Eunoia
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--> Most recent Blog Comments Policy Impressum Maths trivia Search this site RSS Feed Eunoia, who is a grumpy, overeducated, facetious, multilingual ex-pat Scot, blatantly opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist, computer consultant, atheist, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Beetle-driver, textbook-writer, long-distance biker, geocacher and blogger 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 Faith does not give answers, it only prevents you doing any goddamn questioning. You are as atheist as he is. When you understand why you don't believe in all the other gods, you will know why he does not believe in yours :-) Oh, and he also has a neat English Bulldog called 'Kosmo'.
Some of my bikes
My Crypto Pages
My Maths Pages
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Monday, April 30, 2018
Gauss @ 241Today is the 241st birthday anniversary of the famous German mathematician Gauss, so Google has done a doodle in his memory.Left to right, the segments represent 1) his profile, 2) (top) his contributions to astronomy, 3) (bottom) the 17 sided polygon he wanted on his gravestone (but they didn't know how to carve one although Gauss had come up with a trigonometrical construction method), 4) three different Gaussian (=normal) probability distibutions, 5) a theodolite as used when he mapped the country, 6) three bars representing the symbol for congruance which he introduced in 1801. Back when Germany's currency was the Deutschmark, we had a 10 DM note dedicated to his memory :- The front side shows Göttingen university building with the astronomical observatory behind it. Superimposed on this is a sketch of the normal distribution. On the right is Gauss in 1840 as portrayed by A.Jensen (but they flipped the image). The other side of the note shows a sextant (actually a viceheliotrope) which he used to survey the Kingdom of Hannover by triangulation 1820-1844 as shown in the bottom right. The concentric rings behind the sextant represent his work on magnetic fields and the faint elliptical lines represent his astronomical work, e.g. calculating the orbit of Ceres in 1801. Educate people by putting science on the currency! Way to go! Sunday, April 22, 2018
Find the page :-)So someone had removed a sheet (=double sided page) from a paperback book. The sum of the remaining page numbers was 15,000.So which pages had been removed? I'll give you a Comments (4) Tuesday, April 17, 2018
Making up ;-)Mr. Alexander Vladimirovich Yakovenko, who is the Russian ambassador in the UK has an excellent command of idiomatic English. Recently he decided to try to defuse the situation with the ex-double agent Sergei V. Skripal and his daughter, Yulia. He decided not to reference the recent bone of contention. He invited them to dinner at the redbrick Porton Hotel, which is the only hotel in Porton Down. It has two bars and a restaurant. So he kicked off with pre-dinner drinks in the saloon bar, asking "So, what's your poison?" ;-)Comments (2) Friday, April 13, 2018
Friday 13thSo what gives Friday 13th its paraskevidekatriaphobic reputation in Europe ?1307, November : Philip IV of France arrested hundreds of the Knights Templar. 1869, November : Rossini died. 1873, May : Austro-Hungarian empire, 120 firms all go bankrupt on the same day. 1927, May : Berlin stock exchange crashes. 1928, April : Loose, Köhl and Von Hünefeld make the first transatlantic flight east to west from Ireland to Greenly Bay in 36½ hours in a Junkers W33 :-) 1956, April. Vienna stock exchange building burns down. 1962, April : in Hamburg the Star Club opens, opening band is The Beatles :-) 1972, October : An IL62 crashes at Moscow airport, killing 174. On the same day a plane of the Uraguay air force crashes with 45 on board in the wilderness , 16 survivors. Survival of the 16 only possible by corpse-cannibalism :-( 2012, January : Cruise liner Costa Concordia rams a coastal reef killing 32. Captain Francesco Schettino jumps ship, doesn't stay on board till last :-( And I'm sure there are lots more I've missed... Monday, April 9, 2018
Bomb's away! :-)Good news first : the big bomb which caused the mass evacuation of Paderborn (26,307 people) was defused successfully at 17:02 yesterday afternoon, so now things are getting back to normal :-)
Logbook : The fuses were date-stamped 1944. The bomb will now be driven to the secret disposal area, the TNT washed out into small containers which are then dried and burned. Usually the casing is cut up for scrap, but maybe Paderborn will keep it whole for a museum display? The only thing that went wrong was that the town's information server went offline (crash due to overload?) because there were so many people accessing it from 16:00 onwards to see if the danger zone had been reopened yet. I had expected to read of break-ins, burglaries and thieving in the danger-zone, but the police presence was so heavy, the local paper hasn't reported any. Comments (2) Thursday, April 5, 2018
