World championship level mental arithmetic

Schoolboy David has a question about yesterday's blog-entry : "What sorta sums in yer heid are at wurld champion level?" David, in order to merely qualify, you have to be able to do the following, without writing anything down. No, I didn't qualify even to enter the competition.

Add up ten 10-digit numbers in at most 90 seconds. Try this example:-

4192539821
2938481272
2937541625
4738291112
3982711928
6625127394
4866543004
3004830981
6016682334
2738430864

Multiply two 8-digit numbers in at most 90 seconds. Try this example:-

 18567942
*73465137

Take the square root of a 6-digit number, e.g. 691158 in at most 90 seconds.

Work out which day of the week it was for a given date, e.g. 25-10-1696. Also <90 secs.
I teach you here how to work out which day of the week it was for a given date.
2nd Nov 2004 is a Tuesday, and in Florida 2+2=5 for sufficiently small Republican values of 2.

Sunday's PS : And the winner is ... Robert Fountain (GB). Looking at the times he takes to solve these mental arithmetic problems, I see that Mr. Fountain thinks 2 to 3 times faster than I do. Wow! But to relativise it, I timed myself running 100 meters this morning; I'm almost two times slower than the world record holder there too. And over twice as old too ;-)
Divesh Ramanlal Shah (India) und Jan van Koningsveld(NL) were 2nd and 3rd respectively.

posted by Stu Savory on 30th October 2004 at 08:15 Central European Time permalink Email

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A teacher's lament

Most of my own teaching experiences have been positive. Mostly I've taught self-motivated adults. Students, post-grads, post-docs; maths, AI and cryptography. Sometimes I'll coach kids from our village who need to catch up in school, although that is harder. The one on one situation helps motivate them too though, showing them that school maths is really like a Swiss-Army mouse that you can use in lots of situations (physics, chemistry, programming, engineering classes etc).

Of course, the time spent as a flying instructor - especially aerobatics - was with exceedingly well motived adults, some of whom went on to become airline pilots etc. Although I admit, it's a funny feeling being flown on an airliner by one of my former flying pupils. On the one hand there's pride "That's my boy!". On the other, I can't help remembering all the things he got wrong, way back when ;-) Now they fully eclipse me, and/or make a special effort to "grease it on" when I'm on board :-)

Lament : My two sisters-in-law are teachers at regular state schools and are often stressed out, mostly by the schoolkids' bad behaviour. So to illustrate a (british) teacher's school stress, I'd ask y'all to read this math-teacher's secret diary. It's long, ten pages or so, but it really opened my eyes to teaching classes of uncooperative to downright-hostile unmotivated deprived city kids. Wow! Well worth reading! I think I'd flip out within a week, given that job! It's not for me. On the stereo now I have Pink Floyd singing "We don' need no edu-kay-shun".

At the other end of the spectrum, we have the World Championship in mental arithmetic being held in Annaberg (Saxony) this weekend. Adam Ries would have been proud of them.

BTW :The Swiss Army mouse & other neat things can be found at Kevin Kelly's Kool Tools.

WEB STUFF : I generally point people whom I help with HTML and CSS also to The Dark Wizard's Spellbook and to Mandarin Design for HTML & CSS help. Read both weekly!

TOP SECRET : I see from my logs that I've been getting several hits from the US Air Force and other MIL servers, all reading my elementary crypto pages. These are all in German though. You guys would make things easier on yourselves by reading the stuff in English in the neat Wikipaedia : Topics in cryptography section. Nothing special to see here, move along now.

posted by Stu Savory on 29th October 2004 at 07:11 Central European Time permalink Email

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More on, the Crawford Cowboy

In the traditional Hollywood western as shown on TV the bad cowboy wears a dark suit. Just like Dubya on TV. In the traditional Hollywood western the bad cowboy shoots first and asks questions afterwards (making damned sure he doesn't answer any). Just like Dubya. In the traditional Hollywood western the bad cowboy is an amoral gunslinger mostly telling lies. Just like Dubya. In the traditional Hollywood western the bad cowboy may not even own a single cow. Just like Dubya. It's a pretty poor rancher who has no grain in the silo. Couldn't pour piss out of a unspurred western boot with the instructions on the heel; all empty hat and no cattle.

In the Norse legends of the Prose Edda there is a single cow Audumla living in Yggdrasil , the world tree, who brought forth the Gods. Audumla belongs to noone, but also to everyone.

Dubya probably thinks he can milk that cow for oil she's worth, or just use her for target practice; Goddamn cowboy! But it's the pattern on Audumla's hide that has me scared.

