|
Stu Savory's Blog
An auld Scot blogging frae Germany | |
|
| |
|
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
More Skylines . . .
Many blogreaders have taken a liking to the Skyline Meme which I started last Wednesday. Just take a photo of your local skyline, blog it, link to the Skyline Meme Permalink & mail me your permalink so that I can link back to it here. I'm no photographer, just a lowly wordsmith who puts the occasional snapshot in his blog (usual over in the right sidebar someplace), but some blogreaders are so-called Photobloggers (a scene new to me) who blog high quality photos rather than words. Their photos are of course just superb compared to my snapshots so please click their links and enjoy a pleasant surprise. On Sunday I listed those skyliners who had mailed me up until noon. But within the last 36 hours several more of you have joined the Skyline Meme as I list below:-
People want more. Mandarin Meg suggests "the Skyline project rocks big time. But, we each posted ONE skyline. ONE direction. How about an North, South, East and West skyline view?" It would be nice if those four blogreaders coming yesterday from exotic (to me) locations, namely Singapore, Japan, Uraguay and Uzbekistan would join the Skyline Meme please :-) With my skyline shown at the top, I'm cheating a bit, because it was only our skyline view for a week this year while we were on vacation in the Austrian Alps. The ~8000 foot mountain is called the Dachstein, the high plateau (where our holiday hut was) is ~3000 feet up. But really I wanted to see only your local skylines in this Skyline meme please, no tourist stuff. Sunday, September 26, 2004
First Fall FeedbackYour Feedback this week : Summer is gone and Red Zora reminds us with a beautiful photo that autumn begins with the fall of the first leaf. Indeed in the US, Autumn is called Fall.
Ever more people are joining my "Show us your Skyline" meme, which I started on Wednesday September 22nd. For those wanting to join in, just take a photo of your local skyline, blog it and mail me your permalink so that I can link to your photo. I would like YOU to link to the Skyline meme, the Skyline meme permalink is "http://www.savory.de/blog_sep_04.htm#20040922"; if however, you link to "http://www.savory.de/blog.htm" (=this blog) instead, your readers see the most recent entry rather than the Skyline meme. Link rot in the long term :-( Originally, I'd thought just to point the digicams out of the window, but you folks are getting much more imaginative and creative than I am, with some really great shots. I see that Susan of
Easy Bake Coven joined
the Skyline meme first. I especially liked the way she shot her
city nestling in its valley, so I just now climbed up the hill and
took one of our village Henglarn nestling
in its valley too; pop 600, elev 800, 1 church, 1 shop, 1 pub.
David (from Scotland) wrote to me saying his school class tried out my divisibility rules. Pairs of (mutually self-checking) children each learned one rule. The teacher would write a number < 2500 on the blackboard and the class would test in parallel to see if the number was prime. David is 12 going on 13 he writes. They are just learning about mathematical proofs. David asks me "What are the easiest and hardest maths proofs YOU know?" Well David, before I answer your question, there is some bad news. There are some mathematical things that cannot be proven nor can they be disproven. A man called Kurt Goedel proved this for us back in the early part of the last century. As you move into your teens, you may enjoy a book called "Goedel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid" written by Doug Hofstaedter a quarter century ago (Doug is 59, about my age). Doug won the Pulitzer prize for this book in 1980. It will open your eyes to a lot of interesting things in the worlds of art, music, and history, not just mathematics, and show you how they all tie in together. And it will lead you on gently to understand Goedel's proof. A tip for adults as well. Now back to your question : "What are the easiest and hardest proofs YOU know?" The easiest proof is probably the proof that the square root of two cannot be represented as a fraction (that is called being irrational and has nothing to do with being mad, although it nearly drove the Pythagorians mad). In fact, at 12 & 13 you and your classmates should be able to prove that. The hardest proof for me was the proof that the product of two consecutive