Death of Jesus - its all about the money!

Do you believe Bible in a questions of Jesus life and death as a god? If no - than you are smart one. But is it possible that the Bible describes real life of some good guy named Jesus but in very sick and twisted way? I believe :-) it is possible. If you don't mind some historical insight, than you should enjoy the following essay I found here.

In general it is about money exchange operations on Roman Empire, Jew's church that had a major profit from it and Ponty Pilat who suddenly found himself in need of money due to involvement in conspiracy against Tiberius and his reforms...

But unfortunately you have to translate it from Russian.

Associations

So there is one forum's game called "Associations". What do you associate word "grass" with? If you are GIS-specialist than association would be "GIS" because of GRASS open-sourced and very powerful GIS, that was originally developed by US military forces and then given to the community when corruption ESRI took the upper hand in US army. But if you are just common jerk then it is possible that your association would be "weed", isn't it? Understandable. Actually it was a Russian forum and Russian word "трава" - grass that looks like "травка" - weed (and if you think that I'm talking about marijuana, then you're wright completely wrong!).

But that was your's associations, not mine. I associate this word with a "космодром" - space launching site. Why? Because there is one song ("Трава у дома" - Grass Near Home) from 1983 and there are lines about spacers who dreams not about space launching site or deep space, but about grass near their home. By the way it was my first movement inside my mom's belly in 1983 when she was at the concert and this song played...

I have a strong nostalgia feeling when I hear this song or think about it. It was easy to find a video on YouTube (there are a lot of different videos for song). And I watched a modern version and... there was a comment...

"Great song! POLAND and RUSSIA brothers forever! Grettings from Poland. Fuck politician! Normal people in poland and in russian is OK. POLITICIAN is bad in all world. Politician begin War. Religion and piliticion is very bad because begin war, Example:  JEWISH vs ISLAM this is very stupid conflict. NO POLITICAN and NO RELIGION = NO WAR! sorry, i speak english little..." 

Such words are priceless... And it is difficult to understand this fact when you are too young and too proud of your country. So don't listen to the fuckers in the TV when they tell you to hate someone from another country or that people from another country hates you. Politicians and priests are lying to take control over you and made you obey their will so they can gain more power and money. Just talk to aliens a bit more.


That was my thoughts on associations and grass... I want to prevent you from get completely bored and let you enjoy the "Трава у дома" song. Say "hello!" to 1983!

OSM, google and yahoo undercover in QGIS

Yesterday I've discovered "OpenLayers plugin" for QGIS. This is pretty cool thing to have a Google maps and satellite as Yahoo and Openstreetmap as a wms-layer in QGIS. I will show you:

(Just click the image for better resolution)

Now it is much simpler for me to compare FIRMS fire data (yes, from that exclusive archive data access I mentioned in previous post) with landfills locations.

Unfortunately, there is only one example of successful fire detection on the landfill in the Leningrad region (it is on the picture above). In other cases I have to look into Landsat archive. Maybe they will have the images for the days when fire near landfill was detected. Looking forward to download them... yeah... 1Gb per archive.

Lucky data mining

It was a lucky day for data mining!

I believe, you know that if you try to get some spatial information in Russia then you'll eventual start to shit bricks. I remember for one project I've been calling to the response person in one regional committee for 3 or 4 month asking about my request (while they must give you response during 30 days), I do remember that they prepared some answer, but I do not remember if I finally managed to my information!

But for now I'm working on a waste management project in Finland. Today I asked someone (we've never met or spoke before) to give me some spatial information for my research. I had no hope that she'll share it! BUT I WAS WRONG! I've almost cried while reading the e-mail. It was like: Yes, sure! Here you are! Use it well and don't forget to leave a proper reference in your research. By the way, I can send you more in different formats!

I wish I ever get such response in Russia!

For another part of my research I need fire spatial data. It is available at FIRMS site, but they provide only 2 month old data when I need data for past 10 years. So I asked guys if it is possible to get data for several years. Guess what they answered! Yes, sure! We're just in the middle of developing request page, so help yourself and test it in the process!

Yeah baby! It's a smell of civilized world! Too bad that I have to get back to Russia in a several months...