Winnie @ 150

Tomorrow we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Winston Churchill, aristocrat, soldier, MP for 60 years, prime minister of GB, warlord, Nobel prizewinner, author, painter - a man of many talents Here is his loooong Wikipedia entry. I post this a day early so as to give you time to read it all.

During the WW2 years as PM he was often caricatured as the epitomy of the British Bulldog spirit and when campaigning for election as an MP often took his bulldog with him on the trail.

Even nowadays there are friends who still name their bulldog Churchill (shown here at 18 months old).

His most famous speech is worth re-reading :- "Blood, toil, tears and sweat"

Gone, but not ever forgotten.

Comments(1)
Mrs Anon (USA) sent me this misquotation of Churchill as long as I did not mention her name :

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on November 29 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

---

No speeding ticket

Blogreader Jenny asks "... so how many speeding tickets have you got this year?" well, none so far. On 1/2 of the autobahn Germany has no speed limit. In areas where the dictator-like green party rules a state, they introduce ridiculously low speed limits, 120 or 130 km/h, claiming it lowers noise levels and fuel consumption. No wonder people drive faster. Like in the UK, allegedly limited to 70mph (110kph) , they seemed to be doing 85 mph between Dover and London when I was there last on a motorcycle.

But in the case shown above I couldn't even reach the speed limit! The fastest I have ever riden a motorcycle has been just over 300 kph (and that was on a race bike on a race track). My road bike and my oldtimer sports car only go about 240 kph. So the limit shown above only applies to e.g. a Bugatti Veyron or similar ;-) And whoever can afford a Bugatti can also afford to pay the fine.

Comments(2)
Billions of Versions... wrote " It's the same around here. The more expensive the car, the faster they go on the highway." Up until it puts points on your licence.
Billions of Versions...replied " They get a lawyer, who calls the city's lawyer. The city doubles the fine and reduces the charge to a parking ticket. SO for the cost of a lawyer and a doubled fine... Parking ticket, no points." Clever.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on November 22 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

---

Podcast : AI in the 1980s

Back in 1982, Japan started their 5th generation computing initiative focussing inter alia on logic programming. I was working at Nixdorf Computer AG at the time and established an AI (Artificial Intelligence) R&D team to build and market an expert system shell. I didn't keep a log of what we had done, but knowledge-engineer friend Bernhard did. This year he collected all the logs and wrote a 400-500 page history (in German) of what we were doing back then. One of the Apple AI team submitted this document to a modern Large Language Model (LLM) AI as a prompt and asked the modern AI to turn it into a podcast (in US English) using artificial voices. Now you can listen to an AI from 2024 talking about our AI efforts from 1984ff in this

Both of us found it interesting to see what it chose to extract and what it omitted, our memories differing a bit. Back in the 1980s we were running our expert system shell on a 16 bit mini-computer with limited memory, (which Nixdorf was selling at the time) so the performance was an issue. Neural nets had not gotten off the ground back then; LLMs are a recent development.

In this blog on September 3rd of 2021, I wrote about our old AI SW, TWAICE now ported to a modern laptop and running like greased lightning.

Listening to the LLM podcast reproduced above made us astounded at the progress that has been made in AI over these last 40 years. It took the modern LLM just 5 minutes to read 400 pages in German, translate it from German into English, produce a digest and generate the 8 minute podcast. Listen to the podcast please and tell me what YOU think of it.

BTW, I won't be using the podcast format much; I'm staying with texts.

Comments(1)
Billions of Versions... wrote " Interesting. And for those that didn't listen to the podcast, it's only 7:49. Not bad for reviewing a 500-page book." Bernhard and I would like to know why it chose to omit parts we thought relevant. However the AI was incapable of introspection, so could not tell us.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on November 17 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

---

Wolf problem worsens

Back in May of 2021 I told you of my surprise when meeting a lone wild wolf in the nearby woods. They were rare here in Germany a decade ago but are now becoming more of a problem. By 2020, Germany's total wolf population had grown to about 128 packs, most of them living in the northern states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Lower Saxony. In these states, the density of wolves is higher than in Canada. Under German (and international) law wolves are a protected species; in several regions livestock damage compensation programs exist. Just as well, as of last year 5000 farm animals were being killed annually here by wolves (mostly sheep). Farmers have taken to adding alpacas and/or donkey to their flocks as these fight off wolves. Discussion has started on whether hunters should be allowed to cull them to some extent.

