Barcelona by train

I recently went to Barcelona, to attend a concert by Adexe y Nau as part of the Festival Mil·lenni in Sant Jordi Club. Fantastic show, by the way!

For this first time, though, I made the whole trip by train and public transport, and it was surprisingly easy. No need to fly or hire a car.

And the CO2 emissions are much lower – highly recommended!

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(from EcoPassenger)

2020 Goals

Here are my goals for this year:

  • Further reduce my carbon footprint and continue to actively support Fridays For Future in the struggle to achieve climate justice
  • Reach at least a normal BMI, i.e. a BMI less than 24.9:
      • Reduce my weight below 174 lbs. (79kg) and start exercising
  • Submit at least three responses to Call for Papers / Meetup talks
  • Run regular Rancher meetups in Cologne
  • Process YouTube backlog, publish regularly on YouTube throughout the year, and improve my video and photo skills
  • Reach these Social Media milestones:
      • 10.000 Tweets
      • 1.000 Instagram posts
      • 100 YouTube videos
  • Earn enough credits to start my Bachelor thesis in early 2021

2020 must be the year in which CO2 emissions begin to drop!

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(#COP25 – posted by Aidan R. Gallagher)

Visions For Climate

With the (still) pretty abysmal Klimapaket of our government and the catastrophic failure of COP25 in Madrid, there’s only one course of action left – to organize ourselves and start protecting our climate!

One small step is the Visions For Climate summit in Berlin, January 24th to 26th, for people and organizations that are actively working to reach climate justice in time, for all.

Come and join us – see you there!

SM who

(Social Media post, from the organizer)

200!

After a little more than a year I’ve managed to reach my second last milestone of 200 lbs. (90 kg) – 25 lbs. (10 kg) more to go until I’ll reach my 2020 goal of a “normal” BMI.

Huge shoutout to my coach, Tanja Schlagenhauf – I wouldn’t be here without her counselling and advice – thank you!

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(Keto salad, Little Italy, 12/13/19)

Global Climate Strike

The latest reports from climate scientists are quite devastating, we’re getting close to what they call irreversible tipping points – do we really want to risk turning our earth into an inhabitable rock?

This Friday we were 630,000 people overall in Germany, according to the Fridays, protesting together against the inaction of our governments facing the climate crisis; in Cologne, we were in total 20,000 people on the streets.

Young Sheldon joined Jane Fonda for their weekly FireDrillFriday in front of the Capitol – at 11 years of age, Iain apparently has much more courage and intelligence than many adults!

On a positive note, the ailing Social Democrats have chosen a new group of leaders, and hopefully with it a more socially and environmentally friendly direction in their politics. Time will tell, though.

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(NeustartKlima, Cologne, 11/29/19)

Vagabundo

During the winter developer’s conference at Senacor Technologies AG in Nuremberg, they presented a nice little tool to measure and offset carbon dioxide emissions during business travel.

The tool is called Vagabundo and is realized using a serverless framework; it collects data from all business travels, calculates CO2 emissions and offsets them through Atmosfair – great approach at using technology to protect our climate!

It’s currently an in-house project, but Senacor seemed amiable to open-source it.

Much more than the offsetting part, I like the reporting – how much CO2 do I emit during travel and how could I optimize it?

Taking this a step further, I could see creating internal (team) competitions – who’s the best at having video conferences instead of in-person meetings? Who’s able to reduce air travel the most?

I think, there’re endless possibilities – anybody as interested as I am?

2019-11-16

Wine quality

As part of a school machine learning project I stumbled upon the excellent tutorial by Elite Data Science on Scikit and wine quality.

This tutorial uses a data set on wine quality for training and testing provided by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

As we’re nearing the end of life on Python 2.x, I’ve updated the tutorial script to work with Python 3.5.3 (on Debian 9).

Great starting point to work with new data – I can highly recommend the tutorial!

2019-11-09

End of an era

If we’re serious about protecting our climate, we need to show and apply the true cost of CO2 emissions to where they occur.

One business that will for sure suffer is the airline industry, especially the low-cost carriers – that most likely will not be a business model that can be sustained much longer.

Of course I do accept the necessary change and will adapt, but that’s where it hurts me the most personally, and I quietly mourn the ability to travel the world freely; it almost feels as if my wings were clipped.

But long distance trains are an option, too – if they weren’t so expensive … I really hope we will reintroduce sleeper carriages and over night trains in Europe!

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FatSecret

One of the key things to do when attempting to loose weight is to track what you eat.

My dietician recommended FatSecret (Android / iOS) because it tracks both calories and macro nutrients, which comes in quite handy on a LCHF-type of diet.

I’ve been using the app  for almost a year and can say that I’m quite happy with it – you’ll be surprised by the insights you get, and it definitely helps a lot with sticking to the diet. I use it together with a simple fitness tracker to determine the amount of calories spent – in the end, loosing weight comes  down to keeping your calorie intake below your calorie expenditure, doesn’t it?

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(FatSecret weekly report)