Storm of 1780

I am currently reading a book on the history of the Caribbean. To follow-up from the previous post where I briefly mentioned hurricanes, there is an account in the book of a hurricane that passed over the region in October 1780. During its passage, it killed well over 22,000 people and totally destroyed large British and French naval fleets as well as hundreds of merchant ships. Back then there were no instruments to measure the force of the hurricane, but maximum wind gusts are thought have exceeded 300 km per hour since raindrops stripped the trees of their bark!

Back in the Caymans

I am back in the Caymans, having accepted the job offer from the Information, Communications and Technology Authority (ICTA). I have been given a week to sought out all tasks related to a move abroad: accommodation, schools, banking etc. So far I have opened a bank account and found a place to live. The apartment is located in the George Town area close to schools and work. It has a sea view and direct access to the sea and a beach half a block away. The Google Earth coordinates are: lat=19.2784135251, lon=-81.3917586815

As I write this post there is a thunder storm passing overhead. The last couple of days I have been watching the developments of hurricane Felix. It passed way south of Cayman as expected. The people here didn’t make any fuss at all. With hurricane Dean a few weeks ago, however, it is my understanding that some areas were vacated and people prepared themselves for a hit.

The potential for a hurricane passing over the Caymans has influenced me in some of my tasks this week. For example, when renting a house, a two story is recommended. During hurricane Ivan (three years ago), the island was nearly covered in sea water. A quarter or more of the buildings on the islands were reported to be uninhabitable, with 85% damaged to some extent. A second story can keep you dry. Another example, is my choice of car. During Ivan almost all cars were covered in sea water, ruining car engines. Obviously, I don’t intend to buy an amphibious vehicle, but through private purchase there is a risk of buying an Ivan infected car. As a person with very little understanding of car mechanics, this has narrowed my car search efforts to car dealers.

The prospects of a hurricane passing over the island both scares and fascinates me. Currently, we in the midst of the Atlantic hurricane season. The figure below illustrates the Atlantic hurricane season with over 97% of tropical activity within the period of 1 June to 30 November.
There is evidence that the global warming might be making the storms stronger (not increasing their number). In addition, global warming may also be causing sea levels to rise. The Northwest Passage is now open (connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans) and melting polar ice and glaciers may cause a rise in global sea levels - something that should be a major concern for Caymanians. Cayman Islands is very low lying and I suspect a rise of only a few meters could have disastrous effects.

Flying and Delays

As I write this post I am in Heathrow Airport waiting for my final connection to Copenhagen. It is currently 1 hour and 10 minutes delayed. I need to catch a train with a connection to Ærø at 4.40 pm. Expected arrival in Copenhagen is presently 4.25 pm. The alternative is a three hour wait for the next scheduled ferry.

There have been several delays during my roundtrip to Cayman - more than I’m normally accustomed too. My flight out of Copenhagen (to London) was delayed an hour. Add to that an hour to find our luggage which had mysteriously disappeared. With the shuttle service closed for the day, a taxi was the only transportation option. However, with a massive queue outside Terminal 3 and one taxi arriving every 2-3 minutes, I faced the prospect of waiting more than an hour. I decided to try Terminal 2. Luckily, the queue there was much smaller and within 10 minutes I was on my way to the hotel. I arrived a quarter past midnight - delayed two and half hours and utterly wasted.

It is surprising that a large international airport like Heathrow is not better equipped to deal with transport issues late at night. The Heathrow express does operate at this hour, but is not very helpful if you are going to hotel in the vicinity of Heathrow. The key lesson to learn is either to avoid Heathrow after 10.30 pm or find a hotel at the end of the Heathrow Express line. And if you find yourself in a massive taxi queue try one of the other terminals.

