Eunoia
Nav Tools

--> Most recent Blog


Comments Policy
DSGVO
Impressum
Maths trivia
Search this site
RSS feed for Stu Savory's Blog RSS Feed


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 called 'Kosmo'.


Some of my bikes


My Crypto Pages


My Maths Pages


Monday, May 28, 2018

NSU motorcycle museum in Eschershausen

Yesterday we rode about 70 miles NE to visit the NSU motorcycle museum in Eschershausen. Here is a small subset of my photos. Scroll over for a short description of each photo.

This is a private collection. The owner (78) restored each and every one of the bikes to working order, even the pre-WW1 bikes. There are more NSUs here than in the works museum at Neckarsulm! Finally, here is the one bike which does not run; because it is made of wood, a fictional bike he carved himself ;-)

Comments (1)
Brian (UK) asks "What, no OSL, no Max?" Sorry, but my photo of the NSU OSL was out of focus, but here's my photo of an NSU Supermax :-)

Comments (1)
Clive (UK) wrote " The private NSU museum looks worth a visit indeed; are you aware of this private museum nr. Hamelin.. it's quite something! http://www.haz.de/Nachrichten/Panorama/Uebersicht/Privatmuseum-Die-Grundmanns-sammeln-Autos Grundmanns have the only prototype VW Beetle chassis anywhere (1936?) andmost early Porsches. There's also the official Bulli museum in Hessen ?" Haven't been there at all, but Hameln is not too far away, so we shall see :-)


Friday, May 25, 2018

DSGVO aka GDPR

Today the new European Union Data Privacy Law (DSGVO) comes into effect. Nevertheless it remains unclear exactly what we bloggers have to do to conform. Mainly, we have to inform blogreaders and guest-bloggers what we do with their data. And tell them that they have a right-to-forget, i.e. can have their data removed if desired. So, below, you will find my attempt at providing this information. I have made it accessible from the left sidebar, and will be updating the statement as interpretations of the DSGVO requirements become clearer.

Person responsible for data-privacy at this website :
Stuart Savory
Amselweg 4
33165 Henglarn
Germany

Telefon: 05292-1291
E-Mail: data-privacy@savory.de

Site users have the right

  • to be told what data are stored about them, if any
  • to have their data deleted unless other laws require the further use of such data
  • to be informed if data are passed to a third party
  • to complain to our local authority if they believe we are misusing their data
  • to be informed when their data are corrected or deleted.
Use of this blog is free. NO password or age data are required. NO cookies are used by us. NO financial information is requested or stored by this site. We have NO shop function. NO scoring is done. There is NO newsletter, just a summarizing RSS Feed (see left sidebar). NO use of Twitter or Facebook. NO advertising. Contact may be made via email, in which case your email address will be stored. When you access this site, your URI will be passed to our site provider (Manitu) for the sole purpose of counting hits on our site. Sometimes the blogs embed videos provided by YouTube (YouTube LLC., 901 Cherry Ave., 94066 San Bruno, CA, USA). YouTube is owned by Google LLC., 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043 USA, who declare compliance with the EU-US Privacy Shield, see https://www.privacyshield.gov/participant?id=a2zt000000001L5AAI&status=Active
BTW, Your own browser sends your accessibilty data to their servers.
Third parties may request to generate cookies, which you may deny access.

Guest bloggers provide their name, email address and a photo to go on the copyright line of that blog entry. These data are stored and displayed.

Comments may be made only by email. Comments made by other bloggers will be linked to their blogs. Comments from non-bloggers will be attributed to their given name, or to Anon if so explicitly requested; email addresses will not be used unless specifically requested. NO photos of commenters.

If you think I've missed something, please let me know :-)

No legal warning without previous contact! If the content or the presentation of these pages infringe third-party rights or statutory provisions, we ask for a message without cost note. We guarantee that rightly disputed passages will be removed without any need for legal assistance. However, we will completely reject any costs incurred by you without prior contact and, if necessary, file a counterclaim for breach of this provision.

