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Eunoia
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Tuesday, February 27, 2018
Indoor MC TrialOn sunday the MSC Brake organised their 29th international indoor trial for motorcycles and since this is held just 40 miles north I decided to go watch it. But Wow! the entry tickets now cost 28€ for a seat even at the back (I wasn't going to stand for 4 hours!).As usual for a biker show, it started with a scantily clad but very athletic girl doing a 
First off, the riders were presented, each "led" around the five sections of the track by an aspiring junior from the MSC Brake organising club. Boring! 
Each of the 5 or 6 sections contains section-specific obstacles. The idea is to ride the bike over the obstacles without putting a foot down to maintain balance. One dab of the foot costs 1 point, falling off the bike or the obstacle costs 5 points. The winner is the rider with the lowest points total. The bikes are light, 65 to 75 kg, 125 to 350cc single cylinder engine, about 12 to 20 bhp, tiny tank, no seat, just a frame, brakes and very long travel suspension. Some of the obstacles are quite high; this one was a barrel, almost 6 feet high and no wider than the bike. So the rider had to leap the bike up from the floor onto (but not beyond) the barrel, stop, turn the bike 90 degrees on the top of the barrel by jumping it around on its suspension with the brakes on without falling off the barrel, then leap down again. 
The tallest obstacle was the "Gotham city skyscraper Bat-tower", about 20 feet high, with 2 smaller towers to act as steps. Nobody got it right, too hard, and these were national champions from Italy, Germany, UK etc. The section nearest to my seat (and thus photographable by me) was a line of tree trunks at varying angles. About 7 or 8 of them with gaps between too. 
So the riders had to jump the bike up or down onto a trunk, stop, turn 90 degrees to attack the next trunk, etc over 7 or 8 treetrunks. Height differences about 3 or 4 feet between trunks. 
On another section close enough for a photo, the riders had to jump up 4 feet onto the yellow obstacle from the left, stop, go slightly downhill, then jump up another 4 feet onto the upper slope, before jumping down. This guy screwed up that second jump and fell off the back of his bike as it rolled back off the upper slope. The guy on the left with his hand open is the judge, documenting 5 points for falling off. 
Considering I can only jump my street bike (180 kilos) over a 1 foot log or stone, I have to admire these guys' abilities and applaud like the other 1800 spectators. The winner was Franzi Kadlec, current German champion. Second was UK champion Jack Price with only 7 penalty points. The two italians shared third place. The local club rider came eighth. Out of ten. The beer bar ran out :-( Comments (1) Thursday, February 22, 2018
Where's Waldo?This B&W movie dates from 1962 and this screen shot shows the 59 club for rockers some 56 years ago in Paddington, London, UK. The club organiser was Father Bill Shergold, show on the right here, pipe smoking as usual.
Now play Where's Waldo : which one is me ? (use my recent headshot from the left sidebar if you must)? Sorry if this sounds narcissistic, but it's just a game :-) Comments (4) Solution : I'm the guy at the back, light hair quiffed, in front of the door and standing two behind Graham Hullett, with head and one shoulder visible. No beard then. Friday, February 16, 2018
The Timetravellers' vocabulary dilemmaImagine you are a timetraveller going back about 400 years (thus speaking Early Modern English). Although you try to blend in, your vocabulary alone may give you away. You would have to avoid using any words invented during the last 400 years : television, laser, tank, holocaust, reentry to name but five. Now imagine you are a timetraveller from four hundred years ago travelling forward to today. There will be lots of words you would not understand, unknown in your original time. See the 5 above.Also, the pronunciation will be different. See this (10 minute video) example of pronunciation in Shakespeare's time. So you would need to learn that rhotic dialect. Now some linguists will argue that we know two dozen words from proto-eurasiatic which have survived 15,000 years (I, we, you, spit, worms etc). I accept that, but the timetraveller would need a larger vocabulary. So let's pretend the timetraveller only hailed from 1755 and jumps forward 263 years to today. 1755 was the year that Samuel Johnson's dictionary was first published. Surely the timetraveller could blend in by only using words from Johnson's dictionary? 
