A Pashen for Graveyards

Australian Shiela, antipodean friend and bloggeress Queen Strumpet, who is known in Real Life^® as Anna Pashen, responded to last wednesday's blog-entry about those graves in Grunau cemetery by sending photos of her home town graveyard.

The small town in question is Ingham, Queensland in Australia. She writes "Sadly there are no (Google Maps) satellite images of the cemetery - or rather they are such poor quality that they don't allow for zooming in past the point where it looks like a patchwork quilt. The 'houses' with the names Spina and Patane were my godparent's parents graves."

She goes on "The landscape shot I took didn't turn out, but to give you an idea of the scale, these grave-houses are about twice average human height. When inside one of them, you can stand easily, and there are a LOT of them. About a full acre block!"

"There is a central altar inside as well as smaller ones above each grave. The graves are usually placed first to the sides then centrally, and then to each side of the center if the building is large enough. They are raised from the floor almost like a bench and the entire interior and exterior is tiled. One of them (which I was unable to find when I took these photos) had an air-conditioner so the elderly widow could sit in comfort while mourning her husband and child. ... I suspect 'grave-houses' may derive from having a cemetery in an area with a high water table."

On the subject of 'high' graves, I told Anna that in the Great Hall of England in Winchester (UK), which used to be the medieval capital of England, the Kings' of England's coffins are stored up on the rafters, making them pretty inaccessible to any raiders as the rafters are over 60 feet high. As a one-time morgue body-washer ( a well-paid student job) I know that corpses urinate and defecate as rigor mortis sets in. I also know that in the middle ages (as with Jews/Arabs nowadays, afaik) corpses had to be buried before sunset, presumably for hygenic reasons. So I wouldn't want to have been standing under those rafters trying to heave the boxes up ;-)

Anna adds "The Ingham sugar mill is now the largest in the world (for sugar that is) and it is also home to the longest jetty in the southern hemisphere (not a lot of competitors on that one). Also one of the dampest places in the cosmos while still being technically classed as land - stand still 5 minutes and you'll find Moss on your shady side ;-)"

And I thought that the shady side of Moss was a drug-ridden singer called Pete ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 30th May 2006 at 06:30 CEST permalink Email

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Franz Wimmer's Jew's Harp Manu-Factory

T wang, twang, twang. Twaang, twaang. Twaaaang.

Oh what a monotonous old twanger I am!

When we were in Austria a fortnight ago we went to Molln, a village which supplied the pre-TV, pre-radio world of hundreds of years ago with Jew's Harps for making your own 'music'. At one time 33 families there were gainfully employed in this cottage industry. Now there are just three, one of whom is Franz Wimmer in his one-room 'manu-factory'. So we went to meet the famous man himself.

Franz works in a small one-room workshop and was happy to see us, his first visitors on that rainy day. He took ¾ hour off to explain the Jew's Harp to us. His family has been making Jew's Harps since the 16th century and he now exports 160,000 of them each year. He showed us all the steps involved, both via the old manual production methods and using stamps and dies in machines as is done nowadays. He is an accomplished musician and played a number of multitonal tunes for us. Me? I could only get the one basic twang, sometimes an overtone and a tremulo if I waggled my tongue :-( So we bought a pack of four, each in a different key, to practice at home; they only cost €2 each, after all.

Franz Wimmer's Jew's Harps are exported to retailers all over the world, especially amongst the nomadic and more primitive cultures, e.g. Papua/New Guinea, Kirgistan, Siberia, Altai, Jakutsk, Nome (Alaska) and even Washington D.C ;-)

Over the years Franz Wimmer has visited and got know all of his retailers personally (recent trip marked on the map above). There are also regular Jew's Harp festivals held around the world which he attends. I bought a CD of recordings from one of these. It is amazing what complex sounds can be conjured out of these simple instruments by expert players.

From these international festivals he has brought back the local equivalents of the Jew's Harp, some made of bamboo and string, some of bone even. He played each of these in his collection for us, so it was a very instructive and musical hour which we spent with him.

Thankyou, Franz Wimmer, for dedicating so much time to us!