integers can never be a power >=2. That was finally proved by the very eccentric Paul Erdoes and John Selfridge in July 1975 (see the Illinois Journal of Mathematics, Vol 19, No 2). Mind you, there are other proofs much more complex than this one, but I don't understand them. For example, Wiles proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, which runs to over 1000 pages. There are probably only half a dozen people in the world who understand that, it's way over my head! Blue Witch says that she too uses dictation SW for her blog. Another Dragon fan! Anna Pashen (Queen Strumpet) thanks me for pointing her to Mandarin Design, so you have another fan now, Meg :-) Every friday, Atrios does cat-blogging; this time it's political. So a dog-loving friend in the USA sent me this poster , suggesting that our canines get political too. Saturday, September 25, 2004
Many happy returns, today (or thereabout)
Happy birthday, Sarah nee´ Aylward and Irene nee´ Wimmer! Afraid I've misplaced both of your addresses, so this blog birthday greeting is in lieu of a card this year. Ooops. I must be getting old, to forget that. Sorry. Main thing though is that you are not forgotten :-) Today is also the birthday of my belgian E-friend Reinhilde Zelck and on the upcoming Tuesday it will be Taran Rampersad's birthday too. Taran is now the new editor of the Linux Gazette. More people are joining my "Show us your Skyline" meme, I've linked to those I've heard from (in the Addendum to the original post, below). Thankyou, all of you. We see a beautiful world. Wednesday, September 22, 2004
Show us your skyline : a new blog meme
Just yesterday I had a first-time blog visit from a reader via the Maricopa County (Arizona, USA) domain maricopa.gov. Welcome, welcome. That website has a beautiful skyline displayed in its header. It gave me the idea that we could start a new blog meme, showing each other our respective skylines. If you think the view out front is not so great, you can show us the back yard view instead if you prefer. Let's all join in and share our area's skylines; I know that several of you live in really beautiful places (specifically : Doug Alder, Joel Sax, Frank Paynter, Yule Heibel to name but four). Just grab that digicam & snap away. Alternatively, if you have to walk/drive a little way to get to your favourite view, just tell us that it's nearby, but show us anyway. This Earth is a beautiful place; share your view please. Addendum/Feedback so far: If and when you blog your own skyline,
drop me an Email
so that I can link to you HERE. I see that Susan of
Easy Bake Coven joined the
meme first :-)
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
Disturbing trends towards neo-fascism :-(Oh, Oh, Oh. A trend I definitely dislike. As you may know, Germany here is a federal country having 16 states. Two of these, Brandenburg and Saxony - both in former East Germany - had state elections on sunday and displayed a sad trend towards extremism. The remaining state inhabitants (over 1 million have moved out in the last decade, looking for work) are disgruntled with the federal government's capping of social security handouts. Many who usually voted socialist (SPD) now voted neo-communist (PDS) on sunday. Worse yet, many who usually voted christian conservative (CDU) now voted neo-fascist (NPD and DVU) on sunday, a dangerous trend indeed and likely to pull their state economies down even further by discouraging new investors. Voter turnout, by the way, was an unchanged low 55%; however the extreme wings took 30% of the vote between them. Unpleasant indeed!The BBC News website has an english language summary report on this situation. They also have an analysis of the discontented voting from a UK point of view. On the coming sunday we have town and county elections here in our state of NRW (North-Rhein-Westphalia) and we'll see what happens here. I don't expect a 10% slide down into neo-fascism here as we saw in Saxony. BTW, our voting is done via traditional paper slips in urns, local totals counted and reported locally, and is so much less liable to manipulation than the 3rd world banana republic situation with the easily manipulated US voting system. The US drift toward fascism under the Bush Junta in the USA is much more dangerous on a worldwide level, which is why I am often seen Bushwhacking to get Kerry in the white house. Television (CNN) showed Kerry's NYU speech yesterday. Good one, showing W's failures up! 
