Category Archives: Personal

Darum ist es am Rhein so schön…

SWR Mediathek: Der Südwesten von oben – Das Rheinland. (Dauer ca. 45 Minuten, verfügbar bis 05.01.2017.)

Der Film zeigt einige Orte, an denen wir schon gelebt haben…

  • Andernach in der Vulkaneifel mit dem Kaltwassergeysir (der damals nicht mehr/noch nicht erschlossen war)
  • Hunsrück

… und viele Orte, an denen wir schon gewandert sind …

  • Brohltal
  • Steillagen des Weinbaus an der Mosel
  • Burg Eltz
  • Hunsrück
  • Rheinauen
  • Oberes Mittelrheintal mit den Burgen Ehrenfels, Rheinstein, Pfalzgrafenstein, Rheinfels, Maus, Sterrenberg, Liebenstein, Katz
  • Bacharach, Burg Stahleck
  • Loreley
  • Siebengebirge

…oder die wir besucht haben.

  • Trier an der Mosel
  • Cochem mit der Reichsburg
  • Mainz
  • Bingen mit dem Mäuseturm und die Nahe
  • Boppard mit seiner großen Rheinschleife
  • Koblenz, Festung Ehrenbreitstein, Deutsches Eck (Moselmündung in den Rhein)
  • Neuwied
  • Brücke von Remagen

… like riding a bike

It’s common knowledge that there are some things that you cannot unlearn once you’ve learnt them, like riding a bike. Right?

Destin Sandlin, creator of the educational video series Smarter Every Day, learnt how to ride a bike that goes left when steered right and vice versa. It took him eight months until it “clicked” – but then he found that he couldn’t ride normal bikes any more!

I’d love to try riding his Backwards Brain Bicycle. When I first tried to ride a recumbent bike I had a similar experience because on a normal bike, you steer mostly by shifting your body weight and only turn the handlebars a little bit to help. On a recumbent, you can’t really shift your weight much, so you have to steer by making lots of tiny movements with the handlebars. (This is especially hard if your recumbent has under-seat steering, though I’ve heard that pivot steering is even harder). It took me a few tries until I managed stopped my brain from trying to shift my weight, but once it clicked, riding the recumbent was not too difficult. Since the directions are not reversed, I can still ride an upright bike like before.

Bears

The Guardian: Bears get a handle on opening car doors – but could it be their downfall?

“‘Food-conditioning’ and other adaptive behaviors have become common among bear populations – and could lead them into dangerous contact with humans.”

When André and I went to Yosemite in 1999, we were warned not to leave food (or toothpaste etc.) in the car because bears were able to open car doors and saw in a video that the bears would grab the top of the door and fold the window part down and out to get inside. We’ve since learned that this trick was more or less exclusive to bears in that area, and in other National Parks were were advised to lock food in the car overnight because bears couldn’t get it there – they couldn’t open car doors.

Before I read the article I thought that other bears now had caught up and were folding down car doors, but this bear uses the door handle of an unlocked car! The article also states that bear damages to cars has declined in Yosemite during the last 15 years – not because bears have stopped going into cars, but because they have learnt to use the door handle instead.

Link via Garret.

Another Favorite Bird

Either spring is near, and the stork I saw today was among the first to migrate back, or it was one of the rare ones that doesn’t migrate and spends the winter here.

In any case, I saw it on my daily walk, and it flew towards our village and seemed to circle above it for a bit before I lost sight of it.

It didn’t look quite as impressive as this photo, but it was almost overhead.

Carlos Delgado White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) in Madrid, Spain.

In flight. White storks fly with their necks outstretched. (By Carlos Delgado, scaled down, CC BY-SA 3.0)