Ice music

I forgot to mention today about hearing the ice sing while skating. Beautiful (and loud). Here's an analysis by an acoustical engineer, Gunnar Lundmark, relating tone frequency to ice thickness. I guessed - with my less than perfect ear - that today's tone was A4. According to wikipedia that's 440 Hz which would correspond to about 7.5 cm of ice. The ice was reported to be 9 cm which should have produced something closer to a G4. Amply within my margin of error.

From Gunnar Lundmark's site you can link to sounds of ice music. Try the sound of thin ice and the sound of too thin ice.

We've got ice!!

The clear, cold days started well before Christmas and the temperature has been sinking steadily: -10C today at midday. We (Alessandro, Ariana - a Czech friend - and I) went to a lake a 20 minute drive east of Uppsala where today's ice report indicated 9 cm thick ice. With the cold temps and no snow at all, the whole lake was skateable. The white stuff is ice crystals which didn't interfere with skating although it was easier skating in the clear, dark streaks that criss cross the lake. The streaks are where the ice cracked and refroze.

The skating equipment is designed for long distance trips such as going around the islands of the archipelago. A basic set consists of long blades attached to cross country ski shoes (although this can get more or less specialized). Poles are used much in the same manner as for skiing. The orange ice picks are essential safety epuipment and are worn aroung the neck for easy access should you fall through the ice and would like to climb out again. A soft pad for breaks is a nice luxury item I like to have, too.

Burnt goat

Looks like they torched Gävle's goat last night. This is what it became about 12 hours after I took its picture for yesterday's blog post . The story's in the Local.

Gävle Julbock

The large straw goat in the town of Gävle made the news on Christmas day. Not because something happened to it, but simply because it was still in place, untouched and unharmed. The 13 meter high Christmas symbol has been torched more often than not since it first made its appearance in Gävle in 1966. Various strategies to ensure that Gävle still would have its goat have been tried including employing guards, making a spare goat and, in recent years, drenching it in flame retardant. The flame retardant worked but took all the yellow luster out of the goat. This year's method is different: no guards, no flame retardant, no spare. It burns up - it's gone. This realization seems to be sufficient to get the bonfire-happy Swedes to leave their goat alone. So far, anyway.

While in Gävle today, I bought a little wooden goat to decorate the Christmas tree. If you're wondering why the tree doesn't have needles, it's because I converted my potted ficus plant into a Christmas tree this year.

The other pic is just a classic tourist shot of the houses in Gävle's old town.

Correction: Apparently there are guards at night, and a torching attempted had been successfully thwarted by a passerby who used one of the available extinguishers. I don't see it in my pic, but there's supposed to be a burned patch on one leg.

New blog

I've finally decided to separate my CIGS ramblings from my personal ones even though the two often overlap. The plan is to move over all CIGS related stuff from this blog to the new one, Sunny Side Up - a CIGS adventure. Apparently my last post on quantum eficiency had a tad too much detail for some friends and family. This way I can feel free to talk about band gaps, Fermi levels and activation energies along with the usual nuts and bolts of the CIGS world somewhere else. Not that I will - there's a risk of severe ignorance exposure. But at least the possibility's there. I hope to get some CIGS-savvy guest bloggers over at the new blog, too, starting with my co-workers at Uppsala University. We'll see if this goes anywhere. It'll be a couple of weeks before I actually move the CIGS stuff.

I still plan on expounding on my usual inanities here.