Most wolves have come in across the border from Poland onto the northen plains of Germany, then spread from there, as shown on this map.

Where does your country draw the line? When does limited culling start? What is your own position?

Comments(1)
Billions of Versions... wrote " The cattle and sheep ranchers want to start culling at the first sight of a wolf. And then the arguing starts." True here too.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on November 12 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

---

Covid :-(

Been and caught Covid this last fortnight. Rougher than I thought it might be ! The symptoms of COVID-19 are variable depending on the type of variant contracted, ranging from mild symptoms to a potentially fatal illness. And since I had had a (mild?) stoke in April which took four months to mostly recover from, and coronary problems since a decade, I have dreaded contracting Covid. Luckily I had had a refresher injection 3 weeks ago which should ameliorate any symptoms should I catch anything.

Symptoms included coughing, fever, loss of smell and taste, headaches, nasal congestion resp. runny nose, muscle pain, sore throat, and breathing difficulties. So I have isolated myself in the TV room which is conveniently next to a ground floor toilet should I get dire rear (sic!) too. No appetite for 4 days, then only liquids for 3 more. But I could stand to lose a few pounds anyway, so that is a positive side effect.

Then one day a negative test gave me hope again. But it was a false negative. You need 2 or 3 negatives in succession to count as Covid-free again. Only now am I out of isolation again and have been able to resume my household chores, albeit weakly. So tonight I shall be watching TV for the US election results, hoping I don't regress as a result ;-)

Blogging to resume in the next few days. I hope.

Comments(4)
Billions of Versions... wrote " Luckily I've never had Covid. Knock on wood.
Now about your blog. When I use http://www.savory.de/blog.htm I go to the Oct 27 post. If I use the http://www.savory.de/blog_nov_24.htm#20241105 link, I go to the Covid post." I wish noone Covid (except the Toff, maybe). That sounds like I forgot to change the META in the redirection HTML. My covid stupidity, I will investigate, Mike. Do not grok. My html plainly says meta http-equiv="Cache-Control" content="no-cache, must-revalidate".
Doug (Canada) wrote " Sorry to hear that Stu - hope you recover quickly. At our age grouping that can be a very serious illness." Seems like I made it, can no longer taste though yet, nor can I grok. Can walk but 1 lap of the supermarket. I no longer push the trolley, it has to support me :-)
Jenny (Ibiza) wrote "As if you were not sick enough, now you awake in a world where tRump gets reelected :-(" Indeed. Adolf Hitler once said "It is not truth that matters, but victory." How could US voters be so stupid as to elect fascism? It will be a darker world for all of us.
Earth-Bound Misfit wrote " Stu, I just caught up to your blog. Sorry to hear that you have Covid. I've had it and I was kind of worried about underlying cardiac issues, but all was well. As to the election here, what can I say? Over seventy million good little Americans voted for a professed fascist. I do not see good times ahead. Anyway, I've begun looking into moving my blog offshore, in case Goggle knuckles under to Trump. I'm pretty sure it would be not feasible to move seventeen years worth of archives. So I'm researching hosting plans, even if I don't like Wordpress. Following it physically may not be possible, I'm over seventy, and the process of getting a passport in the country of my paternal grandparents (either Romania or Ukraine, I need to look into who had what territory in the first decade of the last century) seems daunting. Hang in there. " Thanks, StinsonGal, for your thoughts. I am 80 now and so very weak from the Covid. I include a graphic below from just before your US election showing the preferences of Europeans. ALL dislike tRump in the majority, not just me. I do not use a blogging tool myself, I handwrite all my HTML. If that is an option for you, I can recommend my hosting service, but maybe an offshore Goggle subsidiary would suit you better?

I shall not be visiting the US again as long as the fascists reign.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on November 5 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

---