Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate

Well, I did go through Ki development training in the early 70's (it's an Aikido thing) -- when Star Wars first came out in 1977 and Obi Wan was describing the Force to Luke, I immediately recognized it as Ki (translated as "life energy" or "mind"; transliterated from Chinese martial arts mysticism as "Qi", though it's written almost the same in both Chinese and Japanese with the rice-like radical in traditional Chinese being simplified into a kind of X)). But unlike in Scientology we didn't check any pseudo-scientific "midichlorian levels", but rather we would use Ki directly in our techniques which depended on us using Ki -- in Aikido, if you try to use physical strength to muscle your way through a move, then it will fail.I also never crossed the streams (nor even realized why the very thought of it would freak out Ray Stantz so very much until two decades later).Now, remember that I'm a retired software engineer with initial training as a computer electronics technician (which included chasing sparks through a CPU's logic diagrams). Combine my hardware training with working in C, which allows you to work very close to the metal, and I was very comfortable working with low-level operations, including bit-fiddling.On my own I had learned sockets programming, which is how network programming is commonly done, about 20 years. While sockets supports upwards of 25 different networking protocol families, TCP/IP is the one used on the Internet and hence the predominant one. So in the process I also learned what I could of TCP/IP and its various protocols.General networking theory is based on the OSI Protocol Stack which consists of 7 layers (hence the discussion of "layer"). TCP/IP commonly combines some of the OSI layers and is described with four layers which I discuss on my TCP/IP page.As for HTTP message fields, ever since the mid-80's, I've had a personal programming project that I keep restarting every time technology changes. In 1981, Navy Reserve officer Larry Bond published his modern naval warfare miniatures game, Harpoon (he had designed it to help train fellow officers) and around 1985 a friend and I sat down to run a very simple introductory scenario involving a Kidd-class destroyer and three Osa-II missile boats. The engagement was for 10 to 20 minutes, but after three hours of graphing, measuring, and calculating by hand we weren't even half-way through the scenario. That's when I decided that I needed to develop a "Harpoon Helper" program that would do all that messy book-keeping work for us. Yes, Bond's game system has been converted to a series of computer games, but there your forces are pitted against the computer's and (in the first iteration at least) you have to micro-manage everything.In the most recent development effort (circa 2013), I expanded my ideas to a networked system. That was inspired by the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) standard in which each unit (including each piece of ordnance in flight) is a separate entity that communicates with all the others (and with the simulation monitor) via UDP datagrams. However, DIS uses multicast and the source code was mainly interface shells, but it got me thinking.I chose to model the application protocol after the HTTP messages that the Web uses. I studied HTTP and started some prototype coding to process my version of HTTP messages. Again, HTTP request and response messages are how web pages operate as they GET resources and then receive them.BTW, Larry Bond had worked with Tom Clancy on Clancy's break-out novel, "The Hunt for Red October", for which they used Harpoon to game out the "battle scenes". A major source of military hardware information that they used came from the well-known and authoritative Jane's books started by Fred T. Jane as reference books to support his naval war game (1906). Wargaming is also very much a part of the curriculum at the Naval War College -- Invicta's videos, eg at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lj42mzT06jo&t=841sBut ever since I retired three years ago, I've done almost no programming at all. I will undoubtedly never complete that project, but it's been a very interesting study.Fun story. At my last job (my final 28 years of employment), because of my skills in bit-fiddling I would usually be given the task of interfacing our units with new GPS receivers, with the communications protocol of their serial comm ports.Part of that was interpreting binary data fields. Most receivers would transmit their binary data using IEEE standards, so the biggest problem would be translating the data stream's big-endian data representation to Intel's little-endian data storage. Fairly trivial.However, we started using a major GPS standard which used an entirely different format for floating-point data. It followed the same basic principles of IEEE-754, but the exponent and mantissa fields were different sizes (which also affected how to interpret the exponent field), along with being big-endian. Plus we had to be able to convert both ways, from RCVR (receiver) to IEEE as well as from IEEE to RCVR. The problem was definitely non-trivial are required concentration and a lot of attention to detail. One flipped or misplaced bit (out of upwards to 64 bits) would be disastrous.At the same time, I assisted a West Coast Swing dance teacher with her classes, mainly minding the door, handling the sign-ins and the money, and demonstrating moves. One of her popular classes was ladies' styling. It didn't take me long to figure out that it wasn't polite to be the only guy present with nothing to do but sit and watch, so I developed the habit of always bringing something to read or to work on.Such as this non-trivial floating-point format conversion problem from work. During one 1.5-hour class, I worked out the entire approach, then refined the approach, then sketched out most of the code. The next day at work all I had to do was type in the code, put on the finishing touches, and test it. Worked fine, so I submitted it for code review. I had mentioned where and under what conditions I had worked on it, so everybody, assuming that I had to have been distracted, did their best to find something, anything, that I had done wrong. They couldn't. 
ABE:
Oh, and yes, there must be something about my site, which is where I place my images, that the forum software doesn't like. I even placed an HTML IMG tag for that Vienna French Toast in the page I'm working on now and it displays just fine, but when I copy-and-pasted that tag to this reply as a test it was "Image Not Found" all over again.Edited by dwise1, : ABE

