planetwater

ground- water, geo- statistics, environmental- engineering, earth- science

Archive for 2021

Stones Turned This Week

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Net News Wire

NetNewsWire 6 is now on the (iOS, iPadOS) AppStore!

Together with NetNewsWire 6 on macOS it is a wonderful open RSS solution, offers iCloud sync that works well (and makes me think about my long-time, by now beloved, but not mentioned on _DavidSmith’s blog in quite some time, Feed Wrangler subscription).

One feature that I use more than anticipated is NNW’s novel ability to subscribe to Twitter Accounts (even searches) like a feed. It’s not surprising given twitter’s gradual and steady deterioration of the timeline.

How else, other than NNW, do you keep track of RSS feeds?

Speaking of blogging, Macdrifter seems to back from his hiatus. What a nice polarity to twitter – few posts, a lot of content! Also, I completely stole the title of this post from him.

Marble Quarry

Admittedly, this video is another link from Jason Kotke, but it has a strong connection to fractured rock hydrogeology, and hence is relevant for this site. The combination of the visuals from the open pit mine with its bulldozers together with the audio from an opera, is more delightful than expected. Then again, I am not so sure what to expect from an ad for a quarry.

Trinkwasser in Deutschland — Mengenproblematik

Obwohl wir (in Stuttgart) bisher eher ein durchschnittlich nasses Jahr haben, werden die Rufe nach mangelnder Wasserverfügbarkeit lauter.

18806 year meo
Hydrometeorologische Größen erstes Halbjahr 2021 im Vergleich zum langjährigen Schnitt an der Wetterstation der Uni Stuttgart.

Dürreperioden: Wird in Franken das Trinkwasser knapp? – Nürnberg – nordbayern.de

Bundesamt für Bevölkerungsschutz warnt vor Trinkwasserknappheit

Ein neuer See fürs Fränkische Seenland? – Gunzenhausen, Treuchtlingen, Weißenburg, Roth, Wassertrüdingen, Wassertrüdingen | Nordbayern

Written by Claus

June 28th, 2021 at 1:03 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Thermally Enhanced Wall Vapour Extraction

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It’s been awfully quiet around here. My delightful New Year’s resolutions are already in the can, and it’s only early March. As if there were not sufficient issues with a raging pandemic.

Maybe the picture below tells you a little bit about my state of mind. This is how my bedroom and office has been looking. Thermally enhanced wall vapour extraction. The person who built a wastewater pipe in the shape of a double-S (yes, literally) should be ashamed for a long time.

Wall
Progress has been made!

Written by Claus

March 9th, 2021 at 4:47 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Too Many Meetings

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It’s mid-January. I had great New Year’s resolutions. I have already downgraded to “blog more”. Brian Romans started what he calls “friday links” on twitter. Let’s say that I aim for something similar, but here on my blog. Which I have been neglecting. Starting to write again on a blog that has been neglected, is in style.

The thing that has been bothering me substantially before Christmas: too many meetings. To some extent, the “too many meetings” problem has been going on before Corona. At the early times of Corona (Spring 2020), there might have been actually less meetings. Currently, the situation seems as bad as it has ever been. One Webex or Zoom, meeting after meeting. It’s difficult to find time to get anything done. This has become very clear over the Christmas holidays.

This article (via Rui Carmo) gets many things right. This I found particularly interesting:

It’s even worse when a worker has several meetings that are separated by 30 minutes. “Not enough time to transition in a non-MRS situation to get anything done, and in an MRS situation, not quite enough time to recover for the next meeting,”

One remedy sounds simple but I am not sure how to achieve this: less meetings

Less time in meetings would ultimately lead to more employee engagement in the meetings they do attend, which experts agree is a proven remedy for future cases of MRS.

So, “just” saying “no” more often!(?) Maybe more tools and automation? Maybe this high – profile advice will help me to decide if I should accept a meeting. Also important: he emphasises that everybody should be prepared, everybody should speak. Breaks sometimes are no real breaks but are giving your brain time to digest thoughts. Even more, breaks are always necessary. And: everything is uncertain!

It is one thing to realise that everything is uncertain, but as @dougmcneall points out:

Making constant risk decisions is exhausting.

This brings us to Corona. During which the usual exhausted-ness seems to be amplified, e.g., with sub-optimal working conditions, and with kids at home. Like Hayley Fowler points out: I’m just tired of everything. Like Brent Simmons point outs:

“I’ve been haunted since hearing, in the early days of the pandemic, that if we all wore masks for six weeks this thing would be over. I was there. I’ve done that for six weeks, and another six weeks, and another. And now it’s worse than ever. It’s a challenge not to be angry. There are healthy, uninfected people right now, today, who are excited for the vaccine and who will die before they get it.

Teaching Experiences

  • webex (which we use at the University of Stuttgart), has now the ability to share the iPad’s screen! It might have been there before, but I realised it existed only on Monday. Before, I knew that zoom can do it. Anyways, this has proven to be a nice tool for teaching sequentially and more spontaneously than an animated slideshow.

  • I’ve upgraded to JupyterLab 3 with it’s visual debugger. Very nice, also for teaching! This ranked list of awesome Jupyter Notebook, Hub and Lab projects (extensions, kernels, tools), that is updated weekly, provides also very many useful hints!

Ending

With Input from

Written by Claus

January 18th, 2021 at 5:03 pm

Posted in Uncategorized