First day of Spring
If there is one day that could be given the title
"First day of Spring" it should be this
day, at least for our part of the country. During
the day, the temperature rose to 23 degrees Celsius.
But not everywhere it was this hot, as can be seen
in the temperature profile
of 16:50. At that time it was 22.9 degrees near
us, but only 7.2 degrees in the far South-West of
the country.
Into the city
This afternoon, I went into the city on my own.
I had put on my walking boots. After I bought I
currant bun, I walked to Gallery "Beeld & Aambeeld". I had a quick look at
some painting by Billy Foley, which I had seen before.
Next I walked to Picture gallery Objektief where I watched some pictures
by Robin Noorda under the
title Transit Mongolia. Quite impressive, I have to say.
Next, I walked to bookshop
Kruimeltje and only made a short visit. Next was
bookshop De Slegte. In the
bookcase with recently acquired second hand books, I found
two books that I read as a young
teenager: De strijd om het Goudschip by Willy van der Heide
and De Discus komt terug by R. Feenstra. When I searched
a right section, I found some more books from these two authors.
Next I went to bookshop Broekhuis.
After looking around, I went to the second floor and watched
some of the drawings and prints by Pieter Appel. This evening,
I discovered that just after I left, a poetry collection was
going to be presented. I missed that.
When I arrived on the "Oude Markt" square, there was a men standing
in a pillory and eggs where being thrown at him (picture). There is some
wierd custom around where I live, that couples who want to marry
are subjected to a kind of test by their friends, who otherwise
simply refuse to give any present. Bystanders could buy eggs for
one Euro each. Of course, I did not join.
Just before I went home, I bought some gherkins and curly kail.
De Slegte: Three books
This afternoon, Li-Xia went into
the city. She returned around a quarter to four and encouraged
me to go to the city as well. Of course, I went to
bookshop De Slegte. There I
bought the two books that I had seen there yesterday both for € 2.00 and the book
Verborgen stemmen (The Good Women of China) by
Xinran for
€ 2.50.
First flowers of Magnolia opened
This afternoon, I noticed that a few flowers
of our Magnolia had opened.
I expect that many more will follow in the coming days.
I usually does around this time of the year.
Natural well
Everytime when I bike to my office, I come past three,
or maybe it is just one, natural well. It hasn't rained
from some time, but these three spots are always wet.
The first spot (picture) seems to be the wettest. Actually it only
appeared after they reconstructed the road crossing on
the left and installed some traffic lights. At first it
seemed it the had forgotten to close some drainage pipe,
because the spot would be flooded everytime after it had
rained, but lately I noticed that it was wet even when
there was no rain at all.
The second spot (picture) used to be the wettest. Even in the middle
of the summer, you can hear the sound of water dripping
into the sink.
The third spot (picture) is a little further. In the picture I have
marked the position of the first and second spot with a
yellow arrow and a number along.
I think that the three wells are linked, that the water
is coming from the same source. The geology of the area
is that there are porous and nonporous layers which were
pushed by glaciers from the last ice age.
(KML-file with the locations.)
(Follow-up: Drainage installed in January 2012)
Playing Go
This evening, I went to the university to play Go. When I arrive, Taco and Rudi were already
encaged in a game, and Huub was watching them. After having
watched the game some time, Huub and I decided to play.
I was given a two stone handicap. In the end I won with
10 points. We tried to replay the game, but we did not
come far. (Game record.) Tonight,
we had several people watch us play. Even one of the waitresses
(a student) game to look and wanted to know the goal of the
game. Rudi gave a short explaination of the goal without
explaining the rules.
Jan Cremer
This evening, I went to bookshop
De Slegte as usual. I looked around, and in the end I
bought the book Jan Cremer Documentaire by Hans Dütting
about the life and works of Jan Cremer. I bought the book at 19:36:01 for € 4.99.
Last Monday, I started reading the
letters of Jan Cremer that he wrote from 1956 to 1996. I think
it would be interesting to read both books sides by side.Before I
already read the autobiographical book Wolf (Wolve)
about the youth of Jan Cremer.
HanniBall is a strategic game which
Christian Freeling
invented in the past week. He published the rules on
the Arimaa forum in a discussion about inventing games.