I haven't been able to fix this but will continue to look at it. The image displays fine in Firefox, displays displaced to the right in Safari (will be fixed), but won't display in Chrome or Edge. Both Chrome and Edge display the image fine in a separate tab but get an error when they try to load the image for display in an EvC message.

Just figured it out. It's a security issue. Chrome will not display http images on an https page. The problem should have begun for you as soon as I moved the website into the cloud, because I changed it from http to https at the same time. That would have been January of 2019.I know how to work around this and should have it fixed soon.If it's possible to flip your site into https mode, that would also fix the problem.

I never saw it anywhere else before or since. I was used to the Saskatchewan prices, Alberta's were a little bit lower than ours and BC's were a little bit higher than ours.

When I was a Scout, there was a simple cardboard (ie, like a playing card is made out of) device for practicing Morse code. We had obtained it already made, so this was not a craft project.The whole thing measured about 4 inches (10 cm) square and was a dark gray color. It was folded into itself in about three layers. On the front layer, there were cut into it horizontal rows of slits which overall formed a circle about 3 to 3.5 inches (7.5 to 8 cm) across. On the inner layer right behind it was painted with a circle of the same size consisting of same-width stripes alternating between the same dark color as the outside and a light whitish color (possibly also luminescent for a glow-in-the-dark feature). The back of the outside is not important, but I seem to recall that it had the Morse code printed on it for reference.The way it operated was that at you would hold it by the top and the bottom between your thumb and your fingers and squeeze it or release it. At the default rest position, the inside dark stripes would line up with the front's slits and the front would appear to be dark. But when you squeezed it, the inside light stripes would line up with the slits and you'd get the "lit up" circle.My question is where and how to obtain them. I know that Morse code is no longer required and has fallen out of use, but I'd like to be able to pass that knowledge on to my grandsons some day. 
ADDENDUM:
Googling for more info (mainly a photo of one), I stumbled upon it as "WW2 NAVY TRAINING AID CARDBOARD MORSE CODE FLASHER" at https://www.worthpoint.com/...-aid-cardboard-morse-130619847 . That site appears to be a kind of antique auction site and the going price for one of those (you need at least two for practice) on eBay is about $30. At least by going there you can see what I was just describing.My father had been in the Navy (WWII plus about a decade in the reserves), so that is probably how we had acquired them.So my question shifts to whether something like that is still being made and where I could acquire them. $30 each (plus $5 for shipping) is a bit stiff for me. 
ABE:
PS
I found them on amazon.com at $3 for a pair.Edited by dwise1, : PS ABE

Edited by dwise1, : added "(mainly a photo of one)"