If you want to hear some Jew's Harp music, just turn up your speakers and surf on over to Franz Wimmer's website, where a traditional Austrian tune is being played.

Drunkards Walking...

Y esterday was Fathers' Day here in Germany, or, as we say in the German pronunciation 'Farter Tag', which turns out to be also an appropriate label ;-)

It is used as an excuse to get drunk; as a result the (traffic-)accident rate triples on that day each year. Here are just five of the accident reports from previous years' newspaper reports, omitting all the drunken-driving deaths :-

• Man fell face down into a roaring bonfire whilst attempting to toast marshmallows. Drunk. Third degree burns; died later in hospital.
• Angler fell out of rowing boat attempting to retrieve beer crate stored under water to keep the beer cool despite strong sunshine. Drunk. Drowned.
• Horse-drawn cart turned over, injuring 16 male passengers when all 16 attempted to sit on the side with their backs to the sun as the cart emerged from the forest's shadow. All 17 (horse was sober) drunk.
• Sober driver killed by runaway beer-barrel. Nine pedestrians were on their way home from the pub, rolling a 100 liter beer-barrel which they had purchased for their planned afternoon drinking. "As we came over the brow of the hill, the barrel got away from us, bounded down the hill and went through his windscreen :-(".
• Beer-crate stacker killed in fall. The group of friends (all drunk) were to take turns stacking beercrates, climbing the stack as necessary to add a new one to the top, as they had seen in a competition on TV. Unlike in the TV-show, the stacker was not secured by a rope and pulley. The stack was at 8 feet before he fell on his head.

So there we were down the pub yesterday, mutually explaining that we had to be careful staggering home, as there were likely to be lots of drunken drivers around. (Actually the drivers are mostly wives picking up their husbands, it's the blokes staggering off the sidewalk and into the road that drivers have to watch out for). To cut a long story short I'd said that a drunk takes 100 steps to go the same net distance as he does in ten when sober; he needs the square of the number of steps needed when sober. Even then he's probably gone in the wrong direction. Challenged to prove it, I couldn't yesterday (too pissed!), so I promised the lads to blog a proof today, I get a pint each if it's understandable to non-mathematical laymen, as Friedhelm demanded.

Assume our man makes staggering steps, all of the same average length. The statement about the 'square of the number of steps needed when sober' is a statistical expectation, so we can use the average for each step without loss of generality. Mark his origin. Our drunkard takes his first (and every) staggering step in a random direction, because we're assuming he's perfectly drunk and staggering about on a level surface. That's step one. Step two is again in a random direction, so there's a 50% chance that this step has a vector component taking him away from his origin and a 50% that this step has a vector component taking him toward his origin. This means that his second step is (as a statistical average) at right angles to the direction to the origin, the net vector component being zero. So we can use Pythagoras theorem. So after step 2, the man has 1 step outward and 1 step at right angles to the first, putting him (statistically speaking) at an expected distance of root(2) from the origin.

The next staggering step is again in a random direction, so we can use the same argument and apply Pythagoras again. One side of the triangle is now root(2), the next step of length 1 step is at right angles, so after the third step we get by Pythagoras that the drunkard is at root(3) from the origin. By induction we can deduce that the drunkard is expected to be at root(N) from the origin after N staggering steps. The relative error of our (statistical) calculation will decrease (as 1/root(N)) as the number N of steps increases. Quod erat demonstrandum. That perfectly clear now lads? If not, get yerselves sober! If so, y'all owe me a pint ;-)

Oh, and read this, you hearty drinkers ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 26th May 2006 at 06:00 CEST permalink Email

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Call me morbid, but if I see an old graveyard I'll go and see if there are any "interesting" gravestones. For example, the graveyard of Melrose Abbey in Scotland has many old headstones bearing a skull and crossbones. Pirates that far inland? Dead Bush/Kerry@Yale secret society members? No. But a concentration of freemasons just north of the border :-)

I found an interestingly different graveyard in Austria last week. Apart from a couple of modern headstones, wooden crosses were traditional. When they had weathered to be unreadable, the grave was deemed suitable for re-use, I was told. So relatives started putting a roof on the crosses, so they would weather slower and last longer. It later became fashionable there to have wrought-iron crosses made, beautiful and intricately wrought. The by-now 'traditional' weatherproofing roof was even kept in the metal design. I think the wrought-iron crosses looked much better than boring oblong stonemasonry.

