Sunday, February 28, 2010
Friday, February 26, 2010
Pink Moves to other Side of the World
This is where I start,
Or click here for a large 25MB image of the South Island, where I will probably stay all months.
Or click here for a large 25MB image of the South Island, where I will probably stay all months.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Royal Navy Field Gun Competition
What an awesome sport
wiki
The field gun competition also referred to as Gun Run or the Gun Run was held annually at the Royal Tournament in London from 1907 to 1999, and was contested by teams from the Royal Navy. After the demise of the Royal Tournament, the Brickwoods field gun competition was revived as a naval contest: it was won for the first time by an Army team (from 7 Air Assault Battalion REME) in June 2005.
The origins of the field gun competition lie in the Second Boer War in South Africa. The legendary story tells of the siege of the British garrison in the township of Ladysmith in 1899. In support of the British Army, the Royal Navy landed guns from HMS Terrible and Powerful to help in the relief of the siege. The Naval Brigade transported guns over difficult terrain and brought them into action against the Boers.
The Royal Navy landed two 4.7 inch guns and four 12-pounder field guns. The guns were transported inland by rail and then drawn on makeshift carriages by oxen. For the final part of the journey, sailors from the Naval Brigade manhandled the guns over very difficult terrain. One story tells of sailors carrying one of the 12 pounder guns for 2 miles after one of the wheels collapsed.
The siege of Ladysmith lasted for 120 days until February 1900. On their return home, the sailors from the Naval Brigade paraded their guns through London and appeared at the Royal Naval and Military Tournament at the Agricultural Hall, Islington. Displays of Field Gun drill continued in subsequent years.
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Gerechtelijke vaststelling van het vaderschap
Een stukje over de Nederlandse wetgeving betreffende de vaststelling van het vaderschap.
Postbus 51:
"Een moeder en een kind kunnen het vaderschap laten vaststellen door de rechtbank. Bijvoorbeeld omdat de man die het kind verwekt heeft, weigert het kind te erkennen of omdat de verwekker van het kind overlijdt voordat erkenning heeft plaatsgevonden. Gerechtelijke vaststelling van het vaderschap (gvv) is een laatste redmiddel om een familierechtelijke band tot stand te brengen tussen de biologische vader en het kind."
"Gevolgen toekennen verzoek gvv
Als gerechtelijke vaststelling van het vaderschap wordt toegekend, betekent dit dat de man (verwekker) de juridische vader wordt van het kind. Dit heeft als gevolgen:
* de man wordt onderhoudsplichtig;
* het kind erft van hem;
* het kind kan de naam van de man krijgen;
* het kind krijgt de Nederlandse nationaliteit als de man Nederlander is."
hier en hier over de bewijsvoering.
"Zo mogelijk zal met een DNA-onderzoek aangetoond moeten worden dat de man inderdaad de vader is. Werkt de man echter niet mee aan een dergelijk onderzoek (ook niet wanneer de rechter deze gelast), dan kan de rechtbank daaraan haar eigen conclusies verbinden. "
Burgerlijk wetboek - boek 1 - personen- en familierecht, artikel 207 en 208
Amazon buys Linux license from Microsoft
"As part of the pact, Amazon will pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money.WTF?!
The deal covers both Amazon's Kindle product as well as the company's use of Linux-based servers. Microsoft has maintained that many implementations of Linux infringe on its patents and has signed numerous licensing deals that cover Linux with both companies that sell Linux-based software and those that use the operating system in their hardware."
Monday, February 22, 2010
Bas Rutten Street Defense
Maybe you remember Bas Rutten (posted by cyberbeast). He also got a movie about "selfdefence". He is doing the sound effects himself! i laugh my ass off so absurd is this guy is.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
More from Banksy's Bristol exhibition
I've blogged about his exhibition before. Here's a video showing more of it. Quite an awesome exhibition, especially considering his specialty is spray paint and stenciling.
Wereld Natuurbestrijdingsfonds
They stole our idea!
With the undertitle:
To protect and to serve humanity against nature
They got some nice articles for example:
How to chop down a windmill
And some nice theory's, like the theory about the searise:
First they measured at low tide and then they measured at high tide!
