|
Stu Savory's Blog
 http://www.savory.de/blog.htm
| |
|
Archive 2006:
Jan06
Feb06
Mar06
Apr06
May06
Archive 2005: Jan05 Feb05 Mar05 Apr05 May05 Jun05 Jul05 Aug05 Sep05 Oct05 Nov05 Dec05 *Best of 2005* Archive 2004: Jan04 Feb04 Mar04 Apr04 May04 Jun04 Jul04 Aug04 Sep04 Oct04 Nov04 Dec04 *Best of 2004* Archive 2003: Jan03 Feb03 Mar03 Apr03 May03 Jun03 Jul03 Aug03 Sep03 Oct03 Nov03 Dec03 *Best of 2003* |
|
|
Monday, June 26, 2006
Sad, sad, sad. Mandarin Meg has died :-(V ery saddening news just arrived. Our dear californian friend and favourite blogger, Michelle Goodrich, otherwise known as Mandarin Meg, shuffled off this mortal coil at the weekend. She will be sadly missed by all her blogging friends. I was one.
Michelle and I used to tease one another on a regular basis, usually in the comments
of her blog. Often, my Bushwhacking would get her dander up. Through her blog, she
taught many of us how to write decent HTML and CSS, I know she had a great pool of
admirers and friends across the whole world. Just last week we exchanged Emails and I'd
invited her to come visit Grimm's fairy tale country, here in Germany.
That was the last I heard :-(
Dear, gentle, Michelle, known to the blogging community as Mandarin Meg, was the friendliest, most patient and gentle blogger I knew. She was a woman of many talents, racing car driver, guitar player, writer, coder, mom, granma and teacher. She taught us a lot. Many would not be blogging today without her encouragement and patient help. Thankyou Meg! Thankyou for being Meg. Thankyou for Being. But I seem to remember that Michelle was/is a Buddhist and so will come back in a new incarnation. I just hope that she has an easier life next time around! Our sympathies go to daughter Karyn and all Meg's friends and relations. Rest In Peace, Michelle! We miss you. Update : here are some other bloggers' tributes to Meg :-
... and of course everybody in the comments on Meg's last blog entry. If you too have written a tribute to Meg, please send me the permalink, as I'd like to collect them here. Meanwhile
Tom Matrullo
has thoughts around how we share our grief for E-friends and bloggers.
Myself, I don't know how to cope with this phenomenon, so I'm linking to these
tributes to Meg because I need to share my grief from half a world away from Sacramento. Akma has made the brilliant suggestion that we can best pay tribute to Meg by showing some of the coding tricks she taught us. She loved quilts. But I don't have enough photos to make a quilt, so here's a strip of slide film, using code I learnt from her :-) Thanks Meg! 
Sunday, June 25, 2006
Free beers with Fibonacci :-)M ental arithmetic feats are always good for winning a free beer at the pub :-)Try this one for yourselves :-
Then get them to fill up the sheet of paper by adding more numbers, each of which is the sum of the two numbers above it. The photo on the left shows the sheet of paper in our pub. They are allowed to use a calculator to avoid making mistakes :-) Then any one of them can draw a line in an arbitrary position of their own choice between any two numbers. Here, 3 lines up. Then, quick as flash, YOU write down a number, here it was 1402950, which you get by subtracting in your head the 2nd number from the top of the list (here 23, labelled A) from the 2nd number below the arbitrary line (here 1402973, labelled B). Then, you tell them that this number (here 1402950) is the sum of all the numbers above their arbitrary line, starting with their choice of numbers. When they have done all the adding up (on the barman's calculator), you can triumphantly collect your free beer for getting the right answer first ;-) Thanks are due to Fibonacci for his series :-) In general though, I can't do this trick more than four times in succession before losing my ability to do mental arithmetic due to the four pints I'd won in the meantime ;-) Friday, June 23, 2006
Hiking the Dortebach valleyT aking time out on our recent motorcycle tour, we wanted to go hiking. Not far from our hotel is the steepest vinyard in the whole of Europe, averaging a 70% slope. However, since it had recently rained a lot, we decided that might be too slippery, and gave it a miss. However hiking & biking friends Andreas and Marion went for a hike in the 'easier' Dortebachtal valley; these are mostly their photos which I am using :-) The entrance is through a little tunnel under the railway line, which you can just see on the right in my photo here. The trail is fairly flat (i.e. even suitable for me), at least as far as up to the waterfall. But after the waterfall it gets steep and with slippery mud, a vertical drop into the woods below and it becomes a rather narrow trail. But if you persevere, you are rewarded by a magnificent view down to the river (Mosel) and of the little village of Klotten, where we were staying. Along the way you can be bitten by, but also admire, the rich insect life in the valley.  Here's a photo of a rare may bug gathering some delicious pollen. In the meantime, those who had chickened out on the hiking went for an day's ride. This included a stop in Traben-Trabach where Dieter had not noticed when dove crapped in his coffee. No, we didn't tell him till he'd drained it ;-) "Funny taste!" he said afterwards ;-) Wednesday, June 21, 2006
The Radio museum in Bad Laasphe.Continuing showing you the various places we visited on our recent motorcycle tour, this is the radio museum in Bad Laasphe, 70 miles south. More, if Andreas is navigating ;-)
 The radio enthusiast who runs this museum has over 1000 different historical radios! If your luck is out, he'll explain them all to you ;-) No, seriously, it's a part of our cultural history during the 20th century. The picture above shows the state of the art during the 1920s, all components visible (and accessible for easy replacement ;-), and headphones instead of loudspeakers. Listening was private, the hobby of the day, like blogging today? 