Nevertheless, when I go, I want be cremated and my ashes Blowin' in the Wind^**, better than being canned in a box in the cold dank ground, food for the worms. Can of worms :-(

PS: For a hilarious funeral story, go read the blog of Four Dinners. Laugh? I nearly died!

^* 'Code your own Banner'-idea is courtesy of Mandarin Meg, quid vide, OK? ;-)
^** BTW, Bob Dylan is 65 today. Happy Birthday, man, and thanks for all the music!

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 24th May 2006 at 06:24 CEST permalink Email

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Hiking the Alm Valley trails in Austria's Alps

As you may have gathered from sunday's blog-entry, we've recently spent a week hiking (well, walking) the trails in the (blind) Alm valley in Austria. Mid-may is the best time for this IMHO, the meadows bee-ing (sic!) in full bloom as I showed you on sunday, and not being mown until the start of june. Our bulldog pup Frieda is 11 months old now, and this was her first hiking vacation. We did about 4 to 6 miles, took an extended break for lunch (NOT a break for an extended lunch ;-) and then a similar distance in the afternoon. Bulldogs, especially show-bulldogs, are often overweight, with 'Chippendale' bowed legs and incapable of doing much more than a couple of hundred yards. But we keep our's slim and fit and she managed these distances with ease. Going by the speedometer on my bike, she can also run at 18 kph and even sprint at 26kph for 2 to 300 meters. That's pretty fit for a bulldog, and certainly faster than any potential break-in thieves might be ;-)

The mountain trails are too dangerous for such an exuberant puppy, so we stuck to the valley trails. Nevertheless, we had to turn back at the Greater Öd lake, because the trail narrowed from a yard to just four inches, I'd be walking it by placing my feet behind one-another rather than alongside as one usually walks; but the dog's gait is wider than the trail was there, so we had turn back. Plus there's a steep hill on one side with NO handholds, and a steep drop down into the lake if you stumble. MUCH too difficult with a playful pup, either with or without a leash, and JUST managable for us bipeds alone.

But that's enough about the hiking. In subsequent entries I'll be telling you about some of the (inhabited) places we visited, from motorcycle museums to a maker of Jew's Harps :-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 23rd May 2006 at 06:23 CEST permalink Email

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In memoriam : Douglas Adams.

Marvin, the depressive robot, reminds us that Douglas Adams died of a heart attack five years ago today, May 11th :-(

Fifteen million people bought his book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a trilogy of five books. Many also saw the original BBC TV version, better IMHO than the recent movie remake.

Bop Ad - his nickname based on his illegible signature - also wrote some of the Doctor Who scripts, and even appeared (as a surgeon) in one of the Monty Python episodes (just FYI, it was episode 42 ;-)

On last year's anniversary of his death the wife and I and some friends went out to a posh slow-food restaurant for some great fish dining. But they were really, really slow to serve us. My wife said hungrily "It's like they've got all the time in the world :-(" , then I riposted "Then this must be The Restaurant at the End of the Universe". Adams had conjured up a space-time warp for the restaurant so that diners could watch the End of the Universe from the 'outside'. We spent our waiting time conjecturing what the End of the Universe might look like, and concluded it would be a single point as space collapsed.

