Mountain of the Week - Mt Kidd North

No more 85-year olds or women with bionic feet, this week's mountain was a real scramble with an elevation gain of 1350 m over 11 km and the highest point at 2950 m. I was tired when I reached the summit. Walking up scree sucks, it's two steps forward and one back. Walking down scree is much better, you're basically gliding down the mountain. An even more entertaining way of getting down the mountain is glissading, which means that you find a snow covered slope, sit down on your bum and slide.

The weather was so-so, during the day. It was raining during the night which made me worry that there would be new snow on the mountain. You do want snow because it is easier kick stepping up snow covered slopes rather than walking up scree but new snow lays itself in a layer on top of the old one and it can easily cause small avalanches leading to accidents. Luckily there was no new snow and it didn't start to rain until we returned to the parking lot after nine hours. However, the mountain was covered in mist most of the time which made the navigation a bit tricky. The guide book said "after the ridge you will see an obvious gully to follow to the top". We saw nothing, but our organizers got us to the summit even if we did take a bit of a detour.


This day 85 year old Ed wasn't on the trip but instead we had a 66 year old crazy Iranian. He is fitter than most of us but has a tendency to wander off on his own and get lost. Once they had to call in the rangers (or Bush Police as he called them) to find him. They found him on the highway trying to hitchhike back to Calgary.


The bear of the week was on the roadside when we went past in the car. Someone yelled "oh, a bear" and this time I actually saw something black by the road.

Tesla music

More on the subject of tesla coils. Check out Steve Ward's Singing Tesla Coil. Coooool.

Stolen from A World of Abstinence.

Mountain of the Week - w 23

This week's mountain is Eagle Hill and Deer Ridge in the Sibbald Creel area. After seeing photos from last week's hike my Chinese room mate wanted to join me. Even though he is used to mountains from his province in China I didn't want to lure him into something too difficult (his outdoor gear consisted of runners and an umbrella). We ended up doing a fairly easy hike of 16 km and 400 m elevation. Mostly forest landscape but once we reached the highest point we got a nice view of the valley. Close to the start of the hike I almost got eaten by a bear.
OK, I didn't almost get eaten but I almost saw a bear, i.e. some of the others in the group saw a bear.

Home sweet home

The New York Times visits Göteborg. Not a fantastic article but still...

Alice and Bob are getting farther apart

A new length record for quantum communication is reported by New Scientist and Nature Physics. The record is 144 km and the signal was sent by free space link.

Via Abstinence Kid.

Thunderstruck

It's been nice and warm (25 ^oC) in Calgary for a couple of days and therefore yesterdays lightning/rain storm was not unexpected. But what a storm it was! It was a magnificent lightshow that me and J watched from the open garage door while drinking brandy. Some pictures from the Calgary Herald are available here.

Mountain of the Week

This week's mountain was Heart Mountain, an easy scramble. About 10 km round trip, 875 m elevation gain and the highest peak is at 2135 m. A very nice trip with quite steep hiking in the begining up to the first summit, two-three easy ridge walks with nice views and then an easy descent. Brilliant wheather and no hurting IT bands made the day even better. I was sweating buckets though, and since I didn't bring enough water I had to rehydrate with two pints at the pub when we got back. As one of the girls cut her knee on a sharp rock and got a fairly deep wound I also realised that one should not only carry a first aid kit, one should also know what's in it and how to use the stuff...

Black holes is da shit?

Two PRL:s within four months is something that Campanelli et al seems to have achieved. They have developed a new computational algorithm for gravitation and have used it to perform simulations of two black holes merging Phys Rev Lett 96 (2007) 111101. The paper (or its animations?) were noticed by Physics News Graphic which I found via Dark Roasted Blend.

This weeks Physical Review Focus mentions two papers looking very similar to Campanelli's, and indeed, one of the papers have basically the same authors as the article mentioned above. It is not unusual that one project renders several similar papers. Usually one writes a short paper briefly describing the finding and then complements with longer, more detailed papers. Two PRL:s though is very well done. My gravitation and cosmology and my knowledge of computer algorithms is a bit rusty but I suspect that the authors got some extra attention since they produced some cool pictures and animations. The research is probably top class (they did get it in to PRL) but if you want to make your voice heard in the scientific noise it doesn't hurt to have some fancy graphic.