Two questions, actually.1) There is a truism mentioned in many literature classes that there are only a small number of different stories such that the thousands of stories we see are just retelling those few basic stories. A good example is the many retellings of Romeo and Juliet; eg, as West Side Story. Or of Joseph Campbell's example of the Journey of the Hero in which the inexperienced and not ready hero embarks on a journey in which he learns and grows into the hero that he must eventually become.We see this all the time in movies and TV shows -- my father used to get a rise from us when we'd be watching a new episode on TV and he'd say that he had seen this one before and we'd argue that it had never aired before now. That was taken to the ridiculous when I returned home from duty at midnight (1977) and my wife told me about having watched back-to-back episodes of Charlie's Angels and Mod Squad. They were the exact same story (armed robber ditching his gun in a park, a kid finds it and accidentally shoots one of the main characters who falls out of sight in the bushes so the rest of the team has to find him/her), the only difference being different characters. We assumed that a writer just resold the script figuring that no one would catch on. A few years ago for fun I searched through Wikipedia's episode lists for those episodes and found them. They were indeed written by the same screenwriter and Wikipedia noted that duplication.My question on this one is: How many basic stories are there? I seem to recall fifteen (15), but I guess it depends on the lecturer.2) There's a basic story that has cropped up a number of times and which seem to be based on a classic story which I heard mentioned in a lecture half a century ago (like everything I seem to recall).I think it's called "A Sailor's Story" and that it's supposed to be Chaucer, though I'm undoubtedly wrong. A sailor falls overboard and just as he is about to drown, he is rescued by a mermaid who takes him to the shore of a fantastic land. He has many fabulous adventures and acquires great wealth, etc, until he finishes drowning. IOW, everything he had experienced was an illusion in the fraction of a second before death. What is the name of that classic story?Ambrose Bierce's version was An Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge, of which a French version was filmed and released in 1963 and was shown on The Twilight Zone (I watched that broadcast). Union troops capture a man and hang him as a spy, but as he drops the rope breaks and he falls into the creek and is swept to safety by the current. He flees to his home where his wife is waiting for him, evading capture all along the way. He makes it to his home, his wife rushes to greet him with open arms, and that is when he hits the end of the rope.There was a film, Clay Pigeon (1971), which starts with a squad on patrol in Nam. A VC lobs a grenade into their midst and one GI throws himself onto the grenade to save the rest, but it doesn't explode. Flash forward to him having returned to Los Angeles and now he's a street hippie. A narc (Telly Savalas) decides to use him as bait to lure out a drug lord (Robert Vaughn), a "clay pigeon" to get shot at. A number of scenes are surrealistic, like the drug lord's obsession with hats. In the end, everybody he loved has been killed and he just barely survived, so he lunges in anger at Savalas, at which point the grenade explodes.In his Nobel Prize winning novel, The Glass Bead Game (1943), Hermann Hesse describes an academia in which, as a side note, students were to write a "life", casting themselves as a person in some past time, a past life. In "The Indian Life", he tells the story of a prince whom, to keep him from getting killed in palace intrigue (his stepmother wanted her own son from a previous marriage to be Raj, like Livia wanted her son, Tiberius, to be Caesar so she killed off all other heirs; Claudius only survived because he was deemed harmless), was sent to be raised by a peasant. He marries and is happy, but the Raj (his stepmother's son) arrives and takes his wife, so he kills the Raj and escapes. He happens upon a yogi in the woods whom he tells his story to, to which the yogi just laughs and says, "Maya!" ("illusion", but very much more than simply that). In response to the boy's pleas to explain Maya, the yogi tells him to fetch a pot of water. When he is at the river, he sees his wife who explains that his true identity had been discovered, that he is the rightful Raj, and they have come to take him home to his palace. He rules wisely and has a son whom he loves very much, so he is very happy for years. But then a neighboring raj wages war with him and conquers his city, killing his son. Devastated, he is put in chains and thrown in the dungeon. Crying over his plight, he notices the light having turned green and instead of being bound behind his back, his hands were holding something, that pot for fetching water for the yogi. Understanding Maya, he returns to the yogi and never leaves the forest.And there are many more examples of that particular story.

Confirmed Chrome user unable to see the picture here.Just let me know if you want a Chrome user to attempt viewing again at a later date.

Sorry, I just haven't been able to get to this.

I'm trying to find the name of a classic story which in English literature (I think, and that it's from Middle English) is supposed to the archetype of a particular class of stories. This long brewing question has been reawakened by my reference to Herman Hesse in another message.Those stories are of this format:

• The protagonist is facing certain death when he is miraculously rescued.
• He then lives a lifetime of experiences and adventures.
• That initial certain death abruptly ends his life. That lifetime of experiences and adventures were just an illusion.