So the penultimate step would be a cube, with 2 points each on the X,Y, and Z axes. The step in the collapse just before that - so we surmised - all of space would be just a cube with THREE points each on lines defining the X, Y, and Z dimensions. Doodling around on a paper napkin, I drew the following construction, numbering the points 1 through 27 :-

Now this cube contains 27 points, nine in each plane, which is a 3 * 3 square. So I could carefully number each of these 27 points with the integers 1 to 27, as you see here (The Gödel numbers get smaller at this stage of the collapse at the End of the Universe). The apparently unsystematic numbering of the 27 points is a numeric tribute to Douglas Adams. How? Just try adding up the three numbers in any X-row. Or in any Y-column. Or in any Z-stack ;-) See, that's a 3-D construct neat enough to cheer up even the android Marvin! BTW, it's numbered so that the 3-D diagonals of the cube share the same property too ;-)

FWIW, May 11th was also the day Rudolf Hess crash-landed in Scotland. His crash site was declared a Disaster Area. Perhaps Hess Set the controls for the heart of the sun? ;-)

Douglas, your's was really great writing. May you never be the subject of a Vogon poem.

Finally, as the Universe ended, our food arrived. Friedhelm's fish was good, Liesel's was OK too, but my wife's salmon tasted off though: maybe it was A Salmon of Doubt? My tea-time sole was superb. As were the delicious chocolate eclairs in walnut ice-cream for dessert. After coffee, we paid our bill, saying "Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish" :-)

In the unlikely event that my blogreaders have never read Douglas Adams, I've popped six of his book covers into the right sidebar today, so you get to see The Meaning of Liff ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 11th May 2006 at 06:11 CEST permalink Email

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Your comments on idiomatic metrification

M emory-marvel-man Ian Docherty followed up on thursday's metrification of idioms and sent the following comment from the UK with some more metrified idioms :-)

One I often use (unmetrificated) is "I have a 30.48 cm, 
but I don't use it as a rule".

"As easy as 3.14159..."

"That goes against the 0.06479891 gram"

"To go around in 6.28318531 radians"

"To go off 0.5 baked"

"A New York 60 seconds"

"Give the enemy no 0.25"

"Rome was not build in 86400 seconds"

"He talks 19 to the 12"

"Wouldn't touch it with a 3 m 4.8 cm pole"

This was fun!

One year blogiversarist (congratulations!) Winston Rand (USA) wrote a suggestion for the metrification of idiots... (sic!) :-

Never happen here. Bush says God is against it. 
We're going back to cubits...whatever the 'ell they are!
Speaking of evil leaders, here's my contribution: 
Give him 2.54 cm and he'll take 1.6 kilometers.

A ustralian blogger Anna Pashen sent a bunch of comments, the relevant one is :-

The only idiom for metrification I could think of would have to be used as a
pun: The old 'In for a penny, in for a pound' - doesn't really work all that
well. I suspect my lack of proficiency in the matter has to do with having
grown up with metric.

Anna, that gives us 'In for 0.625 cents, in for 454 grams' . Hmmm, you are right, maybe it should be 'In for 0.625 cents, in for 1.5 € '. Whatever.

F urther feedback was provided by Wendy Templeton, a blogreader who lives and works in China. I wrote to her asking how Hong Kong had responded to the 97 power handover from the UK to China and whether the system of weights and measures had been changed from the Imperial system to the MKS system or some Chinese standard (of which I know nothing). This is her delightful reply :-

Hm. Bafflingly, Hong Kong is pretty schizophrenic when it comes to this sort of thing. For example, I always think we're more Imperial, but we're not; temperatures are always read in Celcius; unless you're at the doctors, then it's Fahrenheit. I don't drive, but I'm pretty sure cars go X kilometres per hour while they're driving around the Y square-miles of Hong Kong. Yet we are of course sensible enough to have 100 cents in a dollar. People are 5'9", and live in 1,000 square-foot flats (if they're lucky).

Confused? You will be. A few years ago, if you went to the market to buy fresh prawns, veg, whatever, you'd order it by the "catty". Somehow [someone] decided to regulate the system and now you buy food in kilos (even though you weigh 140 pounds). It just doesn't sound right asking for 604.7 grams of prawns. I'd like a catty, please. Oh, and I think gold is still weighed in taels. Except on the TV financial report where it's troy ounces.

Fortunately, we've never had a feel for the funt, peck, obolus or scruple.

None of this seems set to change soon, regardless of 97. It seems so far that the central government in Beijing has taken a very sensible approach to our everyday lives with a sort of "if it's not broken..." attitude.