Some other scary Bushy things I've read about recently (to name but six of W´s 666) are :-

• A Bush pre-election strike on Iran is 'imminent' according to the Lebanese press. Does Dubya want to start WW3 instead of facing losing the election on November 2nd?
• Coincidentally there will be a total eclipse of the moon early Thursday morning. Attacks under the cover of darkness, maybe? Coincidence or conspiracy theory?
• Oregon police shoot bystanders watching Dubya's motorcade. Shooting defenceless people in the back for just looking at Der Führer.
• GOP thugs to intimidate people, preventing them from voting. Whatever happened to Democracy in the US? The US voter turnout is usually much too small anyway.
• The GOP tries to suppress even discussion of the draft. Again, US freedoms such as the first amendment are disappearing under W.
• Incompetent US administration lets 380 tons (yes, tons) of high explosives get 'looted' by Iraqi insurgents. Failed to watch a known store. What if it had been WMD in there?

O My Children, how sayeth ye when yer dad is all riled up? "Pa annoyed"?

POST SCRIPT ca. 15:00 CET Dubya has just now taken his site offline for us readers outside the USA. I would like to think I played some small part in pissing him off enough to make him decide to do that :-) Of course we foreigners can just use an anonymous proxy in the USA, so his move is as useless as all his other moves.

posted by Stu Savory on 27th October 2004 at 06:19 Central European Time permalink Email

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Your history-blog feedback

I got three criticisms of Sunday's history-blog idea. Two of you think history should be written with the timeline flowing forward. Well, as I explained it is indeed being written with the timeline flowing forward. But when it is finished, it is being read with the timeline flowing backward; that is characteristic of blogs, most recent things appear at the top.

The other criticism is valid "History should not be taught as the timeline of a single person or object. Children should be made aware of other things going on at the same time, i.e. give an holistic view of things at each time." Fair does, I'll try:-

Instead of taking a point in space (like the Glienicker bridge in Sunday's blog) and moving it along the timeline, I'll take an arbitrary point in time and see what was happening then. In order to simulate the limited speed of relaying news and messages in the days before electrical communications I'll blog the events closer to home first and the ones farthest away last, since it'd take their news the longest time to get home. Of course, the stack nature of the blog will turn this around.

Arbitrarily choosing (say) the year 1853 as the point in time we'd get something like the following paragraphs. Bear with me for merely using my failing memory and not referring to any history books (laziness here), so I may omit important stuff. Start far away and close in.

1853 : Independence of Paraguay from Britain. Osman sultan Abd al Maschid I declares war on Russia. German carpenter Steinweg opens a piano factory in New York (Steinway & sons). In France, Napoleon III marries Eugenie de Montijo(Spain) in Notre Dame. Verdi's "La Traviata" premieres in Venice. In London Latimer Clark installs the first pneumatic-pipe postal system. In Oberndorf (Germany) Fischer invents bicycle pedals and Grandduke Nikolaus Friedrich Peter of Oldenbourg lets Wilhelmhaven harbour to the Czar of Russia. Nearer home, a bell support in the tower of the local Paderborn cathedral cracks through. And there is fighting between the two neighboring villages Henglarn and Atteln here.

Hmmm. I'm not sure that that particular idea works, nor is it suitable to the blog format. There seem to be no causal connections; but that may be my bad memory.
Oh well, try anything once, but admit to your failures (did you hear those 4 words, W? ).

posted by Stu Savory on 26th October 2004 at 10:19 Central European Time permalink Email

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Just how corrupt are YOU ?

We've all heard how Halliburton is 'awarded' contracts at inflated prices without competitive offers being demanded (Rumsfeld/Cheney). That's an example of corruption. So is Enron. Mafia-style ethics are everywhere it seems. Or are they?

The diagram on the left is an excerpt from the Corruption Perceptions Index published by Transparency International. Transparency International is the leading global non-governmental organisation (U.N.) devoted to combating corruption. Its mission is to create change towards a world free of corruption, and so it is worthy of a mention here, at a minimum annually.

The least corrupt countries are Finland, New Zealand and Denmark. The most corrupt countries are Nigeria, Bangladesh and Haiti (only 146 of 192 countries measured). South Africa is 44th, Mike.

Here in Germany we managed to get up to 15th place. Most corruption here has to do with the awarding of big building contracts (e.g the Munich soccer stadium), and with the resale of pharmaceuticals. Doctors and dentists are often caught overcharging the insurance companies here too. France was down at 22 but Switzerland up at seven. As expected, Italy was way down low, mafiosi maybe? I couldn't find a mention of the Vatican , despite all the bribes to the families of small choirboys being buggered by catholic priests worldwide. Outsourced and/or outlandish corruption maybe? We shall (wholly) See.

The USA is down at position 17, more corrupt than most European nations except France and of course Cosa Nostra Italy. However the Halliburton-style oil-money nation-building type of corruption is attributed by them to Irak, whereas IMHO this is really American corruption. There is a lot of corruption reported in the oil-countries, indeed Baksheesh is a Persian word.