Monday, September 20, 2004
Using pencil and paper for problem-solvingBeen talking with cyber-friends a lot about problem-solving lately. Problem-solving is done in your head, but pencil and paper are good aids to thinking. I have friends and relations who are teachers and have taught others myself (as a university lecturer and as a flying instructor). We've discussed what we tell children about when to use pencil and paper rather than keeping solution-steps in your head. Here is the consensus:-
Similarly, algebra or calculus are not easily represented in HTML. Meg and I have discussed this in the past and deplored it. I usually end up writing the algebra or calculus with another tool and then including a screen-capture .gif in the HTML. Again, one needs to label intermediate results to be able to refer to them. And in the case of archived documents (such as this blog) one needs to think about the scope of the names/labels being used. I remember what a hassle I had until I even got permalinks to work in this blog! To sum up, there are a number of different knowledge representations available, bright people have a veritable armoury thereof, which they use daily. External storage (paper and pencil, computer networks) can be used sensibly to communicate ideas. The cybersphere does not yet have adequate interchange standards for non-text knowledge representations. Blobs - Binary Large OBjects - such as .gif, .wav or .mov are not an adequate solution. PS: If you want to know if you just think that you think, or really do, try the Mensa Workout. PPS: Congratulations, Taran, on your new job as Editor of the Linux Gazette! Friday, September 17, 2004
Lighten up, man!Several people found yesterday's blogpost and its associated links pretty heavy going, they wrote. So here are some lighter recent contributions from you blogreaders.Klaus, from Talkeetna, Alaska, sent his photo of Alaskan mailbox humour. Olaf, from Attendorn, Germany, sent a photo of his new living-room fireplace (but our bulldog Wilma would have preferred the window view I think ;-) Jane, of London (UK), wants to see more of my Bushwhacking political posts. Andy, a retired Telecom person from the UK (where the emergency telephone number is 999) asks which BT cretin installed THIS public phone? Flowers for Algernon indeed. Sarah (address unknown) liked my August 18 article about the history of keyboards and sent me feedback about a newfangled virtual keyboard. Finally, I'm wishing a happy birthday today to Doug and tomorrow to Riri (our champion charity walker). Live long and healthy! Welcome too, to Anna Pashen (Brisbane, AUS). And to the people visiting from the Department of Defense Educational Activities, I C U. Thursday, September 16, 2004
Further mathematical notesOne of my popular web pages showed how to test for divisibility by numbers up to 20. There have been several Emails asking me to extend this range, and so I have just added to that page so that it now gives a complete set of divisibility tests for primes below 50. A higher limit is possible, but not pragmatic, for reasons stated there. Despite the fact that most of the visitors came from .edu sites, they did not seem to be able to do the algebra needed to arrive at the general solution and so I have added the latter at the bottom of that page. O tempora, O mores or 'Flowers for Algernon' or were they just being lazy?Another blogreader had looked at my list of famous mathematicians and asks cautiously why it includes Albrecht Duerer (1471-1528) whom he had thought of only as an artist. Duerer had an excellent grasp of perspective and used geometrical techniques with ropes and poles to get the perspectives proportionally correct in his pictures. If you look closely at e.g his picture of Melancholia you will see that the young lady is probably sad because the 'regular' solid in the background has the wrong perspectives and so is not quite the 'regular' solid the viewer expects to see. A wry artist/mathematician joke perhaps. In the same picture, the wall-square between the lady's head and the bell is a magic square (horizontals, verticals and diagonals each sum to 34), again showing his grasp of mathematics. Here is the current table of contents of my mathematical blog entries. Monday, September 13, 2004
Fed up with Smileys, smartass?I just found this brill Orkut posting by a young lass, Philippa Tasker from Auckland (NZ). Philippa doesn't appear to have a blog or website, but I found the idea so neat, I've taken the liberty of giving her idea additional publicity. Philippa is fed up with regular Smileys and applies the ASCII-art idea to the other end of the body, viz:-
Fans of such bum humour might want to buy a Flatulence Filter Seat Cushion by GasBGon too. Or if that isn't silly enough for you, try John Cleese' website. Sunday, September 12, 2004
Anybody making Oktoberfest plans?
If any of you blogreaders are planning on coming to the Oktoberfest in
Munich (Bavaria) this year, remember that it is held in September,
despite being called the Oktoberfest. The official 'Anstich' (i.e.
breaching of the first beer barrel) is on the dot of noon in the
Schottenhammel beer tent on Saturday 18th September.
The Oktoberfest then runs on until 3rd october.
