The weather predictions are becoming more and more convincing that we here in
the Netherlands are heading for a winter period. For Sunday, about 10 to 20
cm of snow is expected, followed by a week of
cold temperatures. At the end of the week, there could be 10 cm of ice in the
North of the country.
It already started to snow yesterday evening. This
morning, I tried to measure the height of the snow on a table outside. It is
difficult to establish the amount of snow that fell because there is a strong
wind which blows the snow away. I measured the snow height on two spots and
concluded that about 15cm of snow has felt during the night. It is still
snowing and it will continue snowing during the day, the night and also
tomorrow according to the weather predictions. According to the weather
predictions the coming weeks the temperatures will remain below zero (Celsius),
meaning that the snow will not melt away and stay on the fields for a long
time. My estimate is that during the day another 3cm of snow fell.
Today, there is going to be some more snow. A bigger
problem is that the temperature is going to drop and stay below zero (Celsius),
which causes the snow to stay. Often, snow happens at the end of a cold period
in the Netherlands. Now it is at the start of a cold period. The last
predictions are that the temperature will stay below zero for at least a week.
This morning, it took me a quarter of an hour to get the car out of a parking
lot. I have some snow dunes in my back garden.
My estimate is that during the day (since yesterday evening) about 4cm of
snow fell.
Today is a double date when the date is
written in the format MM/DD/YY or YY.MM.DD: 02/10/21 or 21.02.10. The next such
date is on December 11 this year. This is the third mention of a special date for this year.
At 23:52, I bought the book Environments written by Frans Haks, Egbert
Switters, and Swip Stolk in Dutch, published by Studium Generale
Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht in 1968. I bought it online from De Slegte, Antwerpen
for € 100.00.
Today is the first day of the year 4718, the year of the ox according to the
Chinese calendar. The spring festival has begun.
This is both the year of Andy and I, meaning that
this year we will have our 24th and 60th birthdays,
respecitively. Today is also a palindrome
date when written like 12/02/2021 (DD-MM-YYYY), 12-2-21 (DD-M-YY), and 21.2.12 (YY.M.DD).
In the afternoon, Conny and I walked along the
roads called Moorveenweg, Hegebeenkweg, Berktepaalweg/Kwekerijweg,
Riethermsteeg, and Ontginingsweg. The name of Berktepaalweg refers to the
marke stone called Berktepaal. But this
stone is not along this road, but along the road called Moorveenweg which runs
parallel to it. The road called Bertkepaalweg was only extended to the border
between the municipalities of Enschede and Haaksbergen around 1937. So maybe
the road was called like this, because it was going into the direction of the
Berktepaal. We saw many animals tracks in the snow,
most of which seems to be from rabbits and/or hares and maybe also deers. Conny
took a picture of what looked like a hare in the distance and one of what
looked like a deer in the distance. We also saw many examples of snow shaped by
the wind. Surprising how just a small tree can lead to dunes in the wake of the
tree. The picture above is of
such a dune. I suspect that turbulence plays some role in the development of
these dunes.
I watched the first half of the video Platform Experience - On demand (in Dutch) on the Thinkwise channel. Thinkwise is a developer of low-code development platform, a platform that they for 16 years used to
develop solutions for their customers, but in the past two years are marketing
as a development platform. During the presentation, they said that the
documentation is available online. I looked up their data modeling and was a
little disappointed that it is table oriented. It was interesting to read
the data modeling guidelines. It is interesting to read about strong
entities, weak entities, link tables and inheritance tables, but it shows that
the table oriented approach is an implementation of a more abstract way of
modeling data. It seems they do advocate composite, and possible large, primary
keys, which could not always be the best implementation solution. But it seems
to work for the kind of applications that they target.
It seems that the battle against COVID-19 is
a lost battle. Take for example, the scientific publication
Mechanistic
transmission modeling of COVID-19 on the Diamond Princess cruise ship
demonstrates the importance of aerosol transmission, which suggest that it
is very difficult to stop the spread of the virus. As expected, the virus is
mutating and possible avoiding antibodies against earlier infections including
antibodies produced by vaccinations. And now the first hybrid has been found,
which combines the mutations from two variants, B.1.1.7 and B.1.429. There is
no reason why this will happen again. Some specialist are stating that
a cytokine storm
plays an important role in people getting seriously ill from a COVID-19
infection. Maybe more effort should be put in treating that. One such possible
treatment is the EXO-CD24 drug found by Prof. Nadir Arber. The effectiveness of
this drug has not been scientifically established yet by means of double-blind
study with sufficient number of cases.