The graphic shown here is reproduced from the FAZ newspaper. As an interesting aside, I assume that the artist's choice of colours for the extremes of the corruption scale was guided by the colours of the american political parties competing in the November 2nd election ;-)

Feel free to mail me examples of corruption in your country, that I may blog them (anonymously, if desired). December 9th will be the U.N.'s world anti-corruption day; maybe we can help them fight corruption by blogging openly about it. For a small fee I won't mention W ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 25th October 2004 at 05:29 Central European Time permalink Email

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A Glienicker Bridge blog idea

Recently I'd been talking to a friend who is a teacher. He teaches computer science (IT) and history classes (what a mixture) and was looking for some project ideas bridging the two subject matters for his class. This coming winter term he wants to cover blogging in the IT class and the cold war in the history class. Each child should have an independent project to do.

I suggested he combine the two classes (same pupils anyway), have them research something or someone historical and then make a simulated blog of the results. The children could follow the timeline, blogging the oldest event first and adding newer events weekly in order.

"That's a power idea, but I'd need an example" was his remark, which triggered off the association to Gary Powers, the CIA U2 pilot shot down by the Russians and then exchanged at the Glienicker Bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam. This is my example for the bridge.

The Glienicker bridge between West Berlin and Potsdam is where the two superpowers used to do spy-swaps to get their own spooks back. To visualise, think of John Le Carre´s book The spy who came in from the cold. So here's a translation of the example historical-thing blog I made for him, which the children will use for orientation. Remember, the entries are to be blogged one per week, this is the complete thing though, in a sketchy headline form. The children would have their own choice of subject material and be expected to flesh out their weekly blog entries with as much historical detail as possible and with relevant links. When they've each finished their projects the best will be reversed to get it in chronological order again and then submitted to the Wikipaedia; that should motivate the kids!

10.11.1989 : Border opens also for DDR citizens. Berlin wall falls.

10.03.1988 : Three men in a lorry escape at speed across the bridge, crashing through the barriers.

09.12.1987 : A DDR car with 2 men in it tries to escape across the bridge but fails due to barriers.

11.02.1986 : Anatolij Schzaransky (sp?) swapped and another small escape-plane handed back to the DDR.

01.12.1985 : Repairs finished. Bridge renamed Glienicker bridge and officially opened as a diplomats' crossing border post.

11.06.1985 : Biggest spy-swap ever. The US swapped 4 russian spies for 23 CIA spies (DDR citizens) held in the DDR. Should have been 24, but one woman decided to stay in the DDR because her family was still there.

15.11.1984 : DDR unblocks the bridge after West Berlin agrees to pay for the much-needed repairs to the bridge.

14.11.1984 : DDR blocks the bridge until West Berlin agrees to pay for needed repairs to it.

28.06.1979 : A glider was returned by the British Army to the Soviets here. It too had been used to escape from the DDR to West Berlin.

11.04.1978 : A DDR sport-plane which had been used by someone escaping from the DDR who landed at RAF Gatow in West Berlin was taken apart and returned on a lorry across the Glienicker bridge. The DDR had refused to let planes simply be flown back AFAIK.

11.02.1962 : CIA U2 spyplane pilot Gary Powers exchanged for Colonel Abel here.

13.08.1961 : Border DDR - West Berlin closed as the Berlin Wall was built, so the bridge border-crossing was closed too.

19.12.1949 : Restored and reopened for traffic, renamed Bridge-of-Unity.

??.04.1945 : Destroyed by shaped charges hit by tankfire in the last days of WW2.

??.??.1907 : New Glienicker bridge built of stone to replace the old wooden structure.

Now a question to any teachers reading this ; is this an idea "historic timeline blogs" that you could use? Or does history HAVE to flow forwards? Or is it pedagogic nonsense? Or will kids just cut & paste from existing Wikipaedia or other online sources? Enquiring minds (eg mine!) wanna know!

posted by Stu Savory on 24th October 2004 at 06:24 Central European Time permalink Email

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No prime college student left behind

A college reader from the US (whom I shall generously leave nameless) wrote saying he had read my various maths pages and liked in particular the pretty quilt of prime numbers I wrote about (Sieve of Eratosthenes page). Thanks. BUT!, he then asked What's the biggest prime?

There is no biggest prime, sir. There are an infinite number of primes. Remember, an integer is either itself prime or can be uniquely factored into a product of primes. So assume that there were a largest prime P. Now form the product of all primes upto and including prime P, write 2*3*5*7*11*13.....*P = N. Add one, giving M=N+1. Now M is either prime or factorable. If it is prime, it is bigger than P, thus leading to a contradiction. Assume it is factorable, then if you divide M by any of the primes 2 through P there will always be a remainder (1) left over. So M must have a factor larger than P, which is a contradiction again. Therefore there is no largest prime P. Quod erat demonstrandum!

Now seriously, as a college student you should have been able to deduce that yourself. Fortunately I am not disposed today to rant about the decline of US educational standards and indeed have been kind enough to leave you anonymous, but you know who you are. Wake up!

posted by Stu Savory on 23rd October 2004 at 10:40 Central European Time permalink Email

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A choice of features////////futures

Half-price-midweek-movie-deal : Weds. you can take in a horror movie at a bloody low rate in the nearby town. I could choose between three : Nosferatu (Klaus Kinski as Dracula), Der Untergang (Adolf Hitler's last days in power), neither of which was likely to get my blood curdled as much as #3, or (as #3) to watch AGAIN Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911. Needless to say I chose the latter. It's THE significant bloodcurdling movie in the runup to November 2nd.