Comments (4)
Renke wrote " I'm (fortunately :)) not a lawyer but it seems rather likely that your (and mine, for that matter) blog is outside of the scope of the gdpr - see article 2.2.c (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-2-gdpr/). Lutz Donnerhacke (a well-known figure around hacker culture and privacy in Germany, and one has to love his surname) wrote two rticles about a possible implementation, a more abstract one (https://lutz.donnerhacke.de/Blog/Der-praktische-Weg-zur-DSGVO) and a second part applying the theory to his own blog (https://lutz.donnerhacke.de/Blog/DSGVO-am-Beispiel-des-eigenen-Blogs). In German though. Sorry. My own blog's data privacy statement is something like "if you really really want a cookie you have to comment and tick the c heckbox, my webserver doesn't even store IP addresses". Good to know, I wanted to be on the safe side, however.
Uwe, a russian address seller, wrote in Cyrillic which I translate as " Only we have a base of 250 million e-mail addresses of businessmen from all over the world for $500. [sgkmga] 1000 000 e-mail addresses for $2. Cheaper no, no where. [gsmiqvqj] Our contacts:andrey100077@gmail.com , ICQ: 666784430 [xlirazl] 7753191[vdocf] " Didn't you notice that I specified ? I suggest you blogreaders block the addresses he gives.
Renke wrote again, suggesting " but wait! there's more! one important right is the invocation of a supervisory authority (https://gdpr-info.eu/art-77-gdpr/). I think it's only polite to give the users a hand and publish the appropriate authority within the privacy statement. In your case it's the Landesbeauftragter für Datenschutz und Informationsfreiheit Nordrhein-Westfalen (https://www.ldi.nrw.de/). The most active and helpful authority in Germany is imo the one in Schleswig-Holstein, they even have a handy web form to lodge complaints (https://www.datenschutzzentrum.de/formular/beschwerde.php)." Good idea, thankyou Renke, I've embedded the link you gave me.
Petra (A) suggests "DSGVO is the german acronym. In English it is GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation?). I suggest you add this to your header. The EU document is 99 pages long, you have summarised it well :-) Will you be providing a German version?" Header adapted. German version sometime later :-)


Wednesday, May 23, 2018

Blogroll additions

After a few people have dropped out of my blogosphere, I decided to make some new additions to my blogroll, to keep it interesting. Here are the additions :-

All hat no cattle : Sarcastic humour about american politics. Daily updates.

Greg Laden : US-based comments on things found in the american press. Frequent updates.

On her Bike : Kinga Tanajewska rides her motorcycle from Australia to Poland. Rare updates.

Reading in Reykjavík : Icelandic bibliophile reviews the books she is reading. Rare updates.

Starts with a Bang : Cosmologist Ethan Siegel writes good stuff on astronomy etc. Daily updates.

Please go read what they have to say and see if you like their writing etc.


Monday, May 21, 2018

Marion's new book

26½ years ago I founded a motorcycle club at the company I then worked for. It has survived over the years and still has 20+ active members. One of the founding members was my good friend Marion who organised the 25th anniversary outing and has spent the last 18 months collecting old photos and anecdotes from past and present members. From these she has produced an excellent book, documenting the chronik of the club. This blogpost is just to say THANKYOU for the effort :-)

This is Marion's first book, much enjoyed by our club members, containing anecdotes that I for one had forgotten, so it brings back pleasant memories in its 200 pages. Thanks also to Andreas for building the photo database and to Volker for doing the production.


Thursday, May 17, 2018

Dambusters' Day

75 years ago today, around 1 a.m., the 617 squadron of Lancaster bombers, under command of Guy Gibson, attacked the Möhne dam, the Sorpe dam and the Eder dam at night, intending to deprive the Ruhr valley munitions industry of both water and electricity supplies. The Möhne and Edersee Dams were breached, causing catastrophic flooding of the Ruhr valley and of villages in the Eder valley; the Sorpe Dam sustained only minor damage. Two hydroelectric power stations were destroyed and several more damaged, but Operation Chastise wasn't the complete success it was made out to be by Brit propaganda at the time and the post-WW2 movie.

As it happens, I now live in this area, just 60 kms east of the Möhne dam and 80 kms west of the Eder dam, hence my interest in today's anniversary.

The dams were protected by 2 lines of torpedo nets, so an aircraft could not just drop a torpedo into the lake to attack the dam. However, eccentric Brit boffin Barnes Wallis had developed a 4 ton bouncing bomb which was designed to skip OVER the torpedo nets. It was a pretty big cylinder, see photo below.

The bouncing bomb was mounted below the bomb bay of a Lancaster bomber - which had terrible aerodynamics anyway - on a rig which would spin it up to 500rpm so that it had sufficient back-spin to bounce across the surface of the water, see photo below.

