Facing Norway in sport one thing is nevertheless the most important; to win. I have won 75% of our games against Axel Juul, which shows that Sweden still is the country to beet on the Northern European tennis stage. All these wins have been in tiebreak after three sets. I have never won the first set. My skill is in the second and third set where I somehow manage to keep it together.

This is a picture from the warm up of today’s game. The game ended 2-1 (5-7; 7-6; 7-6) in my favor.

Axel Juul playing tennis

The tennis Cort in Coogee

The following can be read from NSW Rural Fire Service web page:

Smoke in the Blue Mountains

Posted: 11/05/2010
National Parks and Wildlife Service are conducting a hazard reduction in the Massif Ridge (Blue Labyrinth) area of the Blue Mountains. NSW Rural Fire Service is providing assistance.

It seams like the fire/smoke is only due to a controlled exercise for reducing the fire risk. There is therefore nothing to worry about and hopefully the sun will be visible in Sydney tomorrow again! Currently the fire danger in the area is between very high and severe which has started the hazard reduction.

Recently I made an assignment in the course Management of Risk on the topic “hazard reduction for fire”. The task involved looking at the best measure to decrease the probability of the whole forest burning down. A utility curve as constructed for different percentages of forest burning down. In the end it actually turned out that burning 5% of the forest to decrease the probability of the rest of the forest burning down was the best option. This is exactly what I think is done at the moment so the numbers where actually somewhat related to reality.

Another example that management of risk professors love to discuss is related to redundancy. A reason for having more than one engine on an air-plane is that if one fails there is still enough power in the other engines to land the plane. In some cases this way of thinking is OK if the assumption is made that the engines fail independent of each other. However this is not always the case.

In 1982, all four engines on a British Airways Plc Boeing Co. 747 flying to Perth, Australia, shut down as the aircraft encountered ash spewed from Mt. Galunggung in Indonesia. The plane fell for almost four miles before the pilot was able to restart three engines and make an emergency landing in Jakarta. (Business week, 2010-04-15).

The ash was a common failure mode causing all the engines to die. You should always be aware of common failure modes when you try to use redundancy to increase the reliability of your system…

On volcanic ash:

Why cant planes fly through volcanic ash?

Yesterday Alex had her birthday party. We had dinner at a Kika tapas bar in Kings Cross. Tapas is definitely one of my favourite forms of eating and Kika (kika.com.au) is a good option for supplier . $40 for a full stomach and Sangria is in fact also a very good price.

Here are some more pictures from Karl’s camera:

[flickr album=72157623795333257 num=30 size=Small]

• Janson’s frestelse
• Sofia’s egg box
• Halved eggs with caviar and onion cream (for starter)
• David’s BBQ chicken
• Ham and cheese pies
• Meatballs
• Sausages
• And something more I forgot…

For dessert Sofia is making some kind of white chocolate fondant with raspberry sauce.

Happy Easter!

Royal National Park, Australia

Also the world’s largest passenger ship visited Sydney Harbour.

The world's largest passenger ship