Archive for May, 2006

Why does it always rain on me?

Friday, May 26th, 2006

Here in Kent we are in the middle of a drought. Or so all the water companies and media tell us. Our local water supply company, Mid Kent Water, has been granted a Drought Order (not yet currently in force) along with Southern Water which would allow them to prohibit certain water usage such as watering sports pitches and cleaning the exterior of buildings. The first Drought Order in eleven years was granted to Sutton and East Surrey Water and comes into force tomorrow (27th May).

This is rather contradictory to what is happening with the weather this month. May 2006 is already the wettest month in Canterbury since before September 2004. We have had nearly twice the long-term average precipitation already and there are still five days of the month to go. It has rained on the last eleven days. So is there still a drought on?

Well probably yes. The rain has come too late as most of it will evaporate or drain into rivers and out to sea. If the rain fell during the autumn or winter, there is much less evaporating allowing aquifers (underground water sources) and reservoirs to charge. So while water running into some rivers and streams now will find its way into the few reservoirs that there are, most will just disappear.

The cumulative deficit in rainfall for 2006 in Canterbury is still some 50mm. Including 2005 in the equation, since January 2005 we have missed out on some 290mm of rainfall - the total for 2005 and 2006 is 693mm when we should have had nearly 1000mm. Also, both the winters of 2004/5 and 2005/6 were dry, so reservoirs and aquifers didn’t get chance to recharge.

Perhaps the drought won’t bite as hard if the current wet month continues into June and July. At the moment the possibilty of even more draconian measures to stem the use of water is still quite likely in the south-east of England.

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Prizes

Tuesday, May 23rd, 2006

After receiving some rather cryptic e-mails from the Director of Music at the University, I found out last week that I had been awarded the Colyer-Fergusson Music Prize. The prize-giving was held in the Senate at University yesterday - there were quite a few important-type people there including the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (from whom I received my prize).

The Colyer-Fergusson Prize is awarded in memory of Sir James Colyer-Fergusson to honour students who have made an outstanding contribution to the musical life of the campus. I have played trumpet in the University Concert Band and Big Band for the last 5 years that I’ve been in Kent and I’ve been on the Music Society committee for the past two years as Concert Band librarian. I seem to always get roped into helping out with musical activities around the campus from stewarding the orchestra and chorus concerts in Canterbury Cathedral to setting up and clearing up the Concert Band rehearsals every Wednesday.

I hadn’t really anticipated that I’d ever get a prize for what I’ve done, but it’s nice to get a bit of recognition for all the hours I’ve committed to the Music Society over the past few years. I still have at least one more year left: I am still on the Music Society committee next year too!

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Where are your Antipodes?

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

“The other side of the world” is quite an exciting concept - it’s the place that is the furthest distance that you could travel to. This is more often called the antipodes - the most diametrically opposite point on the Earth’s surface.

In Britain, the antipodes are often taken to be either Australia or New Zealand. They’re certainly a long way away, but exactly where is the antipodal point to you? Thankfully there’s an easy way to find that out! zefrank.com has a nifty little Google Maps mashup that shows two maps side by side: the centre of the two maps being the antipodal points of each other. Using this tool I can find out that the anitpodal point to Canterbury in the UK is in the middle of the sea off the southwest of New Zealand.

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Shifting Meridians

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

I know all about the complexities of the time zones around the world when I set out to create a way to be able to find out what time it was at a particular latitude and longitude in the world.

The BBC have aired a programme on Radio 4 which details the various oddities of the time zone map. Did you know for example, that China uses one time zone for the whole country despite the fact that China is several thousand miles across. I guess that means that people in the west of the country will be going to and coming home from work at an unearthly hour compared to those people in Beijing.

As far as I can tell there was no way to do to easily find your time zone or local time or even to look up the local time for something that has been georeferenced on the Internet, so I started drawing a map that I could process into the relevant data. This was a daunting task (and is already out of date and needing updating!). The map ended up looking like this:

Time Zone Map

The data has since been linked into my EarthTools website so that you can find out the local time for anywhere in the world just by positioning a map rather than knowing what city you are near or what time zone that city is in. For example, I can find Paris fairly easily and get it to give me the time zone and local time there.

