Eunoia
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--> Most recent Blog Comments Policy DSGVO 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 after the death of his old dog, Kosmo, he also has a new bulldog puppy, Clara, since September 2018 :-)
Some of my bikes
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Wednesday, November 28, 2018
Attractive numbers : 495 and 6174What do I mean by attractive numbers? Let me show you.Chose any three digit number having unequal digits, let's use 318 in this example. Write the digits in descending order = 831. Subtract the number with the digits in ascending order = 138. Now 831-138=693. Repeat using this number. So 963-369=594. Repeat using this number. So 954-459=495. If you now continue, you will always get 495. Wherever you start with a three digit number, you will always finish up looping on 495. That's why it's called attractive; wherever you start from, you always get attracted to 495. Now lets try a four digit number with unequal digits, say 7869. So 9876-6789=3087. Repeat using this number. 8730-0378=8352. Repeat using this number. 8532-2358=6174. Repeat using this number. 7641-1467=6174. If you now continue, you will always get 6174. Wherever you start with a four digit number, you will always finish up looping on 6174. Can you come up with a five digit attractive number? What happens when you try?
Monday, November 26, 2018
InSight on Mars :-)As I write these few lines, I'm watching the NASA livestream on YouTube of the landing of the InSight lander on the surface of Mars. Eight light-minutes away. 89+ million miles.And it is a success. This screenshot shows the people in the JPL control room erupting in joy as the telemetry indicates a successful touchdown. Of course, the words "control room" are a misnomer, they're not controlling anything. The spacecraft operates autonomously because it took eight minutes for InSight's signals to reach Earth. So, congratulations to the programmers who made the spacecraft self-sufficient. After a few minutes InSight sent its first photo of the Martian surface. Understand that the (translucent) dust-cover is still on the camera's lens because the 12 landing rockets kick up a lot of dust from the surface at touchdown. All those black particles you see are Martian dust on the lens cap. The horizon appears very curved because of the short focal length being used by the underside fisheye lens. Ignoring this curvature (a fisheye artefact), you can see that the lander is pretty well horizontal, the landing radar having managed to avoid landing on any rocks there. No doubt, there will be much better photos once InSight takes its lens cap off :-) Thanks to NASA for providing this live stream, it was a tense few minutes to watch! Congratulations to all concerned. This really IS rocket science :-) NOT rocket science though is NASA's artist's impression of InSight on the surface of Mars : with the sun low on the horizon, why are the shadows of the solar array directly under the craft?
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Saturday, November 24, 2018
They're bigger than you'd thinkNerd night at the trattoria. So we're sitting there joking and trying to outnerd one another at our corner table when two ginormous women waddled in and sat at the other end of the place, ordering and eating an XXL pasta plate for couples. Each.We start a quiet round of "Yo momma" jokes, men can be vicious :-( Yo momma is yuuuge. Yo momma could eclipse the moon. Yo momma has the mass of Jupiter. If Yo Momma was a black hole she'd not even fit on the chair... etc etc. So I interrupted at this point to give some nerdy realistic numbers as input to rein in their fantasy : The radius of the event horizon of a black hole with the mass of the Sun would be just short of 3 kilometers. Jupiter's mass would have an EH radius of about a meter. Earth? Not quite 9mm. And a 140 kg pasta-eating Yo-Momma lady? About 2*10^-35 meters. Schwarzchild's formula for getting the size of the Event Horizon (above) assumes a spherical non-rotating black hole with the "emitted" (pace Hawking) photon leaving vertically from the EH. Spinning black holes are infinitely thin discs with a one dimensional EH and so a more complicated kettle of fish. Looking at all the possible emission angles, we get a photosphere of 150% of Schwarzchild's formula. But that would be unstable, the smallest stable orbits for photons (travelling at the speed of light) is out at 200%. And the smallest stable orbit for a massive particle (Yo momma) is out at 300%; all for non-rotating black holes. So you see, they're bigger than you'd think . . . At this point the nerds interrupted me, saying I'd outnerded them all, and my prize was to buy them all the next round . . . :-(
Thursday, November 22, 2018