The flight out of Heathrow the next morning to Cayman (via Nassau) was also delayed, although with no real consequence as Cayman was my final destination. Leaving Cayman yesterday morning, however, was different story. I was still trying to check-in when my flight was scheduled to depart. Technical difficulties at the check-in counter made turnaround impossibly slow. Nevertheless, we managed to make up most of the time before our arrival at Heathrow. With an ongoing connection to Copenhagen I was of course very pleased with this development. However, my excitement was short lived. Upon landing at Heathrow we were unable to taxi to our gate because of traffic on the ground. By the time I stepped out of the plane I only had 25 minutes to reach my Copenhagen flight. Sprinting to Terminal 4, I managed to make the gate 10 minutes prior to scheduled departure, only to find, as noted above, that the plane was delayed.

All in all, you can’t claim I have been lucky in my travels this time around (although I did travel on the 7th of the 7th month of 2007).

UPDATE: To add further dissatisfaction, my luggage did not arrive at Copenhagen airport. I will have to wait a few days before they find it (I hope) and send it to me. In addition, the plane did not land before 5 pm, so I am forced to take the last ferry arriving at midnight instead of 9 pm.

To Hell and Back

Today I went for a walk up the north-west side of Cayman Island. There are two attractions: Turtle Farm and Hell.

Turtle farm breeds turtles - predominately the green sea specifies. Christopher Columbus who discovered the Cayman Islands in 1503 also named them Las Tortugas. It was the presence of the marine crocodile, however, that gave the islands their name, after the Carib word caymanas.

About 60% of each year's turtle hatchlings are raised to 3 - 4 years of age before they are processed for food that is sold locally. A national delicacy apparently and not one I have managed to taste. The remaining 40% are released into the ocean when they are around one year old. Out of these, a few are kept as future breeders.

Hell is an altogether different attraction. Rock formations that supposedly resemble the charred remains of a hell fire. A rock named ironshore makes up the rock formation. Ironshore is common on the island and is essentially limestone although it bears resemblance to volcanic rock. The grayish-black colour is product of algae secreting acid that also erodes the ironshore to create the hellish shapes.

On my way back to the hotel I got a lift from an old lady who was one of the original Caymanians with surname Ebanks. She was able to trace her decedents back to the first official population count in the eighteenth century. The count at that stage was around 900. By the time got back from Hell, the recruitment consultant ad left a message on my hotel phone advising that I had been offered the job. We have until Tuesday to accept. More will follow…..

Some facts about Cayman:

• Discovered by Christopher Columbus on 10 May 1503 when his ships were blown off course by strong winds. Consists of three islands Grand Cayman, Little Cayman, and Cayman Brac
• The capital, George Town, is named after King George III of England.
• The islands are formed primarily of limestone.
• Grand Cayman is the largest island and approximately 35 km long and 13 km widePopulation of approx. 50,000 English is the official language.
• The national flower is the wild banana orchid, the national tree is the silver thatch palm, and the national bird is the Cayman parrot.
• Pirates used the islands as a hideout well into the eighteenth century.
• The country has the highest per capita income in the Caribbean.
• The economy is based largely on tourism and the islands' status as an offshore financial center.
• There is no business or personal income tax
• Major sources of government revenue include import duties, a tax of 7.5–10 percent on land or property transfers, a 10 percent tax on tourist accommodations, airport and cruise ship passenger departure fees, company registration fees, work permits, and business licenses.
• More than six hundred banks are registered, with assets in excess of $500 billion, making the islands the fifth largest financial center in the world.
• The governor is appointed by the British Crown.
• An eight-member Executive Council advises the governor. Five of the council members (called ministers) are elected from the fifteen Legislative Assembly representatives.

From Brisbane to Cayman

So it has been a while since I posted anything. It has been a few very busy months. As I write this post I am sitting in The Courtyard Marriot Hotel on the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean waiting for a response to a job interview. The previous post was submitted from our apartment in Brisbane.

Having left Brisbane on 10 June (Tobias birthday) we made our way to Thailand. Here we spent three weeks doing pretty much nothing. The majority of time we were at the Holiday Inn Resort on Koh Phi Phi Don (about 8 x 2.5 km and the shape of an H), a fantastic island paradise off the southern coast of Thailand.