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Union Flag

Friday, May 19th, 2006

Union Flag The Union Flag was 400 years old on 12th April this year. Although Britain has technically never actually had an official flag, the Union Flag has been pretty much universally adopted as such. Oddly, there is also very little protection of the status of the flag, except when it is used as a jack on a ship at sea. The flag is also used as a canton (inset in the upper-left corner) for other national and regional flags around the world, particularly in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

The flag is composed of the red cross of St. George representing England, the red saltire cross of St. Patrick representing Ireland and the saltire of St. Andrew representing Scotland. None of the flag actually represents Wales!

The photo was taken on a blustery day from on top of Dover Castle in Kent. I had to jam the camera against the battlements to keep it steady for the required shutter speed (around 1/30th of a second) to get the flag to blur.

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Exams

Tuesday, May 16th, 2006

It’s that time of the year again. Students have spent the last two terms swatting up on what they need to know for the exams at the end of the year. I get to earn lots of money by invigilating them and making sure they don’t cheat!

Exams at the University of Kent are quite a big deal. Unlike other universities which do their exams at the end of each semester, all the exams are crammed into the six-week summer term. For the first few weeks there are exams happening all over campus - in the sports halls, as well as in Darwin and Keynes colleges. There are also a few people with special arrangements such as extra time elsewhere.

Invigilating is quite dull though. And you have to spend three hours stood up and not being able to sit down (unless you want to feel the wrath of the senior invigilator). Luckily most of my shifts are with the students with special arrangements, but one today was in the main sports hall looking after some 400-odd students. In the exam halls there isn’t much to do as an invigilator. Occasionally a student wants extra paper or a cup of water. Even more rarely a student wants to go to the toilet (you have to follow them in!) but that’s about it. The exciting parts are setting out the exam papers before the exam starts (and reading them if they look half-interesting) and collecting up the answers at the end (and trying not to read them!).

When I am invigilating over where the students with special arrangements do their exams, I have the added luxury of being able to sit down and even to do some work. Luckily you are only ever invigilating a few students at a time so they don’t demand too much attention. Many of them have 25% or even 50% extra time for their exams so you could get a 5 hour or 6 hour shift. This is good for the bank balance! The main advantage is that there are few distractions so I can actually get on and do a decent amount of work.

For the students I guess it’s a completely different ballgame. The exam they are sitting might mean the difference between a good job and stacking shelves in a supermarket, so they are quite often very stressed. This year there’s the added stress of not even knowing if the exam they are sitting will be marked as a number of lecturers are refusing to mark coursework and exams in a dispute over pay. My view is that while lecturers might have a reasonable claim for an increase in their pay over and above inflation, they should find alternative methods of emphasising their point other than an assessment boycott. Ultimately, a final-year student who has not had all their assessments and exams marked may not be able to graduate when expecting - this is likely to have a significant impact on whether they can go into a job after finishing at university. The university might also have to make arrangements for first- and second-year students to proceed to the next year of study without first having all their assessment and exam marks. Certainly not a good state of affairs, particularly as there doesn’t seem to be any movement with regards to getting the lecturers’ pay deal sorted out.

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Labelling contour maps

Friday, May 5th, 2006

I’ve been writing code to automatically generate contour maps from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data. The results have come a long way since I originally blogged about doing this for earthtools.org.

Since the original experiment about a month ago, I have made a number of changes. Firstly I’ve made the contours orange - a colour which stands out more clearly over the satellite images. I have also added an alpha transparency to the contour tiles (which are drawn on a black background) and reduced the opacity. This helps to increase the contrast between the contours and the satellite image. Unfortunately, as the tiles are saved as PNGs, this means that they don’t work too well in Internet Explorer 6. I’ve added a “this site is optimised for Firefox” link to the page to keep people happy!

One of the trickier things is labelling contours. It’s all very well being able to draw them, but without labels you don’t have the foggiest idea what they mean. I’ve been working on a clever little algorithm that attempts to label all the major contours. It works by finding the straightest part of the contour that is long enough to fit the label on. If the contour isn’t long enough to fit the label on then it doesn’t label it.

