Eunoia
| ||
--> 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 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 Comments (2) : Monday, May 26, 2014
Hannoversch Münden Town Hall photosSunday'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) : Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Minimum WageOn 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 :-
The bottom 7 minimum wages in Europe are :-
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) : 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. Comments (2) : Friday, May 16, 2014
2048 : an addictive gameI'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) : Wednesday, May 14, 2014
H.R.Giger. R.I.PHe 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 LectureF 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) : 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!).
Friday, May 9, 2014
The Barista's
|
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 Blogroll Ain Bulldog Blog Badtux... Balloon Juice Cop Car Curmudgeonly... Demeur Earth-Bound Misfit Echidne of the snakes Fail Blog Finding life hard? Hattie (Hawaii) Making Light Mockpaperscissors Mostly Cajun Murr Brewster Not Always Right Observing Hermann Pergelator Rants from t'Rookery Scary Duck 6 decades & counting Spork in the drawer Squatlo Rant The Alternate Brain The Magistrate's Blog Xtreme English Yellowdog Grannie Archive 2014: Jan Feb Mar Apr Archive 2013: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2012: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2011: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2010: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Archive 2009: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec 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
|
Index/Home | Impressum | Sitemap | Search site/www |