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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


Friday, May 30, 2014

Steinertsee model railway :-)

Sunday's motorcycle tour took us to Lake Steinert near Kaufungen where the Kassel Model Railway Club runs a narrow gauge railway. And by narrow gauge I mean a scale of about 1:10 (~ 8 times HO) The photo on the left shows that my motorcycling boot just fits between the rails. The third rail is to enable them to run a slightly larger gauge around the same track, it is NOT electrified.

This first photo (below) shows the 4-track station (raised platforms are not needed) with the switching house for all the (electrically switched) points and signals in the background. This was operated by an adult with a walkie-talkie and a track-layout diagram board. In the foreground, a blue streetcar, battery powered electric traction unit to scale, operated by a 14(?) year-old kid with a traditional railwaymen's black leather cap, a uniform T-shirt and walkie-talkie too. The traction unit could pull one passenger wagon.

The main attraction, for us and for the small kids and their dads, were the hand-made unique steam engines (scale about 1:10). Here we see the engineer raising steam in a siding, with the "help" of two budding young railwaymen :-) Wood-chip powered, it took an hour to raise full steam.

One of the other engineers needed to do some maintenance work on his locomotive, for this there is a siding set up as a raised work-bench, so you can do the work while seated comfortably rather than laying down.

The photo below shows SWMBO (seated, left) and our friend Frank (centre) in the turntable yard which feed rolling stock into the 9 various sidings. Nine sidings are enough to do a Radix-sort if they need to rearrange the sequence of the carriages in their trains, which are short enough. In a real shunting yard you might want to combine this with a Shell-sort to cope with the longer trains that occur in real life. When I was a kid, British Rail was still doing shuffle-sorts on their goods trains, less efficient than a Shell-sort. Dr. Donald Shell published the first version of his sort in 1959.

Here's a shot of the other side of that 0-6-0 shunting engine. Asymmetric con-rods already! I just loved the drip-bucket, made to scale too :-)

Meanwhile the 2-8-0(?) steam locomotive had raised steam, so I bought a six-ride (= 2 rides for the 3 of us) ticket for a mere €7 from the ticket-lady so that we could go for a ride, which is 2-3 kms through the park at Lake Steinert. Said tickets were duly punched by a 12-yr old(?) ticket-collector and platform-regulator, who was wearing his uniform T-shirt (it was a hot day) and a regulation leather railwayman's cap. He also gave us the safety lecture : do not lean over lest the carriage tip off the narrow gauge, keep your feet and arms tucked in, do NOT try to pick the flowers whilst in motion, no eating or drinking or smoking during the ride etc etc.

The train took off with a surprisingly good acceleration, after all, steam engines have their maximum torque at zero revs, reaching about 10 km/h (=6mph) a fast walking pace. You sit ON rather than IN the 4 carriages because the gauge is so narrow. In the photo below I just held the camera out at arm's length and took pot luck with the shot. The engineer/driver has a walkie-talkie too, to communicate with the switchman as necessary.

The warning not to pick flowers was indeed relevant as we chugged through fields of waving daisies and margaretta. Childhood memories :-)

We did our second lap drawn by the electric tram shown at top, driven by a young teenager. Then we retired from the sunshine into the refreshment hut run by the wives, moms & grannies of the operative staff. Home-made cakes and soft drinks. This club runs on enthusiasm, not on profit-margins!

You could tell EVERYBODY was having a good time. Steampunk Sunday!


Wednesday, May 28, 2014

The Meaning of Life ;-)

This first Math anecdote told to me by regular blogreader Doug Alder, of Trail, Canada, to whom all compliments may be addressed :-)

A child asks his teacher "What is the meaning of life?"
The Teacher responds "Math".
Later the child realizes that
M is the 13th letter,
A is the 1st letter,
T is the 20th letter,
H is the 8th letter, and 
13 + 1 + 20 + 8 = 42 :-)

Some Catholic trainee priests were walking around our local town wearing T-shirts declaiming Truth + God = Life. So I nipped into a store, bought a plain white T-Shirt and a thick black marker pen, and wrote onto my T-Shirt
So it follows that : Life - God = Truth (just do the math, folks)
on MY new plain T-Shirt, and walked along innocently behind them ;-)

Comments (2) :
Renke (D) wrote "Love your shirt - a brilliantly executed trolling activity! Kudos to you!" Thankyou. BTW, try clicking on my name, below ;-)
Doug (Canada) then sent this cartoon for Renke & myself :-)


Monday, May 26, 2014

Hannoversch Münden Town Hall photos

Sunday's motorcycle tour took us through the old town of Hannoversch Münden just before noon, so we decided to have lunch in the front yard of the old town hall, which dates back to the 14th century. The 'new' facade was restored between 1604 and 1618; it is so magnificent I decided to blog some photos of it today :-) Here's the full view first :-

This next shot is of the balustrade and the coat-of-arms decoration above the main central entrance. Both date from 1605.

