Last night I was watching my fave TV show Top Gear and they mentioned the perfectly circular Nardo ring in Italy. well I Googled it and here it is. An awesome sight from space!
Here are the coords in Google Maps. Check out the satellite view!
http://maps.google.de/maps?ll=40.324539,17.824676&z=13&t=h&hl=en-GB
And here is a cool image!
Here is a gallery of my Nordic Ski trip this morning.
Ice cold at the start – 9.12am, was even ice in my nose to begin with and I couldn’t feel my fingers, but I soon warmed up.
As a boy, around this time of year post Christmas I’d be sat on the floor, busy cutting out parts from a Christmas gift Airfix kit. You’d cut out the parts, then glue them together.
I’m doing one this year at 44 years of age, but a cloth one. Alright it’s a teddy bear needlework kit! A gift friends purchased from Tchibo, you get fluffy cloth and a paper outline to cut, yarn, and fluff to fill it. Initially I didn’t want to start, but the wife gave her usual disparaging comments about me, and I stubbornly decided to see it through. What is happening during its making though is wonderful.
I’m sitting there breathing, concentrating, creating, solving problems, in fact all the stuff perhaps my Mum might have “just got on with”, but in our X Factor world today we’ve completely lost. Well I at least have. There is something profoundly meditative about the whole experience, the occasional frustrations, then the relief at the resolution of problems, which the digital world just doesn’t give.
Put me in my other fireplace room /we call it the tile stove room as it used to have a ceramic stove which we took out for a cosier looking glass fronted fire), some candles (four naturally!) and it takes me back to 1940s Britain. One only needs one of those huge radio cabinets with Dick Barton Special Agent, some Ovaltine and we’re back in the days of the Blitz!
I’m going to give him when he is complete to my son. Today during a moment of calming him down after he slipped, fell and cried, I asked him what we might name him “Teddy” he said. I told him the original name of teddy bears was Edward, so could we name him Edward? He agreed, so Edward when he is finished will have a birth certificate which came with the kit, and will be the new arrival in our household.
I’ve always been a lousy sleeper. The last few nights I ought in theory to have slept like a log (It’s been a Haaaard Day’s Night!) yet at 3am every ngiht I’ve been wide awake, unable to get back to sleep. This has been my downfall all my life, tiredness, lethargy and the odd depression. it does ease up with regular exercise, but at Christmas this is simply impossible.
As my wife set off for work this morning she mentioned the weather. “I wonder if the low pressure we have at the moment is affecting your sleep?” she asked,. Moments later Google was my friend and I got surfing the subject of weather on sleep. It seems there may be a link between dropping pressure and sleep, according to these amazing links I found:
http://www.robsworld.org/barometer.html is a more anecdotal account of weather effects on people
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2854702/ is a more scientific study.
http://www.ciesin.org/docs/001-338/001-338.html is a more general study of the effects of climate on humans. We get a lot of Föhn here which I often hear induces headaches, which don’t seem to affect me. Mind you I was raised at sea level as a boy.
So that got me thinking – can a scientific link be found between barometric pressure and amount of sleep? Thus can there be a correlation between Jeremy going occasionally bananas and self medicating with the odd dash of alcohol and being up all night, and the weather?
I used to be interested in a sleep disorder called DSPS – Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome. I used to fill out a spreadsheet application detailing my sleep patterns. Upon analysing the sheet it became apparent I didn’t have that disorder, yet is it possible I have sleep apnea which means my breathing goes odd in the night waking me up? Perhaps. I think two approaches will help. Recording my daily sleep patterns again, yet relating this to barometric pressure may be a successful strategy.
Another will be to somehow record perhaps my breathing at night somehow using a long term tape recorder, ´to see if my breathing changes in the early hours of the morning.
Surf surf and surf again Jeremy, and look what you find! This gem of an article turned up:
http://www.bmj.com/content/332/7536/266.full
We just started going to our favourite recycling centre. and what did we find the other day? A Didgeridoo!
Without that article I might have thought this was nuts. But it sounds plausible. Sleep therapy with the didge!
Right then,
Here is a snippet of advice from one who has just learned his mistake. I am presently digitizing our town for Openstreetmap as I believe in the community effort to build a map of where we live.
I’ve been entering JOSM then using Nominatim to select the town in which I live – “Holzkirchen” in southern Germany. Unnoticed by me, there are two “definitions” of the place. The first is a relatively narrow small area defines as a “town” which I’d been clicking on often. The second is as (I think) a region. I’d been clicking on the former and downloading OSM data for that alone.
Now I didn’t realise my error till I received a rightly disgruntled message from one who had been far more hard working than I in the same area. Upon checking the data in JOSM I saw that he was absolutely right. My error was to capture over an area Nominatim had selected which was too narrow.
I thus duly deleted all my bad capturing, which was doubly captured house outlines and apologised to him!
I hope that makes sense.
(yes I know that is awful English! I heard it once at a playgroup during story telling!)
I continue digitising houses the best I can in OSM, yet it is now obvious I need to understand the finer points of JOSM. Thus a perusal of Steve Coast’s video explaining how stuff is captured:
http://showmedo.com/static/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.1.5.swf
I think we need to check the road and street naming also in our database. It does seem to already be in excellent shape though.
The greatest discovery I made is the building plugin in JOSM! I can now input buildings very quickly!
As part of my efforts towards a quality bike map of my region i am learning Mapnik. Installing under Windoze was a pain but I managed it, and got my very first output from the test script:
…and at the end I found a local distiller who will take our plums and make Schnapps out of them!
Have always admired his writings in the Indy and have decided like with my Pollan book to check out his references in GE. Here is the first:
I wonder if this is the road the bin Laden built between Khartoum and Port Sudan?
Was trying to examine places near south Sudan but didn’t see much evidence of conflict.
However this region has some stunning stuff. See:
