Fukushima: Propaganda and Self-Interest
Due to the dramatic events in Japan, I had to reactivate my blog. While the Japanese people are suffering from unbelievable consequences of an earth quake that was followed by a tsunami that was followed by several nuclear "incidents", it is very hard to obtain accurate information about the severity of these nuclear "incidents".
Everybody acts in their own self interest
Governments, naturally, do not want to spread panic among their citizens. News media, naturally, want to attract as much readers as possible, corporations want to retain their reputation and market position, anti-nuclear groups want to fight against the proliferation of nuclear power and - last, but not least - the nuclear industry also acts in their own interest.
While looking for information sources, I came across the website world-nuclear-news.org, a news service backed by the nuclear industry. Whatever you might think of nuclear energy, there is one thing you can learn from this news service: How to do public relations properly and how to describe very dramatic events as calm and undramatic as possible.
Propaganda?
Let's take a quick look at two news articles. The first one is called: Problems for units 3 and 4 and starts with this quote:
The cause of the fires remains unknown due to radiation in the area, and they could in fact be one fire that died down before reigniting.
Plain English: This basically says that there is so much radiation in the area that no one could go there to check what caused the fires. In addition, one fire that first died by itself and then "reignited" sounds much more innocent than two uncontrolled fires.
Efforts are underway to refill the pool, including an abandoned attempt to douse the building with water from an army helicopter, hoping to get some to go through the damaged building.
Plain English: This part of the text says nothing about the status of those "efforts": Will they be successful? What exactly are these efforts? When I know what to do, I say "I am taking the car and drive to Hamburg". But when I say "I am underway to start an effort to go to Hamburg", this could mean that I haven't even made one single step towards my destination. In addition, it suggests that no one actually knows what to do.
Plus, "pool" sounds so much nicer and so much more innocent than "nuclear fuel rod container". "Abandoned attempt" and "army helicopter" sound at first sight as if everything was under control, but reading it a second time it shows desperation. What can you do more if you can't even use an army helicopter? "Hoping to get some to go through the damaged building" only underlines this desperation further.
The "pond" is "warming"
Next news story is called: Possible damage at Fukushima Daiichi 2
Radiation decreasing, fuel ponds warming
Plain English: Positive news! "The fuel ponds are warming": Doesn't this sound nice, a warm summer day at the pond? Nice description for an overheating and possible explosion of gases and fires that might come afterwards. Not to forget about the radiation.
Loud noises were heard at Fukushima Daiichi 2 this morning and a major component beneath the reactor may be damaged.
Plain English: There was an explosion and the reactor might have been damaged. Just imagine you sit in the plane, and the captain says that "I heard a loud noise and I think that a major component of the plane may be damaged". Sounds not nice...
Concern is growing over the status of fuel cooling ponds at units 4, 5 and 6.
Plain English: The cooling does not work, it might heat up so much that it starts burning eventually. When your health "status" is deteriorating, you are ill.
The pressure in the pool was seen to decrease from three atmospheres to one atmosphere after the noise, suggesting possible damage.
Plain English: Sounds good when pressure is decreasing, but this is actually a bad sign.
In line with the theory that non-condensed gases in the torus will be released fairly promptly and not replenished at the same rate, it is possible that the radiation release - at least via this route - will diminish and stabilise.
Plain English: Nice to hear that radiation will diminish, but "at least via this route" suggests that there might be other, more dangerous, sources of radiation that in the end might actually lead to an increase of total radiation.
Similar to the need to cool fuel in the reactor core, used fuel assemblies in cooling ponds require a covering of water to remove decay heat. The main differences being the amount of decay heat to be removed decreases exponentially with time and that fuel ponds are much less of an enclosed space than a reactor vessel. At the same time, ponds may contain several years of fuel.
Plain English: Here again, it sounds like a good development at first "much less on an enclosed space than a reactor vessel", but if this actually starts to burn it is even worse because the radiation cannot be contained as good as in a reactor.
Road ahead and ways to help
There is not much to say. I am actually really thankful to be far, far away from the events in Japan and I am really amazed how well the Japanese people seem to handle the situation. If you want to donate money, read this blog entry and donate your money wisely.
I can only hope that the situation at Fukushima quickly improves, and that Japan finally in all of these adverse circumstances gets a little bit of luck.
May 17th: Norwegian Independence Day
May 17th, the Norwegian Independence Day, was a rather wet affair this year: Temperatures in Oslo down at about 4°C degrees, some snow in the upper parts, rain in the lower parts of the city and lots of wind as well.
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Music ensemble in the parade
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Also the concerts at Kubaparken later on suffered a bit because of the weather. We managed to stay there for only about 3 hours, but then went indoors to have a real Norwegian dinner with all kinds of traditional Norwegian food. No, not pizza or hamburgers this time, but well, sausages were there as well.
