Frank Witte 🇪🇺 🇳🇱 🇩🇪 🇨🇵
@alarcos
UCL, Computational Economist & ex-Theoretical Physicist, Bass player, Glacier hiker, DoB: 30 Messidor CLXXIV.
The NL-system works as follows: The age-group 4-12 studies a largely "national curriculum" in elementary school. Secondary education basically starts with a shared 2-year "foundational curriculum" alongside a path-specific component that is "preparatory vocational" (vmbo), "general" (HAVO), or
The folks on his Air France flight must have quite the horrifying view to their right ...
(My local cinema this morning) Oh wow ... I can think of a scene or two that might upset a dog🤭
Up next: Pentagon introduces "refreshment breaks" in the Iran War for the White House to do some market-manipulation, crypto- and merch-advertising.
All's well that ends with some maths to puzzle about and a local beer ... what a lovely day😍
After having a closer look at the Glacier du Nant Blanc, which show lots of 'dry' glacier ice, some.rockflass debris but little in terms of seracs, I packed my binoculars back into my backpack and headed down i to the valley. This year I really enjoyed finding a good spot and then just look 😊
My phone can't capture it well ... but this block of ice just underneath the Tacul just seems suspended in air right underneath the seracs 😄 There are no routes below it ... but should I get another coffee and stare at it till it breaks off and falls?
The northern flank of the Maudit looks better, but with my binoculars I see debris that looks rather fresh, and seems to have come down from just below the summit / col de Maudit, with traces all the way down 😬. July 7th mayhem.
I don't know whether there are still teams doing the Tacul ... but it looks as if someone took a hammer to that north-face. There's still a vague track to the summit ridge, but with a couple of big open crevasses along the way 😬 with the heatwave I would be weary of the few remaining snowbridges.
Today, I allow myself some binocular-mountaineering😄 At the moment I am staring at the Grand Mulets route. The hut approach looks rather sketchy given the state of the Bossons glacier at Le Jonction. Quite q few tracks from the hut up to the petite plateau, but also significant serac-fall debris.
When the Sun is just right, the Glacier de la Griaz (just below the centre), or what's left of it, still manages to reveal some.of its icy heart underneath that coating of 'rockflour'. Mont Blanc meanwhile wears its 'bad weather hat'.
Well, after another 32°-33° day in Chamonix valley, the Mont Blanc massif is cooking up a new thunderstorm
Four radar snapshots of a Thunderstorm ⛈️ forming over Mont Blanc tonight (blue dot is Chamonix-Mont Blanc) as a merger of several smaller ones, before setting off in the direction of Geneva.
This is the #MeteoBlue forecast for #Paris. It's been updated 3 times in the last 12 hours and everytime it seems to get worse. Nighttime minima of 27°C and consecutive days of 38°+. 😵💫😢
An Italian thunderstorm is slowely crawling across the Mont Blanc massif ...
I have been applying this strategy religiously since 1986 but still waiting for my "magical year" with 5 Nobel-worthy publications ( or 5 any publications for that matter), so: either it doesn't work for bass guitars 🤷 or the real reward is the joy & relaxation it brings. I surely experienced that.
A pretty stupid post, if you ask me. Calculators *worked*, gave verifiable answers to questions that were tedious but not difficult with pencil & paper, replaced rote memorisation, the use goniometric tables and of slide-rulers. They weren't sycophantic facilitators of technical and cognitive debt.
First seeing the Bossons & Taconaz glaciers as a teen in the early 80's left an indelible mark on my. I didn't realise at the time I'd watch their increasingly rapid collapse with my own eyes.
Good choice! But perhaps the UK should also adopt some of the Dutch culture around vocational training & careers. Real change cannot come from organisation & institutions only, it's also a mindset & culture that needs change.
The paper that got cited was a labour-of-love, not in the sense that it took me decades but in the sense that I loved doing the work and even quite liked writing it up. One referee thought is was rubbish, the other thought it was brilliant, and I doubted either had read it.
I am holder of a publication record which allows me to savour every single citation I get when it happens & treat myself to a beer to celebrate🥳, with 0 risk of intoxication. Today, I found out I have my first citation from China ... by this paper from 2021. 🤗
It's always seemed to me that the 'prediction' of the positron is the most mind blowing prediction of the 20th century, perhaps alongside the prediction of gravitational waves. The former, a prediction of a new form of matter, had no precedent. The latter, technically, had a precedent in Maxwel's
Dispensing the Starlink dummies seems to work reasonably well, but the in-orbit engine restart was cancelled.