There will be the usual dozen or so huge beer tents, seating 7000 drunks each, and the fairground rides etc outside. The litre (=2 pints) glass of beer - served by low-necklined waitresses (see photo left) - is to cost just over €7 this year - be warned, it is considerably stronger than american beer. See you there maybe? The coming weekend is also
Doug Alder's
birthday, and - same weekend -
Riri's birthday too.
So let me congratulate both well in
advance, as I may be too tipsy to remember then ;-) Thursday, September 9, 2004
Lightweight political linksBlogreader Petra thinks that my saturday opinion Absolute Zero was too polemical, and asks me to tread more lightly, especially on 911. OK lass, here are 7 other political opinions :-
Blogreader Bob Fairnie (frae Scotland) hae scrievit : "The new Scots pairlament haes a new wabsteid tae gaun wi its new biggin at Holyrood. Hae a keek at it on an in the languages neuk (tap, left) click on Scots. A bate ye'll be as dumfoonert as A wis." Wednesday, September 8, 2004
In the beginning was the word...Last month - specifically on 18th August - I blogged an article called Write on the speed limit about the history of keyboards. Two schools have written to me in the intervening fortnight - a UK primary school and a US high school - with further questions I'll try to answer today.The US students asked : We liked the tablets photo (and the Moses pun), but would like to know when man invented the very first writing, and where? The oldest document that I know of was found in Uruk, a small town in southern Mespotamia (nowadays Iraq) and is a clay tablet dating from around 4000 B.C. This and other tablets using the same lost language used ideograms (picture-symbols), about 900 symbols are known. Cuneiform was used 3500 BC to 500 BC. For comparison, egyptian heiroglyphics date from Menes (the first pharaoh) 3500 BC too; these soon moved from depicting specific objects to depicting phonemes/syllables and thus becoming combinable to 'build' new words for which there was no picture. In China, Cang Jie - living about 2500 BC - standardised the symbols used partly even today in chinese, korean and japanese. The first alphabet - of 30 letters (consonants only) - is due to the Semites (~Arabs & Jews) about 1700 BC. Hebrew still has only consonants, you (the reader) added the vowels to make things pronouncable (=prnncbl?). This is probably the reason why only the high priest can pronounce the 42-letter name of JHWH ? The greeks in 800 BC used just 22 of those 30, as did the romans (latin, 700 BC). German runes appeared in 300 BC. The first shorthand appeared about 450 BC in China, the first writing for the blind is attributed to Valentin Hauy (1793 AD in Paris). Louis Braille was a student in Hauy's school and came up with Braille in 1835, AFAIK. Now, kids, I'm not a linguist or historian, so you might want to consult an encyclopaedia, but that summarises what I know about ancient writing systems. The UK primary schoolchildren are learning to send SMS text-messages on their mobile phones whilst learning to spell. They are having speed competitions to see who can send text messages fastest without making any spelling mistakes, they tell me. And they want to know What is the fastest you can send texts? (I'll assume you don't mean just me ;-) As it happens, there has just recently been a world SMS speed record attempt. The trial sentence to be thumbed in (without any errors) was :- "The razor-toothed piranhas of the genera Serasalmus and Pygocentrus are the most ferocious freshwater fish in the world. In reality they seldom attack a human."The winner was Kimberly Yeo, a young girl from Singapore, who thumbed it in only 43.24 seconds. When I tried, I needed 4 tries to get it right, the correct thumb-in taking me 72 seconds. There was an article in Sky News about it, here is the appropriate Sky News link.
Mandarin Meg liked the
antique calculator photos I put up last sunday but misses the
rotary calculator. I assumed you mean the neat Curta calculator, Michelle,
the one that looks like a crossbreed between a pencil-sharpener and a
hand coffee-grinder. Follow the link for more info on the
Curta calculator, they
have an excellent description and lots of neat photos. In Memoriam : Frank Sanache, last living code-talker, died a fortnight ago, aged 86. R.I.P. Sunday, September 5, 2004
Some Calculating RemarksOver 10% of the hits to this blog are to the ever-popular Sieve of Eratosthenes, a quilt of prime numbers. So maths must actually be popular! Indeed, several of you have written asking for more of the easily digestible maths stuff, and both Pietr and Jane have suggested that I collect the maths posts in one place, because they have been hard to find until now.So I have written some new, short, and easily digested mathematical mini-articles, including
An approximate history of PI and a list of
the top 100 famous mathematicians
(test how many thereof you know). Here is the
table of contents of the mathematical articles.