Here is my counter-example sentence using only words from Johnson's dictionary : Samuel Johnson's book was the first large real dictionary giving definitions of each word, e.g. sock: worn between shoe and foot ;-) Of the approximately 300,000 words known at his time, his book contains about 40,000. Ten years hard work and contrafibularity ;-) Now dictionary.com, when challenged with contrafibularity, replies "There are no results for: contrafibularity, but we are adding new words daily. Here are some of our most recent additions: metacognition epigenetics tranche digital divide nano declutter paradigm shift confusticate aha-moment workaround eco munge artisanal exoplanet aggregator ultracrepidarian input device multiversa kaizen pixelate" Now bear all this in mind when I tell you that Shakespeare invented over 1700 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original but in context so listeners would understand what he meant. Now ask yourselves :
Comments (3) Monday, February 12, 2018
Calculated NostalgiaFellow blogger Cop Car has put up her collection of slide rules, to which I was able to contribute photos of my two (an Aviat 617 and a DDR school slide rule). So I just went down to the study and picked up another couple of pieces of nostalgia to show you.Firstly, a brass mechanical calculator, a Brunsvige 13RK, which I picked up on EBay cheap and then restored to working order. We used these as students at the beginning of the 1960s. Yes, that's a carrying handle on the right rear, but the calculator weighs several kilos! 
My other piece of science nostalgia today is the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 42nd edition, which I bought aged 16 for 5 pounds 5 shillings (almost a week's wages back then). 3278 pages of finest india paper. Published by the Chemical Rubber publishing company of Cleveland Ohio, since 1914, it was a truly useful companion when I was reading Physics at City University, London, UK. 
After 58 years it's a bit dogeared and stained in places, so I can tell which pages I referred to a lot e.g. tables of integrals and Laplace transforms etc. It seems I couldn't remember the 68 rules for naming organic compounds either, because those pages are thumbed a lot, as are the radio circuits design formulae. Nostalgia is exactly what it used to be ;-) Comments (1) Sunday, February 11, 2018
Ignorant advertising :-(I do hate it when adverts get their facts wrong. Not just photoshopping, but also videos. Here's a recent case in point.Just watch this 20 second Mentos ad and see if you can spot their blatant error. You can ignore the fact that it is spoken in German, the error is visual. So I wrote a sarcastic Email to Mentos, pointing out that even primary school children know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, thus the Earth rotates from west to east. But apparently their advertising people are more ignorant than primary school children because in their advert the Earth is turning the wrong way! It wouldn't have cost them a single Euro more to get it right instead of misleading their viewers :-( They haven't even bothered to acknowledge receipt of my mail, although I know someone there looked at it, let alone apologising or even correcting the ad. Don't they employ proofreaders/viewers or quality-assurance people any more? Tuesday, February 6, 2018
Remembering the WallThis week, the Berlin Wall has now been down as long as it was up; FSM be praised.It all started on 15th June 1961 when the East German honcho Walter Ulbricht claimed that noone intended to build a wall. Sure enough, East Germany began to build the Berlin Wall barely 2 months later, on 13. August 1961 :-( 
The East Germans called it the anti-fascist protection wall and claimed it was designed to keep West Germans OUT, whereas everyone knew it was designed to keep East Germans IN :-( On their territory was a wall, a strip of mines, an anti-tank barrier and watch-towers with border guards instructed to shoot anyone trying to flee the country. 
It is estimated that 138 people were shot trying to flee East Germany. 
Finally, on 9. November 1989, the Wall was opened and subsequently torn down. People were free to cross the border. 
Now, this week, the Berlin Wall has now been down as long as it was up :-) And local amateur historian Christian Bormann, 37, found a section of the original Wall, kept it secret and has announced it this week. Well done that man! Let's hope that local politicians preserve this hidden piece of history! 
