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 after the death of his old dog, Kosmo, he also has a new bulldog puppy, Clara, since September 2018 :-)
Some of my bikes
My Crypto Pages
Tueday, March 29, 2022
Dumb Idea #26 ?
As you may know, Russian military vehicles fighting in the Ukraine have a letter Z, handpainted on,
so the Ruskies don't shoot at their own troops' vehicles. By mistake or fragging the CO?
But there is no letter Z in the cyrillic alphabet, so the Z is just a symbol for War, some propaganda wingnuts claiming it is half a swastika.
Sadly there are some (ex-)Russians here in Germany sympathetic to Putin, who paint the Z on their cars, T-shirts etc,
putting fear into the hearts of many, including Ukrainian women and children seeking refugee status here. Send the bullies back to Moscow!
To put a stop to this bullying, some state governments have made the display of the Z illegal.
Unfortunately this can also be interpreted as banning our letter Z too. So, what if these bright politicians want to order a piZZa for lunch ?
Do they have to substitute an S for each Z, thus asking for a delivery by the piSSer-boy ?
Don't count on common sense coming to the rescue, it's in short supply.
And what about Scrabble players? There are 1,413 Scrabble words with Z in them. My favourites are
pizzazz(45), zyzzyva(43), pizzazy(39), quizzed(35), jazzmen, jazzman and jacuzzi (all 3 scoring 34). Do I have to write these with S now?
The intention is good, but we'll have to see what happens in the execution of this new state law.
Comments (3) Billions of Versions... (Mike) wrote "
My wife’s hair gal is from Russia and she is a Putin fan. But she was also a tRUMP fan. So, her brain is a little scrambled in the political area."
They seem to prefer autocracy to democracy because they don't have to think for themselves :-( Anon sent these two cartoons from Ukraine :-)
Ann (UK) asks "So what letter do you use?" All German military vehicles have regular number plates which start with the single letter Y-.
Well, here in the northern hemisphere it is. Or will be, at 16:33 pm
to be astronomically precise, that is. So all I've got for you today is some of the blooming evidence in our garden where we've been weeding in the spring sunshine (at 11°C).
That last photo is of the basalt-column graveyard where five of our bulldogs are buried and which we'd freed of weeds and added a new candle in their collective memories :-)
Comments (1) Billions of Versions... (Mike) wrote "
I have some daffodils and my magnolia is starting to pop. Oh, and my forthysia is coming out too." All beautiful.
W
ell, the Coronavirus has once again put a stop to (crowded) celebrations and parades here, so I've just got a couple of videos for you tuday,
bringing fond memories of a motorcycle trip around Ireland in 2016 (blogged July 15th 2016 through
August 30th 2016).
Because Americans write dates in the format MM.DD.YY they celebrate PI day on 3.14 (today), whereas
Europeans, writing dates in the format DD/MM/YYYY, prefer to celebrate it on 22nd July (22/7), PI rational approximation day.
Actually, I was taught 355/113 as an even better approximation to PI, but it doesn't fit either date format :-(
Be that as it may, geeky celebrations are held today - Covid-19 permitting - to cerebrate celebrate PI day. Mostly these take the form of competitions
to see who can recite the most digits of PI correctly.
I did once manage to get to over 255 one year, but that is nothing compared to the REAL experts.
I'd like to try reciting PI with that EEG cap on (see here) , to see what my EEG Theta waves were doing.
The world champion, a man from India, managed over 70,000 digits !!!
Best lady, Susanne Hippauf, runs 23rd in the championship listing, but is of local German interest.
She is a 40 year old policewoman from Frankfurt/Main in Germany who once held the record when it was at 11,104 digits.
Another competitor lady later raised it to 15,000 digits, so Ms. Hippauf is aiming for 15,600 this year to regain the German and ladies' records. I wish her much luck and no interruptions.
There is an excellent article about the constant PI in Wikipedia; it is a long read though:-)
The photo below shows me standing in front of the PI wall at the mathematics museum in Giessen. You can read off the digits of PI by starting off
at the centre and spiralling outwards. There are a couple of related anecdotes here :-)
Interviewer : How many digits of PI do you know?
Me : Zero....
Interviewer : ????
Me : ....which first occurs at the 33rd position ;-)
There is also a grossly evil coincidence :
The sum of the first 144 (= (6+6)*(6+6)) decimal digits of PI is 666 ;-)
Then there is the inside joke about a recitation of the digits of PI here in Germany:
Judge : Well, those were the first 760 digits of PI, do you know the next one?
Competitor : Four.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nine.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nine.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nine.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nine.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nine.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nine.
Judge : Correct, do you know the next digit?
Competitor : Nein.
