinson joined MI6 in 1991 as Agent D/813317 - you may remember his book The Big Breach too. Then Stephen Dorril wrote a book about the latter-day MI6, called MI6: Inside the Covert World of Her Majesty's Secret Intelligence Service. The British Government decided to censor Chapter 36 completely (Why? It's pretty harmless.) But now - courtesy of Cryptome - you can read the annotated chapter 36, online since Tuesday. Eliza : The MI6/MI5 stuff reminded me of Eliza. True, Eliza is now head of MI5, but I had been reading Joel Sax' amusing scripts produced by his Bots and my brain jumped associatively sideways (it does that a lot these days) to Eliza, an AI (artificial intelligence) program produced in the early 80's (?) by Josef Weizenbaum. Reading Joel's bots reminded me that Eliza must have come of age and be over 21 now. Happy birthday too, Eliza.
Thirsty, June 17, 2004
Seven left corners of the Blogosphere
Whilst 3142 bloggers are left with the trauma of having the
rug suddenly
pulled from right under their feet (courtesy Dave Winer), I surfed around to
find seven new (to me) fun corners of the Blogosphere.
I being me, these seven are mostly left corners ;-)
"Bloggers are unconstrained by such journalistic conventions
as good taste, accountability and objectivity -- and that can
be a good thing." [ Time Magazine, 2004 ].
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Putting it badly (=screwing up?)Sometimes newspapers and/or news-websites DO phrase things in rather dubious ways - intentionally (puns) or unintentionally - which raise a wry laugh; spoonerisms perhaps, which sometimes cause a rapid editing of the website concerned, the author not realising that a search-engine may have cached the howler. Here are some recent choice examples :-
Apropos the need for re-editing your texts, Roland Emmerich is being accused of plaigarising a 1993 book Polar day 9 by Harvard-Professor and author Ubaldo DiBenedetto as a basis for the script of his new film "The day after tomorrow", it is reported by the German magazine 'Stern'. Same plot, same turning points, even the same names used, allegedly. The state court at Cologne is due to hear this case beginning today. Tracking it, I'll keep you posted. Well I confess to screwing up too; I had all my archives pointing to themselves instead of back at the current entry. So I've just gone back and edited all of them to make the last entry in the archive index line of every archive page point to the current blog entry. Now anyone who comes directly to any of my archived blogs (via a search engine or someone else's links or a permalink) can get from there to the most recent entry in just one click. Why did it take so long for the penny to drop? I must be getting old faster than I thought. After all, it's a feature others have in a different form; see Meg, Frank, Joel , etc.
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Blogging at seven, already!It is merely coincidental that this blogentry is being written at 7 am local time. The title today refers to the fact that schoolchildren only seven years old are already blogging successfully. Children at Hangleton Junior School in Hove, Sussex are using weblogs (with Manila) as part of their normal routine, and are doing better at school than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher John Mills says. A BBC News website has more details.Obviously, we need to encourage people to use the Internet more, instead of removing their blogs at a single day's notice (bummer, Dave!). One way to encourage people is to increase the bandwidth available and lower the costs. So I decided to look at broadband Internet usage in Europe and the proportion thereof which is DSL vs TV-cable. Here is a list of the results of my research (for Old (pre May 1st 2004) Europe) :-
Mind you, we do need to do something about the spammers. Just filtering out the spam is merely a passive response. Let's get more agressive and set active spambot-traps, like this one and this one and this one. How do these traps for the spambots work? They contain lists of invalid EMail addresses which the spambots harvest thus corrupting the spammers' databases with addresses which cause mail-bounceback. The spammer may then sell his database to the next spammer before either of them notices the corruption. Way to go!
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Hans Blix honouredDr. Hans Blix, UN Weapons Inspector team chief, was awarded the Peace Prize by the state of Hessen (here in Germany) yesterday. Well deserved, I thought. I did not see the US ambassador at the ceremony though. Tsk, tsk.
Tuesday, June 8, 2004
Transit of Venus, 8th June 2004
Yes, I know that it's not a particularly great photo, amateur digicam
and all that, but you can see professional results on professional
websites. Blogs are about personal experiences. Whatever. Thanks
go to the people's observatory (Volkssternwarte) at Schloss Neuhaus
for their great organisation. Six or seven scopes for public viewing,
all with good filters, and one even with a very expensive
red-hydrogen-spectral-line filter so that we could see the
protuberances flaring. Well done you amateur stargazers there!
This photo is for those of you who missed the big event of the century. The next (even more unlikely) will be the prosecution of Shrub and his entire junta for war-crimes. Thanks to all of you who sent congratulatory Emails today. Turning 60 hasn't mellowed me, I can assure you. I'll continue tilting at windmills and Dubya.
