Katyusha (Катюша)

I am a huge fan of Igor Presnyakov and what he does to/with his acoustic guitar.

Hear him perform the Russian song Katyusha (Катюша)

Distances from Bonn

I came up with the strange idea of sorting European capitals by how far they are from the town I live in (Bonn, Germany) and found that half a dozen of foreign capitals are nearer than the capital of Germany.

City	Country	Distance in km
Luxembourg City	Luxembourg	142
City of Brussels	Belgium	195
Amsterdam	Netherlands	234
Paris	France	400
Bern	Switzerland	425
Vaduz	Liechtenstein	437
Berlin	Germany	478
London	United Kingdom	510
Prague	Czech Republic	527
Copenhagen	Denmark	659
Vienna	Austria	726
Ljubljana	Slovenia	755
Bratislava	Slovakia	779
Monaco	Monaco	779
City of San Marino	San Marino	857
Zagreb	Croatia	857
Budapest	Hungary	942
Dublin	Republic of Ireland	957
Warsaw	Poland	976
Oslo	Norway	1047
Rome	Italy	1065
Vatican City	Vatican City	1065
Sarajevo	Bosnia and Herzegovina	1143
Stockholm	Sweden	1181
Belgrade	Serbia	1195
Vilnius	Lithuania	1300
Riga	Latvia	1308
Podgorica	Montenegro	1347
Madrid	Spain	1421
Minsk	Belarus	1430
Tirana	Albania	1432
Ankara	Turkey	1447
Skopje	Macedonia	1463
Tallinn	Estonia	1474
Sofia	Bulgaria	1522
Helsinki	Finland	1530
Bucharest	Romania	1583
Chişinău	Moldova	1639
Kiev	Ukraine	1648
Valletta	Malta	1745
Lisbon	Portugal	1845
Athens	Greece	1931
Moscow	Russia	2086
Reykjavík	Iceland	2257
Tbilisi	Georgia	3034
Yerevan	Armenia	3106
Baku	Azerbaijan	3469

If you find this idea interesting what about composing a similar table for the location you live in?

Obtaining Tweeted Images in Original Size

An increasing number of tweets contains images uploded to twitter. Here is one example:

A particular example

I assume that you know how to find out URLs of images that are used on a web page.

The URL of the image you see in the tweet is https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A0BRGqGCcAEBdHW.jpg with the dimensions 600px × 428px (scaled to 435px × 310px).

If you click on the image to obtain a larger version you are presented with https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A0BRGqGCcAEBdHW.jpg:large with the dimensions 1,024px × 730px. This still isn't the original image.

I then made a well-educated guess and tried
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A0BRGqGCcAEBdHW.jpg:orig and it actually worked; I got the original size image with dimensions 2,048px × 1,460px.

So all you need to do to obtain an original size image is to append »:orig« to the URL of the small version of the image.

Note that this only works for images uploaded to twitter not for images hosted on flickr.

Here is one example: https://twitter.com/VirtualAstro/status/241683461155475456 shows a nice photo of a blue moon; the 3 MP image can be found at https://pbs.twimg.com/media/A1qS3JvCQAE0QPv.jpg:orig

Polar Sea Ice Page Updated

I had to update the Polar Sea Ice page because it referred to the record ice extent as data of 2007 while in reality the record extents (minimum in the Arctic, maximum in the Antarctic) are currently being updated every day (as of writing this on 2012-09-02).

I originally did not expect this to become necessary so soon. The reason for this misjudgement of mine is the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. Back in 2008 I learned that it should currently be counteracting the effect of global warming on the Arctic region.

A BBC article of 2008-05-01 puts it like that:

The Earth's temperature may stay roughly the same for a decade, as natural climate cycles enter a cooling phase … A new computer model … suggests the cooling will counter greenhouse warming. However, temperatures will again be rising quickly by about 2020 …

In contrast, a recent BBC article (2012-08-27) has this to say:

A recent paper from Reading University … [estimated] that between 5-30% of the recent ice loss was due to Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation - a natural climate cycle repeating every 65-80 years. It's been in warm phase since the mid 1970s.

Allow me to call this difference in description a little strange.

NASA: Arctic sea ice reaches record low

Asteroids Missing Earth: What Means “Close Call”?

Every now and then you read about asteroids passing Earth in a certain distance but nobody gives you a feeling of how close such an encounter is. Allow me to fill in this gap.

Say an asteroid passes in a distance x from Earth, the radius of which we will call r. We now can ask how likely it is that an object that hits a disk of radius r+x also hits a disk of radius r provided that it any point on the larger disk is hit with equal likelihood.

The likelihood then is p = A(r)/A(r+x) where A is the area of a disk of the given radius, In other words p = πr²/π(r+x)² = 1/(1+x/r)². If we now define ξ=x/r (which is the distance in units of Earth's radius we get a quite simple formula: p = 1/(1+ξ)².

Using ξ is advantageous as it is a value you actually find in tables. Let’s try a couple of values; LD means Lunar distance and is the distance in terms of the average distance between Earth and Moon:

Distance in		ξ	p in %
LD	km
1.65614	636619.77	100	0.098
0.49684	190985.93	30	0.104
0.16561	63661.98	10	0.826
0.04968	19098.59	3	6.250
0.01656	6366.20	1	25.000
0.00497	1909.86	0.3	59.172
0.00166	636.62	0.1	82.645
0.00050	190.99	0.03	94.260
0.00017	63.66	0.01	98.030

Please note that the closer an encounter is the less meaningless this rough estimate becomes as the asteroid by no means randomly hits the disk of radius r+x but follows a clearly determined path.

Termtter, a terminal-based Twitter client

Termtter is a terminal-based Twitter client written in Ruby that can be installed as a Ruby gem. In the easiest case you simply type in

gem install termtter

and you are done with installing the program, otherwise see How to Install.

Once termtter has been installed you can simply  run it provided that you do not need to use a proxy; in that case see Configuration. However, like any other Twitter application, termtter needs to be authorised in order to function properly.

Therefore, at the initial run, termtter will provide you with an authorisation URL.

First launch of termtter

Once you visit this URL, you will be asked whether you want to authorise termtter to use your Twitter account.

Visiting authorization URL

If you choose to authorise the application (i.e. termtter) you will provided with a PIN.

Obtaining PIN

After having obtained the PIN you need to enter it in termtter. Copy and paste will not work because the PIN is shown as an image.

Entering PIN

Now that termtter has been authorised you can use it at your liking.

Termtter at work

Michael Geist at INTA Workshop

If you want a brief explanation what is wrong with ACTA this video is an absolute must.

The full text of the report can be found at http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/6350/125/