"I am a jam donut!"55 years ago today, in Dallas, JFK was shot by (ex-sniper) Lee Harvey Oswald using a $19.90 rifle, and a second bullet from an unknown shooter.That was the day the world stood still. Everyone here in Germany was sad too, and hoped there wouldn't be a war. 250,000 Berliners went on a silent demo march as a mark of respect. SWMBO was 18 at the time and had seen JFK and the then German chancellor Adenauer riding in an open cabrio through Bonn (at the time, Bonn was the capital city of West Germany). JFK was loved by the Berlin townspeople for his promise to defend them against the Russians. His misstatement went down in history, when instead of saying "Ich bin Berliner!" (= I identify as an inhabitant of Berlin) he said "Ich bin ein Berliner." which translates as "I am a jam donut" ;-) Kennedy, you were the knight in shining white armour who prevented WW3 (aka Cuba crisis), we wish we had a US president like you again instead of the lying orange idiot we have now! Americans, why did you vote for this current corrupt knave? Comments (2)
Sunday, November 18, 2018
A marriage made in heaven ;-)Once upon a time there was an italian couple who lived in Rome, right next door to the Vatican. This couple were planning to marry, but died in a traffic accident just two days before their planned wedding date.They ascended into heaven and met St.Peter at the pearly gates, asking him nervously "Can we still get a church wedding here?" St. Peter replied he wasn't sure about that, but he'd check inside and get them an answer. Six whole months later, he came back to the gate with their answer. But, in the mean time the couple were having second thoughts, after all it would be for ever, and so cautiously asked St.Peter "If it doesn't work out, can we get a divorce in heaven too?" Tearing his old grey hair, St.Peter shouted furiously "I searched the length, breadth and height of this place and it still took me six months to find you a catholic priest!!! So how long do you think it would take me to find a lawyer, let alone two?"
Monday, November 12, 2018
Hessen's election :-(If you thought that during the recent US mid-terms, Georgia was the epitome of voting screw-ups, what with all the gerrymandering and downright voter-suppression, just wait until I tell you about the chaos in the elections for the state of Hessen in Germany!Now while the Georgia election was all about the Republican GOP cheating as much as possible to get their people elected, our Hessen election was characterised by sheer bumbling incompetence it seems. According to the preliminary results announced, the Green party came in second, just a hair's breadth ahead of the SPD. But the winning CDU didn't get a clear majority and so there will have to be a coalition state government. But who? In what combination? That depends on the recounts taking place to make up for the initial screwups. They're juicy : let me tell you! In over a dozen voting areas : the vote-counts for different parties were swapped, there were number reversals in the vote-counts as reported by telephone, piles of paper voting slips were ignored, and local results that weren't counted by the news deadline were just "estimated" (= guessed) by interpolating from neighboring voting areas! Sheer bumbling incompetence or deliberate attempts to rig the election results? You decide! So we will have to wait until the end of the week for the results of the recount. Be interesting to see of there are any prosecutions for attempted vote-rigging or if it will all be just swept under the carpet since the recounts should have caught all the "errors". I hadn't thought that honest elections were so hard to have.
Update 16/11 : Hessen recount results
Interestingly, the number of people eligible to vote went up by 946 and the number of votes counted as spoiled (write-ins etc) dropped by 8475. Draw your own conclusions! Now, although the number of votes per party changed, the rank of the parties remained CDU, Green, SPD, AfD, FDP, Linke with the remaining minor parties below the 5% cutoff. This means that the existing coalition CDU & Greens could continue to rule the state of Hessen, albeit with a majority of only 1 seat. A member of NRWs supreme court thinks the election was still not valid since boxes of counted votes remained overnight in the counting stations with inadequate security. Personally, I am amazed at the huge recount differences. Comments (9) Note to hassan bakhtiyarisafa : please stop spamming me, goddammit! Yellowdog Grannie, (USA), who turned 75 today, had this in her blog :- Dagmar (D) has some breaking US news : the Democrat woman, Kyrsten Sinema, won the Senate seat after the recount in Arizona; their first female senator :-) Ed (USA) updates us "Democrat candidate Josh Harder has defeated Republican incumbent Jeff Denham in the race for California’s 10th district." GOP down 4.