The resort had all the essentials for the making of a relaxing vacation. Staying within the bounds of the resort you could be forgiven for thinking that this was an island of perfection. However, just outside the resort was the island’s sea gypsy population and other less exclusive resorts giving a more realistic picture of the status of the island. In addition, every morning from around 6 an army of workers would clean the beach allocated to the Holiday Inn resort visitors. Upstream from the resort various rubbish would drift downstream during the night littering the otherwise beautiful beach. Litter in the water seems to be a general problem in the island region. According to Majken who visited the area 11 years ago, it was also problem back then. No matter where you are in the island region you find rubbish. The tsunami may have played a role, but it is unfortunate that locals (and tourists) are not more concerned with this development and have been educated in environmental protection.

During our stay we also managed to visit Phi Phi Don’s sister island Phi Phi Lei. Lei is uninhabited except for the Viking Cave which is guarded to protect the nests of the cave swift.

They are renowned for building nests with a unique chemical mix needed to produce the Chinese delicacy - Bird's Nest Soup. It is also on this island you find the world famous beaches Loh Samah and Maya Bay. The Beach was filmed here.

While the beaches in Thailand are fantastic the main Beach here on Cayman, seven mile beach, is just as impressive and impeccably clean. Despite its name it is only about 5.5 miles long. The stretch of land making up seven mile beach is the most developed and expensive area of Cayman and houses most of the island's luxury resorts and hotels.

I think the job interview went well. Cayman Island could prove to be a good place to live.

Artist corner

Tobias has been drawing and painting a lot recently, here are a few examples.

Turister i Sydney

I dag var vi paa en dagstur til Sydney. Hovedattraktionen var selvfoelgelig operahuset. Enormt smukt og meget interessant. Utzon's design var klart forud for sin tid. Udefra aendrede operaen form og udtryk ikke kun efter hvorfra den blev betragtet, men osse efter tidspunkt paa dagen. En ting jeg blev overrasket over var vi danskere var mere involveret end blot Utzon i det ellers staerkt politiseret arbejde med at bygge operaen. En dansker Ove Aarup (udtales "arab" paa engelsk - en kilde til forvirring) var Chef Ingenioer paa byggeriet.
Harbour bridge var osse imponerende. I det hele taget er livet omkring havnen i Sydney ret fantastisk.
En dag var ikke nok, men nu har vi leget turister i Sydney. Det ville have vaeret underligt ikke at have set operaen efter at have boet i Australien i tree aar.

Taking fake to a new level

The Chinese have taken fake to a new level with the Shijingshan Amusement Park in Beijing. The President of the park insists that nothing is copied from Disney and that all the characters are original creations .... Here a Minnie Mouse look-a-like is not a mouse, but a a cat with very large ears! See pictures and videos here.

Fraser - tredje gang

Mens Bette og Svend er har vi vaeret paa Fraser Island for tredje gang. Vi kom hjem i gaar. Nogenlunde samme tur som sidst (se tidligere post). Til forskel fra sidstegang var vi heldige med vejret ved Central Station og Lake McKenzie. Det var dog en kold nat ved Central Station. Som Bette bemaerkede var det som at sove i en kold og fugtig kaelder. Vi ankom til Lake McKenzie kl. 8 om morgenen som de foerste. Et fantastisk syn med sol fra en skyfri himmel og spejlblankt vand.

Brisbane Marathon

Today I ran my first marathon, the annual Brisbane Marathon. Start was an early 6.00 am. Majken and I headed down to the start at the Southbank Cultural Forecourt at 5.15 am, joining the crowd of people heading home after a long night on the town. Grandmother was designated babysitter.

By 5.45 am dawn was rapidly approaching and a couple of minutes before the start it was just light enough to take a few pictures without a flash. Deputy premier Anna Bligh provided a few words thanking the major sponsor Mizuno and we were off.

The course is a mostly flat, out and back loop course along the Brisbane River that encompasses the Goodwill Bridge, Riverside Drive, the City Botanic Gardens and the Coronation Drive Bikepath. Marathon runners had to do the same course twice.

