Wednesday Movie - The Avalanche

If you have ever wondered what it is like to get caught in an avalanche then this weeks movie gives you a pretty good taster - very scary.

Telavåg

So we have our old friend Graham over at the moment and since the weather was nice on Sunday we headed out to Glesvær for a walk and coffee and cake at the cafe. Glesvær is a pretty little fishing village on the south of Sotra that has a real summer feel to it. It was a favorite spot for sea kayaking and now its works for pram pushing.

On the way back I spotted a sign to Telavåg, which was a place I always wanted to visit, so not being in a rush to get back we followed it. Six km down the road we came to a very pretty village, nestled in a rocky bay. Perched up on a cliff above the village is an excellent museum that tells the story of the tragedy that unfolded almost 70 years ago.

In 1941, following the Nazi invasion of Norway the villages on the west coast of Sotra became centres for smuggling arms and people to and from the Shetland Isles. The service was so busy it became called the Shetland bus.  Back before the Sotra bridge put Telavåg an easy 30 minute drive from Bergen city centre, the area was very remote and isolated. Ideal for illicit partisan activites.

But there are snakes and cowards everywhere and soon the German's had learned of the activites, so they sent a troop, including two senior Gestapo officers to the village to arrest two resistance fighters staying in the postmasters house. They arrived early in the morning and caught the partisans in bed. In the ensuing gunfight the Gestapo officers and one of the freedom fighters were killed. The Germans were enraged and extracted a harsh revenge.

They first rounded up all the men and destroyed the houses of the postmaster and several other key people. The men were all shipped off and ended up in a concentration camp in east Germany, only 41 survived the war. Then they returned, rounded up the women, children and old people before levelling the village. Every house, boat house and barn were destroyed. They sunk the once proud fishing fleet. The survivours were then shipped off to Bergen and later spread around Norway. This was the worst attrocity against civillians in Norway during the war and served to galvanise resistance elsewhere.

After the war, rebuilding the village became a matter of national pride and within four years all of the buildings were replaced. Now its hard to differentiate this pretty village with its colourful wooden houses from any of the others along the coast.

The museum is well worth a visit and has an excellent film that tells the story.

 

Then

And now

Tilt shift timelapse - Jackson Hole and Whistler

So the new video craze is "tilt shift" which original started as a method of taking photos with a special lens that removes some of the effect of convergent lines, if for example you need to photograph a tall building. It is also associated with very shallow depth of field. The effect is that it often looks like you are vieiwng a miniature model.

As with many of these things it started with expensive lens and  now can be done with post processing of photographs in special software. Most recently people have started making movies using it.

The best I have found takes us on a ski tour to the Tetons here and another to Whistler here.

The effect is pretty amazing and its well worth wathcing both videos on full screen.

In the army now

One Sunday morning the pastor noticed little Johnny was standing staring up at the large plaque that hung in the foyer of the church. The young man of seven had been staring at the plaque for some time, so the pastor walked up and stood beside him and gazing up at the plaque he said quietly, "Good morning son." "Good morning pastor" replied the young man not taking his eyes off the plaque. "Sir, what is this?" Johnny asked.
"Well son, these are all the people who have died in the service", replied the pastor. Soberly, they stood together staring up at the large plaque Little Johnny's voice barely broke the silence when he asked  quietly, "Which one sir, the 8:30 or the 10:30?"

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On some air bases the Air Force is on one side of the field and civilian aircraft use the other side of the field, with the control tower in the middle. One day the tower received a call from an aircraft asking, "What time is it?"
The tower responded, "Who is calling?"
The aircraft replied, "What difference does it make?"
The tower replied "It makes a lot of difference. If it is an American Airlines Flight, it is 3 o'clock. If it is an Air Force, it is 1500 hours. If it is a Navy aircraft, it is 6 bells. If it is an Army aircraft, the big hand is on the 12 and the little hand is on the 3.
 If it is a Marine Corps aircraft, it's Thursday afternoon".

Aruora Video

Living in Norway gives the oppertunity to see the northern lights - if it ever stops raining. This is the best video I have found so far that really captures it. Also check his other videos they are also pretty cool.

