World of Change

World of Change

Inspired by our 10th anniversary, the Earth Observatory has pulled together a special series of NASA satellite images documenting how our world—forests, oceans, human landscapes, even the Sun—has changed during the previous decade.

September 17, 1979

October 4, 2008

In the early 1980s, scientists began to realize that CFCs were creating a thin spot—a hole—in the ozone layer over Antarctica every spring. This series of satellite images shows the ozone hole on the day of its maximum depth each year from 1979 through 2008.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/WorldOfChange/

Impressing and scary…more on the NASA Site.

President of the USA

Barack Obama is the new president of the United States of America.Congratulations. Hopefully he won’t participate in JFK’s destiny. Good luck !

Update :

Well he´s still alive and will visit my beautiful home-state – Thuringia on the 5th of june.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hX0ownimfSxXD5eYxIloH_ejxo8w (german)

One of his grand uncles helped to liberate the concentration camp Buchenwald as an american soldier during world war 2 and so he want´s to visit the place.  Though the place is definetly no fun, I guess many people will be there to give him a warm welcome.

Update 2 :

That´s it, he has been here and now he´s gone. The MDR took some great pictures of the AirForce One landing in Erfurt.

And the white rose for all the victims of Buchenwald – may they never be forgotten.

Note : The Creative Commons License for this site does NOT apply on these pictures. All rights for these pictures Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, except the white rose pictures by ddp.

restaurant : IKEA, Erfurt / Germany

Short and simple – the food at IKEA is really cheap and the quality is really bad.

I´ve never been a big fan of this place but from time to time I go there to buy some fresh furniture. I want to be part of the yuppie hype too…

Anyway – I had a classical german Schnitzel with french fries and cream sauce. It was more cold than hot, the Schnitzel reminded me of my morning newspaper and the fries have never seen some salt. At least the sauce was okay, but also not a celebration for my palate. My girlfriend had some organic noodle casserole with tomato and cheese. The whole thing was dry like a desert, I couldn´t find any cheese and it was cold too.

The only good thing was the free refill for the soft drinks. My no-name coke tasted a little bit like a mixture of CoCa Cola (Coke) with some lemon limonade. Ohhh and the 2nd good thing was the price – not even 10 EUR for 2 persons is incredibly cheap.

Our menu :

– Schnitzel with french friens and cream sauce

– organic noodle casserole with tomato and cheese

– no-name coke

http://www.ikea.com


Größere Kartenansicht

restaurant : Alt Weimar, Weimar / Germany

Well it´s not one of my best protected secrets and so everyone who knows me or have seen me may already guess it : I like eating ! So from this point of view I decided to write a little bit about interesting places I visited to gain some food.

This is gonna be the first review, more to follow soon.

<<< the bill – click to enlarge

The Alt Weimar is a higher class restaurant with a small but very interesting menu. Though I didn´t knew most of the items on the menu (or haven´t heard their names either) it was one of the best meals of my life.

The reason for that might be star cook Sten Fischer (http://www.fiese-koeche.de) who did a great job in serving an extraordinary, fresh and free of food additives dish.

Honestly – with 72,70 EUR for 2 persons it was not cheap and above my normal investment in food. But it was absolutely worth it.

My girlfriend did an interview with Sten Fischer about his job for her study and if we are lucky it will be available here soon.

The Alt Weimar has a website, too : http://www.alt-weimar.de – if you want to know more – check it out.

And last but not least – our menu (with absolutely no warranty for the translation) :

– selfmade woodruff punch

– goose liver soam soup

– anchorena lamb

– herb ribbon noodles

– variation from the frozen ananas

– variation from the torka bean

– water

Größere Kartenansicht

 

Thoughts about the Internet

  • The aware surfer

She knows what she does when using the internet. Paying for services on the internet is highly uncommon for her, because she knows that everything that costs money is avaiable for free – at least somewhere. She´s a convinced Mozilla Firefox user with a technical affinity, maybe Google Chrome user (because of the faster Java VM) for testing and occassionally browsing. Though skeptical about the Web 2.0 thing she´s participating probably in Facebook and for listening purposes in Youtube and mySpace – the latter with a growing antipathy because of the spammed design. She´s got a fixed schedule on websites to visit every day and never spends time on leisure-browsing. Discovering new sites is only a part of focused searching, preferential using Google. She´s got plenty of email accounts, but only one or two of real interest – all the others are used for several spam purposes mainly for website registration affairs.

tbc…

bike trail on the future ICE track – part 1

The Deutsche Bahn AG ist currently constructing a new ICE track from Erfurt to Nuernberg. When it´s finished in 2017 it will reduce the total traveling time from Berlin to Munich to something around 4 hours. Right now you need approximately 8 hours. The project started in 1996, got interrupted in 1999 and was continued in 2002.