The majority of runners at the start were doing the Half Marathon. I settled into a nice pace with a few of the half marathon runners. At the 4 km mark, the 1 hour 30 minute pacer for the half marathon passed me. This was good news because I hadn't intended to do the first round of the course that quickly. At the 10 km mark I noted a 44 minute split which I thought was okay. Majken had passed me a bottle of sports drink at around the 8 km mark which I had sipped for 2 km.

I reached the half marathon mark in 1 hour 35 minutes. At that time I thought “this is too easy”. My legs were good and my pulse was low, but it would not last! By about the 24 km mark my legs all of a sudden froze. The feeling in my legs was crippling and led-like. I was running on a slight incline when it happened. At that stage I thought “f*&%! - I have 18 km home, this is far too early to hit the wall”. Anyway, I pushed on at a much slower pace. At the 28 km mark Majken was standing with a bottle of sports drink. When she passed me the bottle I was hoping that it would save me. But of course it didn’t - although I did manage to increase the pace slightly for around 4km. By the time I hit the finishing straight I felt utterly crippled. I crossed the finish line in 3 hours and 33 minutes. Just outside my goal of 3 hours and 30 minutes. Taking into consideration my battle for nearly 20 km, I was happy with the time.

It was a great learning experience. The marathon distance is one I will do again. Next time I will have to train more purposely towards it though. My longest training run was a meager 20 km and I only ran that distance once. I will need to do more long runs (probably around the 30 km mark) so I can postpone the onset of problems with my legs to later parts of the race.

Next time will be the Hans Christian Andersen Marathon in Odense in September.

March Update

It has been a while since I last wrote a post. Blogging doesn’t really take-up much time, the problem seems to be that it requires effort to make it part of a weekly rhythm.

It has been a fairly eventful March.

Three weeks ago I resigned from my job. It was with somewhat of a heavy heart that I submitted my written notice of resignation, but also a relief to make it public. There were several reasons for it, but ultimately, what triggered the decision was Majken’s wish to return to Denmark to explore her business options. It had nothing to do with our lifestyle in Brisbane which we have come to enjoy very much. At this stage I do not have a job lined-up in Denmark and do not actively plan on pursuing possibilities - I will do so when we are back. We arrive in Denmark end of June.

Majken did her first Triathlon at Bribie. Incredibly she managed to finish first in her age group. She has been training hard for the event, so it was only fitting that she did well. We are now the proud owners of little blue cup which symbolizes her victory.

Last weekend we spent at Mooloolaba on the Sunshine cost. Mooloolaba was the host of a three day action packed sports festival. Friday evening there was a 5km twilight run, Saturday an ocean swim and a bicycle Criterion and on Sunday it all culminated with an Olympic Distance Triathlon (1.5 km swim, 40 km bike ride, 10 km run) which was also an ITU event. I participated in the triathlon. My time was 2 hours 18 minutes which I am pretty happy with. The good thing about participating in an official distance event is that I now have a benchmark for the future.

Thursday this week the children’s grandmother and her partner arrived in Brisbane. They plan on staying a few months. Both Tobias and Christoffer were quick to accept their presence.

During the next couple of months we plan to do a little sightseeing and obviously need to take care of all the logistics related to an international relocation.

MapMyRun

Recently, I became aware of web-based training route application called MapMyRun.com. It allows you to create and share training routes and browse routes that have been submitted by other users. The site also has functional tools like a distance calculator and a workout calculator that determines your pace, speed and calories burned based on your sex, age, weight, height and time required to complete the route.
I tried to measure a route I regularly time myself on. According to my bicycle computer it is 9.65 km. Drawing it up on MapMyRun.com gave me a total distance of 9.60 km.

All in all, a useful (and seemingly accurate) tool, so give it go by clicking here.

Rationality and impatience

In recent post I discussed Tobias and time preference -the general conclusion was he was very impatient, although there was also an element og inconsistency in his choices. Eric Bettinger and Robert Slonim have an article in the Journal of Public Economics (Feb 2007) touching on children's rationality and patience. According tot he authors children are impatient and probably not rational and there is a lack of a relationship between mathematical ability and pateience. An extract from the abstract below:

....little is known about the nature of children’s patience, how it varies across children, and whether children can even make rational inter-temporal choices. This paper examines the inter-temporal choices of 5- to 16-year-old children in an artefactual field experiment. We examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future. We find that children’s choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting, boys are less patient than girls, older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores, private schooling and parent’s patience are not correlated with children’s patience...