Do they know something we don't? Even Bush's relatives vote for Kerry!

posted by Stu Savory on 21st October 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink Email

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Melmoth, & other horror story themes.

Horror story : Yesterday, I enjoyed re-reading Melmoth the Wanderer written by Charles Robert Maturin around 1820. Early gothic horror at its best (Melmoth sells his soul in exchange for immortality). Oscar Wilde was inspired by this tale when he wrote The picture of Dorian Grey. Indeed, after his 2 year imprisonment 1885-87 in Reading Gaol in England (for being homosexual) Wilde lived in France for a while under the assumed name of Melmoth. In 1888 Oscar Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol, also well worth re-reading.

More GOP voter fraud : Two of you readers have chided me for my less-than-fair-and-balanced Bushwhacking on Monday. Undeservedly I thought; was it not Dante who wrote in his Inferno that there is a special place in Hell reserved for those who remain neutral in times of conflict? I cannot remember his exact words, but that was the gist. And as Atrios points out in his Eschaton blog, the GOP in Philly are trying to block the black vote there too. And of course the early votecasting in Florida began going amiss, partial ballots being handed out to paper-preferring voters and voting-machines screwing up; what did you expect, it's a banana republic.

Looking horrible : My friend Ivan uses the Opera browser too, but he runs it on his PDA. He showed me how horrible my (and most other) webpages look on a tiny screen. Yeuch! Now I couldn't find any tips at my usual HTML & CSS design source Mandarin Design about designing for small screens, but the Opera developers themselves have a rather useful page of tips entitled "Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen: A List Apart".

Good news : Yesterday I managed to ride a motorcycle again (albeit only 100 miles), recovering from my spinal pain hiatus (scroll down to read my October tenth entry). And I've got outgoing-mail working again (cf Oct 13). Our new mail address is but the old one still works for you too, mail to the old address is being forwarded.

Wilde again: I should have blogged about Wilde's 150th birthday last Saturday, but forgot, so if you read down this far today, then congratulations on getting to the bottom of the page ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 20th October 2004 at 06:12 Central European Time permalink Email

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How W manipulates the coming US election

Whether you are Harry Windsor or Dubya Bush, you only need to cheat if you think you can't get the desired result honestly. I wonder how Dubya squares the Republican manipulations for/of the forthcoming US election with his Christian conscience? Remember, Dubya is sooo Christian, he doesn't even (need to) go to church.

The Republicans are making every (illegal!) effort they can to reduce the number of vote-willing Democrats actually registered. Reuters reported already a couple of months ago that that millions are being blocked from voting in the election.

They also report on the usual gerrymandering (realignment) of voting district borders to gain a more republican-favourable result.

Then there's the trick of putting dead men on voter rolls, who then presumably turn in unverified postal votes. In Ohio ( and at least two other states) we have the Ohio voter registration scandal wherein Republicans posing as neutral vote registrars collected vote registrations, and then destroyed the registration cards of likely Democrat voters. Ohio is also the balanced(?) state where the Republican officials tried rejecting voter registrations because the registration paper was too lightweight! Mene, mene, tekel upharsin! (="Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting", which was the biblical writing on the wall, Dubya!).

In Florida, where Dubya's brother Jeb reigns oh so neutrally, thousands of eligible voters are wrongly on his barred-felon list. And of course we can expect an election meltdown in Florida similar to the last one. I won't even point you to the shenanigens set up with the Diebold non-auditable electronic voting machines, since I've ranted about these all year now. Dieb is our German word for "thief" by the way, just in case you didn't know that snippet.

This dishonesty pisses me off! I ask you to go read Shameless Agitator's piece (especially §14) on 14 characteristics of Fascism before voting. Except for Dubya, Karl Rove etc who should go read this Reuters article : Revenge is mine saith the Lord! and reconsider their sins!

Things have come to a pretty pass when all you can expect of an American president (alleged Christian) are lies, deceit and dishonesty. A Nixon redux; time for a change. Vote Kerry!

On a lighter note, even the country music people are coming out against Bush. You can download this song "Takin' My Country Back!" free until 3rd November. Go listen to it and enjoy.

posted by Stu Savory on 18th October 2004 at 06:26 Central European Time permalink Email

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Sunset of the Skyline meme

My Skyline meme appears to have run out of steam, with no new submissions apart from the San Francisco (USA) skyline by Alan Duke this week. So I've decided to let the meme expire in a glorious orange. It bows out with the final skyline photo, shown above. If I missed any last-minute stragglers, mail me and I'll link to them, otherwise consider the meme closed. And remember please , photoblogger Cameron Stephen (thanks, man!) has an improved viewer interface to the Skyline Meme still available too. Go look.

