Y Safle

Recently a discussion between friends on the history of Baptists in Radnorshire descended into a dialogue on Old English and German grammar (as they do!).

I (from my vast and in depth knowledge of grammar[sic]) gave the benefit of my insight that I think nouns are atomic, inasmuch as that you cannot both have a noun “mayoroflondon” and still have the ability to divide it into its constituent parts. (The point at issue being whether an EDnglish noun phrase is the same as a compound noun).

Okay, enough of the boring stuff - I can see you nodding off already! Stick with it…

My friend wrote:

Languages such as German and Norwegian do this sort of thing frequently.

I had to ask whether they do

Now I don’t profess to be an expert on German. The only German phrase that I profess to have learned in school was how to say “My wombat is constipated”. I now find I have forgotten even that snippet - useful a phrase as it has been over the years.

But from my recollection, German uses compound nouns as nouns. Thus if the German for dog is “Barkensniffer” then a dog catcher would be a “barkensniffersnatcher” and his van would be a “barkensniffersnatcherwagen”. If I recall correctly, one may continue compounding nouns until it is no longer possible to say the word without pausing for breath!

But these are nouns that are compounded. Not noun phrases. (unless anyone knows better!)

For the pedantic - I know that the German for a dog is “hund”. The above is from an obscure dialect of German spoken by villagers in a small hamlet in the Black Forest. The village is well known both for its wonderful layered cakes, as well as its curious lack of dogs.

And for the terminally curious, I have just looked up my one phrase of German. It seems that if your Wombat is having trouble with motion regularity, and you wish to ask a vet to intervene with appropriate medication (or a large bowl of prunes), you need to say:

Meine beutelmouse hat verstoppfung

So now you know.

(For my next trick I shall dredge from the depths of my memory how to say that the hovercraft is full of lobsters).

I mentioned before that I am something of a pedant. I also mentioned I am something of a sloppy pedant. A case in point occurred when I wrote the following:

I don’t know about you, but I do not only speak English in an English class!

I meant that I speak English in other circumstances, and not just in an English class, but another pedant shot back with:

If you’re gonna get pedantic, that sentence is ambiguous.

[At this point we will leace the interesting digression on whether "gonna" has become a legitimate verb auxiliary].

It could mean that you also speak Zambezi in an English class.

I naturally replied:

As the Zambezi is a river and not a language, that is hardly likely.

However there are a number of languages spoken by the people who live around the Zambezi. The river name itself comes from the language of the Batonka tribe (originally from Malawi). Other languages spoken by the people of the Zambezi include Thakwani, Sena and associated dialects, Nyungwe, Nyanja, Marenje, Manyawa, Lolo, Kunda and Kokola.

I was reminded recently of the Geek Code.

This is quite old, but I have always thought it has a major deficiency: any true geek would not use such a cumbersome code. For anyone who has written a text editor in one line of APL, and a dancing sig in four lines of perl, the ineligance of the geek code speaks volumes.

For each attribute we are told to specify the extent of our geekiness by modifying the attribute with +, or ++ or - or - -. However, this requires two unicode characters (32 bits), or at least two ascii characters (16 bits) to represent something that can be expressed in just two bits.

As the attributes are all text based, we can used the unused bits of the attribute and XOR the modifier bits to them. This needs some care, as we don’t want to return any non printable characters, but a true geek code would use just one byte of data for each attribute with modifiers.

Of course, quiche eaters would have none of this. A quiche eater would probably want to structure the code something like this:

begin occupation_code 
  attribute.x666.type = "Geek of Computer Science" ; 
  attribute.x666.modifier = modifier_struct.values.positive ; 
  attribute.x666.strength = 2 
end occupation_code 

(They would probably also write it in XML or provide a published schema under LDAP).

To accomodate both real geeks and quiche eaters, we could perhaps have a compact but human readable code, where the modifier is written as an integer, and also acts as a separator (as all modifiers are integers, and all attributes are [a..z] or [A..Z]). This is similar to the scheme that works behind the scenes in the DNS. A scheme written by geeks and for geeks.

