Murderous wildlife

This is not my usual kind of post, but I just had to record this.

I was disturbed late last night (OK, I hadn't actually gone to sleep) by an unbelievably blood-curdling screech from outside. I was a little surprised as we live high-up on the 14th floor, and now that the nights are getting cold we have the windows closed, so for a noise from outside to be that audible it has to be pretty loud. It happened again, and continued, so I got up and looked out of the window. For the next ten minutes or so there was a hideous throaty-skwaky-screechy sound so loud that it echoed around the buildings. I presumed that it was a fox (although there have not been so many around here this year) mauling a goose or some other fowl, although the noise was so loud that it may have been another fox, as I can't really imagine any kind of bird making that sound. Certainly a fox was involved, as I saw it running across the road shortly after the death-throe sounds finally subsided. Whatever it was, the victim certainly died in excruciating agony. Nature - red in tooth and claw, in the middle of Deptford!

Obviously not satisfied with its slaughter for the night, the fox then went on to terrorise the local human population. It stalked around making aggressive screech-barking sounds for the next 20 minutes. I observed one man getting out of his car, who upon hearing the noise ran very quickly to the entrance to the block of flats and waited nervously to be let in - looking over his shoulder all the time. Not long after, a group of three lads (obviously coming back from a club) were walking down the the road when they heard the screech-barking. I heard one of them shouting "fuck! what was that?!". They looked around at each other for a second, and then they legged it down the road for a hundred yards or so before looking back. It was quite funny to watch. I imagine that these guys had no idea what it was that they were running away from, but they were certainly scared.

I am sure that those lads will get over the experience, but it is fascinating to realise that predatory animal behaviour can still have this kind of effect on humans, even in the middle of London.

(picture from the Tooth & Claw website)

Mapping bliss

I have said before how much I like maps, and for many years I have been recording our travels in electronic maps of one form or another. I have always been fascinated by maps, and I like plotting-out where we have been, or plotting (in the other sense)where we would like to go. And it suits me to organise information spatially - that's how my brain works.

Ten years ago, this meant nothing more sophisticated than manually drawing routes on a map image using PaintShop, and later using simple (crude even) GIS (geographic information systems) applications. But more recently the advent of the amazing Google Earth has meant that I can create accurate vector maps over a high quality map/image base, and include all sorts of extra information. I have found this irresistible - compulsive even, to the extent that for our last canal boat holiday I used Google Earth to produce a map showing all 110 locks we were due to pass through - to within a couple of metres accuracy. The last few times we have been away with friends they have been "treated" to detailed Google Earth files detailing the location of recommended bars and even the best route to walk from the station to the hotel. It is over-the-top I know, but I love doing it. However, I have always struggled to effectively present map information on our web pages, and until very recently I have usually had to resort to simply posting static images and screenshots.

Two fairly recent developments have changed all this. First, the excellent Google Maps service provided a method of incorporating your own information into their map viewer. This means that I can now display maps and interactive information I have created in Google Maps on a web page in any browser. And now they have introduced a simple way of embedding these interactive maps into any web page (including Blogger). You can see the results in the two examples above and below. These are both segments of our recent trip to north Norway - the first shows our route from Tromsø to the Lofoten islands, and the second is a detailed view of the centre of Tromsø. You can pan and zoom the maps, switch between map and aerial views, and if you click on the icons you will see further information and pictures etc.



It's great - I love it. Expect more!

A load of old rubbish

This weekend was London's annual "Open House" event, where hundreds of public, private and commercial buildings around the city are open to the public. We usually try to use this opportunity to see buildings we wouldn't normally have access to, and this year we decided to vist somewhere close to home - a major industrial building which dominates the view from one side of our flat in Deptford.

SELCHP (South East London Combined Heat and Power) is a refuse incineration plant which generates electricity from the domestic refuse of four London boroughs (Lewisham, Greenwich, Westminster and Bromley). The plant opened in 1994, and was a major (and not uncontroversial) addition to the local skyline. Open House gave us an opportunity to look around inside and find out exactly what happems to our rubbish.

We were pretty impressed by how they handled the visitors - of which there were, perhaps surprisingly, quite a few. We were greeted at the entrance, handed a brochure and given a short safety briefing. Then it was up to us to make our way around the marked tour route at our own pace. There was no guided tour, but there were employees stationed all along who were quite happy to answer any questions.

The tour route took you past all the main processes, although not in the logical order, which might be a little confusing for some. Possibly the least impressive thing came first - the steam turbine. For something which generates enough electricity for 35,00 homes, it didn't look that big, although it's 3,000 rpm rotor certainly created a powerful hum. More impressive was the control room, with its detailed wall-mounted plant schematic, complete with dials, flow meters and digital displays now made rather redundant by a couple of LCD computer screens that the operators actually use to control the plant these days.

But the real star of this show is on one side of the control room, where two control chairs with joysticks look out through a window into the main refuse bunker. This is where the rubbish trucks dump the refuse, and from where two giant grabbers pick-up the refuse and deposit it in the hoopers that feed the furnaces. The grabbers are operated from the control chairs just like those fairground machines where you operate a pulley-controlled grabber and try to pick-up a prize from the hopper and drop it into the chute. But these grabbers are enormous! They are about 4m in diameter and can pick-up 5 tonnes at a time. Because the process is partly automated, anyone can operate the grabbers with a little supervision from the staff. You just have to use the controls on the chair to lower the grabber, point it at a part of the pile to descend to, and then tell it to close. The raising and depositing of the load in the furnace chute is automatic. The kids loved this, and there was quite a competition to get into the chairs and have a go (so we didn't bother waiting). Seeing one of these grabbers open and descending close to the control window was pretty impressive.

The other thing that impressed me was the furnace itself. Obviously, at 1,000 degrees C you can't see directly into these, but at the bottom end of the furnace (the furnace grate is angled about 25 degrees) there are small inspection hatches with a metal plate that you can lift up and look through a thick glass plate up onto the furnace grate. What you see is a fiercely hot yellow-orange inferno with a cascade of burning rubbish slowly descending towards you. Flames shooting up, and ash and embers floating down. It really was like something from a sci-fi movie.

This may not have been the most architecurally inspiring building to visit, but it was fascinating to see how it all worked, and the ingenious engineering which make is all happen. It is also good to find out exacty what happens to all the rubbish the we generate. This kind of facility is not exactly flavour of the month at the moment, and there have always been questions about the emissions that they create, but it does mean that very little of our rubbish in Lewisham is simple sent to landfill sites.

PS: Sorry, I forgot to take any picures inside the plant!