Friday 26 August 2011

GNSS Guidance and Other Friday Night Musings

The new Guidelines for GNSS Positioning in the Oil and Gas Industry have recently been published. You can find them at the IMCA website, and also the OGP one. A lovely read; reminds me of the type of documents I used to know insideout. Alas I am just management material now.

There are echoes of the latest RICS guidance here too, "Guidelines for the use of GNSS in surveying and mapping', the latest edition can be found here. Not sure if you have to be member to download this one though - surely not.

Interested to read that the sea ice has melted sufficiently this year to give routes through the Arctic.

I've also been reading the UK Government's open data consultations which were released earlier this month - Making Open Data Real: A Public Consultation and the Public Data Corporatation. These are important documents which need measured responses. However, it being Friday night, I was also quite tickled by the adverts which popped up between the pages of this consultation - ranging from ferry offers to kitchen appliances, xerox adverts and more than the usual smattering of warnings that 'the end time is here'.



Monday 15 August 2011

French Benchmark and Other Goodies

Well, you knew I was going to look didn't you? Found one in Thonon-les-Bains but this was in St Jean d'Aulps. Good old IGN.

Other French goodies... Visited the control room of the ATLAS cell of CERN. Spent the whole day here wandering around the exhibitions and having a 2 hour tour. I must confess that our tour guide's enthusiasm was a bit much for me at times (she's an experimental physicist) but I have no doubt that I probably sound as keen/geeky on my specialist passion too. [For those with good eyesight you'll note that the LHC was being maintained at this moment and there are no experiments being conducted].

After a whole day of quarks (I had no idea there were so many), antimatter, string theory, muons and the search for Higgs boson my head was somewhat stuffed.

I was interested to find out why the majority of the LHC is in France. Apparently in Switzerland one owns not only the surface skin on which your property is, but all the land beneath it. You can imagine that building a 27km ring 100m below ground makes for some complicated land law discussions. ATLAS is the only one of the 4 experimentation units on the LHC which is in Switzerland.

Enroute to CERN I realised that our sat nav was displaying our next road name. Isn't this just cool?