Nationwide warning day

The German government announced for today that in order to be able to warn as many people in Germany as possible about dangers in an emergency, the warning channels are tested once a year. The test warning is planned for around 11 a.m.

A test alarm is to make cell phones and sirens ring, howl and buzz loudly throughout Germany on the nationwide warning day. Separate siren signals are emitted for A,B, and C disasters. Fire and flood to be added. Cybersecurity is still ignored. The warning, announced for around 11 a.m., will be triggered on Thursday (12 September) by the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) in Bonn. Citizens will then receive a warning message on their cell phones via the Cell Broadcast System. The test alarm will then also be broadcast via radio and television stations and on city information boards. Anyone who has warning Apps such as Nina or Katwarn installed on their smartphone should also receive a notice of the test warning this way. Municipalities can also use additional warning devices such as loudspeaker vans and sirens.

The siren register is however still incomplete. In many places, old sirens have been upgraded or new, modern sirens have been installed in recent years. Due to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the devastating flood in the Ahr Valley in 2021, many responsible people at federal, state and local levels have become convinced that this warning device should also be available to alert the population in crisis and disaster situations. However, a nationwide overview of where sirens are available and where there are regional gaps is still missing, as a spokeswoman for the BBK admitted when asked. "The densification of siren locations is in the hands of the municipalities and is supported by the federal and state governments through funding programs," the Federal Office said.

As the test results come in, I will add to this blog entry. Local data first.

11:00 Siren goes off 1 km away downwind, barely audible. Background noise 29dB (=quiet room), with siren 30dB; 31dB on the front porch. Easily overheard. New firestation and siren are downwind with the prevailing wind, not upwind like the old one. Was this not taken into account in the planning phase? This mobile phone too old to support Cell Broadcast, so no warning there either. SWMBO's newer phone was on and got the Cell Broadcast.
11:01 siren changes from continuous tone to ululation. More perceivable. I did not have radio or TV on, so no warning there. No local loudspeaker van, just siren.
11:45 (planned) All clear sounded. Not heard above a local conversation :-(
Summary : it flopped :-(

No national summary on TV by 16:00 hours.

Comments(1)
Jenny (Ibiza) asked "What do A,B,C stand for?" Atomic, Biological and Chemical weapon attacks respectively.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on September 12 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

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Crash, Bang, Wallop, etc :-(

As regular readers of this blog may know, I spent over a quarter century as a flying instructor. So I still scan accident reports to see what we can learn from them. This includes reading the "reports" in the national press for their early heads-up. Surprised and disappointed to find out there were 6 (SIX) light-aircraft accidents over this last weekend. Weather was great for VFR, very hot though. Did noone check for density altitude? I would have expected less than 0.3 accidents , so what went wrong?

Bad Sassendorf-Lohne : About 30 miles WNW of here, Cessna 172 (4-seater) crashed on takeoff departing after a plane-meet. Two on board, an 89 and an 83 year old. Both dead; plane went up in flames (on extended centreline?). Police shut the airfield down, so other planes had to stay overnight. Cause unknown. FYI, I am 80 myself with over 5000 hours as pilot-in-command, but no longer instruct. A C172 is VERY easy to fly, grass runway is plenty long (830 metres) even for aborted takeoff, so I have no suspicions to put forward.

Korbach ; About 25 miles SE. Piper Cub, 2 seater crashed on takeoff. No fire. Both on board injured and hospitalised. Runway is grass, 600 m long, so should be no problem for a Cub even for an aborted takeoff.

Bamberg(Bavaria) : Cessna crashed on takeoff, hitting the fence and caught fire. Runway is asphalt about 1 km long if I remember correctly, Cessna should only need about 220 metres. Pilot died in hospital.

Hermutshausen (near Stuttgart) : Ultralight biplane crashed on take-off from 80 feet altitude after scraping a tree. 2 on board (pilot 54 and his son 11), both hospitalised. No fire. No photo.

Uetersen : Ultralight biplane crashed on landing attempt from 60 feet altitude when scraping trees. No injuries. No fire.

Gutersloh : Ultralight biplane hit the trees. No fire. Pilot dead afaik :-(

Did noone check for density altitude? I would have expected less than 0.3 accidents , so what went wrong?

Comments(3)
Jenny (Ibiza) wrote "What is density altitude and why do you think it important? And KISS a non-pilot?" As the air gets hotter, it gets thinner. So the plane has less lift. And the engine develops less power, to accelerate the plane (over a longer takeoff run) to get to a higher speed needed to develop the lift (aka >= weight). Often a pilot will pull back to rotate the plane at a speed they are used to (aka visual clues) so the plane will stall. Pilot friend CC suspects stall trouble too, she wrote. Maybe just getting into ground effect too (max altitude = ca. 1/3 of wingspan). Inexperienced pilot may take a while until they realise what has happened. Decision delayed? Run out of runway? Unable to put it back down again in the remaining runway? Overshoot and crash? Was that understandable, Jenny?
Pilot friend Cop Car wrote " Hard to know what to think, Stu. As you say, all pilots should be well aware of the way density altitude plays into aircraft operations. When I read of unexplained takeoff crashes, my first thought is a stall incident. Even experienced pilots get caught in them - usually as a secondary stall, IMHO. I lost an instructor, and a physician friend lost her husband (and her own mobility, now being confined to a wheelchair) to stalls. Each was experienced enough that such should never have been the case." See also what I wrote to Jenny.
Billions of Versions... wrote " People don't realize how many small plane accidents there are every year. Along with small planes just disappearing and never being found. " Not true in Germany here. Every crash is registered and investigated. Planes may disappear in USA (its bigger) but not here unless at sea.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on September 9 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

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Vocabularies

Blogreader Ed (USA) and I have been having a (heated) email discussion about what vocabulary is suitable for a/my blog. We disagree. So today I thought I would blog about vocabularies.