The window of the mayor's office projects out by almost two feet, so he can see out on both sides too. It dates from 1604; the glass looks more recent.

We had just seated ourselves outside when the old clock struck noon. The clock is so old that it only has one hand (the hour hand) which was typical in the 14th century. Noon was struck on the carillon of 16 bells which you can see in the top photo on either side of the clock display doors/windows. Our luck that we were there at noon!

The clock display doors/windows opened and two curved platforms emerged slowly and met in the middle as shown in my photo below. The figure in the red coat is Doctor Eisenbarth (1663-1727) from which we can deduce that this mechanism was added at least a century after the facade restoration. He is shown extracting a tooth from some poor fellow who almost escapes, despite being held down firmly by the burly man in red trousers behind his chair. I quote " Eisenbarth was a "travelling surgeon", and his journeys took him throughout most of Germany. He usually travelled with a large entourage of up to 120 persons. This group included entertainers, harlequins and musicians performing in a carnival-like atmosphere while Eisenbarth plied his trade. The spectacle drew large crowds, and the loud music and revelry helped drown out the cries of pain from his patients." My emphasis underlined. He is also notorious for inventing a ginormous hook which he used to pull out cancers, hemorroids, etc. from his patients. There were NO anaesthetics back then either (shudder!) :-(

But enough of Dr. Eisenbarth (=Iron beard). The current landlord of the Town Hall restauraunt/brewery has a great sense of humour! Modern day Germans are known for religiously separating their garbage by type (plastic/metal/glass etc) to make recycling easier. So in the gents' toilet there are three urinals, labelled Helles(=lager), Dunkles(=stout) and Pils so that you can help your beer to be recycled correctly ;-)

I'll tell you about the rest of this M/C trip in another blogpost.


Friday, May 23, 2014

RIP Friedel Münch :-(

This is a belated announcement of the death of Friedel Münch on April 27th at age 87. I just heard about it :-(

Friedel Münch was a genial designer and constructor of artisanal motorcycles. There are only 478 genuine Münch that he built, no two identical, as he was always making improvements.

I met him several times, usually at the vintage races in Schotten, except for some years after he had his serious stroke. A late friend of mine owned one and I was once allowed to ride it. Thanks for that trust, such unique bikes go for €60,000.- these days!

The first (B&W) picture below shows him trying out the prototype NSU-powered four in 1966, the world's first superbike could do power-wheelies despite its weight! We don't need no steenkin' crash-helmets ;-)

The next photo (below) also taken at Schotten shows my friend Frank standing proudly next to three roadgoing Münch TTS in the public bike park.

The next photo (below) shows the 1200 TTS bike used for the sadly disappointing 2000 road movie Mammuth starring Gerard Depardieu.

The yellow bike shown below is a one-off special he built for a friend, a three cylinder two-stroke, as a break from his usual 4-stroke fours. Still uses the famous huge Münch drum brake though :-)

For those of you wanting more details than my photos can provide, I point you to the biographical book by an acquaintance, Winni Scheibe, who lives just 20 miles down the road from me. Winni has/had(?) an nice BSA Rocket Metisse. You can (only?) buy the book direct from Winni (winni-scheibe@t-online.de), as far as I remember it cost about €50. In English and German.

ISBN 3-929534-15-0 is the book number, btw.

Comments (2) :
Franz (D) writes "There is an exhibition of 26 Münch motorcycles in the museum at Speyer!" I know, I was there. That's where I took the photos of the red Mammut and the yellow triple shown above :-)
Piero (I) points to another recent demise "If you are hero-worshipping motorcycle designers, please aslo remember Massimo Tamburini who died of cancer at April 5th age 70." Ah yes, the Bimota guy. I have never had a Bimota (beyond my budget), but I have test-ridden a Ducati 916 and an MV F4, both designed by him. Nowadays I ride sit-up-and-beg bikes, no sport bikes, because of back pain I get if crouched over too long. The HP4 on one lap of the Ring (which I blogged about) was a rare exception.


Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Minimum Wage

On sunday, voters in a bloodless Swiss referendum voted against a proposed €18-equivalent minimum wage. Companies had made public / blackmailed / threatened that such a minimum wage would cause widespread job cuts. A smaller number might have been successful because an €18 minimum wage would have far above even Luxembourg, the current Euro-country with the highest minimum wage.

The top 7 minimum wages in Europe are :-

  1. Luxembourg 11.10 €
  2. France 9.53 €
  3. Holland 9.11 €
  4. Belgium 9.10 €
  5. Ireland 8.65 €
  6. Germany 8.50 € beginning 1/1/2015
  7. GB 7.43 €

The bottom 7 minimum wages in Europe are :-

  1. Spain 3.91 €
  2. Greece 3.35 €
  3. Portugal 2.92 €
  4. Poland 2.31 €
  5. Hungary 1.97 €
  6. Rumania 1.14 €
  7. Bulgaria 1.04 €

For the States, I have no numbers, but this Democrat poster explains :-

Next sunday we have the European elections. I expect there to be a low turnout but a high protest vote, both left and right extremes.

Comments (5) :
Barbara (UK) points out that "Brooklyn Beckham, son of millionaires Victoria and David Beckham, works in a London coffee shop for a wage of only €3.20 !" That's what I call a realistic upbringing :-)
John (UK) wrote "Nigel Farrage's right wing anti-Europe, anti-immigration UKIP party is likely to get a third of the vote here!" To his scared voters, I say : if an uneducated, unqualified, immigrant who can't speak the language can take your job within 48 hours, then YOU are part of the problem!"
Piet (NL) opines "There should be a maximum wage, to get a grip on those runaway bankers' boni." No countries have one, although some have (had) draconic income tax progressions.
Jake (USA) tells me "It's $7.25 here; for tipped workers $2.13 +tips to make at least $7.25. Here's the link." That's €5.30; Thanks for the heads-up :-)
Jake (USA) continues "So you know who to blame!" Okay :-(


Monday, May 19, 2014

Looking up :-)

U p until this weekend in Germany we have been having an annual German weather phenomenon called the Eisheiligen aka Ice Saints which are a fortnight or so of days with cold, wet weather, on the aforesaid Saints' days. Sub-zero nights and miserably cold days.

Now they have gone and we are getting warm weather again. So we went for a walk with the dogs around the perimeter of the local airport. Just lying on my back in a meadow below the take-off paths, I took these two photos, an Airbus and and older MD-90. Things are looking up indeed :-)

The planes would be doing upward of 120 knots at that point, so I set the shutter to 1/500 sec and let the camera's electronics worry about aperture and ISO-speed. Zoom was about 10x, I guess.
I'm pleased with the results my new camera (Lumix DMC-TZ61) delivered.

Comments (2) :
John (UK) points out that "1/500 sec at 120 knots is 4 inches, yet I can read the registration letters on the Airbus which are abou 4 inches wide too I guess??????" Perhaps the optical & electronic picture stabilisation helped? But yes, the photo originals are surprisingly sharp (it's an 18 megapixel camera, btw).
Hattie (Hawaii) wrote "Just reading through your blog now. Glad the weather has improved. Enjoy your summer!" Thankyou. Wilco.


Friday, May 16, 2014

2048 : an addictive game

I've just discovered a rather addictive game called 2048. It is played online, perhaps on your mobile phone. The objective is to assemble powers of two, if you shove two identical numbers together, they will merge to give the next power of two. You win by getting a 2048 tile; I've never got above a 1024 tile yet :-(

The screenshot on the left below shows the starting screen, a pair of 2s in a random position on the 4*4 tiled screen.

The central screenshot shows the penultimate move prior to losing one of my games. I should have dropped the right column one position by using the 'down' key, then merged left using the 'left' key.

The right screenshot shows my current highscore at the top.

I like that when you reopen the window, the App remembers where you were and resumes the implicitly saved game. Unfortunately, it can only save the one game.

Three hours of my life irrevocably gone and nothing to show for it. Get thee behind me, Satan! :-(

If you want to try playing 2048, here is the link.

Comments (1) :
Renke (D) wrote " Full disclosure: I don't understand the fascination with this kind of games at all. It seems 2048 was a rip-off of 1024 was a rip-off of Threes. The devlopers of the last game claim that all clones are broken and doubleplusunfun. Another browser/phone game with similar mechanics is Fe[26] - I'm still not convinced that it's worth my time but I like the "plot": Smash atoms to recreate the fusion cycle of a a star :) I agree that Threes is the better game for your mobile phone :-)


Wednesday, May 14, 2014

H.R.Giger. R.I.P

He scared us all with his pictures of Alien; somewhere I have a signed copy of his 'Necronomicon'. A very impressive Swiss artist. Requiescat in pace.


