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Personal blog of Erlend AakreWelcome to my blog containing sporadic personal ramblings, coding, electronics, D&D and anything else.
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Royally stupid
2011-03-11To help out with the current situation in Japan, our unbeloved Princess Märtha Louise has done the following to help (quotes from the facebook page of her “angel school”).
“Send the angels to the disaster area to give their light, their frequency, their tone so that mother earth can come to balance as quick as possible”.
WOW.. I frequently get pissed off at her for being a credulous half-wit spreading utter bullshit, but this latest crap.. Is she’s deliberately trying to make me puke in my mouth!?
For years she has been spewing out moronic crap about the angels she can see (and for a hefty sum, she’ll teach you to contact your angles). She can also talk to the dead of course, and no crank would be complete without claiming to be able to do healing.
I’ve always despised monarchism, it’s archaic, useless and wastes huge piles of taxpayer money on those
.. Suffice it to say, the Princess of woo does not improve that image one bit. At least I’m delighted to see the facebook page for that asinine angel school of hers is getting flooded with trolling and negative comments which seems to come from 4chan and lots of Norwegian facebook users who think their actions are distasteful, maybe there is still hope for this country.
On behalf of Norwegians who are not severely delusional, we’re sorry (and embarrassed as hell), some people are just beyond help :(
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Supermoon terrorizes small norwegian village
2011-03-09Today I saw a particularly silly story in the local Newspaper: “Supermånen Sprer frykt” or “Supermoon spreads fear”.
To sum it up, in 10 days the moon will be closer to the earth than it has been in 19 years. The newspaper then goes on to list a bunch of conspiracy theory bullshit about several times when the moon has been at its closest to the earth, earthquakes/tsunamies/etc. occurred.
The moons orbit is not a perfect circle, so the distance from the moon to the earth varies between roughly 350’000 km and 400’000 km.
The moon’s effect on the tides is around 60-70% and the sun makes up 40-30%, so of course when the moon gets closer the tides get more extreme, and unless I made an error in the calculations below, the difference in gravitational force between the earth and the moon from when the moon is farthest away and closest should be 13.764%
Update: It seems the formula I used above is the “shared” gravitational force between the earth and the moon, Phil Plait came up with a maximum 50% increase in the moons gravitational effect on the earth, which is a more useful number. Also he’s an astronomer, so I’d take his word over mine.. On anything but Star Trek trivia :)
When the moon is at it’s closest and at the same time line up with the sun, we get what’s called the Perigean spring time. In other words, a big ass tide :)
Earthquakes and statistics
They also cited a professor in astronomy (they actually referred to him as professor in astrology, but later changed the article and deleted the comments pointing this out).
The paper suggests that earthquakes can be caused by the moon being to close to the earth (sounds like a 50′s sci-fi movie), but what I find quite surprising is the rather strange quote from the professor: “I would be very surprised, if there was a really strong earthquake at this particular date”. and that while living in California, he witnessed an powerful earthquake on the day before a “supermoon”.
The USGS defines a strong earthquake as anything with a magnitude of 6.0 or above (Christchurch was 6.3). On average there 150 earthquake like this yearly.
So the chance for a strong earthquake to happen on march 19th, is 41%.
If we however include the day before and after, the chance increases to 79%.
If we where to include 2 days before and after, we’re up to 92%.
So it’s pretty certain that a big earthquake will take place on or around march 19th, and it’s pretty certain crazy doomsday nuts will say there is a connection between that statistically predicted earthquake and the evil moon.
The chance of the quake hitting a densely populated area however is much smaller, so maybe the nuts won’t notice itupdate 11.03.2011
As statistics predicted a large earthquake did occur. It did hit a densely populated area, and caused a huge tsunami that hit the northwestern coast of Japan causing massive damages and deaths :(
The newspaper actually takes this flawed thinking to a whole new level, posting a picture from a earthquake/tsunami in Indonesia, making the point that it “happened only 2 weeks before a supermoon” (oooouh spooky!!).
This is just moronic.. the chance of a strong earthquake being 2 weeks before or after a certain date is 99.999977369 %
Note: all my calculations are based upon dates of earthquakes being relatively evenly distributed through the year, as confirmed by USGS
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Jim appreciation day
I declare February 20th the new international Jim appreciation day:
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Silly Norwegian names
In Norway everyone who pays taxes is put in a public database which says how much money they make and how much tax they pay, and which year they are born. This of course is pretty controversial and each year there is a big debate when the new list is released.
Personally I don’t care, but the upside is that this list can be used to find silly/funny/awesome names :D
- 2 people in Norway is named Jack Bauer
- 3 people have Batman as middle name, 1 as last name
- Only 1 person has Superman as middle name
- 3 people have MacGyver as middle name
- over 100 foreigners have the last name “Moradi” which in Norwegian translates to “Yourmother”
- 5 people have Skywalker as the middle name
- 12 People have Picard as last name (which is why my application to have my middle name changed to Picard was denied.. Since there are so few Picards in Norway, I would have to get a written permission from all of them to use that name) :(
- There is a guy in Norway named Frodo
- A 23 year old girl with the last name Stalin
- Peter Griffin pays tax to Norway
- A guy in Norway is actually named Bruce Campbell
- 22 people have the last name “Leet”
- 3 Aragorns
- One guy has the following middle names: “Gimli Arn Macgyver Chewbacka[SIC] Highlander Elessar”
- 3 people have Thrall as last name
- 4 people are actually have Virgin as their last name
- While 3 people have Troll as their last name
- 1503 Khans, but only 66 Kirks…
- 9 Inaras, 16 Zoe’s, 4 Cobb’s, 2 Kaylee’s and 7 Malcolms :)
- 1 Girl has Buffy as middle name
- 5 people have Angel as first name
- 2 people have Angelus as first name :o
- 1 Guy is named “Giles Rupert” (close enough I guess ) :)
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10:23 Trondheim (Sleeping pill overdose)
Today was the international 10:23 Campaign. Thousands of people with a bias towards reality took huge overdoses of Homeopathic “Medicine”.
I took around 70 (3500% overdose) homeopathetic sleeping pills today, if I had taken real sleeping medicine I would probably be dead or dying about now.
Homeopathy of course is pure and utter bullshit, the 70 pills did not make me sleepy or affect me in any way, which is exactly what is expected for a “medicine” which has no active ingredients and consequently fail to show any effect besides placebo when scientifically tested.
Letting 60 pills melt under your tongue at once kinda sucks btw…
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Meerkat projection
To my great dismay searching for “Meerkat projection” always ends in disappointment:
I’ve always thought of meerkats whenever Mercator projection comes up, so I just had to do this to get it out of my head:
PS: This computer does not have photoshop, and my GIMP skills sucks, so only the northern pole is EMBIGGIFIED (yes, it’s a word).
PPS: That image reminds me of the Star Trek TOS pilot, “The Cage”.. BOW BEFORE YOUR MEERKAT OVERLORDS!
- Arcturus - Hufsa English Translation
- Wolves of Welton extended (maps)
- Simple Sitemap on Github pages
- Old Man's Child English Translation
- Mere of Dead men map (Forgotten Realms)
- Leilon map (Forgotten Realms)
- Conyberry map (Forgotten Realms)
- D-Link DCH-Z510 Siren with Smartthings
- New blog, jekyll and github
- Fedcon 2011 - Day 3