Pietr (Moscow) also asked last month for photos of historical calculators. Here are four :- 
These four machines are reconstructions of original designs and are to be found in the world's largest computer museum, the HNF, here in Paderborn (Germany). Upper left :
Schickard's calculating mechanism, 1623 AD,
four functions, made of wood. Upper right :
Leibniz' calculator, 1672 AD, four functions(+,-,*,/),
made mostly of brass. Lower left : One of
Leupold's calculator designs, 1727 AD, four functions, brass and ivory. lower right : Hollerith's census tabulator, 1890 AD, electrical punched-card reader. Further antiquarian elucidation can be found on the History of Computing Project timeline. Saturday, September 4, 2004
Absolute Zero Absolute zero? It's the warmth of
compassionate human feelings generated at the NY Republican National
(-Socialist?) Convention.
Absolute zero? It's a count of the coffins of those dead soldiers returned home that the freedom-(of speech)-loving Bush/Cheney administration has permitted to be photographed (see left). There are so many US dead that they are recycling the flags now. Absolute zero? It's the number of memorial services for the returned dead that their Commander-in-Chief A.W.O.L Bush has attended since the beginning of the Iraq war. Absolute zero? It's the combined count of days that pResident A.W.O.L Bush, pResident-of-vice Cheney the Dick, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul I've gotta spy Wolfowitz, Richard prince-of-darkness Perle, and Karl Rove served in combat. The six-pack of cowards. The RNC is over. Now it's time to recycle their trash. Wednesday, September 1, 2004
Moving On : Can you believe your eyes?
My Sacramento eFriend Meg, she of Mandarin Design, always makes a special effort to blog HTML code which looks the same in all browsers, at all screen resolutions and all picture sizes. An honourable aim, but is it achievable? Look closely at this, folks. People viewing this picture will see different things, even if they are using the same browser, even if they have the same screen resolution, even if they are looking at the same screen! No, it's not an animated GIF, with which people looking at the same screen would see the same thing. This is just a plain JPG. But what you see is subjective. It is FYEO - for your eyes only - and depends on which part of the screen you are looking at and which point you were focussing on prior to that. Only if you move far enough away or reduce the size of the JPG image so that you can encompass it all without moving your eyes, will the picture appear static. A camera does not help you, because you still need a person to look at the picture which the camera took, which will be no different from this one which I posted. Deep remark : This is a political parable today. Unless focussed, you can see no detail, and, what you see depends on what your (political) point of view is! I see Bush defeated in 2004! 
One of the things that may be moving when if are not actually looking at it continuously, is the upcoming US election result. Indeed, it enrages me to the point of speechlessness that Diebold have a backdoor into the vote tabulator system which sums up all the reported results! They don't need to rely on hacking their 4,500 audit-trail-less touchscreen voting machines. Diebold - or anyone knowing a 2-character password and the IP or dialup number of the vote tabulator system - can access it from a PC anywhere in the world and change the election results. Diebold have put a second set of books into the MS Access database used for the vote tabulation. This makes me physically sick! If I were John Kerry, I would be up in arms and shouting this out for the world to see this latent Republican vote-cheating! More details at Black Box Voting, go read all 5 pages there and become apoplectic as I did! |
 RSS Feed
Who is this Ilunga ?  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. ;) 30 Quality Blogs American Samizdat Betsy Devine Brian Moffatt Carpetbagger Doug Alder Easy Bake Coven Elaine Kalilily Frank Paynter Irregular Times Jeneane Sessum Joel Sax La Vache Qui Lit Making Light Mandarin Design Mercurial Mike Golby Old fash. patriot Orcinus Pen-Elayne People's Republic of Seabrook Rude Pundit Secular Blasphemy Sherri Stephen Downes Susan's Hindsight The Left Coaster U.C.C.U Uninstalled Vajra Chandrasekera Yule Heibel Recent Photos
|
| Index/Home | Impressum | Sitemap | Search site/www |  |