Eunoia : Stu Savory's Blog - July 2024

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Nav Tools --> Most recent Blog Comments are OFF, so send any via Email to :- Comments Policy DSGVO Impressum Maths trivia Search this site RSS Feed About Eunoia, who is a grumpy, overeducated, facetious, multilingual naturalised German, blatantly opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist, computer consultant, atheist, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Porsche-driver, textbook-writer 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 after the death of his old bulldog, Kosmo, he also has a new bulldog, Clara, since September 2018 :-) Some of my bikes My Crypto Pages	Sunday, July 28, 2024 Submarine road trip U-17 is a German Navy cold war U-boat which will be preserved as a museum ship at the Technik Museum Sinsheim. So this was her last tour; by road already , from Speyer to Sinsheim, so about 30 miles as the crow flies; more as the sub gets rolled. She was laid down in 1970, launched two years later, commissioned in 1973 and decommisioned in 2010. Then she was sold to the technical museum in Speyer (where I first saw her) for display to the taxpayer who could see where their money went. After her trip up the river Rhine, she rusted in the open air in Speyer, as shown below. She is a type 206 cold war diesel-electric ship, designed to operate in the shallow waters of the Baltic, defending against any soviet ships. There were 18 built, this one bears the (pennant) number S196 on her sail. This week she is being moved further inland to the sister museum in Sinsheim, to be her final resting place. After shipping her, 350 tons and 150 feet long, on a raft on Rhine and Neckar rivers, she was put on a huge low-loader for the road part of the trip. They even closed the autobahn one night for her, reversing down a bit of the autobahn, before she proceeded via bridgeless back roads and squeezed through villages at walking pace. You may never get the chance to see something like this again - a bucket list item - she arrives at her destination at 2 pm CEST today. At least go watch the videos of each stage of the move which the museum has put online here. The text on the web pages are in German only, but the videos are worth watching. If you prefer to see some Kriegsmarine (WW2) U-boat movies, I would point you to the video in English by rock band Sabaton, from the Wolfpack movie. FWIW, Germany now has just six active hunter/killer submarines afaik. Back on 2016 I blogged about a trip through HMS Alliance, a post WW2 sub on display in Portsmouth UK, read my blog here for a comparison. Comments (2) Anon asks how big that low-loader is. Afaik it has 30 axles and 240 wheels. I did not count myself, just asked. Carol (UK) asks "Are those windows at the front?" No. Subs do not have windows. Those are the doors over the torpedo tubes maintaining the streamline form of the hull when not in attack mode. U17 has no backward facing torpedo tubes, unlike HMS Alliance, which could thus attack any other sub following her. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 28, 2024 permalink Comments Email Monday, July 22, 2024 Try a foreign crossword Let us do a little experiment. See how long you take to do a crossword in a language you do not perhaps even know. This is a simple kind of crossword used in Germany. It has no cryptic clues as in UK crosswords. In fact all the (German) words used in it are listed below the crossword, indexed by their length. You do NOT need a dictionary and do not need to know what the words mean. Just use logic to fill in each word in the correct position. One word is given, just to get you started. When done, send me a mail (to mail@savory.de) telling me how long it took you. Hint, it takes me, a German, about 3 to 5 minutes. You can print it out if you dislike scrolling, it should fit on a single sheet of A4 paper. Here is the JPG. Summary 24/7/24 20:30 CEST: Well, that was disappointing. I was hoping for many more than three answers. What a flop! Comments (4) Pergelator replied " 12 minutes 23 seconds. Five English words, all the rest are gibberish." Well done, Chuck. It is more of a logic puzzle than a crossword really. Jenny (Ibiza) noted " I forgot to time myself; about 7 or 8 minutes I guess, but I can still remember some German." Might have helped? I doubt it though. Ed (USA) confessed "No time, because I got it wrong :-(" Honest of you! Billions of Versions... wrote " I printed it out. It took me about 9 minutes to write in the answers. It wasn't hard. It just took a while to write everything. Is there a cut and paste version of this?" Thanks, Mike, for the effort. I do not know what a cut and paste means. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 22, 2024 permalink Comments Email Friday, July 19, 2024 SCOTUS joke Just found this Roe-vs-Wade joke by UK comic Jimmy Carr. It is so good I repeat the video as linked here. Comments (1) Doug (Canada) sent this link " Here's Bette Midler's take on SCOTUS Video". Cop Car wrote " Thanks, Stu and Doug, for links to the videos. " De nada. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 19, 2024 permalink Comments Email Tuesday, July 16, 2024 Trump security failures Most of you will have read about Trump being shot at, Crooks shot at a convicted crook. So I am just going to look at where I think the Secret Service failed. YMMV, because it is easy to criticise at a distance. 1) Preparation. Some SS man (Secret Service) should have stood behind the lectern beforehand to see which rooftops and windows within 500 meters were in line-of-sight. All windows to be closed before Trump allowed on stage. Said rooftops should have been manned. I say 500 meters because a sniper using a telescopic sight can hit a head at this range. Apparently a Republican gun-nut at 130 meters cannot. Further, during the Trump talk, a drone with a live TV camera could have seen all the rooftops in real time. Drones are cheap these days, so why did the SS not budget for this reusable resource? 2) Lectern. Why was the lectern not made bulletproof? Kevlar is cheap too. Perhaps even a pane of bulletproof glass on top? Why was it so small? Trump was clearly visible behind it; and the SS woman placed in front of him was much smaller than him, so did not cover him. Big guy needed up front. 