 In the 1940s and 50s components became more reliable and were hidden inside cabinets. There were two trends. One trend was towards the radio as furniture, so they were nicely made wooden cabinets (see the photo on the left). Loudspeakers came into vogue instead of headphones and listening was a family entertainment. The other trend, as shown in my photo on the right, was towards smaller radios, cheaper and with smaller cabinets, perhaps even made of bakelite, the first plastic. This is still the era of valves though, before transistors came in (1960s). Also, the user interface has been simplified, one (frequency) scale and its associated rotary knob, a band selector switch (LW,MW, both amplitude modulation), and a volume knob, so that even Joe (and Joan) Average could use it. 
 The trend towards electronic gear as furniture included record players, tape recorders, radios and even the first (black-and-white) TVs. The furniture became avante garde in its design. My photo on the left shows a piece where the triangular top, which included the TV, could be swivelled in any direction, to make the picture visible from anywhere in the room. This particular rare piece of antique gear would fetch 15 thousand Euros if it went on auction these days! The picture on the right shows the kidney-shaped table popular in the early 60s, this one with an integrated radio and stereo(!) loudspeakers in the sides. 
 The museum covers not only radios but also phonographs etc. My photo on the left shows (left to right) : a purely mechanical player for cylindrical recordings, a similarly purely mechanical player for disc records which superseded the cylindrical ones, and an early electronic record player with amplifier and a (mono) loudspeaker. The photo on the right shows the integration into furniture. This early stereo(!) contains a central radio and a pull-out record player (78rpm only(!)). The right side contains a tape-recorder above the right loudspeaker. The space above the left loudspeaker is for storing record discs and the covered shelves below the radio are sized to store tape spools. Open sunday afternoons. Tuesday, June 20, 2006
Madame Butterfly
 One of the places we visited on our recent bikers' trip was the Butterfly Garden at Castle Sayn. In the grounds of the castle - attractive in its own right - there is what is basically a large tropical hothouse. It contains a hundred different butterflies, flitting about (too difficult to photograph in flight because flashes are not allowed), as well as a dozen tortoises, and even a leguan. The flora are magnificent too, in particular the pink orchids. Well worth seeing. Thankyou, Marion, for suggesting it. PS, here's the Castle Sayn website.  On the CD-grinder : the best of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas. Monday, June 19, 2006
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Just a heap of ole numbers?One of things I love about Maths is the way things suddenly click together; I love the bright flash of insight and that big Aha, or Eureka! as those wet guys say.Here's a neat example from some revision I was coaching a while ago...
