The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

It’s time for another round of photos, which is my form of an art project. This time, we have interesting things to notice about the housing in the heart of Amsterdam around the canals. We start with some of the very skinny houses, or at least sections of houses. I’ve never gone through one of the doors for these, but I’d hope that the home is only as wide as a single door. I’m sure it’s not, but it looks like it from the street.

Near the Amsterdam Zuid station. 

This is more nerdy stuff related to my job….

This video is a set of individual images captured by one of our Dove satellites. The Dove was travelling overhead at about seven kilometers per second (or 15,658 MPH) while it took pictures of the Soyuz rocket. The rocket hit around 1,200 mph one minute into its flight, which is about half the time of this video (so about 6 seconds of video). It was carrying 48 new Dove satellites for us. Click the image to watch the video or read more here.

Today when walking around Amsterdam, sweating, I remembered when my friend Jeff and I stepped out of the Bangkok airport in November 1997. It was the first time I’d really felt humidity just hit me. We walked out and I thought “oh, that’s what high humidity feels like”. We then took a taxi at crazy speeds down a freeway, but his speedometer said “0”; that’s a different story.

Relative Humidity in Bangkok in November is about 82%, which is still higher than the average of 72% in July in Amsterdam. Either one is too high for me!

If you’re wondering, the Relative Humidity % in July in Fargo is 55%, Seattle is 61%, maybe 68% in San Francisco, Salt Lake City is dry at 26%, and New York City is 57%.

Lorie and I were at the launch of Planet Lab’s 88 satellites back in February 2017, although we don’t appear in the video, which focuses on that launch but covers quite a bit more. It gives a good overview of Planet, what we’ve built, and the challenges to get there. So sit back and watch the 16-minute “All-Seeing Eye In The Sky” video:

Not far from mt office in Berlin is a BMW showroom. A new 5 series electric hybrid is around 90-100k Euro. I will not be buying one! Nice cars and motorcycles though. 

Notice the mam standing at the end of the ladder. It’s a statue that’s part of the art instalation. 

I didn’t realize that there was a Concord sitting at LHR, but we rolled past it today on our way to take off from LHR to AMS.

We had a free upgrade at Hertz. Range Rover Evoque. It’s a very nice car to drive.