Christian has been inventing games for a long time, and in the
discussion he claimed that he could get an impression of the
quality of a game by just looking at the rules, thus without
having to play the game. Christian did not invent this game
to proof this point, but when it happened to him (by his own
surprise) he decided not to play the game before fixing the
rules. Today, he did play the game against his son and he
did not find neither inconsistency nor incompleteness in the
rules. This game is unlike any of the games he invented before.
It looks quite interesting.
Magnolia
Today, it was warm day again. The highest temperature
was 23.8 degrees Celsius. When I came home, I enjoyed the
many flowers on our Magnolia
that are now fully open. I also took a number of pictures,
one of which is shown on the right.
Easter Fires
Yesterday evening, when we drove home from Almere, we saw three
Easter Fires
while driving on the highway. In this part of the
country there has been a strong tradition of making bonfires of
wood left from pruning. Today, I tried to located the position
of these fires. I succeeded with respect to the first and the
last. From the second, I only have a guess. The fires where in
the villages Dortherhoek, Loo, and Beuseberg. See also
this detailed map in Google Maps for all the Easter Fires
in Overijssel.
This morning, the smell of the fires was still hanging in the air.
Yesterday morning, there was also a smell of fires, but this was
from fires lit in Germany where they have the tradition to ignite
them on the evening of Holy Saturday.
CPHPC
According to Alzheimer's disease: A new small molecule approach to treatment from UCL,
a new small molecule drug, called CPHPC, may have a positive effect
on Alzheimer's Disease because it
aids in the removal of Serum amyloid P component (SAP) from the blood
and also from the brain. Removal of SAP may stop the accumulation of
plaques in the brain, and thus stop the progression of the disease.
This was announced by Professor Mark Pepys from
The Centre for
Amyloidosis and Acute Phase Proteins.
CPHPC is shorthand for R-1-[6-[R-2-carboxy-pyrrolidin-1-yl]-6-oxo-hexanoyl]
pyrrolidine-2-carboxylie acid. This drug has been known since early 2002:
Amyloid buster? New drug hinders Alzheimer's protein.
Large numbers
Yesterday, during a dinner, I had to think back about the
problem of generating large numbers
with BF programs. Today, I got the
idea for this program:
>n_1..>n_k<[>[-<[->>a<<]>>[-<<b>>]<]<<]>[-<+>]<
where n_1..n_k,a,b stand for one or more + characters.
This program calculates the number n_1.(ab)^(..^(n_(k-1).(ab)^(n_k))..)
with a program length of 35+n_1+...+n_k+k+a+b.
This program does calculate numbers that are larger
I do not know if it beats the program that I described
on January 24, 1999, but it
looks like it could, as the core of the program is shorter.
This program makes use of a construction that I have not
used before in programs to generate large numbers, but which
is being used rather frequently in compact BF programs. The
construction is a "sliding" loop, a loop in which the memory
pointers moves. The idea of the program is to fill the location
1 to k (where the starting location is location 0) with some
numbers and next raising powers while walking back.
Large numbers
Today, I modified the slcc program,
which I wrote a long time ago for calculating large numbers.
The program found that the BF program
">+>+>+>+<[>[-<[->>++<<]>>[-<<++>>]<]<<]>[-<+>]<"
(with a lenght of 47 instructions) leaves the following number
in the first memory location:
13407807929942597099574024998205846127479365820592393377723561443721764030073546976801874298166903427690031858186486050853753882811946569946433649006084096
A similar program with just one extra "+" produces a
number with more than 6000 digits. By just prefixing the above
mentioned program with ">+" it calculates the
number 4 to the power of the number mentioned above, which is
a number that has about 0.602 times this number digits.
For a table of number that can be calculated with programs shorter
than 47 instructions see here.
Turkish Airline victims go to court
Three victims of the Turkish Airline crash
have decided to go to court with the Lawyers Manuel von Ribbeck
and Mide Eidson from Ribbeck Law. There action is based on the assumption that
the initial report by accident investigators said that a faulty
altitude meter probably caused the crash. I am not a lawyer,
but I think they do not have a case, because the pilots made
the decision to land the plane with just one auto-pilot active,
which is a configuration that is not certified. It would have
been perfectly possible to land the plane without the auto-pilots
active. If I understand it correctly, than the data from the
black-box shows that the problem with the radar altitude meter
occured at least twice before and that in both cases the pilots
landed the plane without any problems.
