Environment

Stormschade

Topics

Het is me het weekendje wel geweest. Na de zware storm van donderdagavond druk bezig geweest met de schade op te meten; en die is er toch wel : een omgewaaide boom, volledig vernield tuinhuis, en wat weggewaaide dakpannen. Veel getelefoneer met verzekeringen en herstellers. En de wind blijft hier maar gieren...

Rain radar

Topics

Man, the weather out here really sucks : nothing but rain since a month. And one can't really do large works in the outdoors without a rain shower. Luckily, Buienradar.nl shows a radar image of the rainfall, so you know if you have time to mown the lawn without getting wet.

Motte

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In 1998, six months after I bought my house, it got flooded after 14 hours of uninterrupted heavy rainfall. The little river the Motte, running 100 meters next to my house, couldn't bear all the water and set the neighbourhood blank. Though the damage was minimal - only my cellar got submerged, I became very suspicious after some days of rain.

Luckily I found out about this site which measures the heigh of the nearby river, the Motte. Even a little graph, depicting the situation for the past days, is plotted !

Ligustrum ovalifolium

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We spent the beautifull weekend planting a hedge in the garden : 225 little hedge plants, called Ligustrum ovalifolium, or Californian privet were planted in a 60m long ditch. A giant's work, but the result seems great.

We bought the hedge plants in the impressive Genker plant centre, a fairly large garden center which was decorated with the most insane hedge statues, like the horse and carriage depicted on the left.

Indian Ocean earthquake

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The devastating megathrust earthquake of December 26th, 2004 occurred on the interface of the India and Burma plates and was caused by the release of stresses that develop as the India plate subducts beneath the overriding Burma plate. At least 27,000 people were killed by the earthquake in Indonesia. Tsunamis killed at least 18,000 people in Sri Lanka, 4,300 in India and 1,400 in Thailand. The tsunami crossed into the Pacific Ocean and was recorded along the west coast of South and North America.

This is the fourth largest earthquake in the world since 1900 and is the largest since the 1964 Alaska earthquake. Here's an animation of the tsunami following the earthquake, a photo gallery, and a realplayer video of the tidal wave. Of course, no blog post about this disaster should be complete without the information of how to give help.

History of Earth

Topics

The earth is over 5 billion years old. Life first originated in the oceans 3.4 billion years ago. The dinosaurs died out 65 million years in the past. Human recorded history stretches back 10,000 years in time.

These numbers are too large to visualize, and difficult to compare. That's why a timeline is interesting : an image sometimes says more than one thousand words. Hotu.org (HistoryOfTheUniverse.org) offers a nice timeline of the last 15 billion years of Earth. More impact on the climate of the last aeons can be found Climate Timeline Tool. Some others exagerate a bit in the visualisation of this timeline : the history on a toilet roll.

Interested in the future ? Faction Earth gives a probable future of the next 150 years : accelarated population growth and the formation of city clusters aka city plexes. Corporate and biological warfare with the origin of mutant humans and extinct life on Mars. Luckily, this possible future is all part of a computer game.