Earth

In the last year and a half, I have often found myself with a fair bit of time on my hands. So, alongside reading, running, and sleeping in excess, I like poking around on the Internet looking for interesting things to see and do. The latest of these is Google Earth.

Basically, this program lets you look at satellite images of the whole world. Some areas aren't captured in as much detail as others, but most are high-res enough to have a good idea of what's on the ground, if you've been there. So in the last few weeks, I've been re-visiting, from above, some of my European travel locales from last year, as well as some local sites. For instance, pictured below is the beach at Scheveningen, near Den Haag (The Hague), the start of an epic bike trip across the Netherlands (a scant 180 km).

And this is how Google Earth sees it:

If you get the software, you can check out a few other sites of interest (to me, at least), foreign and local, that I have pinpointed. So download away, and you can play at home.

Election roundup

Quickly, my prediction for seats in the election was: 125-100-55-28, mostly because I like roundish numbers.

The results (as of 11:30pm, on CBC's website): Conservatives 125, Liberals 102, Bloc 51, NDP 29, Independent 1. So not too bad (although to be honest, I had a secondary prediction of 125-100-60-23 that was a little further off).

I am glad that the Bloc is down and the NDP are up, and the Conservative minority government is weak enough in size so as to make significant co-operation a necessity. An unholy alliance of Tory and BQ would be a worst-case scenario, but I don't see it happening. It was also nice to see the voter turnout slightly up.

Martin steps down, which is probably good. My riding went NDP, as expected.

UPDATE: The final numbers are 124-103-51-29-1, although I think a few ridings have had results that triggered mandatory recounts.

Are you an idiot, or are you just stupid?

A letter to the editor in today's Winnipeg Free Press (and by the way, the 90s called, and they want their website back):

It's clear which path to take

I would like to commend Coun. Harry Lazarenko for his recent comments regarding "ignorant" cyclists on our streets. As an avid motorist, I am harassed daily by not only cyclists, but pedestrians as well. Granted, most of the time there are no sidewalks or paths other than the road, but we need to discourage the very idea that motor vehicles should courteously share the streets with anyone smaller or cleaner than them.
The Active Transportation Study would have us believe that only about seven per cent of commuters walk or cycle to work, but I can tell you that even a few of these radical and often belligerent hippy-types are a huge inconvenience to motorists. I've actually been forced to slow down more than once or even (if you can believe it), go around some of these people.
One middle-aged woman I often see trudging down the street to work and back every day actually had the nerve to give me a quite nasty look when I passed her at a speed just marginally over the limit, and gave her a little "slush bath".
I say, scrap the whole notion of more studies, more paths, and more weirdos who don't drive everywhere. We should be spending on our tax dollars on our overly stressed health-care system instead.

DEBORAH SMITH
Winnipeg

Part of me thinks that the whole thing is tongue-in-cheek, but the joke would be lost on most people. But maybe I am just a belligerent hippy-type, or an inconvenience.

Of all places...

The world is full surprises. Forgive the cliche, but I made an amazing (or at least perplexing) find this afternoon at the grocery store in the basement of Winnipeg's Bay store downtown (possibly one of the most bizarre grocery stores around). Here it is:These vlokken (chocolate flakes) are a breakfast staple in the Netherlands, but I have never seen them anywhere else. Simply take a piece of bread, apply butter, and sprinkle flakes. A white ingredients sticker (in French and English, presumably to satisfy language requirements) on the back of the box was the only alteration to the otherwise entirely Dutch package. I might not have been so surprised to find it in an imports or gourmet shop, but The Bay? Needless to say, these vlokken greatly improved the quality of my supper pancakes. Lekker.


Update: Perhaps that wasn't so rare a find, as I found some chocolade hagel (think chocolate sprinkles for your toast, as opposed to the chocolate flakes above), in the same box as is pictured in the link.

Sunk!

I was playing Battleship the other day, and had a good time. So I went about trying to find a way to drain the fun out of the game. Though I'm not much of a mathematician, I figured there must be some optimal pattern of "guesses" to locate most quickly most of the ships. Without putting too much thought into it, this is what I came up with:

Now, this approach will catch all possible placements of carriers and battleships (length 5 and 4 respectively) because there are no places where there are 4 or more consecutive empty grid cells, vertically, or horizontally.

In every column and every row, there are 2 possible placements of a destroyer or submarine which would escape detection. In total, there are 8 placements per row and per column for a 3-cell vessel. So, the possibility that a destroyer or sub will be placed to escape detection will be [(2*10)+(2*10)]/[(8*10)+(8*10)] = 40/160 = 25%.

The cruiser is a tougher beast to find, occupying only two cells. As best as I can figure, there are 180 possible placements of the cruiser, and 5 in each row, and in each column, that are not detected. So the probability of the cruiser not being detected using the above search pattern is (5*10)+(5*10)/180 = 55%.

Furthermore, the probability that a piece of each boat will be hit in this 24-strike pattern is (0.75 * 0.75 * 0.45) = ~25%.

Now I'd like to know if there's a better way.

Book list '05

Just for fun, the books I read in 2005, in chronological order of completion:

1. Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective
2. Robert Cormier, Beyond the Chocolate War
3. Michael Moore, Stupid White Men
4. H.G. Wells, Ann Veronica
5. Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You
6. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
7. Mordecai Richler, Barney's Version
8. Frank Abagnale Jr., Catch Me If You Can
9. Franz Kafka, The Castle
10. Frank McCourt, 'Tis
11. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter en de Steen der Wijzen
12. Gertrude Mackprang Barr, In the Shadow of Silence
13. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter en de Geheime Kamer
14. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter en de Gevangene van Azkaban
15. Nelson DeMille, Plum Island
16. Dan Brown, Angels and Demons
17. J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter en de Orde van de Feniks
18. W.O. Mitchell, Ladybug, Ladybug
19. Bill Bryson, A Walk In The Woods
20. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground
21. Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel In Brief
22. Fyodor Dostoveysky, The Adolescent
23. Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero
24. Leo Tolstoy, Hadji Murat

Not all of them were winners. The Tom Sawyer titles seemed like Twain was trying to cash in on his earlier success with the Tom and Huck brand, the Catch If You Can book was (big surprise!) poorly written, the Kafka book took some work to finish, and Nelson DeMille's Plum Island was so entertainingly bad that I was compelled to leave it on a train in Norway (but only after I was done). The Harry Potter titles I evidently read in Dutch, so they took more time to get through than they would have otherwise.

Edit: John Steinbeck's East of Eden should be in there somewhere as well, probably somewhere among numbers 12 - 16, but I forgot to write it down.