Conny and I decided to walk along the border
near the city of Overdinkel. We first made a stop at the border between the village Glane
and Gronau to find a border pole we missed last
year May 31. When we parked our car, Conny
noted stone that looked like a border pole and when walked over, was indeed
the border pole 856-E. After we found the border pole we came for, we walked
in the other direction and found one more pole. From there we drove to another
location and walked a long distance along the border. At a tree, just after
border pole 3-I, that had recently fell down, we had some lunch. The poles we
encountered are:
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
18.0° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 15.1° for the
temperature on this date in 1990. Quite surprising swing of weather, because
two weeks ago was the start of a cold period where the temperature remained
below zero Celsius for almost a week. Conny
and I continued our search for border poles in
Drenthe. The poles we encountered are:
At 12:41, pole 152 (D), which we only saw from the otherside of the river
on Saturday, January 23.
At 13:11, pole 159.
At 13:17 we saw pole 160 from a large distance.
At 13:28, pole 157 (N).
At 14:09, the remains of pole 156-II (N).
At 14:14, pole 156 (N). It looks like pole 156 (D) has disappeared.
At 14:23, pole 156-II (D).
At 14:37, pole 156-III (D).
At 14:51, pole 157 (D).
At 15:56, pole 160-II. (A yellow PVC pole.)
At 15:38, pole 160-I. It looks like the foundation, a stone platform
supported by wooden piles, has been rebuilded completed.
At home, Conny made curly kail hotchpotch with a
spice mixture, consisting of onion powder, celery leaf, paprika powder, ground
mustard seed, caraway seed, savory, thyme, basil, garlic powder, ground white
pepper, ground black pepper, ground nutmeg, turmeric, ground cumin seed, ground
bay leaf and ground coriander. It tasted nice.
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
18.3° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 14.4° for the
temperature on this date in 1990. When walking, we still found some snow in
a ditch along the road, which is a strange experience with the extreme high
temperatures of these days.
The temperature at Twenthe Airport went up to
18.5° Celsius, which breaks the previous record of 16.8° for the
temperature on this date in 1990. This is the fourth day in a row, and
probably the last, with a new record high temperature. The highest temperature
for tomorrow is 17.9° Celsius which was measured in 2019. With a predicted
highest temperature of 15.4° Celsius it is not likely that it will be
broken.
This morning, Conny and I went walking along
the border looking for the first border pole
along the border of the
province of Overijssel and Germany. The border of Germany makes a sharp
turn to the South where the border of Overijssel continues towards the West.
South of this border is the
province of Gelderland. This border pole is called Jurisdictiepaal. It is
placed there in 1766 as a replacement of a wooden pole. The pole played an
important role in a border conflict between the marke of Haaksbergen and
Honesch, which lasted from 1611 till 1773. The pole has the coats of arms of
Gelderland (with date 1766 below it), Overijssel (with the date 1773 below it),
and Münster. It is the first of 186 stones at the border of
Guelders and Müster,
which were placed after the convention of Burlo on October 19, 1765.
We encounteret the following poles/stones:
At 8:52, pole 832 (stone 1).
At 9:03, pole 832A (stone 2).
At 9:15, pole 832B (stone 3).
At 9:25, pole 832C (we presume, because it only the top of it was above
the water).
Conny and I continued our search for
border poles along the border where we started
yesterday. We skipped some part of the border because some stones are in the
middle of a nature reserve and thus not accessible for the public. We
encountered the following poles/stones:
At 11:45, pole 833A.
At 11:55, pole 833B (stone 8).
At 12:33, pole 833 (stone 7) from about 10 meters.
At 13:30, pole 834 (stone 11).
At 13:40, pole 833E (stone 10).
At 13:48, pole 833D.
At 13:57, pole 833C (stone 9).
Near pole 833B we also found a German Trigonometric Point.
This months interesting links