Evacuation neededJust before easter, a Paderborn X family (whom I have anonymised so they don't get hounded by reporters) were excavating in their back garden, presumably to install a cistern or an oil tank or similar, when they came across a long metal cylinder (about 10 feet by 2½ feet in diameter) which they thought was an old oil tank and decided to remove it before proceeding with their own installation. Half way through the excavation they noticed the presumed old oil tank had no inlet/outlet pipes attached! Then the penny dropped. What they had found was an old WW2 bomb :-( Stop work and back away rapidly!Inspection by the local bomb disposal squad confirmed the suspicion, an unexploded 1.8 ton WW2 Brit bomb with 3 rusting fuses :-( Rule of thumb for bomb disposal is to evacuate an area with a radius of 1 meter per kilo of explosive, so that's 1.6 kilometers (a mile), before attempting to defuse the bomb. The bomb is in the city of Paderborn, just south of the centre. So that means that 26,307 people have to be evacuated! The area includes four hospitals, five old-folks homes, a hospice, the complete university campus, a major shopping mall and the student quarters. Traffic on the trunk road B64, the railway line and in the airspace above the city will need to be diverted. So planning this evacuation has taken a week. All incoming roads will be blocked off sunday morning at 8am, the area should be completely evacuated by noon. Then the brave man, dressed in his heavy kevlar layers (as if that would help him if 1.6 TONS go off next to him), will carefully attempt to remove the 3 rusty old fuses. If all goes well, and it usually does because the bomb-disposal squad are real professionals, he should have the 3 fuses removed sometime during the afternoon, whereupon a special crane can load the defused bomb onto a truck for transportation that evening to the place where the bomb can be dissembled/sawn up. Then the all clear can be sounded and 26,307 people can return to their homes, patients returned to the hospitals, and normal operations(sic!) can be resumed. I've mailed old friends who live in the evacuation area to offer them to come visit us sunday afternoon until the all-clear is sounded, because we live over a dozen miles from the evacuation area. Next blog-post (monday?) will tell you how it went :-) Comments(2) Easter Monday, April 2, 2018
Manifestations of god(s)Today is a suitable day to write about the manifestations of god(s), or, to give it its proper name, pareidolia.People's brains lead them to see (imaginary) things in unusual places. Diana Duyser claims she made a piece of toast that looks like the Virgin Mary and even sold it to a casino for $28,000 ! I wonder how she (or anyone else) knows what the virgin mary looked like. It looks more like Greta Garbo to me. Nowadays, of course, you can buy toasters to print selected images, or even photos which you upload to the toaster yourselves! #MePareidolia ;-) In a more unusual piece of pareidolia, someone else claims to see Jesus on his dog's backside, not just on the road to Emmaus ;-) But(t) is it just Christianity that is pareidolic? At least, since Islam prohibits(?) making likenesses of Allah and Mohammed, we don't get any pareidolic images from that religion. However I may have found one from Hindi myself ;-) This is a photo of the base of the General Sherman tree in the Sequoia National Park (USA), the world's largest tree by trunk volume. Look to the left of the hole in the trunk and you might see the head of Ganesha, the Hindi elephant god. Trunk, tusk bases, eyes, ears, crown. If you need help, I've annotated the photo, below.
So how about that? Ganesha in the world's largest tree :-)
If you have any good examples of pareidolia, mail me a link or a photo as a comment please.
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Recent Writings
Gauss @ 241 Find the page :-) Making up ;-) Friday 13th Bomb's away! :-) Evacuation needed Manifestations of god(s) Mondrianesque Bulldog Norwegian Bliss Stone Age Megaliths Bad Signs... ;-) RIP Ralf Waldmann Peak Flu ? Indoor MC Trial Where's Waldo? Timetravellers' vocab. Calculated Nostalgia Ignorant advertising :-( The Berlin Wall Starship Two Burns Supper Flop Folkstone's Funicular Hurricane Frederika What Norwegian... Blogroll Ain Bulldog Blog Badtux... Balloon Juice Cop Car Curmudgeonly... Earth-Bound Misfit Fail Blog Finding life hard? Mockpaperscissors Mostly Cajun Not Always Right Observing Hermann On her Bike Pergelator Rants from t'Rookery Reading in Reykjavík Starts with a Bang Yellowdog Grannie Archive 2018: Jan Feb Mar Archive 2017: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2016: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2015: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2014: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec This blog is getting really unmanagable, so I've taken the first 12 years' archives offline. My blog, my random decision. Tough shit; YOLO. Link Disclaimer ENGLISH : I am not responsible for the contents or form of any external page to which this website links. I specifically do not adopt their content, nor do I make it mine. DEUTSCH : Für alle Seiten, die auf dieser Website verlinkt sind, möchte ich betonen, dass ich keinerlei Einfluss auf deren Gestaltung und Inhalte habe. Deshalb distanziere ich mich ausdrücklich von allen Inhalten aller gelinkten Seiten und mache mir ihren Inhalt nicht zu eigen. This Blog's Status is Blog Dewey Decimal Classification : 153 FWIW, 153 is a triangular number, meaning that you can arrange 153 items into an equilateral triangle (with 17 items on a side). It is also one of the six known truncated triangular numbers, because 1 and 15 are triangular numbers as well. It is a hexagonal number, meaning that you can distribute 153 points evenly at the corners and along the sides of a hexagon. It is the smallest 3-narcissistic number. This means it’s the sum of the cubes of its digits. It is the sum of the first five positive factorials. Yup, this is a 153-type blog. QED ;-) Books I have written
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