Happy Birthday : to 'strine strumpet Anna Pashen today! She is one of several who wrote in sympathy with the spinal pain article I wrote last sunday (10/10/2004). Paul has also asked me to explain the aerobatic terminology I used there too.

Aresti descriptions, Paul, are a convention used to describe aerobatic manoevers used for documenting aerobatic competitions and displays. R/C (radio-control) modellers use Aresti diagrams too; indeed one of the better descriptions of Aresti diagrams is by an R/C modeller. An Immelmann turn is a half-loop followed by a 180° horizontal roll off the top to get upright again; it's an easy figure to fly. The Lomcevak tumble is rather difficult. Impossible in a jet or glider, it relies on using the gyroscopic precession of the propeller to tumble the tail over the nose - arse over forehead as it is often termed - the plane being out of control for a while then.

posted by Stu Savory on 17th October 2004 at 05:27 Central European Time permalink Email

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Punny Art-i-facts : home-made Objets d'Art.

As regular blog-readers will know, I am partial to making puns. This one is a pun(n)y effort for a local arts-and-crafts show, special theme was things made from "cotton".

Our German word for cotton is Baumwolle, made by concatenating the two words Baum=tree and Wolle=wool, hence Cotton=Tree-Wool, inspiring this piece.

How to make it? Start with an old window frame lying around in the garage. Hammer some little nails (more like pins really) into the top and bottom frames asymmetrically on the left side. Thread two thin slightly loose overlapping warps vertically between the top and bottom frames, these will be your tree-trunks. Using two different shades of dark brown wool, weave the two wefts closely, compacting the warps as you move away from the frame, so as to get the shape of two tree trunks. Deliberately make the wefts "knobbly" to suggest irregular bark on the 'tree-trunks'. Neatness not needed!

Take two leftover woolen mop/duster heads and dye them different shades of green. Sew them onto the top of the 'tree-trunks' you've just woven. These will be the 'leafy crowns' of your trees. Finally, glue a piece of left-over green canvas from a defective deckchair (or painted cardboard if you have no canvas) onto the back of the window frame. None of this is complicated at all. Total effort? One weekend, even for a ham-fisted non-artist like me ;-)

Voila´, your home-made punny artifact is finished, a weekend well spent even if it doesn't win any prizes because the stupid judges didn't cotton on that it was a pun! Mind you, I don't think our blogosphere art expert Yule Heibel would even classify this as Art either, but she'd get the cotton-pickin' pun, because she reads German :-)

By the way, I think it's important to use natural colours, so if your window-frame was painted (white or whatever), strip off the paint and just apply a clear covering over the bare wood to preserve it. Enjoy stripping on weekends :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 15th October 2004 at 05:55 Central European Time permalink Email

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Three out of four ain't good :-(

Seems I didn't get a faultless switchover to broadband monday evening :-(

I can surf, FTP works, incoming mail works. But I can't mail out. I enabled SMTP server authorisation as per instruction leaflet, but regardless of which Mailer I use (e.g. Outlook Express or Opera under XP) I still get the following error message:-

Serverantwort: '550 5.7.1 ... Relaying denied', 
Port: 25, Secure (SSL): Nein, Serverfehler: 550, 
Fehlernummer: 0x800CCC79 

Turning the firewall off temporarily didn't help. Mails to myself (which I'd used as a 'test' case monday) work OK, maybe they just do a short loop inside my PC, I don't know.

So what's the problem with "Relaying Denied" ? What am I doing wrong? Or rather, what should I be doing differently?

Any tips per Email to will be appreciated.
Feedback :Thanks, Doug, but that tip didn't work; same error message. But Aha! With your insight I now understand what the Provider is doing differently, and, more importantly why. So I can now develop a workaround maybe :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 12th October 2004 at 23:59 Central European Time permalink Email

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Going Broadband

Broadband : Yestreen I changed from a 64 Kilobaud ISDN dialup connection to a 2 Megabaud broadband connection. Quite easy to do (30 minutes) and boy is this fast now! Thirty times faster! It'll change my surfing habits. Huh? Yes, I use Opera - a tabbed browser - and had gotten used to using double or triple tabs so that whilst I was reading the foreground tabs, the background tab(s) could be pre-loading their pages. Now it's so fast I no longer need to use that trick. The extra speed means that I can visit more pages. I can view Flash stuff, which I had previously turned off, can download MPEGs etc without dying of boredom, and all for less money because of a volume- rather than time-based tariff. Our country village finally got DSL!

The very first high-speed Email I got was of course SPAM. Allegedly an educational institute offering a degree online (as if I didn't have enough of them already). I've ringed their top-of-the-page offers in red for you. Isn't it interesting to see what spammers top-of-the-page offers are ;-) Three things spammers need to know about (especially the centre one)!

