Okay, this was a roundabout way to get a travel warning.

I happen to have Facebook "liked" the Swedish railways page. This morning I got the following notice:

Information för resande till Norge.
Med anledning av rådande säkerhetsläge i Norge har norska polisen beslutat att införa gränskontroller för resande in i Norge. Detta medför att krav på pass, nationellt id-kort alternativt körkort har införts.

Google Translate:Information for traveling to Norway.
In view of the prevailing security situation in Norway, Norwegian police decided to impose border controls for travel in Norway. This means that passport, national identity card or alternatively driving license has been introduced.

Security situation? What security situation? Did I miss something? So I fire up the news.

Apparently this is all about a warning the Norwegians received recently. From The Local:

“The PST [Norway’s security police] recently received information that people with links to Islamic extremists in Syria may intend to carry out attacks against Norway,” PST chief Benedicte Bjørnland told a press conference in Oslo on Thursday. She added that the attack was planned to take place “within a few days from now.”

Terror alerts happen from time to time, and I hope this one passes without incident. After the Breivik attack in 2011, the Norwegian authorities are understandably alert.

Mostly I'm just finding it noteworthy that I found out about this particular alert this way.

Lightningmaps.org. Check it out.

Lightningmaps.org is a visualization of lightning data collected by a lightning detection network set up by a volunteer community of detector station operators.

They include instructions on how to set up your own station. "If you are not from Germany, Austria, or Switzerland you can even get a complete controller kit, a complete amplifier kit, ferrite rod antennas, and a gps modul for cost price, if desired."

Their real time map looks particularly cool when you turn "Stations: on".