Finally, we should remember that the eccentric scottish singer Ivor Cutler told us back in 1961 that it was an East German wall in his not unrelated "song" Get away from the Wall ;-) Sunday, February 4, 2018
Starship TwoIn november of last year the first known intersteller asteroid (‘Oumuamua) transited through the inner solar system, dipping through the plane of the ecliptic, before departing on its hyperbolic orbit, never to be seen again. ‘Oumuamua (pronounced oh MOO-uh MOO-uh), is Hawaiian for "a messenger from afar arriving first."
The picture shows an artist's impression as we have no clear photos. NASA told us it is an 400 meter long elongated pile of rubble, ten times as long as wide. Hopes were dashed that it was the first alien starship to visit us, inter alia because it did not manoever, merely falling sunwards under gravity's sole force. We didn't even send a robot spacecraft to intercept it, alledgedly because it was travelling too fast (1 light-year per 11,000 years) in an orbit too difficult to reach. And nobody looked back along the incoming track to see where it came from nor even if it was alone :-( So, just an asteroid, we were told. But what if it really was Starship One? 
She-commander awoke, suppressing the muscle-pain as the suspended-animation bay thawed her out. Her starship rumbled into life again as her crew unfroze. First she checked the star-clock, 50,000 unrelativistic years had passed since the last star. Two light-weeks ahead, she knew, would be the passive-robotic probe-ship scout making its run through the habitable zone of the star-system still a dot in the front viewport : standard procedure, a passive probe run, erring on the side of caution. Next "day", the probe-scan message came in. Three planets in the habitable zone; the inside one had a surface temperature far too high, the second, a blue one, had a single large moon worth investigating and a surface temperature enough to keep water liquid (except at the poles); the third was rust-coloured and sandy, a bit on the cool side. The rest were gas giants with many moons as usual, all far too cold. As per standard procedure the probe had not manoevered and had kept radio silence apart from this one short maser burst to send this message back. The passive probe had not been intercepted, so none of the planets in the habitable zone had space-faring locals; a good sign, she thought. She-commander commenced braking and modified her course to make an approach to the outermost habitable planet. It turned out to be inhabited by robots, seven of them in all, some had run out of power. A dying civilisation, she thought, with no ruins to show who had built the robots. She-commander repowered the dark matter shielding and reset the starship's course for the large moon of the blue planet. No interrogation signals emaneted from that moon, nor from its blue planet. The surface of the moon was scattered sparsely with artefacts, several hundred of them. She-commander revised her opinion; some were remnants of chemical rockets, presumably they had come from the blue planet. She put her crew on high alert, and sent a maser message back along her approach route to advise those following. Next intercept (almost invisible, thanks to the dark matter shield) would be the irregular mechanical structure they had noticed in a low orbit around the blue planet; presumably an indigenous space-station.
To be continued, when She-commander permits release of classified data. Comments (1)
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Recent Writings
Indoor MC Trial Where's Waldo? Timetravellers' vocab. Calculated Nostalgia Ignorant advertising :-( The Berlin Wall Starship Two Burns Supper Flop Folkstone's Funicular Hurricane Frederika What Norwegian... Police Museum Size Matters? Poles Apart (Non-)Xmas Dinner Mele Kalikimaka Saving Charlie Brown Challenging Patchwork Bitcoin Bubble Bill Bailey videos Letter to Elon Musk The wind cries Mary Russian Sculptors fail Dances with wolves Says our TV ! Coach and Horses Visa-free travel Globetrotter Glamping Burning Boat Gone Fishing Blogroll Ain Bulldog Blog Badtux... Balloon Juice Cop Car Curmudgeonly... Earth-Bound Misfit Fail Blog Finding life hard? Mockpaperscissors Mostly Cajun Not Always Right Observing Hermann Pergelator Rants from t'Rookery Yellowdog Grannie Archive 2018: Jan 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 : 153FWIW, 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
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