Category Archives: Around the World

How do you pronounce…

It’s not always easy to find out how to pronounce something in a foreign language. If you don’t know a native speaker you can ask and are not familiar with the phonetic alphabet, you can try the Acapela Text to Speach Interactive Demo. You can enter words or a sentence (or use their demo text), and the software will read it to you. There are 24 languages available, from Arabic to Turkish, and they’ve got the most common ones like English, French, Spanish and German, of course.

Found in this Ask MeFi thread.

Kranichzug

Jeden Herbst höre ich die Kraniche, die nach Spanien unterwegs sind, um dort zu überwintern, in der Luft trompeten. Das erinnert mich immer daran, dass der Sommer vorbei ist und der Winter kommt. Interessanterweise höre ich die Kraniche nie im Frühjahr; vielleicht fliegen sie dann eine andere Route?

Den Zug einiger Kraniche kann man auf Kranichzug.de verfolgen; dort kann man verfolgen, wo beringte bzw. mit Sendern versehene Kraniche gesichtet wurden.

Around the world

You know this website that lets you check all the states and countries you’ve visited and shows them on a map? Well, Douwe Osinga has improved the interface since I’ve last been there, and I’ve visited another country and a few more states, so here are my updated maps as of August 2008.


visited 16 states (7.11%)

Not very surprisingly, I’ve mostly been to European countries. But I’ve also visited two countries in Africa as well as the US and Canada in Northern America.

In the US, I’ve mostly been to the Western states. (New York and Kentucky may not really count because I only changed planes there and therefore just saw the airport.)


visited 13 states (26%)

Create your own visited map of The World or of The United States!

Vacation

As two of my few remaining loyal readers guessed (1, 2, 3), André and I went to the Northwestern part of the US and the Southwestern part of Canada, namely Oregon, Washington, Montana, Alberta and British Columbia. More specifically, we spent time in the Canadien Rocky Mountains (to which Glacier National Park in the US belongs, at least geologically) and on the coast, including Vancouver Island.

I’m going to post about our trip some more in the future, but today I want to show you someone else’s photo: Sea Anemone Eating Crab in Washington State. This was today’s photo of the day at National Geographic, and it reminded me of the anemones we saw on the coast in Olympic National Park. I was tempted to stick my finger in one of the anemones just to see how they would react, but now I’m glad I didn’t. ;-)

For comparison, here is an anemone which André photographed on Second Beach in Olympic National Park on July 24th, 2008. Click for the bigger version.