Ernest Louwes
Today, Ernest Louwes, was released from prison after having
served for eight years. He was convicted for twelve years
on the murder of Mrs. Jaqueline Wittenberg on September 25, 1999,
which becamse known as the Deventer
murder trial. His conviction has been highly disputed, and
labled as a
Miscarriage of justice. In the Netherlands, people
are usually released from prison at 2/3 of there conviction
period on good behaviour. Ernest Louwes already was outside of
prison for some time, but placed under certain liberty restrictions.
He also was not allowed to speak with the press, which is quite
unique for the Netherlands. This restriction was tried in court
and although the court lifted the restriction to a certain degree,
but it was done in such a manner that it was still enforced.
Today, Louwes is allowed to speak as a free person, and he did
so during several television programs. Tomorrow he is going to
present a book about his story of the murder trial.
Curcumin
Today, I came across some announcement that Regina Appiah-Opong
is going to receive her PhD on dscovery that curcumin seems to
reduce the activity of Cytochrome P450 3A4 and Cytochrome P450 2C9.
Already in June 2007, the article Inhibition of human recombinant cytochrome P450s by
curcumin and curcumin decomposition products was published
about this.
Prelimenary report about Flight 1951
Today, the Prelimenary report about the crash
of Turkish Airlines flight 1951 on Wednesday, March 4 near Schiphol, Amsterdam was released.
This report seems to confirm the information earlier give on
flightglobal.com with respect to the following
facts about the last ten seconds of the flight:
- the stick shaker activated at about 400ft above ground and the
first officer increased power
- the captain took control and as the first officer released the
throttles they moved to idle due to being in "retard" mode
- after six seconds the throttles were advanced but as the engines
responded the aircraft hit the ground in a slightly nose-high attitude
In the Prelimenary report is says:
The stick shakers activated at approximately 460 feet, warning
the crew that the angle of attack (AOA) was too high. The data
of the digital flight data recorder show that the thrust levers
were immediately advanced but moved back to idle. When the thrust
levers returned to idle, the autothrottle was disengaged. Whether
these actions were performed by the crew or automatically is still
under investigation. At that moment, the speed was approximately
110 knots, the pitch angle was approximately 11° Aircraft Nose
Up (ANU) and the recorded AOA was approximately 20°.
At 420 feet the autopilot was disengaged by the crew and attempts
were made to recover. At 310 feet the pitch attitude had reached
8° nose down. Almost simultaneously the thrust levers were
advanced to their most forward position after which the aircraft
ascended somewhat and the pitch angle increased.
According to the last recorded data of the digital flight data
recorder the aircraft was in a 22° ANU and 10° Left Wing Down
(LWD) position when the recording ended.
The description is slightly confusing, as the second paragraph details
the facts mentioned in the first part. The report does not mention
the time between the different events, but we can estimate them from
the facts. An airspeed op 110 knots is equal to 203.72 Km/h, which
is equal to about 56.6 m/s or 185 feet/s (fps). The normal glideslope
is such that rate of descent is about 5% of the airspeed, which leads
to 9.25 fps for the given airspeed. But in this case, it might have
been higher. So lets assume that they where already 20 fps. Then you
get the following timeline:
- At 460 feet, shakers activated and thrust levers were advanced.
- At 420 feet, 2 seconds later, the thrust levers moved back to idle and
the autothrottle was disengaged.
- At 310 feet, 5.5 seconds later, the thrust levers were advanced
again.
This timeline seems to match the description given at flightglobal.com.
Swine flu: level 5
The WHO has raised the Swine Flu threat level to 5. But is that a good
decision. Are we really at the brink of a world wide
disaster. As it seems no, there are only eight confirmed
death cases in the world and most cases outside Mexico
has been very mild. It is unknown how many people have
been infected in Mexico, but it might much more than
the suspected cases in Mexico. Which means that the death
rate might not be much more than of a normal flu.
(New Scientist article.)
If this virus is like the Spanish flue, it might come
in several waves, of which the second wave might be
the worse. In that case, it might be better to catch
it during the first wave, because at the moment it
seems rather mild. So, maybe it is better to let it
go loose. The economical damage done by all the restrictions
might be much more than the actual damage done by the flu
virus itself. Anyway, the virus has already spread over
the world, and then I do not think about the cases that
have been detected in the developed world, but all the
undetected cases in the developing world. I can hardly
imagine that the virus has not already spread to many
countries in South America. It is the hidden cases (often
mild) that are responsable for most of the spread of the
flu virus.
This months interesting links
Movements
KMZ file of movements (incomplete).
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