Whorls

On my last observing run, we winded and clouded out. However, looking at the infrared water vapour pages at NOAA, I saw a beautiful line of vortices spinning out between two fronts of air.


NOAA keep all the imagery public for 30 days, so use a script to pull the images over and stitch them together with mplayer to produce an animated GIF.


# grab all the data for this night with the whorls in them
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}00.GIF;done
for i in q -w 0 23 do wget http://www.goes-arch.noaa.gov/WCWV08145${i}30.GIF;done
for i in *.GIF; do c=`echo $i | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]'`; mv $i $c; done

for f in *gif ; do convert -quality 100 $f `basename $f gif`jpg; done

mencoder "mf://wcwv*.jpg" -mf fps=10 -o test.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800


Big Ideas (using a ZX Spectrum)

This video actually made me tear up a little bit. The nostalgia! The genius! He even used a "WH Smiths" computer cassette tape, which all parents were conned into buying for their Speccy laden kids at Christmas!

Kudos to Tim P. for finding the link.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Arseilles and Airports

Well, that was a bad experience.

I went to a work conference in Marseilles for a week, and I am glad to be back in the country. To be fair, these particular conferences are week long affairs that result in burnout in three or four days, but this one was compounded by the, um, facilities that were laid on. To add insult to injury, we had paid 600 Euros with the punitive exchange rate of about $1.6 to 1 Euro for this conference, and what do we get?

One the first day, we got:

No air conditioning. In Marseilles sweaty summer heat.

Half the number of chairs for the number of people that attended.

Four of the talk rooms were in fact one single space divided by chipboard dividers. Yes, we got the triple whammy of hearing someone else's talk, not being able to see the slides because there was a wall of glass windows with daylight streaming in, and no microphones for fear of drowning out the other conversation.

Standing at the back of the rooms reminded me of a Merchant Ivory film set in the deep south - half the people were fanning themselves with their programs and the men generated minature armpit lakes of sweat in their buttondown shirts.

Oh! And they didn't have any supplies of water - no fountains, no jugs of tap water, nothing at all. I think I made five new friends when I looked under a cloth covered table, stole a bottle of Perrier water (that was scheduled for us in the afternoon, remember) and poured out five glasses of cold water. There was a minor stampede as people raced over and drank thirstily, and then I was told off by a French waiter for drinking unallocated water. They would have made a mint if they had had a stall selling bottles...

So - Charles de Gaulle airport. Essentially, don't go there. At all. If you can help it. For although it is pretty to be in, they have only two toilets in the E side of the building - apparently beautiful people don't need the toilet at all. And also, you cannot move the artfully designed chairs from their appointed spots, as THAT'S WHERE THEY HAVE BEEN BOLTED TO THE FLOOR. Do Not Disturb The Sexy, People.