Also they got a fix for the searise problem: Just pull out all the whales
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Huge lanslide in Italy caught on video
You've probably already seen clips on the news, but here is more complete footage.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Polar Pot Plot
Plotting this formula yields a nice leaf:
PolarPlot[(1 + 0.9 Cos[8 t]) (1 + 0.1 Cos[24 t]) (0.9 + 0.05 Cos[200 t]) (1 + Sin[t]), {t, -Pi, Pi}]You can see it plotted here.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
When exploratory drilling goes wrong
Lots of fun things can happen. You could open a door to hell which has been burning for almost 40 years now. This story was featured previously on the blog.
You could hit a salt mine under a lake, thereby draining a complete lake like a bathtub, and making a canal run backwards.
wiki It is difficult to determine exactly what occurred, as all of the evidence was destroyed or washed away in the ensuing maelstrom. The now generally accepted explanation is that a miscalculation by Texaco regarding their location resulted in the drill puncturing the roof of the third level of the mine. This created an opening in the bottom of the lake, similar to removing the drain plug from a bathtub. The lake then drained into the hole, expanding the size of that hole as the soil and salt were washed into the mine by the rushing water, filling the enormous caverns left by the removal of salt over the years. The resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, many trees and 65 acres (260,000 m2) of the surrounding terrain. So much water drained into those caverns that the flow of the Delcambre Canal that usually empties the lake into Vermilion Bay was reversed, making the canal a temporary inlet. This backflow created, for a few days, the tallest waterfall ever in the state of Louisiana, at 164 feet (50 m), as the lake refilled with salt water from the Delcambre Canal and Vermilion Bay. The water downflowing into the mine caverns displaced air which erupted as compressed air and then later as 400-foot (120 m) geysers up through the mineshafts.You could also cause a rock fracture leading to a mud volcano that has been erupting since 2006, oozing enough mud to fill 50 Olympic size swimming pools every day, and razing four villages and 25 factories in the process. Article and Video
Monday, February 15, 2010
Extreme fractal zoom
Zooming into the Mandelbrot Fractal (wiki link).
The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were "actually" traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light. You might like to know that this animation took me about two days to set up. My computer then rendered day and night non-stop for just over a month to produce the animation. More
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
What a black hole might look like
A new interactive program reveals the spectacular light show you'd see if you dared to wander close to a black hole. It demonstrates how the extreme gravity of a black hole could appear to shred background constellations of stars, spinning them around as though in a giant black washing machine. More @ NewScientist
You can download the simulator here.
Back form boarding
I'm also back, and had a great time.
Here is your obligatory dose of panoramas:
I had my first accident this year. I did a little jump on the side of a path,
I had to divert to avoid a collision with a skier after jumping back on the path and slightly touched the snow on the right side of the trail. I think my speed was 25-30 km/h when it felt like a stone hit my knee, hard. I fell down and feared internal damage. I happily noticed I could make most knee movements without pain. I stood up to find out what had hit my knee and found this under the snow,
The skin of my knee was completely pierced by this stiff metal wire. I had an interesting and scary look into the inner workings of my knee, through a hole with a diameter of 1 cm, on the side of me knee. I feared that it has also pierced some more important mechanical parts in my knee and needed a stitch (suture). So I hitchhiked to the local French doctor. He stitched the wound and made an x-ray,
No mechanical damage. And I could board the next day, Docteur Delporte told me in actual English. I only wasn't allowed to fall on that knee. He fixed me for 90 euro.
The wound after 5 days of primitive neural intelligence enhanced skin healing.
I was more carefully (and did not fall on my knees), but had no problem snowboarding :) Lucky unlucky me.
Thursday, February 11, 2010
Current sate of the art DirectX 11 graphics
Not game you can play, just a benchmark you can run fluently if you have one the newest ATI DX11 GPUs. Very pretty though. Be sure to watch full screen in HD.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Suicidal man plays with lion friends
It must be amazing to interact with lions like this, however this is very deadly. Even friendly lions and tigers have been known to kill their human companions in play fighting. It seems this guy is aware of this risk though and still wants to take it.
Monday, February 08, 2010
Look at what we're sending to represent us in an internatial music-competition
Even tho it's kinda gay to comment on the Eurovision songfestival, I still wanted to share this with you.
The song shalalie is a sure thing in my book.
Interactive scale of the Universe
A very neat interactive flash applet that lets you zoom between the smallest hypothesized scale, the Planck length, all the way to the edge of the observable universe (which it sadly got wrong because of a common misconception, it is 93 billion LY instead of 14).
Full screen version.