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Patriotic spectator
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Despite the weather ("there is no bad weather, only bad clothing"), it was a really nice day with a truly special atmosphere. For Norwegians this day is very important, except for one Norwegian friend of mine who went to his home town for mountain biking by saying "Freedom and independence? You don't really need this..." (Irony switched on, of course).
For more sunny impressions, check the blog entry from last year.
GPS on the plane: Where am I?
Last weekend, I went for a really quick visit to Germany by plane and had the possibility to try out my new GPS while being airborne. Since I had chosen the somewhat cheaper GPS unit, I had to have a window seat in order to receive enough GPS satellites for the proper calculation of the position.
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"My" plane coming in from Frankfurt-Hahn
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I took Ryanair from Oslo-Torp to Frankfurt-Hahn and therefore, the plane was a brandnew Boeing 737-800. While sitting next to a window and putting the GPS on the armrest, I had enough reception during the entire flight and could always see where we were.
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Data view
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The picture above shows the data view of the GPS. You can see (bottom) that the plane is travelling at a speed of 824 km/h at the cruising altitude of 37820 feet, which is roughly 11.5 kilometres. The "Distance to destination" (i.e. Frankfurt-Hahn; top left) is 546 kilometers and the estimated time of arrival (ETA) was 18:02.
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Map View
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Much more interesting however, was the map view. Here I could see where exactly on the map we were. This helped while being above Denmark to recognize the Danish coastline and parts of the German island of Sylt. Later, above Hamburg there were too many clouds, so nothing of the city was visible.
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Just clouds
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Back at home, I put the data from the GPS into my laptop. Since the GPS logs the position every second, you can follow the entire trip. Unfortunately, I had totally forgotten to switch off the GPS during final approach and landing ( ;-) ), which made it possible to even see at which speed we touched down on the runway. Very interesting data.
On the flight back, I took SAS from Frankfurt/Main airport and only got a seat in the corridor, which made it impossible for the GPS to receive anything. This personal GPS on the plane is definitely something I don't want to miss in the future.
Fjords, Waterfalls and Rainbows: Bergen and Flåm
I finally found some time to edit the 3 gigabytes of pictures from only 3 days in Bergen and Flåm. To see the best of gallery, just click on the picture below. It is very difficult to describe the nature up there, the best thing is to go and see it yourself. In Bergen the weather can be a bit unstable or, as my neighbour put it: "In Bergen the weather changes every twenty minutes. Either the sun shines, it rains or it storms."
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Fjord close to Flåm
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A Short Hello From Molvania
While I was already last year in Lutenblag and I actually had not planned to go there again, the price for a flight was so cheap that I changed my mind. Since today, Molvanian national carrier Aeromolv is offering a cheap no-frills service from Oslo's main airport Gardermoen to Lutenblag airport. We went to Molvania with 5 people and paid in total only 220 NOK (about 26 Euros; bribe money for the Molvanian immigration officials not included) for all the five of us!
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Cheap, but big: our hostel (CC)
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Since radiation levels have dropped enormously since last year, we decided that is was safe to stay a bit outside of Lutenblag. Due to global warming, there is no more snow in the Lutenblag area, only mud though. We stay on the top floor of the hostel, but because of the smog we cannot see anything. I am now sitting in the internet cafe of the hostel and have limited ability to upload any pictures because the top speed that is possible from here is 9600 baud per second and the modem is getting hot already. Not to mention that the connection is lost every 2 minutes.
Tomorrow, we have a guided tour around the nuclear reactor, which is right inside the city center, and afterwards we will see whether the cable car service to the top of Lutenblag's city mountain is operating...
(All pictures of this entry are licensed as creative commons, the credit can be found as a link "(CC)" in the description of the image)
First Class With Ryanair
Last week, I flew to Oslo with Ryanair to organize my study-related stay which will start in February. I took the early flight from Frankfurt-Hahn (EDFH / HHN) to Oslo-Torp/Sandefjord (ENTO / TRF) at 6.30 in the morning. Since there are a lot of rumors about Ryanair and their service, I was positively surprised.
The plane was brand new (average age of Ryanair's fleet is 2.7 years) and was equipped with very comfortable leather seats. Not these dirty ones I encountered about two years ago where you completely sink into the seat. For a two hours flight, the leg room was sufficient as well. What made this a "first class" trip was the load factor of the plane: only 14 people out of possible 189 the plane can carry flew to Oslo on that morning. The whole aircraft was basically empty. This also affected the crew who were very friendly so that I even bought a tea for 2.50 Euros.
