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About
Stu Savory School report for Stu Savory
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 bitch 'Frieda'.

And her big son 'Kosmo'.


Some of my bikes


My Crypto Pages


My Maths Pages

Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Racing in the USA ;-)

Using a new AI SW to be announced on April 1st, oogle tested telepathic streaming online during the Daytona 500 last weekend. The secret test saw them capture the thoughtstream of one of the drivers. Here is a short excerpt : it went like this :-

Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!
Turn left!

This can be improved upon by using a notation common to musical scores...

Turn left! (Da capo).

The current US administration liked this idea and is adapting it for their own nefarious use, thus neatly sidestepping their problem with the media, by transmitting the thoughtstream directly into voters' brains :-

Turn right! (Capo de tutti capi)

Comments (2)
Peter (UK) wrote "Interesting that by implication Daytona is an anticlockwise circuit. Nearly all F1 circuits are clockwise so obviously sponsored by the Conservative Party! I will try the book." Modern racing motorcycles have tyres with softer flanks on the inside of the track's net direction.
Cop Car (USA) wrote "Racing in the USA ;-) Loved it!" Thanks :-)


Tuesday, February 14, 2017

Sigmund Jahn turned 80

Sigmund Jahn was (East) Germany's first cosmonaut.

Back in the mid 70s Russia started a politically motivated space program (Interkosmos) carrying passengers from other socialist states for a week's stay on their space station MIR. On 25 November 1976, Jähn and his backup Eberhard Köllner (both DDR fighter pilots) were selected for the Interkosmos program. To avoid them being mere political freight, they were given 2 years training and performed useful research work (remote sensing of the earth, medicine, biology, materials science, and geophysics etc) during the week's stay. He was chosen because he was fitter than Köllner, afaik.

Back in 2015, Frank and I stopped off at the German space museum in Morgenröthe-Rautenkranz, the village where Jahn grew up. We saw the supersonic MIG he flew for the East German air force outside and inside inter alia walked through the 1:1 mock-up of the MIR space station. Informative fun.

This week, he turned 80. Congratulations, Sigmund!


Saturday, February 11, 2017

Book Tip for Geeks :-)

As a physics geek, I particularly enjoy reading books about the history of science : seeing how things were predicted, discovered and how progress was made.

David Salsburg's book "The lady tasting tea" covers the progress made in the field of statistics over the last 100 years. Academic jealousies tried to bury progress made by others, but thorough experiments led to newer and more powerful techniques.

There are NO mathematical formulae, nor any graphs, so the book is accessible to the layperson too. Mind you, some slight encounter with Fisher's Z, Student's t, Pearson's R, and the works of Bayes etc will be of some benefit (and the author assumes this background, imho).

Some will ask "Whence that strange title?" Back in 1920, R.A.Fischer and a number of other dons (Professors) were taking afternoon tea in a Cambridge (UK) university garden. A lady claimed she could tell the difference between milk-first and tea-first cups of tea. Most scientists there pooh-poohed this claim, but Fisher experimented on her, other dons making 20 cups of tea, half milk-before-tea and the other half with the milk added after the tea had been poured into the cup. Fisher did a blind test, and sure enough, "The lady tasting tea" got all 20 samples right. This led to the formulation of Fisher's Z for investigation the likelyhood of getting such results by chance.

The ISBN number is 978-0-8050-7134-4, list price is USD 19.99, paperback, 340 pages.

Comments (2)
Cop Car (USA) wrote " What an interesting tail about the tea tasting test. Another case of vector algebra." Good pun there (tail/tale)! Nice!
Oliver (D) opined "What are the chances of me reading that? One in a million!" Ah, but according to Terry Pratchett, one-in-a-million chances ALWAYS happen ;-)


Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Making Murrika grate again :-(

A fter the first 2½ weaks (sic!) of the Senile Carroty-Red's reign (sick!) as SCROTUS, let's take a look at the media here and in the US.

The photo on the left shows typical US humour, low key, but referencing his puppet relationship with Putin. The cap's logo is in russian and reads "Making america great again" (for those of you who can't read russian). The photo on the right is the cover of this week's german political magazine "Der Spiegel" and is much more savage : it shows him decapitating (ISIS style) Lady Liberty with his bungled no-muslim-entry ban.

A myriad other cartoons are in the spectrum between these two.

Despite all the media overhype, you have to give the man credit for one thing at least: delivering on one election promise after another. More than most other politicians ever even tried! Yes, he's bungled one after the other, but what do you expect, after all it's the SCROTUS we're talking about!

There is some talk of impeachment. But then you'd have a presnit Pence ! And even if you impeached him too, the turd-in-line would be even worse!

Oh lawdy, lawdy! Four years of this, and hoping Murrika learns its lesson :-(


Recent Writings
Racing in the USA ;-)
Sigmund Jahn turned 80
Book Tip for Geeks :-)
Making Murrika grate...
I'm gutted, again :-(
Too many !!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm gutted :-)
..., One Cup
Fake News
Better Photos
Cold Snaps
Romani ite domum!
Mr. Goldenballs
F1 poor Loser
Meal of the Year
Term Limits?
Nailed it!
Supermoon
OMFG, USA, WTF?
The Trolley problem
Fall arrives
Horror Weekend :-(
Times are a'changing
Plans for Tronald Dump
Hitler's birthplace.
Donald's Desire
Clinton vs Trump #2

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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 ;-)
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