Tuesday, May 13, 2014

The 2014 Weierstrass Lecture

F riday of last week I attended the 2014 Weierstrass Lecture at the university of Paderborn. Here is a summary of my notes.

Background: Karl Weierstrass (1815-1897) was a famous German mathematician who attended the local prep-school/grammar school, grounds enough for the university here to establish a lecture series in his honour. The introductory lecture about the history of Weierstrass was given by Dr.Ulf Hashagen of the German Museum in Munich, who read verbatim from his slides, a habit I detest as it implies we cannot read the slides ourselves (and do so faster). The content was interesting though, especially the details of the petty jealousies so typical of rival academics, then as now. So well done, Ulf :-)

The main talk, the actual Weierstrass lecture, was by Professor Ben Green, until 2006 at Bristol university, then at Cambridge (2006-2013), now Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics at Oxford. Using few notes, he wrote on the blackboard, so we saw the back of his head a lot :-(

His lecture - announced as being about 'Points and Lines' - covered some of his recent work with Tao related to the Orchard Problem, interesting to me because of the use of Elliptic Curves (which is the tie-in to Weierstrauss). I saw no other cryptographer geeks there though, none I know.

BTW, the elliptic curve sketched on the left of this board is misleading as it suggests there are straight lines which could intersect the elliptic curve in 5 places, obviously wrong, it should be 3 as the dual is a cubic curve.

An interesting presentation which I could mostly follow :-) Very few questions at the end though, which implies most listeners found it challenging. Professor Green lectured in English, so maybe some had a language problem which I didn't???

Ben Green is probably most well known for his 56-page paper with Terence Tao proving that the set of prime numbers contains arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. These are NP-hard to find though, brute force being the method used. Green and Tao have proved the progressions exist but do not have a non-hard method of generating them (which is what makes it of interest to cryptographers). The currently-known longest progression has length 26, noone has found one with length >=27 yet (as of May 2014).

I have a printout of Green and Tao's 2004 proof, so I took it along and got Prof. Green to autograph my copy :-) I'm a geek in that way, I have a collection of autographed famous papers and signed books, incl. Kahn AND Kissinger.

Finally, for those of you who find maths to be heavy going, let me quote from Terry Tao's blog and append an appropriate cartoon...

"One issue here is that our current unconditional bounds on Hm for m=2,3,4,5 rely on a distributional estimate on the primes which we believed to be true, but never actually worked out (among other things, there was some delicate algebraic geometry issues concerning the vanishing of certain cohomology groups that was never resolved). This issue does not affect the m=1 calculations, which only use the Bombieri-Vinogradov theorem or else assume the generalised Elliott-Halberstam conjecture. As such, we will have to rework the computations for these Hm, given that the task of trying to attain the conjectured distributional estimate on the primes would be a significant amount of work..." [sic!] :-(

My emphases ;-)

Comments (1) :
John (UK) points out that "Three out of two people have a problem with maths ;-)" Indeed, but I suspect that those are the same 3 people who understand what Gray Coding is ;-)


Sunday, May 11, 2014

Mothers' Day Priorities ;-)

Today is Mothers' Day - at least here in Germany it is - and OvuSense has conducted a study of a representative sample of women asking them what 10 things they want(ed) to achieve before having their first child (aka becoming a mother). The replies were then ranked by priority as shown below. I refrain from commenting on it, other than the first (sic!).

  1. Get married (sic!)
  2. Own a house
  3. Grow up to adulthood
  4. Travel the world
  5. Pay off their debts
  6. Finish their education
  7. Have a garden
  8. Have an unforgettable vacation
  9. Get their driving license
  10. Buy a nice car


Friday, May 9, 2014

The Barista's Bicycle Tricycle :-)

Walking through town last saturday, on my way to the Town Hall, I came across a barista with his coffee bar on an old delivery tricycle!

This enterprising freelance young man, Andre´ Voigt, has set up a company where he blends his own coffee for sale by the pound. But he also has this old-style delivery tricycle on which he has mounted a coffee machine. He rents this out as a service at trade-fairs, events and e.g. weddings, he told me. He has a truck to deliver the trike to the desired site too. What a bright idea, deserving every success!

