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Archive for 2010

Correcting for street lights

April 07, 2010 @ 01:35 By: gordon Category: Photography

It’s been a while since I’ve taken some night shots. The rain this evening offered some interesting possibilities that I couldn’t pass up.

IMG_0417-unprocessed-r While perhaps not the most interesting photograph, this 2 second exposure of the intersection of Holland and Scott taken from my balcony gave me a chance to play with some of the toys in Photoshop CS4.

You can see the usual orangey hue caused by the street lights. I manually fiddled with some of the settings before deciding to try the white balance tool.

Using the white stop bar at the bottom of the photo as the reference for white, I was able to get rid of the orange and produce this image:

IMG_0417-r

If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that the intersection was being lit by giant floodlights. Very cool.

Limestone versus Granite: Appendix 2 of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan

April 01, 2010 @ 08:50 By: gordon Category: Climbing, Current affairs, Environment, In the news

So, I’ve been reading the full version of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan during the last week or so, along with a number of research articles that it cites. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is Appendix 2, which is titled “Eardley Escarpment description and conservation issues”. This is where the authors of the GPECP lay out why, in their opinion, climbing should be all but banned from Gatineau Park.

It starts off by describing what an escarpment is, in general terms, and then moves on to describing the Eardley Escarpment thusly:

Eardley Escarpment is a cliff lying along a south-south-west line. It is approximately 300 metres high, with an average height of more than 200 metres, and is the dominant topographical element in the Outaouais region. It begins in the City of Gatineau and runs north-eastwards along the Ottawa River for several dozen kilometres, forming a characteristic rock slope alignment.

Google Earth view To the best of my knowledge, the Eardley Escarpment, the aspect of which is approximately southwest, follows a line that’s aligned roughly northwest-southeast. If it ran “north-eastwards along the Ottawa River”, it would actually be oriented almost perpendicular to the Ottawa River.

If you look at the image to the right, you can see the Eardley Escarpment (I’ve marked it with a red line) running most of the way from top left to lower right.

But this isn’t the most problematic part of Appendix 2.

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The first strip is always free

March 29, 2010 @ 18:16 By: gordon Category: Health, Seen on the 'net

bacon5 “Mmmm … bacon.”

Though apparently never actually uttered by Homer Simpson according to The Simpsons Archive (he did say “mmmm … unexplained bacon” in one of the Hallowe’en episodes) I know many people who feel this way when it comes to bacon.

According to a story in Sunday’s National Post, bacon and cheesecake have the same effect on your brain as heroin and cocaine. When rats that were raised on regular, healthy rat food were given unfettered access to high-fat foods, they became so addicted that even mild foot shocks weren’t enough to convince them to stop eating to excess. The changes in the rats’ brain chemistry noticed by the researchers were the same ones noticed in cases of additions to heroin and cocaine.

To break the addiction, they had to use a special virus that sort of “reset” their dopamine receptors so they would start eating healthy food again because after two weeks of being forced to go “cold turkey” (so to speak) the rats had not returned to their healthy diet. It seems they would rather stave than eat healthy.

This explains much.

Something I’d like to do

March 25, 2010 @ 16:58 By: gordon Category: General, Travelling

I’ve been fighting The Cold That Won’t Die this week, which has consisted mainly of sitting at home coughing and sneezing, interspersed by the occasional bout of dizziness, and all accompanied by a malaise. (Actually, I did go to work for part of the day yesterday, but the experiment was not a great success and it ended with a strong suggestion that I should go home.)

Anyway, to pass the time I’ve been thinking about something I’d like to do this summer. Coincidentally, the other day my friend Rob wrote about a couple of things he’d like to do this summer  and I was surprised to see that it’s really not that different from something I’ve been thinking about for the last year or so: namely, walking the length of Hadrian’s Wall.

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A closer look at geocaching and the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan

March 24, 2010 @ 15:41 By: gordon Category: Current affairs, Environment, Geocaching, In the news

GatineauParkEcosystemConservationMapwithGeocaches-reduced John Goatcher, a local geocacher, sent me a map that overlays geocaches in and around Gatineau Park on top of the map found on page 39 of the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan (GPECP). As he commented in my earlier post on geocaching and the GPECP, it’s surprising that more geocaches aren’t in the “integral conservation zone” (the dark olive area in the maps), given that it covers roughly half of the total area of Gatineau Park. As you’ll recall from my previous post, geocaches in the ICZ “will be relocated in areas that are less sensitive before the end of summer 2010”.

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Enforcement statistics for the first two years of Ottawa’s Idling Control by-law

March 24, 2010 @ 12:44 By: gordon Category: Environment, Statistics

My recent entry reminding people that the temperature during the days lately have been such that the Idling Control by-law (Bylaw #2007-266) got me wondering about how often people have been ticketed for violating it, so I asked the City of Ottawa for the statistics.

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Geocaching and the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan

March 23, 2010 @ 20:52 By: gordon Category: Current affairs, Environment, Geocaching, In the news

The National Capital Commission has released some additional information about the Gatineau Park Ecosystem Conservation Plan on their website. Specifically, they have released a Fact Sheet, the Priority Initiatives and a document about the species at risk. The full 120+ page report has yet to be made available in electronic form, but I think that you can view it at the NCC Library.

In the Priority Initiatives document are the various activities that will be affected by the GPECP. Besides basically saying ice climbing is pretty much banned from the Eardley Escarpment because it may interfere with deer in the winter (even though other parts of the plan suggest that there are too many deer in the park and the law being used as the justification is a provincial law and not a federal law), it also mentions geocaching.

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