Eunoia
| ||
--> 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 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 EschershausenYesterday 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)
Comments (1)
Friday, May 25, 2018
DSGVO aka GDPRToday 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 :
Site users have the right
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)
Wednesday, May 23, 2018
Blogroll additionsAfter 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 book26½ 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' Day75 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) Monday, May 14, 2018
Jewish BirthdaysSeventy 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) Friday, May 11, 2018
Facial AsymmetrySWMBO 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) Tuesday, May 8, 2018
Celle Old TownWhen 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 snapshotsLast 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. 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)
|
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 |