My blogfriend Renke is a coffee fanatic, so I tried this blend of tricycle coffee so that I could tell him here my (coffee-dilettante's) opinion. I just had a Latte Macciato made of 100% Brazilian coffee, in case the Espresso was too strong for me. It was smooth and creamy, a delight to drink. Very tasty, I can recommend this blend. Soft, but nevertheless, I noticed later how my pupils had dilated :-)

[Insert dubious joke about liking a soft and creamy Brazilian here] ;-)

Andre´ also distributed his PR flyers, which have a link to his website at Liloucoffee.com. But sadly, his website is currently almost information-free :-(
He should provide some PR content informing us about his coffees, his tricycle, and a photogallery of some of the events he has covered. As it is, you have to have a password and login, just to buy coffee. NOT a sufficiently informative website, IMHO, ain't nobody got time fo' dat! :-(

Summary : Coffee & tricycle good, just the website needs improvement.

Comments (1) :
Jenny (Ibiza) laughed "I just LOVED the music behind that final link :-)" Me too. It's based on a real news interview with afaik "Sweet Brown" :-)


Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Rocket Man !

R iding my trusty white charger around the countryside, checking off my bucket list of local attractions to be seen, I came across the memorial to Reinhold Tiling, amateur rocket enthusiast, near Lake Dümme.

Tiling's 1928 idea was to build short range (3-5 miles) rockets to deliver mail to and from the islands off the North Sea coast of Germany. To this end he built and demonstrated (on 15/4/1931) a reusable, solid-fuel, folding-wing glider rocket at the memorial site where a payload of 188 postcards were delivered across Lake Dümme by way of a feasibility/PR study. At its 3000 feet apogee (or at burnout of the solid fuel?) the wings unfolded and the rocket glided to earth some 2 miles away.

On October 10th 1933 (at age 40) he was reloading one of his reusable, solid-fuel rockets when he over-compressed the gunpowder, heating it too much. The resulting explosion splattered burnt pieces of him, his two lab-assistants and the rocket casing around the walls of his workshop :-(

Meanwhile, Wernher von Braun was starting his career with slightly more success that ultimately took us to the moon :-)

But the amateurs who had good ideas too are not forgotten: a crater on the backside of the moon is now named after Reinhold Tiling, located at coordinates 53° 06' S 132° 36' W, it is his other memorial :-)

Comments (1) :
Ed (USA) wrote "I point you to R.H. Goddard, America's first rocket man." Yes, I knew about him, Ed. Thankyou nonetheless.


Tuesday, May 6, 2014

A measured mile

On 6 May 1954, sixty years ago today, Roger Bannister became the first man to run a mile in under 4 minutes. Belated congratulations, Sir Roger :-) The current record is 3:43.13, held by Hicham El Guerrouj of Morrocco since 1999. I just looked up the Mile run world record progression and ran some statistics on the data. Surprisingly, to me at least because I was expecting something asymptotic, there is a high linear correlation of record times (Y) versus year (X). The linear correlation figure is -0.99 (wow!). The gradient of the curve is 0.39 seconds per year. So by linear extrapolation, we can expect to see a sub 3:30 mile by 2032, just 18 years in the future, which may be within my lifetime! Double wow!!

Comments (3) :
John (UK) asks "What was the sample size?" N=32, I used the complete list of IAAF record miles to do the statistics.
Pauline (UK) tells us "The BBC is reporting that Bannister may not have been the first, 18th century runners may have run it in under 4 minutes. Here is the link. Thanks for the heads-up, lass :-)
Peter (UK) wrote "I point you to this page on Spurious Correlations" Those are good. Some had me mentally searching for a hidden causation variable ;-)


Monday, May 5, 2014

Eavesdropping again :-(

In Washington, last week . . .


Sunday, May 4, 2014

Star Wars day :-)

May the 4th be with you ! ;-)


Saturday, May 3, 2014

No turning back!

T here was a fatal crash at Lübeck airport on monday. The light single was at 300-450 feet after take off when it (presumably) suffered an engine problem. From the press descriptions, I assume the pilot tried to turn back to the runway. This is usually the wrong decision unless you have at least 800 feet of air, preferably 1000, below you. Land straight ahead (or turn 30° into, or 15° out of a cross wind), that's your best option.

Let me walk you through the turn-back question mark (named after the shape of the flight path), referring to the diagram I have sketched below.