To find out how straight part of a contour is, I calculate the “wibbliness” of the contour. I try the label as a straight line on various parts of the contour - if the actual length of the contour is close to the straight-line distance then the line is fairly straight (generally). This seems to be accurate enough for the time being (and isn’t too computationally expensive seeing as I already know the length of each straight-line segment of contour).

The results look pretty good:

Contour labelling

Still a few things to fix - ideally the lettering of the labels should be facing uphill rather than any random direction. Then there’s matter of generating all the tiles (many hundreds of thousands) - which could take somewhere between 3 and 6 months for the whole of Europe and the USA.

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April 2006 in Canterbury

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

April was another mild and dry month. Although the month never felt particularly warm, it was characterised by very consisting slightly-above-average temperatures. 20C wasn’t reached at any point during the month. April was again dry, with less than half the expected rainfall. The total for the first four months of 2006 is now 118.9mm (the equivalent total for the first four months of 2005 was 152.0mm). Only 2 out of the last 20 months have exceeded the LTA rainfall. Of particular note is the dryness of the ground and the levels of the River Stour. I don’t think I’ve seen the river so low at this time of year in the 7 years that I’ve been in Canterbury - the level would more befit the end of July rather than the end of April.

For more on the weather in Canterbury see http://www.canterburyweather.co.uk/.

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Somerset Photos

Monday, May 1st, 2006

A little while ago I headed out west to Somerset and Wiltshire. I’ve finally found some time to sort through the 250-odd photos that I took over a couple of days. The aim was to visit a few of the interesting places around Wells - we ended up looking around Wells and also visited Cheddar Gorge and Glastonbury. Unfortunately, the weather was a little grey and everywhere was absolutely crammed full of tourists as it was the Easter weekend.

We started at Wells, one of the smallest cities in England. The Cathedral is quite impressive, although it does appear quite squat from the front.

Wells Cathedral
Wells Cathedral

The clock on the Cathedral (which is hidden around on the north side) is one of the oldest public clocks - installed at the end of the 14th century, it is over 600 years old.

Wells Cathedral Clock
Wells Cathedral Clock

Luckily we got to Wells early enough - on the way back to the car all the car parks had filled up!

Next stop was Cheddar Gorge. The gorge is the largest in the United Kingdom and is some 113 metres deep. It is also where Britain’s oldest complete skeleton (Cheddar Man) was found. The skeleton is about 9000 years old.

Unfortunately, by the time we got to the gorge, it had already filled up with tourists. We parked at the top and walked down the road which runs down the bottom of the gorge. The sides of the gorge are impressive and the road winds its way between the steep cliffs and is often quite steep.

Cheddar Gorge
Cheddar Gorge

The bottom of the gorge was quite depressing - people were parking all over the place and for some reason someone had the brilliant idea of sticking an vile concrete building in the bottom of the gorge for the entrance to the caves and to fleece the tourists of even more money in the gift shop. I had wanted to stop a little in the village of Cheddar too, but that was impossible owing to the huge numbers of people crawling the place.

Out final stop for the day was at Glastonbury. The town is full of strange shops selling all sorts of weird things. The town is steeped in mythology and therefore attracts a certain type of people. Glastonbury Tor stands over the town and is topped by the remains of St. Michael’s Church. The Tor is allegedly the burial place of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere and Chalice Well on the side of the Tor is one of the supposed sites of the Holy Grail.

Glastonbury Tor
Glastonbury Tor

Unfortunately it had clouded over even more by this time and had started to rain slightly. We returned back to the car by way of a cup of tea in the centre of Glastonbury.

The weather the previous day had been a lot better and was much more conducive to good photographs. I was staying in Bradford-on-Avon in Wiltshire, which is a very pretty town with lots of history. The River Avon and the Kenney and Avon Canal both run through the town: the canal is a particularly popular attraction.

Kennet and Avon Canal, Bradford-on-Avon
Kennet and Avon Canal, Bradford-on-Avon

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