Thanks, all of you, for your inputs :-)

I don't think, Wendy, that Dubya ever had a feel for scruples either ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 8th May 2006 at 06:48 CEST permalink Email

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On the metrification of idioms

Protagoras (481-411BC) said that, as quoted by Plato in 'Theaetus'. I'll translate it for you:

M an is the measure of all things.
Especially in that archaic anglo-saxon system of measurement units still used in the UK, USA, and sundry other English-speaking countries, gawds help 'em all. There are feet and hands, ells and cubits, strides and armspreads,

• rods, poles and perches, chains, furlongs, fathoms, miles and leagues,
• bushels and pecks, gills, pints, quarts and gallons,
• ounces, pounds, stones and hundredweights,
• groats and farthings, shillings, florins, crowns and guineas

and acres and acres of ancient, anachronistic and anthopomorphic approximations.

How simple then is the metric system used by the rest of Europe. MKS - meter, kilogram, second - and units derived therefrom. So we can hope that all nations will change over to the simpler metric system. But that's the easy part. What about all the idioms that have accumulated in the English language? Obviously, we have to convert those too ;-)

So here is my first sample of metrified English idioms :-

• 28.4 grams of prevention are worth 453.6 grams of cure.
• "157 cms, eyes of blue..."
• A miss is as good as 1.6 kms.
• Shylock demands his 0.4536 kg of flesh
• The whole 8.2296 meters

If you have any metrified idioms to add, the more ridiculous the merrier, just Email them to me for due credit here :-) Let's meme them. Here's the first fast feedback :-

• Opened my mouth and put my 30.48 cms in it (via Jane, but attributed to Dubya).

PS, the opening line also gives us a hint about metric idioms: "They're all Greek to me!" ;-)

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 4th May 2006 at 06:04 CEST permalink Email

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A Maze In Greece

D uring my early schooldays we were taught about mazes in preparation for a class visit to the Hampton Court garden maze, shown below. We were given ever more complicated mazes on sheets of paper and tried to find our way in to the centre (or back out again), tracking our route with a wax crayon. Try it yourselves.

M ythological tales such as the Minotaur's labyrinth in Crete (about 1600 BC) were taught, as was Ariadne's thread, a method to avoid getting lost in the maze. We were also shown photos of some Hopi Indian rock carvings in Arizona, some African textiles containing mazes, the maze in Pompeii and (the oldest) the stone maze carvings in Rock Valley, Ireland, which are said to be over 4000 years old.

T here are several algorithms (methods) for solving mazes. As small schoolchildren, we were taught to shade in the dead-ends and any loops in our paper maze drawings. This done, we would then choose the most direct path to the middle. But once the mazes got larger and more complex this tip became impractical. So we were then taught about Ariadne's thread and the wall-tracking method outlined below.

Go through the labyrinth keeping your left (or right, if you are left-handed) hand in contact with the wall. Why this hand? Well your fighting-arm is carrying your sword to behead the Minotaur when (not IF) you meet him ;-) Unfortunately this method doesn't work if the maze has paths which surround the goal in the middle, or has loops, or has two or more entrances connected via paths which avoid the middle.

A Frenchman called Tre´meaux (sp?) has a general method that works for these cases too; it is kinda slow though. Chalk a line to your left as you walk through the labyrinth, choosing an arbitrary path at any (possibly multi-way) fork. Should you encounter your line again, or a dead-end, go back the way you came in. At any previously-encountered fork take a new path if there is one, otherwise continue going back. Never enter a pathway which has your chalked lines on both sides.

Why did it occur to me to blog about this today? At lunch we ate a really delicious corn-on-the-cob, soaked in hot butter, peppered and with a few drops of hot Tabasco sauce. Scrumptious! And otherwise known as a Maize in Grease ;-)

And guess what Judy Collins' spiritual song is playing on the CD-grinder as I write this? ;-)
In the spooneristic words we children sang: "A May sin : graze house wheat, this hound..."

Copyright ^© Stu Savory on 1st May 2006 at 06:01 CEST permalink Email

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