We also bought a little wireless monitor, the SMA Sunny Beam, to keep track of the production of the solar panels. “Wireless” as in a wireless connection to the inverter, the SMA Sunny Boy 2100, but the device can also be connected to a pc, to download the data stored on it. Having done that, you can visualise the production of your solar panels, just like this:

The production on a cloudy day in October,

or on a sunny day in March,

or the total amount of energy produced over a four-month period.

(Sorry for the cheesy Excel graphs — I haven’t got anything better at the moment.)

The interesting thing is that we first use the energy produced ourselves. When the panels produce more than we use, the electricity is delivered back to the net. So on a sunny day, when you see on the electricity meter that the energy is being sent to the net, you know that everything in the house runs “for free”, and you’re even getting paid for whatever is left over!

It’s about coordinates of these monuments, ancients weights and measures, mathematical constants, and even “monuments on Mars”, such as the famous “Face on Mars”. There are all kinds of relations between all these numbers, or at least – we are led to believe that. It sounds all a bit too far-fetched, if you ask me…

How about this…

Start with the numbers 360 (degrees in a circle) and 60 (minutes or seconds). Multiply these and you get 21600. That happens to be the number of Nautical Miles on the polar circumference of the Earth.

Stonehenge is located at latitude 51 degrees, 10 minutes, 42.3529 seconds North. Now multiply these numbers: 51 x 10 x 42.3529 = 21600.

The longitude of Stonehenge, (relative to the longitude of The Great Pyramid at Gizeh, instead of Greenwich, of course!) is 32 degrees, 57 minutes 28.8173748 seconds. Multiplying these numbers we get 52562.89164, which turns out to be the following product: RAD (in degrees) x Pi x 2 Pi x square root of 2160.

Now, let’s take the radius in Feet, of the Sarsen Circle at Stonehenge: 48.66934411.
Divide RAD (in degrees) by this radius: 57.29577951 / 48.66934411 = 1.177245771. This is exactly the tangent of the precise azimuth-of-orientation of the ‘Avenue’ at Stonehenge: 49.65408598 degrees. This number, in turn, is equal to (e / Pi) x RAD (in degrees): (2.72258992 / 3.141592654) x 57.29577951 = 49.65408598.

Well, it just keeps on going… There are thirteen pages, this was just the beginning of the first one… Just browse through it and see for yourself.

It’s an interesting puzzle, which requires some logic reasoning, but it can be solved. I challenge you to solve it. Please let me know if you succeed, and how long it took. Don’t forget to check all answers after finishing, because changing one question can have consequences for some of the other questions.

Good luck!

Self-referential aptitude test (link updated)

With digital television, of course, the image quality should be better than with normal, old-fashioned, analog tv. It also includes digital radio, providing superior sound quality. And all that for less than what I pay to my (analog) cable company!

So I said yes. Why not try it for free?

I got the box and installed everything yesterday.
You get an antenna, and a box, and a smart card. You connect the antenna to the box and insert the smart card. It’s all really easy.

But you cannot connect the cable antenna from your tv and radio to the box, because the box is a digital tuner! So the box replaces the tuner from your television and from your radio!

Instead, you have to connect the box with a scart-cable to your television. And with a standard audio-cable to an auxiliary input of your amplifier.
So, just rip out the tuner from your tv, throw away the tuner from your stereo set, and throw away both remote controls, because you don’t need them anymore! And with that, you probably also threw away some of the special features of both tv and radio.

So why did I buy a tv that can store 100 channels, if I now only use the scart input? Why do I have split-screen teletext and 100 pages of memory, if I cannot use it? Why do I have a combined amplifier/tuner with RDS if my radio channels come in through AUX?

I would rather have seen that the box from KPN would have simply replaced the wall socket for my tv and radio antenna cables, than this – a replacement tuner.

Besides these practical drawbacks, there’s more. The picture quality isn’t better than normal analog tv. Of course, there sometimes is a bit of noise on one or two of the analog channels, but when there isn’t, I cannot see the difference between analog and digital. Oh wait, sometimes I can. On digital tv, you occasionally see the typical MPEG block artefacts, which you don’t get on analog tv.

