My eyrie, selfies, skies and work!

Created 7/7/20

I never seem to find time to post things here: work has been crazy for the last few months. Some of that is the chronic backlog but much is down to cv-19. Back in got involved in cv-19 related projects using bits of the CORE system in the UK (project’s lead’s ambitions outstripped his capacities: waste of time), Ecuador (great project, my involvement valued and probably good, settled into low weekly input), Brazil (emerging monthly survey apparently well appreciated there) and Greece (inexperienced by enthusiastic co-leads’ ambitions matched by huge input in one huge initial burst and now we’re working to digest the data). Alongside those was the project to make CORE measures available for online use for free: see my CORE site page or the ResearchGate project. That’s supported over 7,000 downloads as of this morning (daily update page here!) With Clara & Pablo I have even, already, managed a paper out some of this which we think is free to read while the cv-19 pandemic continues and publishers feel generous: here. All that is on top of the regular work and that is slowly speeding up as I settle into my freelance researcher life.

Hah! Hot off the press: no sooner do I publish this post than LinkedIn reminds me of one of those regular pieces of work (the biggest one: so many things to be reported out of the ITAMITED study over the next one to five years I guess. LinkedIn post (hm, immediately broken I think: own goal LinkedIn!). Anyway, this courtesy of Joan Carles, Guillem and Toni … and it is visible in ResearchGate. I really must learn to use these channels … and to tweet!

Why say this? I know it’s a sort of apology for not communicating more with many friends and relations, and apologising to myself for that, and the tottering pile of ‘photos I could have posted here, and the almost equally tall pile of topics about which I’ve wanted to post. Anyway, the image at the top of this post (I hope) is my sort of selfie with the early morning sun behind me and the door of my eyrie open letting the air in. I like my sorts of selfies (as ever you should be able to click on these to get them full sized).

That’s enough self stuff! What about skies? Well, the sky up here is always changing. In the space of an hour we can go from seeing nothing really, just about the next nearest building as the cloud has enveloped us, to clear blue sky and roasting sun, and then to a thunderstorm with dramatic lightning (one day I will try to work out how to catch that on camera). Here is some mackerel cirrus I find curiously beautiful.

And now juxtaposition of cirrus from a different day and time of day with smoe some towering up of cumulus on the high ridge across the valley.

Then there are times with relatively clear blue sky overhangs a little low, rapidly changing cloud and below that mist in the air creates the “atmospheric perspective” I love. (The term is one photographers and visual perception people have for one of the ways we see distance and depth in 2D images: objects in the distance are hazier and lose contrast.)

Then some evenings the sunset is gently beautiful …

And some other evenings it’s anything but gentle …

And I’ll sign off by recommending that you watch at least the first one minute and forty seconds of the time lapse video from yesterday: a truly dramatic sunrise and early morning. The remainder of the roughly four minutes are nice and convey what a lovely day it was but they can’t match that early morning drama. You should be able to click on the image to start it running. Do hit the little icon down at the bottom right (next to “vimeo“) with the four radiating arrows: that should give you the video in full screen mode, it deserves it!