Twins

A while ago I discovered that a girl who works for us is part of a pair of identical twins. What was more interesting is that she is living in Norway as an expat doing a technical job, like most of her peers she has bachelor and masters degrees. She spends her free time mountain biking and hill walking. She is unmarried. Her identical twin married at 18 and never went to university. She lives in their home town (a parochial place in the north Midlands) with her kids and has a mundane, dead end job. She is utterly disinterested in the outdoors and is over weight.
This contrast is fascinating; here are two people with the same genetic make-up and the same home environment (nature and nurture) who are diametrically different. I asked when the divergence had happened and she told me that they had been very similar up to secondary school and then they had been put into different classes and diverged from there.

Is it really possible that that something as mundane as a different class at the age of 11 could make such a huge difference? It’s an extreme example of chaos theory where a subtle change in initial conditions has caused a totally different outcome. What are the implications of this for the rest of us? I actually find it rather scary.

The girl told me that she thought it was not due to that at all. She felt that despite being identical twins there were subtle differences in their genetic makeup that had lead to such different paths in life. This way be true but if it is then it means that all the nature vs nurture experiments where twins are separated at birth, put into different environments and then compared are meaningless. If this pair of twins with the same home environment had been split up at birth it would have been an obvious, but erroneous conclusion that the different environments had caused the differences in development and lifestyle choice.

There is no conclusion to this piece, its just an interesting observation which perhaps has implications for how we consider the nature vs nurture argument and the possible role that very small changes in our life can lead us down massively different routes

Friday Joke

The following are from a book called Disorder in the American Courts, and are things people actually said in court, word for word, taken down and now published by court reporters that had the torment of staying calm while these exchanges were actually taking place. Courtesy of Angharad.
______________________________
ATTORNEY: Are you sexually active?
WITNESS: No, I just lie there.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: This myasthenia gravis, does it affect your memory at all?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And in what ways does it affect your memory?
WITNESS: I forget.
ATTORNEY: You forget? Can you give us an example of something you forgot?___________________________________________


ATTORNEY: Do you know if your daughter has ever been involved in voodoo?
WITNESS: We both do.
ATTORNEY: Voodoo?
WITNESS: We do.
ATTORNEY: You do?
WITNESS: Yes, voodoo.
____________________________________________


ATTORNEY: Now doctor, "isn't it true that when a person dies in his sleep, he doesn't know about it until the next morning?"
WITNESS: Did you actually pass the bar exam?
____________________________________

ATTORNEY: The youngest son, the twenty-year-old, how old is he?
WITNESS: He's twenty, much like your IQ.
___________________________________________


ATTORNEY: Were you present when your picture was taken?

WITNESS: Are you shitting me?
_________________________________________


ATTORNEY: So the date of conception (of the baby) was August 8th?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: And what were you doing at that time?
WITNESS: Getting laid
____________________________________________


ATTORNEY: She had three children, right?
WITNESS: Yes.
ATTORNEY: How many were boys?
WITNESS: None.
ATTORNEY: Were there any girls?
WITNESS: Your Honor, I think I need a different attorney. Can I get a new attorney?
____________________________________________


ATTORNEY: How was your first marriage terminated?
WITNESS: By death.
ATTORNEY: And by whose death was it terminated?
WITNESS: Take a guess.
____________________________________________


ATTORNEY: Can you describe the individual?
WITNESS: He was about 20, medium height, and had a beard.
ATTORNEY: Was this a male or a female?
WITNESS: Unless the Circus was in town I'm going with male.
_____________________________________


ATTORNEY: Doctor, how many of your autopsies have you performed on dead people?
WITNESS: All of them. The live ones put up too much of a fight.
_________________________________________


ATTORNEY: ALL your responses MUST be oral, OK?
What school did you go to?
WITNESS: Oral.
_________________________________________


ATTORNEY: Do you recall the time that you examined the body?
WITNESS: The autopsy started around 8:30 p.m.
ATTORNEY: And, Mr. Denton was dead at the time?
WITNESS: If not, he was by the time I finished.
____________________________________________

ATTORNEY: Doctor, before you performed the autopsy, did you check for a pulse?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for blood pressure?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing?
WITNESS: No.
ATTORNEY: So, then it is possible that the patient was alive when you began the autopsy?
WITNESS: No ..
ATTORNEY: How can you be so sure, Doctor?
WITNESS: Because his brain was sitting on my desk in a jar.
ATTORNEY: I see, but could the patient have still been alive, nevertheless?
WITNESS: Yes, it is possible that he could have been alive and practicing law.