 I had the kids write down some numbers in a heap, such that any number is the sum of the two flanking numbers above it. This gave us a pyramid of numbers, the top of the heap being shown above. This is called Pascal's Triangle, after the french mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), even though it first cropped up in a chinese book which appeared about 350 years before his birth (in 1303 AD), and may be older (450 BC ???). The first pattern the kids noticed was the line of natural numbers on the first diagonal (labelled line A). Aha! Then we went on to discuss the purpose of the lesson, namely the family of horizontal lines like line B, which give the terms in the binomial expansion of (x+y)N for the values of N along line A. Aha! So (x+y)3 = 1*x3+3*x2y+3x*y2+1*y3. Thus the Nth row produces the terms of Sir Isaac Newton's binomial formula, which we were revising in that lesson. Aha, Aha! But we made some other, not so obvious, discoveries... If you run partially down a diagonal, as shown in line C, and then step diagonally at right angles from the end of your diagonal column, you will find the sum of all the numbers on your partial diagonal line. See? 1+5+15+35+70=126 in our example. Aha, Aha, Aha! Now if you form less steep diagonals, as shown by the dashed lines at the top of the pyramid, and add up the numbers along each shallow diagonal, you will get the terms of the Fibonacci Series (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55...) wherein each term is the sum of its two predecessors. Aha, Aha, Aha, Aha! BTW, this series is labelled D in the diagram above. We then extended the Fibonacci Series aways and took the ratios of successive terms. And what did we get? Alternating bounds (approximations) to the Golden Mean , which is (1+root(5))/2, known to the Ancient Greeks and used by artists ever since then. Aha5! And so on, and so forth up to Aha12!, before the time was up :-) Don't you just love it when the kids' eyes light up as they see how all this 'horrible, boring, maths stuff' all fits in neatly together? Maths are not just 'a heap of ole numbers' :-) 
Monday, June 12, 2006
The last Pub in the Country N ot in a temporal sense, nor in a quality sense, but in the geographical sense. The easternmost town here in Germany is Görlitz, which has been nicely restored. The river Neiβe runs along part of the eastern border of Germany, separating it from Poland. As shown here, the German town of Görlitz is on the left bank and the Polish town (on the right bank) is called Zgorzelec. The actual border is defined as the middle of the river. As usual, the Germans mark their border with a black/red/gold border pole exactly one meter into their own territory, which in this case is near the middle of the river. You can see the border pole on the right side of the battlements of the old fort. A few centuries ago the king ordered forts built on the borders, so this one was built in the middle of the river! By royal decree dams were also to be built to ensure a constant supply of water for the towns. Typical burocrats followed the royal decree to the letter and built their stupid, useless, dam across their half of the river! ;-) The old fort is now a pub, so you sit in the sunshine on the roof of the old fort in the middle of the river, adjacent to the border, and wonder about the mental capabilities of burocratic rule-following civil servants. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose! NB: This post is for my good friend and Scottish council-worker, Haggiswurst ;-) PS: Am I losing readership? Or has Site-Meter recently changed the way they count? Thursday, June 8, 2006
Mini-Harpy* returns***
62 today.
Buggrit! How did THAT happen?
Inside I still feel like thirty-something. And now I'm 62**; my first weary Barfday :-( Tired and with aching joints, depressed, with nothing better to do than read the notes accompanying my new anti-hay-fever spray. Whereupon I just read that these are all rare(?) side-effects of said medicine :-( Oh goody, goody gumdrops, I thought I was starting to feel my old mumble - phuggid age :-) So, given my general feeling of depression today, maybe I'll pull out the old small (mini) Blues harp, google for some harp-playing tips, and play me an ancient number I'll call 62nd Bthuthiday Blues, the Blues Holler to include a story about escaping from a disappointing and thoroughly mediocre corporate career rather like the guy shown in the cartoon here: 
If I ever won a get-out-of-jail-free card, that's how it would turn out!
62 today, shee-it! * Bushco fans please note : for once "Mini-Harpy" does not refer to Condosleazy Rice. ** However, there is one good thing about 62 : There is no number which is 62 times the sum of its digits. Indeed, 62 is the smallest number with this property. So today, for the very first time, I can rightly claim "It doesn't all add up". Kinda depressing, innit, Marvin? *** If you are going to invent a time-machine, it doesn't matter how long you took :-) Tuesday, 6/6/6
Bushwhacked, the Movie...Today, 6/6/6, Airforce One landed in Roswell, New Mexico. What is 'He' trying to tell us ?Meanwhile my good friend Haggiswurst points us to "Bushwhacked, the Movie..." Monday, June 5, 2006
This is a no-WM-football site!
If there is anything more boring than 22 grown men chasing a piece of
polyhedral leather, then it can only be Dubya giving a speech without notes or
teleprompter. You will see none of such nonsense in this blog. You can read this blog in
the coming months, safe in the assurance that, while
it may occasionally be showing some balls, none of them will be footballs!