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Ryanair Cabin View During Flight
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The Frankfurt-Hahn airport, which is actually closer to my hometown than to Frankfurt (so I call it Dattenberg-Hahn :-) ), was easily reachable by car as well and the check-in went quite smoothly. Only the shuttle bus driver who brought me from the parking lots to the terminal was not really friendly. Originally, I had planned to fly with Germanwings from Cologne, however, they have cut back their connections to Oslo and will stop the service by end of March. The same happened to Cologne - Gothenburg already (shame on you!).
Due to new hand luggage regulations, it is not allowed anymore to carry liquids into the cabin. Therefore, I brought three empty 0.5 liter bottles, which I filled up with tap water later on. This effort saved about 10 euros as the water you can buy at the airport is quite expensive. The security personnel searched my rucksack very carefully because it seems that they cannot see on their screen whether a bottle is empty or not.
Free Internet at Torp
The Oslo-Torp airport is quite nice as well and even offers free wireless internet. Outside, the Torpekspressen bus already waited with a very friendly bus driver. The ride to Oslo takes a bit less than two hours. To sum up, flying with Ryanair is like flying with any other airline, the only thing is that you pay less and don't fly into major airports.
The flight back to Frankfurt was more crowded, but went along smoothly as well despite incredible wind speeds of about 150 knots (about 300 km/h) at cruising altitude and 30 knots cross winds during the landing. These speeds were luckily lower than on the day before where a lot of flights (including all to/from Oslo) had been canceled due to gale-force winds. Only flight attendant Agnieszka was a bit on the rougher side... ("Please take your seats as quickly as possible! I said, TAKE YOUR SEATS AS QUICKLY AS POSSIBLE!")
Best of 2006
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Best photos of 2006
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I just backed up my photos from this year and found some really nice snapshots that were not posted on my website yet. But instead of stashing these pictures away to collect dust in the archives, I made a "best of" gallery, which shows all kinds of photos from different places in an random manner. Have fun!
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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Naugthy or nice?
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I just wanted to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Okay, an email to the two guys would have done the job as well. :-)
Nevertheless, stay tuned for some design changes and more interesting stories to come. Below there are some pictures that fit a bit to Christmas. They are from Maastricht, where a book shop has opened in a church. I actually don't know what I should think of it, but at least it is not a club or disco.
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Book shop in a church
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You can even drink a coffee there.
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Not wine, but coffee on the Lord's table
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This is where the computer books are. When the books cannot solve your PC problems, you can still come back to get some spiritual support.
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Computer books
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Inside Aviation: Open Day at Bonn-Hangelar
I have already visited quite a few flight decks this year (the first one on a Germanwings flight, the second one on an SAS flight) and today a further opportunity opened. The small Bonn-Hangelar airport, just a few kilometres south of the bigger Cologne-Bonn airport, has a kind of "aviation weekend" this weekend and several planes (mostly older ones) and helicopters were shown. Check the short video for a few impressions (broadband connection recommended):
A few notes on what you see: First, there was an information booth from German Air Traffic Control "DFS" (Deutsche Flugsicherung). In there was a simulation of an airport tower from Düsseldorf airport. The two air traffic controllers were "real" and normally work at Cologne-Bonn airport. First I thought it would be a bit boring to just see numbers move on a radar screen, but what they showed was actually quite interesting.
450 Planes over Germany
There was a screen which showed the current air traffic over Germany. At the very moment I filmed the screen, about 450 aircraft were in German airspace. Quite a lot if you see the littles planes on the map. For every aircraft you can see the flight number, altitude and speed. Besides all the technology involved, they still use a physical "priority list" of planes, where each plane gets a tag and when the plane has landed the tags are removed by hand - one by one. Planes in upper altitudes over Europe are controlled by EUROCONTROL, situated in -believe it or not- Maastricht.
German Federal Police (Bundespolizei), actually headquartered just a few kilometres from Hangelar, showed their helicopters. Although I am not an helicopter specialist, I talked to the mechanic of the Eurocopter model. He told me that it has "everything you'd wish for" and that it's currently one of the best helicopters on the market. It really looked awesome. It's used mainly for reconnaissance tasks like patrolling railway tracks. He actually went so into details about their "orders", as they call their tasks, that I better don't mention it here.
Air Taxi Service
At the last one of three Bundespolizei helicopters shown, one of his colleagues told me that Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel and even the Pope have used it. He said that Bundespolizei provide a kind of air taxi service, the so-called Flugbereitschaft. This air service can be called and then they come and pick up their VIP guests.
Asterisk, My Telephone And Operation “Busy”
Finally and after a long time, again a blog entry about Asterisk, the open-source telephone system. I haven't been using Asterisk for a while since I haven't had a server at hand and only my laptop and a softphone, but now I found some spare time to install the latest Ubuntu release and Asterisk on an older computer. I connected an ordinary ISDN telephone to the computer, basically using my older How-To, but this time with Beronet's mISDN drivers instead of the bristuff.