Friday, November 9, 2018
9/11, a fateful dayMy US readers will think (only?) of 9/11 as the eleventh of september, the day the twin towers of the WTC were razed. To broaden their horizons, let me tell you about today, the ninth of november (written as 9/11 in Europe), in German history.Back in 1918, during WW1, german soldiers went on strike, wanting a republic, and the navy's sailors turned on their officers rather than the british enemy. Two days later, WW1 ended (100 years ago on sunday) and Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated on 9/11/1918, leading to the desired republic. Jump to 1923, when on this day (9/11) the Nazis marched on the Feldherrenhalle in Munich, the failed Beer Hall Putsch. On to 1938, when Nazis - SA and SS - destroyed jewish shops and homes and burned down the synagogues; known as Reichskristallnacht, named after the shards of crystal glass from broken synagogue windows.
But jumping forward to 9/11/1989, we had a happy event as the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain border was opened. East Germany's communist regime (GDR) had lasted just over 40 years. Happy 9/11 this time, a fateful day. Comments (3)
Sunday, November 4, 2018
The Hill of CrossesLithuania is a flat country, we were told they have no word for mountain, but they do have small hills. One of these is the Hill of Crosses, a pimple on the plains, not even 50 feet high. It is famous for all the crosses put there, initially by devout Christians. You can't compare it to Golgotha, if only because nobody knows exactly where Golgotha was ;-)In the middle ages there was a wooden fort here, a defence against marauding crusaders. But the catholic planting of crosses first seems to have happened 1831-1863 as a protest against the Czars at the internationally known pilgrimage site. It really boomed during the Soviet era 1941-1952 when people put up crosses for all the persons being deported to Siberia. In 1961 the Soviets decided to bulldoze the site, burn the crosses and destroy religious statues in the surrounding villages. But the people just put up new crosses. This battle of destruction and re-starting went on through 1985. In 1993, after the Soviets had withdrawn, the Pope finally came for a visit. It really was a centre for protests against the Soviets who would jail any pilgrims caught planting crosses. The Soviets razed the site at least three times, in 1961 they recorded destroying 2000 crosses and digging trenches across the site, but new crosses appeared overnight. By 1990 over 40,000 crosses had appeared on the site. Nowadays there are far more (see photo above), some wood, some wrought iron, even stone. There are even little crosses hung on the big ones! Nowadays you are charged admission to go see them and there are beggars aplenty preying (see what I did there) on the pilgrims and other tourists, who come in busloads. The parking lot is huge, like for a US shopping mall. Comments (1)
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Recent Writings
Attractive numbers InSight on Mars :-) Bigger than you'd think "I am a jam donut!" Marriage made in heaven Hessen's election :-( 9/11, a fateful day The Hill of Crosses The centre of Europe Space museum, Moletai Six :-) The Glory of Autumn Discworld discovered Tallinn, Estonia Riga, Latvia :-) Speech-to-Text ;-) Amber Museum, Palanga Baltic Coast Road Sculpture Park Klaipeda Raganu Kalnas sculptures Getting to know you Sand Statues Buggering the Boys :-( Blogroll Ain Bulldog Blog All hat no cattle Back Reaction Badtux... Balloon Juice Cop Car Curmudgeonly... Earth-Bound Misfit Fail Blog Finding life hard? Greg Laden Infidel753 Mockpaperscissors Mostly Cajun Observing Hermann On her Bike Pergelator Rants from t'Rookery Starts with a Bang Yellowdog Grannie Archive 2018: Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct 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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