From modern times, the best known example is Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1890). In the Civil War, a Confederacy sympathizer is being hanged from said bridge, but when he drops the rope breaks and he falls into the rapid stream which begins his escape back to his home and to his wife waiting for him on the porch. As he is finally running up the walk to his wife reaching out for him, the rope tightens and he dies. I first encountered this story in 1964 when The Twilight Zone aired the 1963 French short film, La rivière du hibou, which had won the Academy Award for Live Action Short Film.The theme was used in a movie I sae in 1971, Clay Pigeon. On a patrol in Viet Nam, Charlie tosses a grenade into their midst and one soldier throws himself onto it to save his patrol. When the grenade doesn't go off, he looks up with a grin of relief and we cut to him having returned from Nam to Los Angeles where he's a care-free street hippie. An unscrupulous cop (Telly Savalas) sets him up as a live target to flush out a drug lord (Robert Vaughn) who takes the bait leading to a final shootout that the hippie survives. As he angrily lunges at the cop who had set him up and gotten everybody he knew killed, we cut back to Nam where the grenade explodes. A lot of scenes are surrealistic. It's streaming on Tubi.In Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, also published in English as Magister Ludi ("Master of the Game"), 1946 Nobel Prize for Literature), one of the the students' assignments is to write a fictious biography set in another time and culture. One such is The Indian Life in which an infant prince's father remarries and, when he dies, servants protect him from being killed by his stepmother to make way for his half-brother by hiding him in a village to be raised as a cow herder, where he grows up, marries, and is unaware of his true identity. When his half-brother, the Raj, tries to steal his wife, he kills the Raj and flees into the forest where he encounters a yogi. He tells the yogi his tale of woe to which the yogi laughs and says, "Maya!" (illusion, as in the Hindu belief that our entire life experience is just an illusion). Asking to be taught, the yogi has him take a pot to fetch water. At the stream, he hears his wife call out to him, telling him that they know that he is the rightful prince. He returns as the new Raj and rules wisely for several years and raise his own son whom he loves immensely. But the neighboring raj starts a war and defeats him, kills his son, and throws him into prison with his hands bound behind his back. Crying in despair he suddenly notices that his hands are in front of him, holding a pot, the pot he was filling with water for the yogi. He returns to the yogi and never leaves the forest.Now you have a sense of this type of story.The story I'm trying to find was mentioned by a guest speaker in one of our German seminars in 1975/6. It was an old story that our professor was also familiar with. In the story, a sailor falls overboard and as he's drowning he's rescued by a mermaid who takes him to land where he lives for many years having many adventures. And then he finishes drowning.Is anybody familiar with that last story?

You previously asked about Chaucer's The Shipman's Tale - I assume you found that.I'm not familiar with anything you say here, but ChatGPT had a couple suggestions:

ChatGPT:

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“Der Fischer und die Nixe” – one of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (but from their Deutsche Sagen collection, not the children’s tales).

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For scholarly context: look up ATU 470A, “The Drowning Man’s Dream”, in Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk Literature.

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--Percy

Thanks, but no joy. The theme of the genre is like the idea of your entire life passing before your eyes as you're dying, only in this case it's imagining an entire future that you will never have.Reading the summary of The Shipman's Tale shows that it is a different story with entirely different themes. So this is not the story I'm looking for. I had previously searched on "sailor" instead of "shipman" and it is only my impression that it had anything to do with Chaucer. Der Fisher und die Nixe (The Fisherman and the Mermaid") is also different. In the version I could find, the fisherman was able to strike a deal with the mermaid to ensure good catches. In most versions (eg, Goethe's Der Fischer) the Nixe would lure a person into the water to drown him.A popular version is Die Loreley, a siren inhabiting the Loreley cliffs overlooking a sharp and dangerous bend in the Rhein where, legend has it, her singing would lure many boatmen to their deaths on the rocks. When we took a boot ride down the Rhein the PA system would tell us about the sights in German, then English, then French, then Japanese. But when we were approaching the Loreley, the German version went into a big production complete with a children's chorus singing the entire Loreley song (by Liszt setting Heine's words to music; I had learned it in high school German class). By the time they got to the rest of us we were already sailing past it.The best that Google could find for "The Drowning Man's Dream" was modern works (eg, 1990's, a couple decades after that German seminar in question), including the well-known parable:

quote:

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• A religious man is caught in a flood and stands on his rooftop, praying for God to save him.
• A man in a rowboat comes by and offers help, but the stranded man refuses, insisting God will save him.
• As the water rises, a motorboat and then a helicopter each arrive and offer to rescue him, but he again refuses, clinging to his faith.
• The floodwaters eventually cover his house, and the man drowns.
• Upon reaching heaven, he confronts God, asking why his prayers were unanswered.
• God replies, "I sent you a rowboat, a motorboat, and a helicopter. What more did you want?".

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But thanks anyway.

I notice that my rating is missing. and i cannot THUMB up or THUMB down any other people's posts. some kind of probation? it's ok. just never heard a word before the account was partially disabled. or after.

My rating sometimes goes missing. I think if you don't post for a while, that happens. Perhaps the algorithm currently used decided that there is not enough recent data to give a rating.And sometimes, when I give a thumbs-up, it does not show until I refresh the page. This behavior has been occurring off and on for a while. I think it happens when the site is not very responsive.