Read more about the track at Wikipedia (only in German) :

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schnellfahrstrecke_N%C3%BCrnberg%E2%80%93Erfurt

The track passes Ilmenau in the east and is nearly finished up to Erfurt – only the rails are missing. Some kilometers south of Ilmenau, in the small village Langewiesen the track ends. From there a big bridge will push the track forwards which is currently under construction.

I visited the construction site several times and got the idea, that it would be a great route for a bike trip. I tested some parts of the track with my bike and came to the conclusion that a trip on the whole track from Ilmenau (Langewiesen) to Erfurt needs some good preparation. Nearly all of the bridges are blocked (and I mean really blocked) so you have to go through the valleys and all the tunnels are blocked too, so you have to go over the top. Sounds exhausting (and it is) but the bigger problem is, that there are no direct paths leading through the valleys or over the tops. I lost the way more than once when I looked for alternatives. So I decided to use Google Earth to have an all-time overview. It proved as a good and necessary idea. Besides that I used my Garmin Forerunner 205 GPS watch to trace my trail – you can see the route in Google Earth below.

The track is covered by a combination of rough gravel and more capillary gravel. Riding on the first is sometimes a little bit tough and you really need to have a good hold on the steering, the second is much more comfortable although you are much faster on the rough gravel.

I felt pretty much motivated when starting the trip on a sunny day in late July. But I underestimated one thing – the weather. With nearly 35 degress it was way to hot for a trail like this. Normally I like riding when it´s that hot but the up and down through the valleys and over the tops consumed more of my power than I expected. There was no alternative apart from splitting the route in 2 parts. So I left the track next to Arnstadt and used the train back to Ilmenau.

My conclusion to the first part is a little bit divided. On one hand it was a damn hard and – especially after the third detour through a valley to get across a blocked bridge – demotivating trip. But on the other hand it was a great moment standing on the top after the last blocked tunnel and having a great view over the lowlands towards Arnstadt and Erfurt, knowing that the most hazardous part lies behind me.

Hopefully I´ll have the chance to ride the 2nd part before the winter comes.

From this point I started my trail with direction to Erfurt :

30082008 auf einer größeren Karte anzeigen

>>> Link to the complete map in Google

bike trail pic 1

Entry point in Langewiesen. The picture shows the construction site for the bridge.

bike trail pic 1

And the view in the different direction, still at the entry point in Langewiesen. That´s the first view you´ll get when you start your trail.

bike trail pic 1

A (blocked) bridge next to Wümbach, the highest on the whole trail, so the largest valley to cross.

bike trail pic 1

Looking back on the last blocked bridge, with nature taking back its original ground. No wonder, 12 years after the construction of the track started.

bike trail pic 1

A view from the top of the first blocked tunnel. On the right you can see the Autobahn A71. At the horizon the next blocked tunnel is waiting for you.

bike trail pic 1

Cars and trains altogether. But where the hack are the trains ? The 2 tubes on the left side are for the cars on the Autobahn A71, the right tube is empty, blocked and forsaken.

bike trail pic 1

And that´s the view you´ll love. It´s after the last blocked tunnel (on the first part of the track) and leads you straight into the lowlands from Arnstadt up to Erfurt.

bike trail pic 1

With this device I traced the route via GPS. It has many additional features for training.

ARD cencors interview with Wladimir Putin

ARD – one of Germany´s TV channels under public maintenance broadcasted an interview with Wladimir Putin. Some guys who also saw the russian version of the interview discovered massive censorship.

Luckily there´s a transcript available on Youtube and Fefes Blog made short comment on the interview (all german – sorry) :

http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=b6457132

The interview with german subtitles :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Zxl8Lu3mY – Part 1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEf7EwSxemk – Part 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuL3pKXgpOo – Part 3

Complete interview from the russian TV (only russian 😉 :

http://rutube.ru/tracks/967558.html?v=139eddb87ba90e44488ea7157eaecb35

Russian transscript and the german translation :

http://www.government.ru/content/governmentactivity/
mainnews/archive/2008/08/29/2344019.htm

http://putin-ard.blogspot.com/

Thanks to LawBlog for the information.