Bloggers' books : Doug Alder read yesterday's article and points out that his dear friend and popular blogger Shelley Powers has written a dozen books! It seems Shelley writes IT-specialist books professionally, go look her up at Amazon.com if you need any computer books. Due to Doug's tip, I've just added Shelley to my blogroll so that we all can visit her blog easily.

The Frankfurt Book Fair laments another drop in attendance this year to 268,300 (it was 289,000 last year and >300,000 in year 2000), despite 1% more exhibitors (6691). Well Fair-director Volker Neumann, let me tell you about customer friendliness! It used to be cheaper. It used to stay open late on Friday evenings, so that locals could pop in after work. It used to have a public day (Final Fair Monday). On the final day (now Sunday) exhibitors used to sell off the books from the stands really cheaply, to avoid having to pack them up and ship them back to HQ. They no longer do this. The fair is almost all B2B now, being about rights-deals and licence-deals. Herr Neumann, your book fair is becoming less attractive to the general public!

Book tip : One very funny new book I did like though, is Terry Pratchett's "Going Postal".

Going, going, gone? The Skyline meme appears to be running out of steam, with no new submissions this week. If you still have a photo of a skyline near you, just blog it and let me know so that I can link to you. Otherwise I'll just let the meme die a natural, gracious death.

posted by Stu Savory on 12th October 2004 at 10:38 Central European Time permalink Email

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Booklovers do it between the covers

They also attend the Frankfurt Book fair, currently running here in Germany. Rowohlt Verlag, who published 13 novels by the new literature Nobelprizewinner Elfriede Jelinek, reacted quickly, hanging out posters and starting a new print run of her books. So I grabbed a list of this year's Nobel prizewinners and went to see what they had written. I remember reading recently in Betsy Devine's blog that her husband Frank Wilczek has won the Physics award this year. Congratulations! That certainly makes stringy quark out of the rest of us third-raters.

I got sidetracked to the following question: Bloggers like writing and are often good at it, so What books have bloggers written? Obviously, this is not a representative survey, just some of the 30 or so bloggers whom I read regularly (well, fairly often; OK then, sometimes).
Back at home, I asked Amazon.com and Amazon.de (here in Germany) what they knew:-

• Betsy Devine herself has two books to her name. "Longing for the harmonies" is written together with her husband. It turns out I actually own a copy of her other book "Absolute Zero Gravity"; it's a small world! If I ever meet her, I must get her to sign it.
• Brian Moffatt has a book to his name too, "Six Days That Shook the Walt". Same guy???
• As does a certain Michael Golby, who may be the ZA-blogger Mike Golby, I dunno, "Curriculum Design" doesn't sound like the blogger Mike Golby that I read.
• Doc Searls et al of course are well known for "The Cluetrain Manifesto", a good book.
• Doc's co-author, Chris Locke (aka Rageboy) has 2 of his own as well, "The Bombast Transcripts" and "Gonzo Marketing", neither of them to my taste.
• Yule Heibel has two books to her name (that I could find). "German Marks..." and "Reconstructing the Subject", both of them reviewed as 'intellectually challenging'.

I had hoped that Frank Paynter, Jeneane Sessum, and Joel Sax had each written books, because I like their writing style, but that appears not to be the case :-(

I certainly think that if Michelle Goodrich collated all her good advice on HTML and CSS that she has on her website into a book, then it would sell like hotcakes. I for one would buy a half-dozen copies as presents for friends. Meg, there's a customer demand, I'm sure. Go do it!

Crosschecking, it turns out that Amazon.com and Amazon.de here in Germany deliver different (language dependent) results:- Amazon.com found three of my books (in English) whereas Amazon.de found another four (German ones). It also found my wife Cornelia's newest book.

If you too are a blogger who has written a book or two, drop me an email to and maybe I'll start another meme on "Bloggers' Books" :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 11th October 2004 at 12:00 Central European Time permalink Email

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrghhhhhhhhh!

In the blinding, searing pain of that split second I knew I'd wrecked my back.

Ten-thousand years of indescribably excruciating tearing, spine speared on the horns of Beelzebub, telescoped into one shock-second. Slipped a disc, leeeeeengthened a ligament, murksed the muscles, stripped the spine, call it what you will, I'd buggered my back.

I'd been sitting in the car, waiting for my wife to get into the passenger seat, when our dog leaped over from the back seat onto the front passenger seat. I'd turned my upper body through 90° to heave 60 pounds of unwilling Bulldog bitch back onto the rear seat. The ensuing struggle wrecked my back last week. But at least my 120 decibel scream scared the dog into cowering cooperation and may have done permanent psychological damage. To me too! The next problem was to get the whimpering heap out of the car. That whimpering heap was me :-(

Disconsidering a regular doc's jabs which merely diminish the symptoms (pain) somewhat and do absolutely nothing about the causes, I decided to go to a chiropracter, hence my offline hiatus last week. Chiropractors are related in direct bloodline to Torquemada, and rack up (sic!) good business straightening people out - by well applied violence, they claim.