3) Speed of response. Witnesses reported the armed assassin to the police 3 minutes before the shot. Noone from police or SS investigated; as long as the report was not clarified, Trump should not have been allowed on stage by the SS. The Close Protection Team were so slow, some did not even appear on stage until Trump was in his getaway car. Useless! And how is a CPT SS man armed with just a pistol supposed to hit a supine target 130 meters away? 4) Secrets revealed. Why did they reveal on live TV where the getaway car was going? (Golf Club, naturally). If there had been several killers involved, that was a dead give-away! In every sense of the words. Comments (4) Derek (Canada) wrote " Hi Stu.....did any of Trump's SS team yell out a warning: 'Donald, Duck!' ? " Oh, nice one, Derek. After the shot I had expected Trump to disappear for 3 days then surprisingly reappear, resurrected? ;-) Jenny (Ibiza) noted "Trump went to the GOP conference next day and promptly fell asleep, having failed to realise it was a Republican who shot at him!" Billions of Versions... wrote " As 75% of other people thought, I thought this was a tRUMP setup. I said, 'I bet he had a fake blood capsule behind his ear so he could slap it and drip fake blood.' I doubt that Mike, as other people were shot too. Anon sent this fake Columbo screenshot. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 16, 2024 permalink Comments Email Tuesday, July 9, 2024 Mallard Currently both Debra and Liz have been blogging about bucket lists. It so happens that today is the 38th anniversary of crossing one particular item off my bucket list. You see, on 3rd july 1938, the A4 steam engine Mallard took the world speed record for steam trains at 126 mph. So an item appeared in my bucket list to one day ride on a train drawn by Mallard if it were ever restored to a working state. Mallard was restored and so on 9th july (today) in 1986 there was a memorial run, a steam train drawn by Mallard and I managed to obtain a passanger ticket. Sure, it only went from York (where the national railway museum is located in the UK) to the seaside town of Scarborough, taking about 3/4 of an hour following the trans-pennine express line. But I had ridden on a Mallard steam train and my bucket list was one item shorter now. Yes afaik we did reach 100mph on a straight, but I cannot trust my memory these days and I did not have my geocaching GPS (to measure speed) with me. Nor it seems did I have a camera with me; how ill-prepared can one be? So I was delighted to find today on YouTube that rail enthusiasts had made a short (12 minute) video of the trip, taking shots from several different standpoints. The video is here. There were a dozen or more passenger carriages. You could open the windows to lean out and take a movie if you wanted. But the best shots/movies were by spectators. BBC/ITV even had a helicopter filming us. Surprising to me, there was no backup diesel at the end of the train for use should the old lady break down. Comments (2) Billions of Versions... wrote " Interesting post. One of those down the rabbit hole posts for me as a train connoisseur. (This was the first time I ever tried to type connoisseur. It took a while to figure it out. Spell check was no help.) Anyway, me, YouTube, and trains spent quite a bit of time together." You and I both. Keith (UK) sent this video of the 5 fastest steam trains. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 9, 2024 permalink Comments Email Sunday, July 7, 2024 Stromboli erupts Over the course of my 80 years I have seen three islands blow their tops. Once, on a hiking vacation in Iceland in the sixties when Surtsey rose from below the waves. It was a sub-sea volcano which appeared to the south of Iceland in the mid-sixties. Researchers kept tourists away so they could study how the volcanic terrain developed without any visitors. It blew for about 4 years as far as I remember, I think it was 1963 to 1967???. The second time I was on a hang-gliding vacation from the peak of Tenerifa, one of spanish Canary islands off the western coast of Africa. There were tourist flights in small planes around another island called Gomera, where the volcano exploded; can't remember the date. In February of 2015, SWMBO and I visited Lanzarote, another volcanic Canary island, which was quiescent, see volcanic landscape photos from my blog then though. Now the mediterranian volcanic island of Stromboli, which basically consists of the volcano of the same name, is erupting. Residents are keeping a close eye on it in case they have to evacuate quickly. Yesterday's aerial photo below. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 7, 2024 permalink Comments Email Wednesday, July 3, 2024 A Stone, no longer Rolling Born on february 28 1942, Brian Jones claim to fame was that he was THE founding member of the Rollin' Stones (original spelling, not a typo). He was a multi-instrumentalist (guitar, harmonica, keyboards, sitar, Appalachian dulcimer, saxophone, marimba, recorder, autoharp) but no good as a song-writer, Richards and Jagger did that far better. Jones was regarded as "an irresponsible drifter", drug-addict/substance abuser and got 7 different girls pregnant. Finally the Stones got rid of him or vice versa; he drowned in his swimming pool just a few days after. Two days later I attended the "Stones in the Park" free concert in Hyde Park and saw he had been replaced by Mick TaylorThe only known released Jones song is "(Thank You) For Being There", which is a poem by Jones put to music by Carla Olso. Okay, so I am not a big fan; so what? It's all blog fodder for this day. Copyright ^© Stu Savory on July 3, 2024 permalink Comments Email Link to the previous month's blog.	Recent Writings Submarine road trip Try a foreign crossword SCOTUS joke Trump security failures Mallard Stromboli erupts A Stone, no longer Rolling A very amusing book Pythagoras on a sphere Dracarys! A history of photography That pale blue scythe Biker Birthday Bash Octogenarian Friend Hubert turns 60 Slaughtering the pig ;-) Pentecostal Post Lufthansa routes 1937 Aurora Quax Hangar open day Blogroll Ain Bulldog Blog All hat no cattle Balloon Juice Billions of Versions... Cop Car Earth-Bound Misfit Fail Blog Finding life hard? Hackwhackers Infidel753 Mockpaperscissors Mostly Cajun Not Always Right Observing Hermann Pergelator Starts with a Bang Yellow Dog Grannie Archive 2024: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Archive 2023: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2022: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2021: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2020: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2019: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2018: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 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've written

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