Sunday, June 6, 2004
Third Stone from the Sun
The musically literate amongst you will recognise today's blogheader as the title of a song by the gone-but-not-forgotten Guitarrissimo Jimi Hendrix. Those who have never heard it need to go beg, borrow or steal a copy of the "Voodoo Child" album. But I'm drifting off-topic already, probably stone(henge)d from listening to Jimi's music! Third Stone from the Sun refers of course to our planet Earth. But now I want to point you to an amazing "coincidence". The photo above is of Stonehenge, a prehistoric astronomical calender in the UK, erected by persons unknown in the dawn of pre-history. Now go zoom in on the third stone from the left. Doesn't that look very much like a left-facing profile of one of the monoliths on Easter Island, erected by persons unknown in the dawn of pre-history, but half a world away? The second "coincidence" will happen on Tuesday 8th June. Remember, Stonehenge, is a prehistoric astronomical calender. If you go stand 90 degrees around to the right from where this shot was taken and watch the morning sun (through smoked glass, to avoid being blinded!) rising above the second stone, you will see one of the rare transits of Venus ( the second stone from the sun) across the face of the sun. Rare? Sure! About 14 times every 1000 years; there hasn't been one for over 120 years. The transit will be visible in Europe, starting at 07:19 CET here in Germany and going on for about six hours. Blogreaders in the USA won't see it, it'll be night there. But in 12 years time (Venus transits come in pairs, 12 years apart) it'll be night here, so this is a once in a lifetime experience for us, let's hope it's not cloudy all day. And the third "coincidence" ? It will happen also on Tuesday 8th June, exactly on the hour when the Venus transit begins at Stonehenge, it'll be my 60th birthday, so we'll be celebrating with a Birthday Breakfast at the nearest Observatory dome, set up to watch the transit. Pretty sure that C.G.Jung had a good thing going with his synchronicity theory ;-) And now for something competely different : If all this astronomical and psychodelic music stuff is crap to you, and/or you are from Rutherford, Ohio (USA) , you may prefer to watch the inimitable John Cleese in 3rd Rock From The Sun, a great space-alien comedy sitcom. Whatever. There's nothing else interesting on TV today. Have a nice D-daze.
Friday, June 4, 2004
Getting it wrong . . .Kann U zpel rite?
Hah! I'm not the only one who rails about the decline in educational
standards, including the simple ability to spell. Over at
Dive
into Mark there's a nice rant too. Whilst in the UK recently, I
noticed spelling mistakes all over the place, from the beach kiosk
owner who cannot spell the word
availability via the pub which
mislabelled its garbage,
to the UK political party
(currently responsible for education) which
cannot even use the apostrophe correctly. But
I hope that one
sign we saw was NOT a spelling
mistake ;-) Rotten to the back teeth : Not only UK dental health seems to have gone rotten, there's more. The anti-terror security in the UK seemed to have gone rotten too, the Gates of Hell (Porton Down is the UK's biochemical weapons lab) were wide open, we could have driven straight in! Even worse, cars driving out were not being stopped for inspection to verify that nobody was smuggling any biochemical weapons-grade materials out of the labs there. Summarising another security screw-up in the USA, Mrs.D writes : "... the President has consulted with an attorney because he has possibly been implicated in the outing of a CIA agent. Pentagon workers are being polygraphed. And the head of the CIA has just resigned." And simultaneously James Pavitt quits the CIA too. Hollywood career : Writing from Moscow, Pietr asks if Ronald Reagan was the only US president to have made films/movies and asked teasingly if Bill Clinton ever made any blue movies? I told him that, if so, he would have signed them (i.e. put his moniker on them). Also, I sent him the secret movie advertisement documenting Dubya's early movie career.
Thursday, June 3, 2004
Stupid is as stupid doesCodebreakers : Surprise, surprise. The USA (=NSA) have been breaking Iranian cyphers for some time now. The stupid thing is that some Drunk high up in the Bush Administration blabbed this to their personal close friend the dubious Mr. Chalabi, who went public with it. So the genie is out of the bottle, Iran will change their cyphers and the NSA will be blind again (how genial!). Now do you know an indiscreet brainless person with a drinking problem high up in the US administration who is a close personal friend of Chalabi? Neither do I, I'll have to think really hard now. NB: Thanks go to Atrios for the heads-up on this one. Are you a Terrorist? You too may be a basically anti-war and/or pro-Kerry person doing your little best to help get Dubya out of office, as is your democratic right. You're not a Terrorist. Or are you? Trouble is, you don't get to define that; Dubya does. So the US gummint has made a list of names, and sometimes addresses, of those people whom they allege are terrorists. So if you're on that list, you're liable to be locked away for years, no charges made, no access to a lawyer, no human rights but maybe a little torture along the way. Dubya has done this to thousands, he could do it to you. Tough shit. "He's got a little list" as Gilbert and Sullivan once wrote. You might want to check if you're on his "little list". So - as my public service - here is the link to Dubya's list of terrorists , go grep for your name (prior to this posting at least, I wasn't on it, after all, they published the list on May 27th in the Federal Register. Ooops ;-) Vanity Plates : I'll finish on a lighter note, but still on the same theme. The State of California's department of motor vehicles has an online database of license plates for you to query. The intention is that you can check for the availability of your desired vanity plate and reserve it online. Of course "Arnie" is no longer available, but then I didn't expect it to be. But what surprised me was that people have taken - and are driving around with - the plates "Eejit" and even "Dubya" ;-)
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Who's the silly Blogger?  Dr. Stuart Savory, who is overeducated, scottish multilingual Ex-Pat, blatently opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist, computer consultant, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Beetle-driver, textbook-writer, long-distance biker, blogger and webmaster living in the foothills south of the northern German plains. Not too shy to reveal his true name or even whereabouts, he blogs his opinions, and humour and rants irregularly. Stubbornly he clings to his beliefs, e.g. that he's not really evil, or even anti-american, in spite of Dubya's efforts to convince him that he should be. ;)
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please, then I can write more in
that vein (vain?) for your amusement and edification :-)
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