14-18 Le bruit & la fureur
An interesting take on the 1914-18 war. 48 minutes in you see mention of mountain fighting.
A Plastic Ocean is an excellent documentary detailing the problems and threats caused by plastics entering water systems and eventually reaching the seas and oceans. This documentary starts with a team trying to film whales. When they finally do find the whales off the coast of Sri Lanka they notice that there is a film of oil and plastic build up miles from the shore. They say that this bit of ocean should be clean as the beaches had been unused for years. They suspect that the plastic had been freed after heavy rains flushed them out to sea.
I went to the Graduate institute to watch this film last night and the crowd was already well informed. When one speaker asked, “Did you know that the Plastic Ocean problem was this serious” at least half of the room, if not more raised their hand. When people were asked about the zero waste movement at least a third of people raised their hand. The auditorium was filled to capacity.
When I was snorkeling in Spain a few weeks ago I was looking for fish and I saw a few small fish. In the past I had been scuba diving in these waters and surfaced to be surrounded by jellyfish. If you’re stung by a jelly fish you don’t need to use urine. Olive oil and seawater will calm the inflamation. I thought that I saw a jellyfish but as I swam closer I saw that it was a transparent plastic bag floating near the surface. I grabbed the bag and I placed it in my semi-drysuit sleeve and eventually swam back to come out of the water. As I walked back from the activity I picked up a second plastic bag and threw them away. If these bags were left in the Mediterranean then sea turtles and other animals might eat them.
When plastics reach the ocean seventy percent sinks to the bottom of the sea and can remain there for centuries. What does not sink is degraded by the sun but it is broken up, rather than broken down. What this means is that you go from plastic sheets to plastic pellets and these plastic pellets outnumber krill and plankton by a ratio of two to one. This means that sea birds, fish and other animals higher up the food chain ingest plastic and it accumulates. Seabirds and whales ingest so much plastic that it fills their stomachs and they eventually die of starvation.
It is at this moment that I am so happy to live in a canton where you can recycle PET in one container and all other plastics in another. This means that almost all of the plastic I use on a daily basis is recycled. It can be re-used for bags, car doors and more permanent uses.
Recycling is a simple and intuitive habit to have. My generation learned to recycle as children and we have kept up this habit for decades. It is so normal that we feel uneasy at festivals and events where we don’t have bins for PET, Aluminium and other products. In some cases I keep aluminium or PET bottles on me until I find a place where I can recycle them. I enjoy that at Swiss train stations you can now recycle paper, PET, Aluminium and other rubbish.
The advantage of recycling loops is that we use the primary material more than once. It means that we don’t need to waste energy and money on extracting oil and other primary materials. We simply recycle the materials. The concept of closed circuits was discussed.
If this post has inspired you to do more for the environment there is a wehike event organised by the Summit Foundation .
This is a hike inaugurating the partnership between WeHike and Summit Foundation, a Swiss ecological non-profit. The Foundation’s mission is to reduce the environmental impact of human activities -leisure activities in particular- in high-traffic locations like ski areas, by raising awareness and proposing concrete solutions. To this end, WeHike supports the Summit Foundation’s objectives by promoting and organising environmentally-aware hikes and waste collection & recycling operations in high mountains.
This is a two day hike near Les Diablerets.
A plastic Ocean is available to watch on Netflix and from other sources. It is worth watching as it will affect how you use plastic in future.
Within the last week Honeypot Originals have released a number of documentaries. Each episode covers a different JavaScript Framework. So far that have Vue.js, Ember.js, Elixir and GraphQL. Each of these documentaries is about half an hour long and interviews some of the key players. What is nice about these documentaries is that they take names and projects that may be familiar to us, but add faces and context to them. I have heard about some of these people via podcasts and more. With these videos I get to listen to them, and watch them explain the importance of their projects.
Vue.js: The documentary from Vue.js: The Documentary by Honeypot Originals
After watching these videos you may get a better understanding of why you would, or would not want to study a specific language. It takes a project from just being a name in the title of a video to something less abstract.
The video about Vue.js cleared some of my hesitancy about studying the framework. Hearing about how the Laravel and other communities grew to be interested in the framework is interesting. It seems like a worthwhile alternative to React and Angular, the two giants in the space.
When I watched the video about GraphQL I didn’t really get the answer about why I should choose it over JSON. So far the answer seems to be “because it only returns the data you want to use. I will need to spend time trying to understand what its key selling point is.
I wanted to take a break from the usual studying habit today, to have a rest day whilst still moving forward.
I am now fourty percent through a Udemy Course to master javascript and I am struggling more, now, than before. It isn’t easy to master such a complex subject. I should practice more, from outside of the course. I thought strings would be simple but there are details that I need to explore further.
That’s it for today.
An interesting look back in to the past. I remember seeing this conflict on television. I know people who covered the story and I’ve heard about how a colleague gave one person a gameboy when he left Sarajevo. That person called and asked about the individual and that’s how I knew of a personal story.
One or two segments in this video show the tape to tape editing process. I learned how to edit this way but by the time I worked as an editor everything had moved to non linear editing systems.
I’m sure this will bring back memories for a few people.
Yesterday the Theta+ Video app came out for Android. The Theta+ video app allows you to trim video clips and then share them to social networks. This means that you no longer need to wait until you get home to prepare content for sharing. You can do it while you sit and have a post activity hot chocolate or other drink.
[caption id="attachment_3325" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Video options[/caption]When you select the raw video it is converted to be a spherical video. When that process completes you can choose between creating a 360 degree video or a cropped one. A cropped one is a tinyworld video.
[caption id="attachment_3326" align="aligncenter" width="169"] Filters, Trim and music[/caption]The next menu gives you three choices, filters, trim or background music. I never bother with filters and the trim option is fiddly on the Sony Xperia Z5 compact with a 13 minute video. With a shorter video I would have found this process easier. Saving is not intuitive. First you trim the video and then you go back and save the changes. While saving you need to keep the app open.
The sharing options are to Facebook, youtube and other social networks. This varies according to which apps you have on your phone. I like that the two first options are facebook and youtube as these are the networks that I usually share to. When I tried to upload to youtube it failed twice. When I attempted to upload to Facebook it was stuck at 99 percent twice.
This is a great app to trim videos before sharing and add some music when required. What I would like to see in future versions is the ability to compile a number of 360 videos together to create edited sequences. They need to improve uploading so that it works better. At the moment of posting all attempts to share videos failed.