Another German map

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You’ll probably want to go and look at this post to see why this is “another” German map.

But, this is another German map, this time detailing the results of the recent European Parliament elections in that country.

That’s the Centre-Right CDU/CSU in grey and the Far-Right AfD in blue. And you’ll note that the country is – once again – divided up right down its historic East/West border. The weird bit here being that the ex-Communist Bloc East is voting for a far-right party that supports Russian president Vladimir Putin, who is all for reliving those halcyon days when the USSR and Eastern Europe was all powerful.

Well, in the USSR and Eastern Europe, anyway.

Still, the Western side is holding onto parties with far less extreme policies.
So I guess things could be worse.

See what I mean?

Ouch.

A taste of Durban

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Given the ongoing state of Durban’s beaches – or rather the water just off them – as illustrated here:

I found the prospect of buying some brown gloop labelled “Taste of Durban”, and with an image of those very same beaches and bits of Indian Ocean, rather unappealing.

Mind you, this actually being Nutella and not sea poop, it’s not like I could afford it anyway.

Ridiculously expensive stuff, although happily E.coli free.

Nerdy video of the week

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Meet Mattias Bjoernstroem. Part man, part airport.

Really:

At his job at an airport in Northern Sweden, he… he does everything. From ATC to snow ploughing to ventilation repair to de-icing planes to… well… Just look at this:

00:00 Working in flight tower 04:54 Ventilation repair 07:09 Guides Boeing 738 to stand 08:41 Driving aircraft stair 09:21 Doing ground work around plane 12:44 Having a look inside cockpit of Boeing 737-800 14:28 Getting Boeing 737-800 ready for takeoff 16:00 removing aircraft stair from plane 16:15 Full Deicing for Boeing 737-800 with type 1 23:12 More work in flight tower sending the Englishmen back home 24:15 Driving vacuum car to suck up the glycol from deicing 26:04 Fault searching runway edge light problem 41:03 Towing a beech 200 to hangar 42:18 Fault searching runway edge light with electric problem 47:24 Plowing airfield with sweeper 52:05 Sweeping runway lights from snow 53:08 Using snow blower 77 to get rid of snow from airfield 53:44 Replacing a broken contact to runway edge light 1:00:36 Replacing electric well on airfield 1:05:50 Ending.

You can click on any one of the those timestamps to watch him working through another task at the airport. Amazing.

Incredibly nerdy, but also a bit fun and all rather different.
And I know a lot of 6000 miles… readers fit those adjectives quite nicely.

More research needed

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Here’s an interesting article about the recent (last 10 years) chaotic weather that has hit Cape Town.

Its writing was precipitated (no pun intended) (or was it?!?) ostensibly by the storms that hit in April, after the storms that hit in September, after the drought that hit a few years back.

And since it was published, we’ve had more extreme weather. 200mm of rain falling onto Cape Agulhas last week, rendering that road – and many more – undrivable again.

Look, this is the Cape of Storms, as referenced in the article. But climate change should be making Cape Town drier, but these extreme events aren’t related to the cold fronts that bring the winter rain to our region. These are the cut-off lows (see 6000 miles… passim) which can occur at any time of year – and they appear to have been occurring quite a lot recently.

They’re nothing new. The Laingsberg Flood of January 1981 was due to a cut-off low.

But are there more cut-off lows than previously, or are we just more aware of them? Are these handful of floods just an unfortunate series of severe weather events, or is this what we must be planning for in the future?

Sadly, n just doesn’t equal enough to give us a definitive answer.

As it says, we now need some more information, but given the toll of these floods: whether it being people cut off, having property damaged, livestock drowning or whatever, we need it soon, please.

That E.coli announcement

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There’s an outbreak of E.coli in the UK. And it’s a particularly nasty one.

A lot of people are quite upset that the announcement contained that phrase:

a nationally distributed food item

As if there’s some sort of conspiracy in not announcing exactly what food item it is, presumably in order to allow more people to get sick.

All the blue ticks. All the time.

Surprisingly though, the nationally distributed food item can’t be named, because they don’t know what it is. (Microbiologists will be waving their hands in the air, trying to attract the teacher’s attention so they can tell you that it’s almost certainly a pre-prepared salad of sorts, but that’s because it’s always a pre-prepared salad of sorts which is to blame when you get this sort of thing.)

What they do know however, is where the bug didn’t come from. Not from a particular holiday destination or cruise. Not from “wild” swimming. Not from a single water source. Not from a school canteen. And so on. And they can do this because of the demographics of the patients, and their geographic distribution.

It’s easy to tie these cases down to one specific bug: genome sequencing can do that very quickly. What it’s more difficult to do is to then work out the link between all of those cases. So what the UKHSA is doing with this statement is trying to reassure the public that swimming, drinking water, going on holiday etc etc is absolutely fine.

Can they identify the nationally distributed food item? No, not yet. Or they would have done.

They could guess, but then they’d get into trouble either simply for guessing, or for guessing incorrectly. Damned if they do, and damned – albeit by tossers on twitter – when they don’t.

They’ll let us know as soon as they know. That’s how these things work.

And in the meantime? Well, there’s plenty of advice on that link about the best way to avoid the bug and avoid getting sick. But with a population of about 70 million people, and “just” 113 cases, I honestly don’t think that you should be treating your fridge as a potential ticking timebomb.

I’d still wash that lettuce really well before you eat it, though.