A child of age 1 can recognise around 50 words. The active vocabulary (= words used) is less, the passive vocabulary(= words recognised) is 50. For comparison, my dog knows about 70 commands. A three year old child is up to 1000 words in its passive vocabulary, active vocabulary is always less than passive. By age five, already 10,000 words are recognised; these counts are for the American subset of English. I do not have the data for German, but new words can be strung together from existing ones which is why DanubeSteamshipCompanyCaptain'sWidowPensionFund is a translation of ONE valid German word.

Most adult native speakers know between 20,000 and 35,000 words passively, the rest have to be looked up in a dictionary. They learn about one new word every day until middle age when vocabulary acquisition slows almost to a stop.

William Shakespeare's works contain about 25,000 to 30,000 unique words, some only occur once and many he made up himself; his audiences could usually grasp the meaning from the context of their usage. However, only about half of the words he made up are still in use today, the other half has fallen into disuse, e.g. What tonguepad mouthfriend would depucelate my frigorifick shapesmith? These are all words in Samuel Johnsons dictionary. Shakespeare wrote 37 plays and 154 works, totalling 884,429 words. Over 7,000 of these words he used only once and he introduced almost 3,000 new words into English, so his audience had to guess from the context what he meant, as have schoolchildren ever since ;-)

UK lexicographer Susi Dent estimates the average UK English native speaker to have 20,000 words in their active vocabulary and 40,000 in the passive set. The most used 25 words occur in 33% of written texts; the most used 100 words in 50% of student writing and the most used 1000 words in 89%.

Blogreaders can estimate the size of their passive vocabulary by taking a large dictionary, opening it at random, and counting the number of definitions they know and multiplying by half the number of pages in the dictionary (half because of counting words on a double page). Active bloggers similarly can use their blogs to count the number of words in their active vocabulary in their writings. So my own passive vocabulary is about 58,000 words and actively I write about 31,000+ words. What are yours?

Ed had to look up e.g bemphites, attic, acrophonic, thrice. Cop Car has so far only had to look up e.g. desmodromic. YMMV. I am not counting my blog entries written in Lallans, Latin, German etc only in UK English.

Then there is the case where words you know are strung together to give a term you may not know e.g. quantum loop gravity. There are also typos. e.g. tern instead of term; oops, my bad.

I think it OK to expand your passive vocabularies via this blog and do not want to dumb it down. After all, you can choose to ignore it if too highbrow. What are your opinions?

Comments(8)
Billions of Versions... wrote " I'm always looking up words and it's no big deal. Today I had to look up slyboots, a word Deb called me in a comment. I'd never heard of it before and it turns out to be from the 1700's. So it's been around a long time. Then there was the word TigDik repeated over and over in the joke. I looked it up today and found it in a Hindi YouTube video and it's just what it is in the joke, a running horse. If anyone has to look up a word I've posted it's because I copied it." Yes, Mike, that is how we expand our vocabularies. Like I just learned the onomatopaic TigDik from you and deduced Hindi horses were shoed.
Lesley (US) asks "So what is the easiest way to widen my vocabulary?"
There are 3 books I know of but have not read myself :
The Vocabulary Builder Workbook by Chris Lele;
Merriam-Webster’s Vocabulary Builder by Mary Wood Cornog;
and Verbal Advantage: Ten Easy Steps to a Powerful Vocabulary by Charles Harrington Elster.
Cop Car wrote " Yikes! I did not remember having seen the word, let alone the meaning. I would feel badly about not remembering the meaning of desmodromic were it not for the fact that I mostly dealt with structural integrity rather than with propulsion systems. Thanks for even momentarily believing that your having stumped me with only one word could possibly have been the case. I would believe that I never told you of the others. Thanks for an interesting post. My preference is to have others, including you, challenge me to learn. I appreciate that you have done that for a number of years, now." Daily, I encounter words new to me, especially since my memory has been deteriorating.
Ed complains "That puts me in a bad light, list ten words you think I dont know and I'll tell you if its true." Okay: alacrity, archetypal, blandishment, crwth, denigrate, eclectic, fatuous, iconoclast, obdurate, and phlegmatic ;-)
Jenny (Ibiza) wrote "I only know 3 of those 10 words." But you are fluent in Spanish too.
Cop Car later wrote "For instance, you stumped me with crwth." It is a welsh musical instrument, like a grecian lyre. If you now ask 'what is a lyre?', I will reply: like a welsh crwth ;-)
Ed replied "You win. I only know fatuous. And what is crwth, it dont even got a vowel?" Think of W as UU.
Jenny (Ibiza) later continued "Are some of those words from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows? As mentioned in your previous blog." No. Doug recommended that book to me back in 2014, but I only recently bought it. An acquired taste. The author invented all the definitions therein, and e.g. 'words' like Tirosi and Fawtle never entered mainstream English. David Reich has a video up explaining how knowledge and vocabulary can be lost. Remember ancient Greece lost writing many millenia ago and had to reinvent it.

Copyright ^© Ole Phat Stu on September 1 , 2024 permalink Comments Email

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