Having taken off from the runway (green) of the airfield (red) you climb straight ahead (as indicated by the dotted path, each of the dots being at 100 feet vertical intervals). At point X your engine fails. It takes you the length of the red arrow until point A to assess the situation while instinctively stuffing the nose down to maintain minimum-sink airspeed (you DO know that off by heart for this plane and the take-off weight, right?)

Turning sharply into the wind (you remember the wind direction at take-off, right?) you bank at 45° - which increases your stalling speed, minimum-sink-speed and sink-rate - while turning through 180° to get to point B. This would have you heading parallel to the runway but OFF the airfield, see my sketch.

So continue the curve for another 45° to point C, heading back toward the runway. Then a short straight (C to D) while you adjust for the effect of any crosswind. Finally, a 45° turn (D to E) to get you back onto the runway.

At this point (E) - remembering you are headed downwind so your rollout will be longer (you DO remember the length of the runway, right?) - drop the undercarriage and lower the landing flaps.

Going too slow at any time will cause the curve-inside wing to stall first (because it is going slower), flipping you over and/or putting you into a fatal spin :-( Similarly, banking at a steeper angle may cause a fatal spin too :-(

I've practiced this turnback after climbing to 7000 feet above a local airfield (just in case I invoked a spin) and found that both of the common charter airplanes, a Cessna 172 and a Piper 28, need minimally 500 - 650 feet of altitude to complete the manoeuver. And I'm a flying instructor who knows what he's doing, and in a non-panic situation. This is why I tell students that unless they have 800 to 1000 feet of altitude, they should look for a landing area straight ahead (+/- 30°). FWIW : flown at 80 knots IAS, turning at 1.4g, the turn diameter will be about 400 yards and the manoever takes about 30 seconds. If you are too high at point D for the runway length, you can slip it (flapless?) in to the runway threshold.

I would appreciate it if other pilots (Cop Car, Earth Bound Misfit, Gian, Klaus, Peter, Sarah etc) who read this would mail me their comments so that we can improve this article :-)


Thursday, May 1, 2014

The Richental Chronicles

600 years ago the Catholic church held a 4 year (1414-1418 AD) Ecumenical Council of Constance (on the German/Swiss border), the only one held north of the alps. A rich noble who lived there, Ulrich of Richenthal, although not involved in the organisation of the Ecumenical Council, wrote a detailed chronicle (aka diary) of the event and the surrounding circumstances. Think of it as the PR-blog of the day.

In the early 1970s I lived in Konstanz, got to visit the Konzil which is the very building used for the 1414-1418 Ecumenical Council and once saw a copy of the Richental Chronicle on display there. It is a magnificently made book, with beautiful coloured illustrations of many scenes, even everyday scenes, albeit some of the artists had a problem with perspective, so the 3rd dimension comes across almost in a comic-book style sometimes.

The illustration on the left shows the papal monstrance being transported from Rome to Constance. The one on the right shows Jan Hus being burned alive at the stake for heresy (1415 AD). Unforgiving, these Christians :-(

The illustration below shows the council attendees debating the pope.

Sixteen "copies" of The Richental Chronicles still exist. I put that word in quotes, because no two are identical. Ulrich of Richenthal wrote on a very modular basis - unfortunately none of the modules exist today - and assembled a different version of his Chronicle for his different sponsors, depending on what PR he thought they would prefer to read. And we complain about Google just tailoring the ads??? Think Pravda!

But why am I telling you this today? Because the Constance version of the Richental Chronicles has been digitally scanned for the 600th anniversary of the Constance Council and from this a beautiful copy is being published. So for under €100 you can own your very own facsimile of the Richental Chronicles :-)

I should warn you that it is hard to read. I find it best to read it out aloud, to decide on the meaning from the pronunciation, at times. After all, the language has changed over 600 years (except for the bits in Latin, they are unchanged, one of the advantages of a dead language :-) There is a more readable modernised (non-facsimile) version edited by T.M. Buck, published in 2011, also available from the Constance archives.


Recent Writings
Steinertsee model railway
The Meaning of Life ;-)
Hannoversch Münden
RIP Friedel Münch
Minimum Wage
Looking up
2048
RIP H.R.Giger
2014 Weierstrass Lecture
Mothers' Day Priorities
Barista's Tricycle
Rocket Man !
A measured mile
Eavesdropping again :-(
Star Wars day :-)
No turning back!
Richental Chronicles
Fairweather photos
The Bard's Baptism
World Book Day
Easter blossoms
Planet-hopping Savior

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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.

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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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