randform

The protest against the Tesla Gigafactory is not yet over, even if the factory building has been basically fully errected. I wrote an update about the current state of affairs and if there are further updates they will be included in the post about the protest.

Tim has made a new trailer for the Enigame 2021_2 puzzle hunt this fall – the spaced out edition.

To those who are not aware of the fact: The main authors of this randform blog (Tim and Nad) are math Ph.D.’s. Since now quite a while we are very concerned about the fact that (pure) math research is increasingly put under high retrenchment pressure. So for example under the name of “shaping for excellence”, the University of Leicester will decrease its fundamental research capacity. For “pure” math this means: the University VC (=vice chancellor) proposes to cease research in pure mathematics and wants again to fire all researchers. It is claimed that this is necessary because: “…to ensure a future research identity in AI, computational modelling, digitalisation and data science requires ceasing research in Pure Mathematics in order to invest and extend activities in these areas.”
For those who know about the mathematics behind AI, computational modelling and digitalization this sounds not only absurd but rather like to cut one’s nose to spite one’s face. But it seems things are even worse that is this “triage” seems to be a pretense as they give no concrete plan “to invest or extend activities” but just to cut in fundamental mathematics research.
As a matter of fact this plan affects a high amount of female researchers. In fact by comparing with the list of academic staff (I count 39 academic staff members) and/or the list of group members in “applied math” and/or the list of women in mathematics on the equal opportunites web page it seems all women but 3 of Leicester’s math department are going to be fired.

Moreover University of Leicester management apparently refused to share data on finances with unions.

-> Please donate and Help Leicester Pure Maths fund Legal Support
or at least sign the petition.

New Music and CGI from Tim for the new trailer of Enigame 2021_1 – the escapism edition!
According to Tim the trailer is not supposed to be a new interpretation of the story of the Black Spider. The black spider is in this story a metaphor for the plague….

Tim had just finished the new trailer for Enigame 2020_2, which will -like the last puzzle hunt- be online only.
Trailer 1 and Trailer 2 are on youtube.

In case someone tries to contact me via facebook, like in particular from the fashion hackdays group: my facebook account https://www.facebook.com/nadja.kutz.1 was deactivated, because it was probably hacked via a phishing attack. Reactivation seems only possible by uploading personal documents, which I won’t.

Tim and me hereby protest against the current plans to build a car gigafactory in Berlin’s vicinity as it poses a too big threat to Berlin’s water supply. There had been massive droughts in the last two years in Brandenburg and the factory is sought to use up as much water as over 75 000 people (for estimation: approx. the amount of people who arrived during the refugee crises in Berlin). Apart from this it is thought to be partially built into a high degree water protection area. We are joined in this protest among others by Nora and Theresa Lantez (website) who live much closer to the envisaged plant and for whom the impact on their living environment would be very direct and rather destructive. Here you can see Theresa dancing:
Theresa Lantez in Bernau.

update Sept.6, 2021: According to the public plans given by Tesla all of the buildings will be built into water protection zones. Moreover the plant site is surrounded by a special european protection zone the Natura 2000 zones. According to my counting the chemicals in the factory exceed by far the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. In the town hall meeting a representative of the Tesla factory answered that the allowed limits are not exceeded, if one counts each processing unit as a kind of “separate factory” (in german: Aufteilung in Anlagen), because in this way the volumes and weights of hazardous substances of each “Anlage” stay below the limits.
There are descriptions of what can be seen as a separate “Anlage” in the allowed limits for a waterprotection zone. I am not a law person but it appears to me pretty clear that the argumentation of Tesla is simply wrong.

Since the town hall meeting in 2020 things got worse, because Tesla now wants to set up a battery factory as well, where alone the cathode material exceeds limits by about a factor of 20 and the public town hall meetings for the new plans were cancelled.

Welcome to Enigame Quarantine Edition!

In the randform blog post Information about solar irradiance measurements sought, I had posted a visualisation of irradiance data from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). In the post it was discussed that there could be a rise in irradiance based on the data from their SORCE mission. I think the rise is also somewhat visible in this interactive plot at the Interactive Solar Irradiance Data Center (LISIRD)…that is it is visible until about July 2015. In this post I also posted a picture of the line 774nm, i.e. “red light” which is slightly out of the visible spectrum. The reason was that it seemed that specific line ranges displayed a stronger rise than others (see circles in the other image in this post). Back then I even made some screenshots from the LISIRD visualization, here you can see the close-by line 798.83nm:

Here it is again in my visualization:

Both visualizations look pretty much the same apart from some visualization effects. But this is how the line in the above time range (here until Dec 18 in 2016) looks as of today in the new LISIRD app:

So things look very differently since about early summer 2015. Is this a correction?
Read the rest of this entry »

Randform sends season’s greetings and a happy new year.