Looking like a cross between Quasimodo and Stephen Hawking, bent over like an old hag, I weaved along following the design of my now Z-shaped spine and collapsed in his practice. The hipbones were so aslant he found, that my legs were six centimeters different in length.

Chiropracters like to surprise you. They creep up behind you, grab you in a full nelson and JERK you upright. Shades of Abu Ghraib. I shall spare you the details, gentle reader. It's a good job their offices are soundproofed though! Various other equally excruciating and variegated surprise attacks reduced the difference by a centimeter per day. Twice daily for several days to seeming eternity. Finally they got me symmetrical again and sent me home (wednesday).

Painful treatment, but it worked. I can now stand upright again, negotiate stairs, and even lift light objects. The bulldog bitch keeps out of lifting distance of her own initiative. Surprise :-)

The excruciating, searing pain has gone, replaced by a permanent dull ache. Nag, nag, nag, like three horses approaching and galloping over my kidneys, hooves pounding Niere ;-)

No more Jiu Jitsu, ever again. No more rollercoaster rides at summer fairgrounds. No more looping a bright red biplane through azure skies. No more pulling six Gee up into a half-loop, Immelmanning off the top and diving to get speed for a high, wild, rolling, tumbling Lomcevak. No more writing Aresti diagrams in oil-smoke across air-display skies. Smoke off! For ever.

On the good side, they say I should be able to ride a motorcycle again; just pause for some weeks and do those exercises to build those back muscles. I'm looking forward to that. In the mean time I may just be boring you with more frequent blogging. Except that next week I plan on switching from ISDN to a broadband line. I hope that hiatus goes faster and less painfully.

posted by Stu Savory on 10th October 2004 at 09:34 Central European Time permalink Email

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Skyliners linking during my offline hiatus

While I've been offline for a week getting my back fixed (maybe I'll blog that episode later for the less squeamish amongst you ;-) another ½ dozen or so contributed to The Skyline Meme.

• Eric shows us a neat B/W view from the small lake across the street from his pad.
• Leslie from La Vache Qui Lit shows us her evening walk skyline. The photo was taken two months ago, so the wheat is gone now. I'm dead chaffed about that ;-)
• Wil Brady has two for us: the first shows us a sunset over the Connecticut river looking toward the decommissioned nu-ku-lah power plant CT Yankee.
• Wil Brady's second link is a neat triptych showing us the Connecticut River looking from Gilette's Castle. Which reminds me, I need to read some Mark Twain again :-)
• Buffy writes that "I finally figured out my permalink" and points us to this link.
• Being really hot on current affairs, Michael Appelmans sends us a shot of the evening sky from Cleveland's Race at the Case Vice Presidential Debate. Must have been a lot of hot air, Michael, for the sky to be that colour ;-)
• Pixeltigris took this one, on the road again, going home, almost reaching Budapest (H).
• Anty (=Ananthakrishnan Narayanan), who is currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Auburn University, Alabama (USA) wrote re. the poetry anthology on my site, but I found this nice photo of a Berijam Lake View on his site, so we get to see India too :-)
• Finally, Cameron has added a sunset over Macclesfield, (Victoria, Australia) at his wife's parents' home, which is close to his place. Hey Cameron, the link seems to be broken!

Seven more syllables
Than ten. I can't blog more,
Lest this Haiku fail ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 7th October 2004 at 00:02 Central European Time permalink Email

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Yet more of the Skyline Meme . . .

Many blogreaders have taken a liking to the Skyline Meme which I started on Wednesday 22nd September. Just take a photo of your local skyline (preferably a panoramic view like the one above) , blog it, link to the Skyline Meme Permalink & mail me your permalink so that I can link back to it. I blogged links to all of your Skyline photos reported to me by Sept 22nd, also by Sept 26th, and by Sept 28th. However, I now have to go offline for a week; "We are but mortal, fortunate conglomerations of third generation stardust, only temporarily fighting Fate's Entropy". But still keep mailing me the links to your Skyline photos, I've temporarily set my spamfilter to put everything with the words Skyline meme in the subject line into a special mailfolder awaiting my restart after the week's hiatus.

In the mean time, so that you can check for readers' new Skyline Meme Links, I've sorted them forwards by date and moved them all together on a Skyline Meme page. I've also set a link to that page in the linkblock above my photo on the right sidebar where it's easy to find(?)

Photoblogger Cameron Stephen is helping out too, with an improved viewer interface to the Skyline Meme, so we've got another access path there. Thankyou for your PHP work, Cameron. However, most of the photobloggers coming his route are not linking back to the Skyline Meme. When you join the meme I expect you to put a link to the Skyline Meme page near your skyline photo, to spread the meme. Yes, I'm talking to you, Darieus, 'Exposing Myself', Joseph Holmes, Martin, Jonathan Day-Reiner, Arne, Rob, Brian, and Sara.

