Eunoia
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--> Most recent Blog ![]() Comments Policy DSGVO Impressum Maths trivia Search this site ![]() Eunoia, who is a grumpy, overeducated, facetious, multilingual naturalised German, blatantly opinionated, old (1944-vintage), amateur cryptologist, computer consultant, atheist, flying instructor, bulldog-lover, Porsche-driver, textbook-writer 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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Thursday, December 29, 2022
Shit Xmas hols this year :-(![]() First off, SWMBO's eye (cateract) operations didn't go so well as mine did. She is still seeing streaks of prismatic light in one eye. Hoping it will improve with time; next checkup on Jan 17th. Then motorcycle friend DG had a stroke and is in hospital. No visiting due to Covid restrictions. He hopes to have recovered by february, regarding the stroke as minor. Another motorcycle friend was diagnosed with tongue cancer, he tells us. In my case the diagnosis was skin cancer, but they freeze those spots away with liquid nitrogen, giving me big blisters that were gone after a week though. Then HW (university friend DW's wife) had a major stroke, so she is in hospital, likely for months. At least they live in Canada so will not be crippled by a major medical bill like an american friend was. Now David's uncle is dying in Buffalo, NY, where the snowstorms are so bad that the mayor has forbidden driving. I don't know if ambulances and hearses are allowed to drive, but I'd think so. It is not like Longyearben on Spitzbergen where it is forbidden by law to die there, because the ground is so frozen they cannot dig graves. You have to be flown out in your final days.
On the positive side, Iwan is still in a datscha in the Urals, so hasn't been called up. Maybe he's just too old anyway ;-) Another friend is recovering from bone cancer treatment and should be well again by the fall of 2023, he says :-) Hoping all you readers are keeping well, all the best for 2023.
Abraham Lincoln was shot dead (while watching a play at the Ford theater ). He was shot in the back of the head by John Wilkes Booth, a second rate shakesperian actor from another theater.
John Wilkes Booth, who was also a Confederate sympathizer, had a brother called Edwin who was a much better actor, later famous for his portrayal of Hamlet.
Years after the assassination Edwin Booth was waiting for a train in Jersey City when a boy fell in the gap between the train and the platform.
Reacting quickly, Edwin Booth grabbed the lad and pulled him up to safety, thus rescuing his life. That boy was
Lincoln's son, Robert!!! How is that for a coincidence?
I would be interested to know whether my US readers knew that.
Comments (5) We've been luckier. Admittedly when I drove off at dawn early last week the thermometer in the car was soon showing -15°C, but the car started well as it had been in the garage
at around zero. The snow was less than 6 inches deep as you can see in the photo below of the single-track road through the woods.
The only problem was the black ice on the road which was very slippery indeed. So I averaged less than 10 mph on that trip!
When I let the dog out for her run she was clever enough to avoid the black ice and run in the snow instead :-)
Now this week we have +6°C, no snow, and it has even stopped raining :-)
So let us hope all american readers have a safe Xmas despite their bad weather. Now it`s almost midnight Bethlehem time, so I'll let
you Xians go watch Mary's water break or whatever y'all do at midnight.
Comments (3) I replied by asking in what year Mary was pregnant and was told in 1 BC (before christ).
Then I said that Jesus was Jewish, so he would have been circumcised 8 days after his birth and asked what year that was and was told 1 AD (anno domini = year of our lord).
But noone called those two years BC and AD back then. Bethlehem was in the roman empire back then, so the dates were written as AUC (Anno urbis conditae = years from the founding of the city (of Rome)).
So the birth year would have written as 753 AUC. Actually the Bible doesn`t tell us when it was, it wasn't worth writing down. But when the first Xians used BC and AD, they
did so using roman numerals since they were still part of the roman empire. 753 AUC would have been written as DCCLIII AUC. Roman numerals don`t have a zero.
Zero first showed up about a thousand years later when people started using arabic numerals. So when the first Xians used BC and AD, they jumped from 1 BC to 1 AD
because they were still using roman numerals and had no way of writing a zero. 1 AD meant the first year in the life of their lord. Nowadays we think of age 1 as
meaning 1 year completed, not begun. Hence the confusion.
Zooming in, we see a self-similar pattern :
Zooming in again, we see another self-similar pattern and so on and so forth
Wikipedia has a thorough article on fractals if the concept is new to you.
Comments (1)
The event will be visible to the naked eye (cloud permitting), but of course binoculars or a small telescope are recommended.
Grab your viewing aids and look at the edges of the moon as described above & hope for good seeing :-)
Comments (3)
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