Of the 19 bombers used, 5 didn't make it there. They were flying very low (under 100 feet) to avoid discovery; the actual attack had to be at sixty feet so the bombs would skip properly. Altitude assessment was by coincident fuselage-tip light-beams reflecting from the lake surface. Bomb-release was from 440 yards out, judged by a handheld Y-shaped wooden frame held to coincide with the dam's towers. The back-spinning bomb then bounced over the water, hopping over the torpedo nets (see sketch below), hit the dam and sank down along the wall whereupon a depth fuse triggered it at the designated depth (see sketch). Back-spin kept the bomb up against the dam wall.

Five of the bombs worked as designed and finally the dam was breached (see photo below). About 1600 civilians and POWs were drowned. Since 1977, Article 56 of the Geneva Conventions outlaws such attacks on dams to cause civilian loss of life.

Three bombs sufficed to breach the Eder dam. The Sorpe dam only had minor damage, and neither the Bever nor Lister dams were hit so the Ruhr valley was not deprived of electricity. Only eleven of the bombers returned.

There is a memorial in Nieheim to the 1600 drowned, about 4 miles from the Möhne dam.

Nowadays of course all the lakes are recreational areas where we go sailing upon, swimming in, geocaching at, or motorcycling around. The repaired Möhnesee dam shown in this aerial shot (with 617 squadron's short run-in approach path) is now 105 years old.

Comments (1)
Clive (UK) wrote " Now to aeronautics... it's possible you may have to edit the caption to the picture of the Upkeep bomb on your dams raid blog :) .. simply because the Avro Lancaster had superb aerodynamics... no question. Acknowledged as the most capable and efficient 4 engine bomber of WWII era. Able to eventually deliver a 10 ton Grand Slam 'earthquake' bomb from circa 18,000 ft, no other aircraft of that vintage could accommodate or lift it. 270 mph and a VNE well into the mid 300s The famous production Spitfire test and aerobatic pilot Alex Henshaw who test flew them out of the Castle Bromwich shadow factory, characterised the Lanc as just a large Spitfire that handled superbly. He would barrel roll them occasionally after flight test (entirely a 1g maneouver)indeed it's said that one returning from France was barrel-rolled around a B17 Fortress to their crew's astonishment. I'd also point you to Albert Speer's (in charge of almost everything productive in Germany by then, including use of Todt slave labour) comments on the result of the dams raid... that he was astonished that we never attacked the rebuilding of the Moehne, consolidating the devastating effect on downstream Ruhr industry, which would have prevented it catching the Autumn rains! Also that should we have put more faith in our task (as always there were naysayers and pessimists, even Harris had to be overruled) with a larger force and succeeded in breaching the Sorpe too... "that would have been that " as far as any useful output from Ruhr industry for the foreseeable future! Finally, next time you are over, may I commend the Mosquito Museum at Salisbury Hall nr. St Albans. A small low key but excellent private museum of de Havilland aircraft and engines, including the only prototype of a WWII aircraft anywhere, Mosquito W4050 built there under cover in 11 months from scratch. Definitely not crappy aerodynamics as it proved to be the fastest service aircraft in the world for two or three years, not bad for a bomber. Even Goering castigated his industry chiefs for not being able to match it... "


Monday, May 14, 2018

Jewish Birthdays

Seventy years ago today, the state of Israel was founded. David Ben-Gurion read their declaration of independence. So doubtless there will be many celebrations, particularly in Tel Aviv, Israel's party-center :-) Tel Aviv has great beaches and 1748 bars, cafes and restaurants - one per 231 inhabitants and its own Iron Dome. All that's missing is a US embassy, which Trump is moving to Jerusalem where the hospitals treat other nutters for "Jerusalem Syndrome" (people who believe they are people from the bible, such as Jesus or Moses etc).

So this blogpost is for my two outed jewish blogreaders, David (NY) and his namesake David (Tel Aviv). Have fun today!

The second birthday commemorated here is the 100th birthday of Richard Feynman, 1965 Nobel laureate, also of jewish descent, born May 11th, 1918 ; one of the ten greatest physicists of all time. I learned a lot of physics from his 3-volume textbook, The Feynman Lectures on Physics :-)

Comments (1)
David (Tel Aviv) wrote "We were celebrating yesterday already, because Netta Bar Zilai won the ESC - European Song Contest - for Israel :-)" I didn't think she was best. First off: since when is Israel in Europe? Many think it was a political fix, otherwise how come Germany didn't come last as usual ;-)


Friday, May 11, 2018

Facial Asymmetry

SWMBO has recently been investigating the phenomenon of facial asymmetry. She does this by taking a photo (shown here in the centre of this tryptich), then placing a virtual mirror vertically along the noseline. That way she has a "right" side which is a mirror image of the left side. And vice versa for the other side. So you can see what the subject would look like if their face were symmetrical.