Switching channels is really slow. But hey, you get less channels anyway… You “only” get 24 tv channels (BBC 1 and 2 are not included and won’t be any time soon) and 17 radio channels. With my analog cable provider, UPC, I get 33 and 38 channels respectively.

And finally, because I now have only one tuner, I can watch tv, or listen to the radio… but not both. I can record a video, or listen to the radio… but not both. I can record a video, or watch tv… but not both.

You can buy a Twin tuner, with which, as you probably already guessed, you can do that. But of course, the Twin tuner is somewhat more expensive.
And if you want to watch tv in another room…? Yes, you have to buy another tuner – unless everybody in the house wants to watch the same programme, of course.

Oh, and by the way, if you get a phonecall from someone at KPN, saying you can try digital television for free, and you do want to try it for yourself, (even after reading this), don’t be surprised if you have to pay the postman 40 Euros, because that’s what the “free” tuner will cost.

Update (Feb. 4): Returning the box isn’t as easy as you might think. You cannot just pack everything in a box and bring it to the post-office. No, you have to call KPN first, because you need a return number. And of course, calling from my work, I didn’t have the smartcard-number available when I called, and they absolutely need that for creating the return number. So, the next day I called again, after looking up the smartcard-number at home, and they provided me with a return number.

They also asked when I got the whole package, because I could try it for free for eight days. So I said, I activated the smart-card on Friday, January 28th. You have to activate the card by phone, so you’d think they would know that at KPN. But apparently not.
Instead, the lady on the phone told me that on Friday 28th, my contract had started, so my 8-day free trial period was already over before I had even activated the smartcard!

She could tell me that I was called about the free trial on January 18. Apparently, they sent me the package the next day and on the same day started the trial period. Even though I didn’t hear about the package until the 25th. That day the postman tried to deliver the package, but of course I was at work. He left a message saying that I could pick up a package from KPN at the post office for Eur. 39,95. The next day I called KPN to ask why I should pay Eur. 39,95 for a free trial and they told me I’d have to pay for the tuner. So the next day I could pick up the package, and as I didn’t have the time to install it, I did that the day after (Friday 28th). But by then, my free trial was already over.

Well, I never signed any contract of course, so they’d better not charge me anything and just return me the Eur. 39,95, or else I think I’m going to get really angry.

No, if you hadn’t figured it out yet, I am not very enthousiastic about digital television by KPN!

If you have the opportunity, you should really go and see it, at the Wilhelminapier in Rotterdam. But you have to be quick, it is leaving for its home port Southampton this afternoon.

Check out the home page of the QM2 and the information about the current voyage “Northern Europe & Fjords”.

Some more facts about the ship: it is the largest cruise ship in the world, with a length of 345 meters and a height of 71 meters. It weighs over 150 000 tons, has a 117 MW electric plant, and is propelled by four 21.5 MW pods to speeds up to 30 knots, or 56 km/h.

It can take 2620 passengers and has a crew of 1253 people. The largest single accomodations are over 200 square meters.
It has 14 decks, 5 pools and 10 restaurants, and an art collection worth more than 5 million dollars.

Unfortunately, during construction, on November 15, 2003, 16 people were killed and 22 injured when a gangway collapsed and about 30 people fell more than 15 meters.

Astronomers have found a diamond in the sky. It’s actually a star (a white dwarf) that died a couple billion years ago, in the constellation Centaurus, 50 light years from the Earth. The core of the star collapsed and the carbon crystallised due to the huge pressure.
The diamond is half the size of our moon, and weighs 10 billion trillion trillion carats!

A press release by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics can be found here.

(BTW, I found an English article here.)

The story in short: weblogger Edward Breedveld got an email from the webmaster of the Makro site telling him to remove hyperlinks to this folder from his website, because he didn’t have permission to deeplink to the Makro site!
This resulted in a very funny email discussion.

Read more of the story at WebWereld, or in German at intern.de, or simply search google for more info.

And if you have your own website or blog, add a link to the Makro folder, just for the fun of it!

I couldn’t resist trying the translate options of google. Besides the English original, it is now possible to read my weblog in German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portugese!