Judge : That's wrong! Competitor : No it is not; I do not know it, so I was right ;-)
If you prefer poetry to maths, try counting the number of letters in each word of this poem and writing them down each time :-
Comments (4) Pergelator wrote "
This memorization bit reminds me of a penance doled out to inmates of the cloister in Anathem by Neal Stevenson.
If an inmate was found guilty of an infraction, the penance was to memorize a number of pages of a book that contained a
zillion digits of pi. Minor infractions might be punished with memorizing a single page, but more severe infractions,
or repeat offenders might be assigned entire chapters. I suppose there might be a feeling of accomplishment in being able
to complete the assigned memorization, but it sounds awful to me.
From one of my old blog posts." It helps if you suffer from synasthesia,
Ms. Hippauf has explained. Billions of Versions... (Mike) wrote "
3.14159265358 is the most I can ever keep in my head. After that I go 'HEY look, a squirrel!'. Just for fun, I printed out the first million digits. Using the smallest font,
I think there were 'I forget' many pages. It was a lot. A fun program to use to see how fast your computer is, is pifast43.exe. I let it calculate the first billion digits
and save them to a file. Years ago, on a 386 computer it took 36 hours to do that. On my present computer it takes 3272.49 seconds or a little over 54 minutes.
Notepad won’t open the file because it’s too big but Textpad will." That little poem in the red circle above will give you 20 digits after the decimal point, to remember. Doug (Canada) wrote "
It’s irrational to celebrate Pi Day !" Transcendentally so ;-) Billions of Versions... (Mike) also blogged "
On March 14, 1883, Karl Marx made his most important contribution to mankind, he died." Didn't know that, thanks.
Found this Tik-Tok short video on You Tube and it's quite scary, don't you think?
The current Putin war against Ukraine makes this seem more probable, Lawrow (Russia's foreign minister) having publicly threatened that "WW3 will be nuclear".
But this is how conspiracy theories get started.
Because no justification for the conclusion is provided. When I was working in AI in the 1980s, building expert systems, we always included an explanation component as a feature (and
as a knowledge base debugging tool). Thus you could always ask back how any conclusion or intermediate result had been deduced. You could also ask why a different
conclusion had NOT been reached. Circular reasoning was also trapped.
But maybe Alexa wasn't using AI, maybe she was running a simulation, in which case I'd want to see each step in the simulation,
since most simulations do not have adequate explanation components.
Of course, Alexa might just be bluffing. A "joke" put there by some Alexa staffer with a bad sense of humour.
Could just be regular Russian propaganda too, just to make us even more nervous. I think this is the most likely. Fingers crossed :-)
Comments (1) Billions of Versions... wrote "
I think this is the same as asking Alexa to calculate pi to the last digit.
She starts off cranking out numbers like crazy. This goes on for ? minutes until there is some crazy ending." I disagree, I think the video is propaganda.
But I don't have an Alexa to try it out. Any takers?
Thorough brain check-out on friday, including my first ever EEG (Electroencephalography),
to exclude a stroke, which it did :-)
Here's a photo, all wired up :-) Painless procedure, in fact I almost fell asleep :-)
BTW, this is what all those electrodes showed as my EEG true-image ;-)
Comments (4) Billions of Versions... wrote "
I’ve never been hooked up like that before. It looks like fun!" Most fun about it was the perky little nurse who applied it :-) Jenny (Ibiza) asks "Is that an output-only device, or can they feed signals in as well?`" Output-only, afaik. Doug (Canada) wrote "
A long ways from what you had when you were doing AI :
Brain-based computing chips not just for AI anymore.
With the insertion of a little math, researchers have shown that neuromorphic computers, which synthetically replicate the brain's logic, can
solve more complex problems than those posed by artificial intelligence and may even earn a place in high-performance computing.
Neuromorphic simulations employing random walks can track X-rays passing through bone and soft tissue, disease passing through a population,
information flowing through social networks and the movements of financial markets." Interesting. Susan (UK) asks "Why the Theta waves?" Because they are the ones associated with memory being exercised.
Having contributed some cash to the 'Help Ukraine' fund locally,
I feel I should provide you with some more immediate help.
So here is a classified WW2 american movie about anti-tank warfare. Still useful.
Comments (4) Billions of Versions... wrote "
Useful movie for sure. But it takes me back to watching old Army films that could put you to sleep soooo fast." It was the only such link I had, Mike. bwtm3000 (Ukraine?) wrote "
I think you have w ide reach blog. This two word message could be affectivein sendin message if in large bold :
Putin = Hitler
Thanks You" (original in cyrillic, which this editor does not support). Doug (Canada) sent this picture Bansky's Ukraine. Did you know, Doug, that the Ukraine supplied 50%
of the world's sunflower oil? That's where mine comes from. Doug (Canada) replied "I knew it was a major product of theirs (thus the yellow in their flag) but not how much. "
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