So this photo above shows what I would look like if I were left-side symmetrical / unaltered photo / right-side symmetrical.

And this photo above shows what our dog would look like if he were left-side symmetrical / unaltered photo / right-side symmetrical.

Weird, huh?

Comments (1)
Liz wrote "That is amazing. Your left-sym dog would look so fierce. And you look completely different in each one." Yeah, it is kind of freaky!


Tuesday, May 8, 2018

Celle Old Town

When we drove through the town of Celle, we decided to take half an hour to photograph some of the old houses in the old town centre (13th-17th century). There were also some scurrilous statues.

The Celle airbase has a statue remembering the Berlin airlift. It is the start of a symbolic bridge. The other end is at Tempelhof airfield in Berlin.


Sunday, May 6, 2018

The 26 dimensional hypersphere surprise!

Having given Star Wars Day a miss for the commercialised nerdy mind-numbing crap it has become, let me blow your collective minds in a completely different way :-)

Draw a square box , four units to each side. Place four unit-radius circles inside it so they just touch one another. These are the black rings in my lousy sketch below. Now ask yourself : what is the size of the largest (red, below) circle you can draw which just touches those black rings?

Applying Pythagoras theorem to the semi-diagonal (green) line we see it is twice root-two units long. Subtracting the diameter (=2) of the unit radius circle, we can calculate the diameter of the central red circle as being root-two minus one = 0.4142...

Circles are spheres in two dimensions. Now let us consider the three dimensional case(sic!) by imagining four tennis balls in a box of side 4 units. Using Pythagoras twice - there are now 3 dimensions X,Y, and Z - we can calculate the diameter of the central red sphere as being root-THREE minus one = 0.732...

Now let us imagine the 4 dimensional box containing 8 unit-radius 4D-hyperspheres. What is the size of the largest (red) hypersphere you can draw which just touches the 8 unit-radius hyperspheres? Using Pythagoras again - there are now 4 dimensions - so we use it over 4 different directions, we can calculate the diameter of the central red hypersphere as being root-four minus one = 1.000

Generalising, for the case of N dimensions, the central (red) N dimensional hypersphere will have a diameter of root(N)-1 as we use Pythagoras theorem N-1 times each along a different dimension.

Indeed for the case of the 26 dimensional hypersphere, the radius will be root-26 minus 1 = 4.099...

So a central (red) 26 dimensional hypersphere will be BIGGER than the box which contains it!!! Does that blow your mind, or what???


Thursday, May 3, 2018

Pied Piper snapshots

Last week our driving route took us through the town of Hameln, the town where the Pied Piper story originated in 1284 AD, so I took the opportunity to take a couple of photos to show y'all.

This first photo shows the metal sculpture outside the (modern) town hall. It depicts the Pied Piper leading the children through the city wall and (permanently) out of town.

The street outside the town museum is paved with cobblestones; some however are little brass plates depicting the rats from the 1284 story.
The photo on the right shows a mannequin of the Pied Piper standing in the entrance to the museum, which is now in the old Leist house, built in 1585-1589 by Cord Tönnis for Gerd Leist.

We had a coffee in the old hall, now a cafe´, then drove on before the rain got us wet, so no photos from inside the museum.

Comments (1)
Liz asks "So does the Pied Piper have any historical basis?" Indeed it does, the story dates from the rats plague of 1284 in Hameln. See wikipedia here.


Recent Writings
NSU motorcycle museum
DSGVO
Blogroll additions
Marion's new book
Dambusters' Day
Jewish Birthdays
Facial Asymmetry
Celle Old Town
The 26 D hypersphere
Pied Piper snapshots
Gauss @ 241
Find the page :-)
Making up ;-)
Friday 13th
Bomb's away! :-)
Evacuation needed
Manifestations of god(s)
Mondrianesque Bulldog
Norwegian Bliss
Stone Age Megaliths
Bad Signs... ;-)
RIP Ralf Waldmann
Peak Flu ?

Blogroll
Ain Bulldog Blog
All hat no cattle
Badtux...
Balloon Juice
Cop Car
Curmudgeonly...
Earth-Bound Misfit
Fail Blog
Finding life hard?
Greg Laden
Mockpaperscissors
Mostly Cajun
Not Always Right
Observing Hermann
On her Bike
Pergelator
Rants from t'Rookery
Reading in Reykjavík
Starts with a Bang
Yellowdog Grannie

Archive 2018:
Jan Feb Mar Apr
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 have written




Index/Home Impressum Sitemap Search site/www