Robin Capper has now identified his photo as a view of Auckland City across the Harbour. Nic at Planarchy hasn't a skyline yet, but links us to the view from the Blogging point. Tudy shows us sunset contrails. Frank Paynter has added a Madison skyline. There is also a skyline of NYC from 1999 blogged by Sunghoon Cho. Pat Wilson took these pictures of the London(UK) skyline from the kitchen window back in May. Harriet (Buffy) has a neat little shot of her London(UK) street, but forgot to mail me, I found her by chance in Blue Witch's comments :-)

MsCantBWrong was! But now she's corrected her URL to this one. Gwen Harlow shows us Downtown Oakland, California(USA). Cameron has added a Skyline looking north-east towards Healsville, Victoria (presumably in Australia).

Eva Gordon (Dallas, TX, USA) has a nighttime shot of Dallas. And then there's Les Hall, also in Dallas (but acceptably far from Crawford), like me an ex-pat Scot (Les is from Aberdeen); Les has put up his Dallas skyline for our perusal too. @Les, the abuin 400 KB PDF document furthset bi the Ordnance Survey is shuir tae be o muckle interest tae onybody that's interestit in the Scots Language. Just tae hae it simpel, it's aye scrievit in English (fur thae Sassenachs).

Canadian friends are bravely fighting my ignorance : Junnie Arreza tells me that Mississauga is in Ontario, and Doug Alder tells me that "States are for Yanks, we have Provinces :-)". And since I obviously didn't know that, there's no use telling me which one he's in, so he tells me he's at Latitude: 49.07970 and Longitude: -117.80204 ; I'll reprogram that Crawford ICBM, Doug ;-) Doug is starting his own kitchen window meme.

Jasmin, also fighting my geo-ignorance, tells me SHE was the visitor from Singapore on Monday, and "the picture I submitted is indeed *THE* Skyline of the central business district in Singapore".

Riri is back from partying in New Orleans and has blogged a 360° view of Toronto, from the CN Tower Observation Deck. Her photo #1 kinda worries me even as a 30 year, 4000+ hour pilot, that little apartment-block tower looks really close to the approach path of the L-R runway, not sure I'd want to make THAT approach to minimums only on instruments and in sea-fog!

'Daisies' skyline is taken in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada "and as you can see, autumn has hit full force here which means the white stuff is just around the corner". Blogless Doris Ehrenstein (Talkeetna, Alaska, USA) mailed me a photo showing that they have the first snow already.

Sorry, Emese (Hungary) and the other holidaymakers, I'm not accepting vacation photos. I just want to see what it's like where other bloggers live, either the view from your house or within an arbitrary 33 kms (20 miles), OK? Please resubmit with local photos, as I mailed you all.

Best Skyline so far? Since I wanted panoramic views in particular, IMHO Josef Holmes has the best Skyline so far, a horizontally scrollable panoramic view of Brooklyn and Manhattan (New York, USA) taken from 1 Hanson Place (29th floor). Go, Joe!

Johannes, writing fron Vienna (Austria) about the maths proofs I suggested to young David last Sunday, says he was always bad at maths and wouldn't even know where to start even on the simple proof that sqrt(2) is not a fraction. OK, Johannes, I've put up a simple proof that sqrt(2) is not a fraction here. David, you and your classmates are not allowed to peek!

Johannes also asks if there is a simple book explaining the main ideas of modern mathematics. It has to be kept simple because he can't (even) do calculus, he writes. Yes, Johannes, I can recommend Foundations and Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics by Howard Eves. That'd be one for Anna Pashen in Australia, too. BTW: That's an Amazon.de link I gave you there, but Jürgen's review of the book is in English, OK? Anna complained about her incompetent old school too, Johannes. I must say that the school which Dr. Carl Rose and I went to was OK (mostly). Can you regular blogreaders guess what the "B.S, M.S, Ph.D" after Carl's and my names stand for? Teasers say it's "Bull Shit, More Shit, Piled Higher & Deeper" ;-)

Jane remembers enjoying reading "Goedel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid" and asks if I can recommend anything else similarly mentally stimulating. Yes, Jane, Doug Hofstadter wrote two other books which are almost as good. They are "The Mind's I", coauthored with Daniel Dennett and the second one is called "Metamagical Themas", both very absorbing books. BTW, did you notice that "Metamagical Themas" is an anagram of "Mathematical Games"? That's the sort of subtle thing one has to watch out for in Doug's books!

USA : The 1st US presidential debate completely underwhelmed me, but I think Kerry "won".

We're thinking particularly these days of our artist friend Maggie M.Roe, because she lives in Washington State (USA) on the olympic peninsula "By the shore of Gitcheegumee, by the shining big sea water" and we've been reading that Mt. St. Helens is getting ready to blow AGAIN. We hope not. Apropos Olympics, a neighbouring village in our Altenautal valley is proud to be home to Olympic gold-medallist Hubertus Schmidt (Athens, 2004). Congratulations again, HS!

posted by Stu Savory on 1st October 2004 at 09:11 Central European Time permalink Email

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