Thus we could have a Geek code that would look like this:

GCS3M2R5h7q9MMOUSE4PRES0i-1

I liked this quote I saw:

With the release of Vista, Windows is now a 64 bit tweak of a 32 bit extension to a 16 bit user interface for an 8 bit operating system based on a 4 bit architecture from a 2 bit company that can’t stand 1 bit of competition

Also, Microsoft did a presentation at the Department of Computer Science recently. An email went around to say that there would be a demonstration of all the new user interface functionality of Vista. At the end it had:

Those of you who are Mac users, I think you have seen it already.

Some years ago an American colleague used a piece of software called “Autoroute Europe” to plan a trip from London to Aberystwyth to come and visit us. The route the software offered was.. um… unusual.

I reproduce it in full below, but the point to watch out for is that it involves 3 ferries, and the language of the place names keeps changing! The trip takes me 4 and a half hours of driving plust stops. The software solution gave a route of 52 hours 44 minutes (and about a hundred miles too many).

Tracing the toute on a map has it crossing to France! Driving inland across France before eventually taking a ferry to Ireland, where one can finally take a ferry to Wales!

Time                                    Road       For   Dir Towards 

0915 DEPART Potters Bar                 M25     31 miles E  Brentwood 
0945 At M25 J31 turn off onto           A282     2 miles SW (Dartford) 
0947 At Dartford turn off onto          Ferry    0 miles E  *Check timetable* 
0157 At Boulogne Sur Mer                N1       3 miles S  (Abbeville) 
0200 Go onto                            D940    13 miles S  (Etaples) 
0226 At Etaples turn left onto          D39      7 miles E 
0239 Turn right onto                    D917     8 miles W 
0256 Turn left onto                     D940    12 miles SE 
0320 Bear right onto                    No name  3 miles S 
0326 Turn left onto                     D940     5 miles E (Noyelles) 
0337 At Noyelles stay on the            D940     8 miles SE (Abbeville) 
0353 At Abbeville turn right onto       N28     15 miles SW Rouen 
0409 At Le Translay turn off onto       D1015   15 miles E  (Aumale) 
0439 At Aumale turn left onto           N29      1 mile  E  Amiens 
0440 Turn off onto                      D915    11 miles SE (Grandvilliers) 
0502 At Grandvilliers turn right onto   N901     6 miles S  (Beauvais) 
0508 At Marseille En Beauvais turn onto D930     6 miles W  (Songeons) 
0520 At Songeons go onto                D916    12 miles S  (Gournay En Bray) 
0544 Bear left onto                     D316    26 miles SW (Vernon) 
0636 At Gaillon stay on the             D316     5 miles SW (Evreux) 
0646 At Autheuil turn right onto        D836     6 miles W (Louviers) 
0659 Bear right onto                    No name  3 miles N  (Louviers) 
0706 At Louviers turn right onto        D836    10 miles W  (Elbeuf) 
0726 At Elbeuf bear left onto           D313     7 miles W  (Bourgtheroulde) 
0739 At Bourgtheroulde stay on the      D313     6 miles NW (Bourg Archard) 
0751 At Bourg Archard stay on the       D313    11 miles NW 
0813 Turn right onto                    D490     2 miles N 
0817 Go onto                            D131     7 miles N 
0831 Turn left onto                     N15      5 miles W  (Bolbec) 
0836 At Alvimare turn off onto          D926    17 miles NW (Fecamp) 
0910 At Fecamp turn left onto           D940    26 miles W  (Le Havre) 
1003 At Le Havre turn right onto        Ferry    0 miles NW *Check timetable* 
0851 At Rosslare Harbour stay on the    Ferry    0 miles E  *Check timetable* 
1241 At Fishguard turn off onto         A487     1 mile  SW (Border) 
1242 At Border stay on the              A487     1 mile  E  (Aberystwyth) 
1244 At Fishguard stay on the           A487    16 miles E  (Aberystwyth) 
1307 At Cardigan stay on the            A487    21 miles E  (Aberystwyth) 
1337 At Aberaeron stay on the           A487    16 miles N  (Aberystwyth) 
1400 ARRIVE Aberystwyth 

Total time: 52 hours 44 minutes; total distance: 346 miles. 

Now we know why Americans have such a peculiar perception of Europe.

Internet Protocol Version 6 is the imminent next generation Internet Protocol, which amongst other things will replace the four byte IPv4 addressing scheme we use now (numbers like 193.1.2.3) with a 16 byte addressing scheme.