The paper is available here (forthcoming version)

Dreaming

Those of you that have seen Minority Report, will remember Tom Cruise draging objects across a screen and manipulating them in all kinds of ways, or pushing them aside to bring up something new. I dreamt about doing exactly that yesterday. It was really cool. No doubt the dream was brought on by a video of Jeff Han, a research scientist at NYU's Courant Institute I saw recently. Click here.

The guys at NYU have come up an interface, which responds not only to touch and gestures, but to varying degrees of pressure. In the video he flips photos across the screen, zooms in, throws them away, and calls up new ones, among a variety of other cool uses. Truly amazing! Read about Han here.

NASA images

I was having a look at the NASA website today and came across a few interesting images.

The first one shows the unusually warm temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere this winter. It shows the December 2006 land surface temperature compared to the average December temperatures from 2000-2005. (Land surface temperatures are how hot or cool the land surface would feel to the touch. It is different from the air temperature, which is what weather stations usually measure.)

Where daytime land surface temperatures are above the five-year average the area is coloured red, places where it is below the average in blue, and places near the average are white. Dramatic swaths of red paint most of the Northern Hemisphere.

This second image shows rivers of smoke from Victorian bush fires from January 11, 2007. These fires are burning from areas in Victoria’s Great Dividing Range Mountains. Places where the satellite detected actively burning fires are outlined in red. Many fires were burning dangerously close to Lake Thomson, the principal source of water for Melbourne (beyond the western edge of the image).

More recently (16 January) the major interconnector between New South Wales and Victoria went down because of bush fires and left many in Melbourne without electricity.

Hverdag igen - nu med en pingvin

[Below is an account of the movie Happy Feet and a new addition to our family - Pingu the toy penguin]

Med farmor og farfar atter i Danmark, Tobias i børnehaven og de første to uger af den australske sommerferieperiode overstået, så er det så småt ved at være hverdag igen.

I mandags var vi i biffen. Vi så "Happy Feet", en tegnefilm om pingviner. Den handler om pingvinen Mumble som er anderledes end andre pingviner, formodentlig fordi hans far ikke har passet godt nok på hans æg (et lidt sørgelig budskab for ligestilling). Mumble kan ikke synge som alle de andre pingviner. Istedet kan han danse (eller steppe) og så er han ellers lidt af en individualist.

Han plages af et trauma tidligt i livet, hvor han jagtes af nogle rovfugle. En af dem er fuglemærket og påstår han har været borført af aliens (som vi ved er mennesker).

Tiden går, Mumble bliver ældre og pingvinerne plages af et fald i fiskebestanden. Fordi Mumble stepper som en vanvittig, ikke synger og er venner med nogle pingviner af en anden race, som taler med spansk accent, får han som det sorte får skylden for den svindende fiskebestand. Mumble tror imidlertid, at det er de fornævnte aliens, der har skylden og drager afsted med sine udenlandske venner for at bevise sin teori. De finder et forladt fiskecenter ved kysten. Men Mumble er ikke tilfreds. Fiskeriet skal stoppes og han svømmer derfor efter fiskbådene. De er ikke sådan at bide skeer med og han ender i en zoo på trods af hans anstrengelser

Mens han prøver, at kommunikere med menneskene (pingvinsprog virker ikke) stepper han, hvilket videnskabsmændene tager som tegn på at der er endnu uudforsket sociale aspekter ved pingviner. De sender Mumble tilbage til Antarctica (med en radiosender på ryggen så de kan finde ham). Her får han sin stamme til at steppe i koordineret facon (ala river dance) foran videnskabsmændene. Videooptagelser af de dansende pingviner vises verden rundt og herefter debatteres hvordan Antarctica kan beskyttes så pingvinerne kan bevares. Pingvinerne beholder deres fisk og vi kan alle leve lykkeligt til vore dages ende.

