mastodon 4.7.2Scientist, physics lecturer, amateur astronomer, bookworm, #SciFi fan, sports enthusiast.
Profile name originates from Heinlein's "The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress", which is one of my favorites. Background photo: sunset over the western Etosha NP, Namibia. #4wd
I write / read / boost on #travel, #hiking, #nature, #books, #ScaleModel, #science, #politics and occasionally on other topics I find interesting.
Located in the EU, English & German.
I have a question for all the geeks out there: What kind of weather phenomenon creates this pattern on my window? It happens always when it’s below freezing and dry. It only happens on this window, which has no side wall to protect it from... what exactly?
I got a new doctoral student to supervise and she is like, sooo young, fresh from grad studies. Yesterday I got a visit from an ex-student (35 yo) and his department head (65 yo) who she described as:
“An old guy and a guy with gray hair were looking for you”
It could be insulting, as I’m older than the “old guy”, but what she was actually saying:
“A person whose age I could still gauge and a person with an age out of my scale were looking for you”
One dream comes true: #kayaking on the Mekong river delta, through the jungles and swamps of southern #Vietnam. Several fruit and cuttlefish farms along the way.
It was 🥵 with humidity pushing towards 100% and 32 degrees C (90 F). The locals were all happy to greet us and offered to sell their farm products (in a very kind and non-intrusive way). Got some bananas, lychee and a peeled coconut. Some tourist boats were buzzing around.
Every year about this time a local farm brings their #sheep to our neighborhood park. There they happily graze the spring grass for a few days, and then they bring them to another section of the park.
Not only is the grass cut for free, but I'm sure it's very good for the soil as well. And the kids from the playground are delighted, myself included 😀
A #ScaleModel project finally finished: german Pz.Kpfw. IV H #WW2 #panzer #tank in 1:72 with a #ScratchBuilt #diorama.
The airbrushed camo turned out quite well, I think. So did the mild weathering and the gravel road, though the stones could have been a bit smaller. Making the house ruin look realistic was really difficult; it took me three attempts and I'm still not quite happy with the result.
All in all quite fun! Looking forward to the next project, probably in a different scale.
Mixed feelings about the #HaLongBay, #Vietnam.
The thousands of limestone karsts indeed deserve to be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. However, they’re heavily marketed and thousands of tourists are processed assembly-line-style.
The coast boasts hundreds of luxury resorts, constructed by a Chinese conglomerate which apparently recently went bust, so it seems to be on-hold. But if filled with tourists, I don’t see how the pristine nature could remain so.
#travel
Train station today, the train's late, so I'm exploring the prices at a local kiosk.
Half a litre bottled water 2.9€, a small bottle of Coke 1.4 €, a can of beer 1.8€.
You gotta love this late stage #capitalism. A product which is essentially free costs more than other products containing 90% of it plus some drugs. And nobody seems to mind.
I had a discussion with our Vietnamese guide as to why it is wrong to say “I want to buy some fruits”, although it is common to “buy some vegetables”.
I tried to argue “fruit” was a mass noun, like sugar or sand, but they countered with “fruits of our labor”…
Yeah… but it’s not the same fruit… oh forget it… just take another, well-behaved Indo-European language as a basis for comparison, not English.
The scene: Vietnam, a small tourist cruise boat, four young men sitting in a whirlpool, two more approaching.
Tourist 1, a European-looking person, to the newcomers: Xin chào! (Vietnamese for Hallo!)
Tourist 2, an Asian-looking person, laughing: Xin chào to you too mate, but I’m Japanese.
An honest mistake, as there are many domestic tourists. Do Europeans also look and sound all the same to Asian people? Japanese I would recognize, but with Vietnamese, Thai and Mandarin I would struggle.
Have to be really careful with translator apps. Going to my next destination in Vietnam, the Phu Quoc island, the app wanted to say to a taxi driver “I was going to fuck cock” 🫣
Fortunately I noticed it in time and managed to do some language gymnastics to get around it.
@ericphelps@mastodon.social
Yeah, I was thinking along those lines as well, but that inner frost-free circle... The window is double-glazed, so it can't be thermally related to the inside. I was speculating about some kind of weird airflow down the roof, or even infrared reflection off the inner pane of glass. Another window like that, 1 m to the left and next to the wall, does not get that frost pattern. Strange, but nice.
It blows my mind that a single intercontinental flight uses up one person's entire #climate compatible emissions.
Not flying at all would be best. As it is, I try to at least offset the emitted CO2, which gives me some peace of mind.
To do this I never use the compensation options offered by the airline. Maybe, if they were transparent about their finances, which they'll never do being corporate hells they are.
Independent non-profits like #Atmosfair are much better.