One issue that had bothered for a long time was the fact that Asterisk cannot produce (or better that I could not make Asterisk produce) a correct "busy" signal to a SIP caller. Instead, when somebody called me via my SIP telephone number and I was talking to someone else already, the line remained dead to the caller and timed out after a while. Although there are commands like DIALSTATUS or ChanIsAvail, they don't seem to work with a SIP call.
So I spent the whole weekend (yes, I had nothing else to do) figuring out what I could do about this. If you use it, you are responsible for any mistakes that might still be in there yourself, so this is just BETA, but for me it works perfectly. I came up with the following solution, in case someone is interested:
The theory is as follows: Suppose we have a few internal telephones, all with numbers 21XX. Now everytime a phone calls another phone, a "busy" variable is incremented. For instance, telephone 1 calls telephone 2. For both phones the busy variable is increased by one, so that busy2101=1 and busy2102=1 (2101 and 2102 are the numbers of the phones, respectively). If now a third phone (2103) calls 2101, Asterisk checks the busy variable. If it is greater than 0 (meaning that the phone is busy), it will signal the caller "busy" or route the call to the voicemail or whatever. If the busy variable is 0, it means the extension is free and the call goes through.
So why not simply use 1 for "busy" and 0 for "free" in the busy variable instead of increasing it? This was actually my first attempt, but the problem occured when the call was hung up. Then the variable was set back to 0 for both the caller and the callee, although the callee might still be in a conversation with someone else. If you then were to try the extension again, the busy variable would show 0 and thus free and the call would be routed to the extension, although being "busy".
By incrementing the variables, it is possible to solve this problem. If 2101 calls 2102, both get 1 in their variables. If then 2103 calls 2102, 2103 gets 1 in its busy variable and checks the status of 2102's busy variable. Even when this is busy now, the variable of 2102 is incremented again by 1 so that it becomes 2. If 2103 now hangs up the call, both variables 2103 and 2102 are reduced by 1 so that 2103 gets 0 and 2102 get 2-1=1. This means that 2102 is still busy. When 2101 ends the call with 2102, both reduce their variables by 1 and finally 2102's busy variable becomes 0 and the extension free.
It might be a bit difficult to understand but maybe it looks clearer in the dialplan (oh, I still hate Asterisk's syntax):
I wrote it as a macro, which you call via this:
exten => _21.,1,Macro(internalcallsetup,${EXTEN},${CALLERIDNUM})
EXTEN gives the macro the dialled extension, CALLERIDNUM gives the number of the telephone which is calling.
[macro-internalcallsetup]
; ${ARG1} = Extension
; ${ARG2} = Caller ID number
; internal calls possible, therefore both parties need to be set "busy"
;this is just to wait for further digits to be dialled (mISDN specific)
exten => s,1,Waitfordigits(3000)
;the busy variables have to be 0 before we start, therefore
;check whether variables are defined and if not so, set them 0
;thanks to the IP-Phone-Forum.de for helping me with the correct IF function
exten => s,2,GoToIF($[x${busy${ARG2}}=x]?3:4)
exten => s,3,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG2}=0)
exten => s,4,GotoIF($[x${busy${ARG1}}=x]?5:6)
exten => s,5,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG1}=0)
;now the caller is set busy (increment +1)
exten => s,6,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG2}=$[${busy${ARG2}}+1])
;now we check if the callee is busy, if so we jump to 50, else ...
exten => s,n,Gotoif($["${busy${ARG1}}" > "0"]?50)
; ... we set callee busy now (increment +1)
exten => s,n,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG1}=$[${busy${ARG1}}+1])
; ... and call
exten => s,n,Dial(SIP/${ARG1},60)
exten => s,n,Hangup
; if busy, we nevertheless increment the callee +1
exten => s,50,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG1}=$[${busy${ARG1}}+1])
; and do whatever we like to show that he/she is busy
exten => s,n,Answer
exten => s,n,Playback(vm-nobodyavail)
exten => s,n,Busy
exten => s,n,Hangup
;now we reset the busy variables by subtracting 1 to the prior state
;when the connection is hung up
exten => h,1,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG2}=$[${busy${ARG2}}-1])
exten => h,n,SetGlobalVar(busy${ARG1}=$[${busy${ARG1}}-1])
That's it! I know there is this GROUP feature in Asterisk, which basically does the same (I haven't tested it, though), but this here works as well. Of course the example above is only for internal calls, if you call externally you also need to set the caller busy. In my dialplan I have implemented this for all contexts and it seems to work so far.
You could also use the busy variables to limit the number of calls to an extension. For instance, 2103 could be allowed to only receive or call 2 numbers at a time and so on.