Some of you may have thought that a football is round. Strictly speaking, a soccer ball is an inflated irregular polyhedron, made by stitching hexagonal pieces of leather to other pieces in the form of a pentagon (trust Rumsfeld to get involved, maybe the Pentagon wants to see Germany (national letter=D) win the final, thus turning the WM into the long sought but never found WMD ;-) ? Now if I give you Euler's formula C - E + F = 2 for convex polyhedra, you should be able to work out from the number of Corners, Edges and Faces exactly how many hexagons and pentagons each are needed to sew a soccer football (made of only these 2 polygons) :-) If you wish to follow the WM on TV (Cthulthu will get your *sole), you may want to know where some of the countries being mentioned are located. Thus I recommend that you look at the following websites first :-
National mentalities about footie differ too. Example: In German the abbreviation used for this competition is WM (World Mastery), whereas the English use World Championship (unfortunate abbreviation = WC). Personally, I've always regarded the latter as an adjectival shorthand for their playing style ;-) Friday, June 2, 2006
Gone, but not forgotten :-(Megacrap! I've lost my old 1960's autograph book :-(It was given to me (a naive teenager) in 1961 by my sixth-form maths teacher, Jeb, for showing him a proof of Pythagoras that he didn't already know. It had about 100 pages of thick (120gr. ?) pages, all in p a s t el colours, "gay" in the past, not present, sense of the word ;-) It was cloth covered in a Royal Stewart tartan. Shame he couldn't spell tho'. I was supposed to collect the autographs of famous mathematicians. However, 1961 was the first year I visited the Isle of Man, to watch the TT motorcycle racing, camping in a soggy field at Hillberry, where I marshalled back in 2002 again. So I 'mis'-used the autograph book to collect the signatures of the racers in 1961 :-) The first signature was by the captain of the Ben-My-Chree, the old steamer which ferried us over from Liverpool to Douglas. I forget his name :-( The second signature was of Geoff Duke , famous for his Manx Norton and Gilera wins. Then, because that year (1961) was the golden jubilee of the TT being held on the Mountain Course, famous past winners were there. The third signature was of first TT winner Rem Fowler , the winner of the very first TT in 1907, when it was held on the St. John's course. He was a gnarly old man in 1961 and showed me an old brown photo of him rounding the Devil's Elbow between Kirkmichael and Peel, on a dirt road as it was in 1907. The fourth signature was of Stanley Woods, still bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and with that magnificent Irish accent of his that I remember so well. And so it went on. Mike-the-Bike Hailwood, Jim Redman, Mike (now Michelle) Duff, etc. etc. Later in the 60's I added Ago, Bill Ivy, and even my subsequent friend Klacks ;-) When friends Marion and Matthias , Neli and I went in 1994, I'd forgotten to take the old autograph book to get the then stars. In 2002 Alex and I went again, but I couldn't find the autograph book despite a desperate last-minute search on the eve of our departure. Probably lost even then :-( Next year will be the centenary of the IOM TT races, and I wanted to take that 45 year old autograph book with me to show people (and bore them). But, despite turning the house upside down I can't seem to find it. Sad, sad, sad :-( So, should you happen across it, or if it turns up on e-Bay, I'd be very interested in buying it back. Just let me know... BTW, here's the most worthless autograph I have; expires 2008, thank the gods ;-)  |
Blogs that I read Bulldog Blog D-Flat Chime Bar Doug Alder Easy Bake Coven Four Dinners Frank Paynter Gary Turner Good Math, Bad Math Greavsie Jeneane Sessum Jonny B's secret diary Making Light Mandarin Design Mike Golby Nobody Asked Older, but no wiser Past Imperfect Reflective Teacher Special Constable The (UK) Policeman Universal Soldier Wasted Days & Nites Now reading
 Sound-bytes ;-)Dubya on 2004/08/05 Berlin Wall Dementi Scotland the Brave Hailwood's Honda Bagpipe (Ceolas) Oboe and organ Auld Lang Syne Song for Dubya SED party song Rule Britannia Spitfire flyby John Lennon Manx Norton Dog barking DDR anthem Joe Satriani Steve Vai Tschuß! 
|
RSS Feed
| Index/Home | Impressum | Sitemap | Search site/www |  |