Steve Gibson discussed IPv6 on his Security Now Podcast (number 25), and as I have said elsewhere, made a few errors, but this bit was interesting:

STEVE:  [...]  So we have, you know, 4.3 almost billion IPs currently[in the IPv4 addressing scheme]. Well, 28 bits for addressing, which is what IPv6 gives us, is really out of control.  That’s 3.4 times 10 to the 38th power.  That’s 340 billion billion billion billion IPs.  So… LEO:  That should be enough, at least until we conquer a few more galaxies, I think.

Okay, lets look at the numbers. With an equitable distribution of IPv4 addresses (and we don’t have an equitable distribution of addresses) we would not have enough addresses for everyone on the planet. As I am not atypical in having a home network of ten or more devices, all needing an IP address, the IPv4 range starts to look very small (especially as nearly half the address range is essentially wasted. Ford motor company have more IP addresses available to them than are available to the whole of China!)

So what does IPv6 give us? Steve Gibson says 28 bit addressing. From 16 bytes? How do we get that? 16 bytes = 128 bits doesn’t it? Where did the other 100 bits go?

Well actually Steve mispoke (or maybe he has been mistranscribed) because the figures he quotes next assume 128 bits of addressing. A 128 bit range allows theoretically for 2.4 x 10³⁸ addresses. Leo says this is enough until we conquer some more galaxies. Actually, this is just enough. Forever!

How do I know? Well the number of stars in the universe is currently estimated to be about 10²². That means that we have, in IPv6, a theoretical 3.8 x 10¹⁶ addresses for every star in the universe. On the very silly assumption of one inhabited planet revolving around every star in the universe, each with a population of the size of Earth, each planet in the universe could have over 6 million IP addresses for every single inhabitant!

It is enough addresses.

But actually, 128 bits are not available for unicast IP addressing in IPv6. When Steve Gibson says that 28 bits or 128 bits is what we have in IPv6, he ignores the structure of the addresses.

64 bits of every IPv6 address are reserved for the host id on a network, and the remainder are split up into different classes. The important class for IPv6 addressing as we commonly understand IP addressing are the aggregatable global unicast addresses, which have a total of 61 bits available for addressing, but these bits are split into smaller blocks, as shown

These allow aggregation of the addresses for routing purposes by various authorities. There is a top level aggregation (TLA), next level (NLA) which might be an ISP and site level aggregation (SLA) which could be a company or university or somesuch.

That company can then set up multiple site networks from its 16 bit allocation. Each one of these networks can have 2⁶⁴ nodes which is nearly 2 x 10⁹ on any single network.

Now assuming we could network together our nodes at a minumum distance of 1 metre apart, we could build a single network end to end, all the way from Aberystwyth (where I am writing this) to the M25.

No, not the M25 London orbital car park. The M25 star cluster in the constellation of Sagittarius, some 2000 light years away.

This would give us an end to end round trip time on the network of 4000 years (plus a few milliseconds processing latency), which is not terribly fast. Indeed we might wonder whether it would be better to have a smaller network using the IP over Avian Carriers protocol (RFC 1149 and RFC 2549)instead!

Sometimes you just couldn’t make it up.

Someone I know found out today that a conference and workshop on prophecy that he was going to attend in the U.S. has been cancelled, because of insufficient numbers.

My immediate question was: Why didn’t they know that the conference would be cancelled already?

An amusing document I came across in the course of my work earlier this month - recounting the minutes of the board of a workhouse (as in the Dickensian workhouses of the 19th Century Britain):

Resolved: to raise the privy wall so as to prevent intercourse between males and females therein.

The mind boggles!

(Perhaps I had better add, by means of explanation, that the word “intercourse” here meant chatting).

From the BBC Website:

The eccentric British sport of hurling wellington boots has been given a mechanical makeover by scientists at Aberystwyth University.

Friends of mine?

Well, yes as it happens!

On a trip to Cardiff recently, I passed this tree in a field not far from Talsarn. The colouration was quite striking on a bright sunny June day. Unfortunately I did not have my camera, but I passed the same way this week and stopped to snap this image.

My daughter complained that there were no leaves on the tree. I explained that blue trees never have leaves - or at least, I have never seen a blue tree that does have leaves.