Tobias havde Pingu med i biffen. Pingu er en pingvinbamse som Christoffer har fået af farmor og farfar, men som Tobias har taget til sig som sin egen. Hvis der var een som skulle med og se en film om pingviner, så var det Pingu.

Tobias er nærmest besat af Pingu. Et par eksempler kan nok hjælpe lidt på forståelsen. Pingu sover i en sovepose ligesom Tobias. Majken måtte have symaskinen frem og sy en til dyret. Da vi var nede og handle ind og Pingu ikke var med bemærkede Tobias, at vi skulle skynde os hjem til Pingu fordi den savnede ham og ikke kunne lide at være alene. Ja, Pingu har meget menneskelige følser på trods af, at Tobias gentagne gange har gjort os opmærksom på at han kun er en bamse (f.eks. da han lukkede ham inde i en plasticpose og jeg bemærkede at han nok ikke kunne få luft).

Pingu får hellere ikke lov til at komme med i børnehaven. Ifølge Tobias ville han blive fyldt med sand og det ville han ikke kunne li'. Det er nu osse meget godt, at Pingu bliver hjemme når Tobias er afsted, så kan Pingu’s rette ejermand - Christoffer - nemlig få lov til at have ham lidt i fred.

Happy Feet er en sød film. Den er flot lavet og Tobias var ret begejstret for den. Det er dog langt fra en storfilm og der er for meget sang og musik til min smag.

Tobias and time preference

We tend to regard waiting as a cost and prefer a benefit now rather than in the future. This is captured in the notion of time preference and concerns the rate at which we as individuals trade-off present and future outcomes (or consumption).

Children sometimes see things slightly differently, so I tried a small experiment with Tobias a couple of days ago. I asked him the following: Would you like 1 ice cream now or 2 tomorrow? His answer was 1 today. I then asked whether he would prefer 1 ice cream now or 3 tomorrow. His immediate reaction was, wow ... 3 ice creams - that's a lot. After some thought he decided upon 3 tomorrow, although it was a difficult choice. He was very tempted to go with 1 ice cream today.

Tobias clearly has a very high positive rate of time preference. He values the present very highly and does not appear to think much of the future. There are a number of reasons why this might be the case:

• He is very impatient;
• He views the future as very uncertain - if consumption of a good is deferred it may never be enjoyed at all, i.e. we as parents change our opinion tomorrow or forget the deal; and
• He has diminishing marginal utility - additional consumption at a later date may add less to utility than consumption now.

Alternatively, he might have been starving and in need of an energy boost. Of course I carefully designed the experiment to avoid this situation by offering him an ice cream as a dessert after a main meal :-).

For Tobias I think impatience is driving his desire for ice cream. Uncertainty over the future also plays a key role because the future is a difficult concept to grasp at his age. Nevertheless, I hope he understands and appreciates that we as parents keep our promises (or at least try to).

But things are not always as they seem. Today I asked him the same questions again. This time he was unwilling to defer his ice cream consumption to the next day. I even offered him 4 ice creams and to that he responded, shaking his head in disbelief: Dad, 4 is too much!

Rock Climbing @ Kangaroo Point

I have often run past the rock climbing wall at Kangaroo Point thinking it would be fun to try. On Wednesday we arranged a climb with Majken’s friend Rikke.

I thought scaling the vertical rock wall would be easy, but boy was I mistaken. I only just managed to fight my way to the top. Rock climbing is a very technical discipline that requires plenty of strength and agility.

Which Superhero are You?

Want to be Superhero tested? Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz. I was 80% Green Lantern, hot-headed with a strong will power and a good imagination.

New Year

New Year celebrations were fairly low key (as they have been for a number of years now). Compared to the localised firework bonanza in Denmark with everyone pitching in with a few rockets and screamers, Australians take a more civilised and centralised approach with a ban on fireworks.

At a quarter to nine o’clock we headed down to the Brisbane River to see the fireworks display for children. This was a warm-up session before the midnight display for adults.

The following morning we practiced our rocket launching skills in the park (see pics below).