Yesterday we had rain and with that rain came a night cold enough for everything to be covered in ice. As I came out of the train station in Nyon I could feel my feet slip frequently. In the process walking was treacherous for those who are not experienced with the pleasure of walking on ice. For others it is an opportunity to look for possible pictures.
On a minivan I saw this pattern on the windowscreen. Water seems to have been blown by the wind at just the right speed to create this fun little pattern. It’s the type of pattern we should look for right before defrosting a car. This isn’t my car so I was just looking to see whether it was a boring sheet or more. In this case it looks like pine needles from a pine tree so it’s nice to look at. Nature finds elegant solutions.
The second pattern of interest I saw was on this pond. When the wind is calm during morning hours the building reflects in the pond. Today the reflection includes a pattern of ice, to add character.
Tuesday should be a good day to hunt for possible images. The air temperature is meant to go down to -6c in the morning. It only lasts for one day so it’s not ideal for proper ice pictures but if there is enough wind then the lakeside could look as it did two or three years ago.
Yesterday I went for a walk in the rain. I walked for two hours, took pictures and listened to Echo Der Zeit and this episode of the Thru-Hiking podcast. Gretel Scarlet was the interviewee. She talked about South Bound (SOBO) hiking the PCT.
It’s interesting to see how different her attitude was to most people’s, how being a dancer, and someone who considers nutrition, speaks differently of food and injuries.
Thanks to the rain most people stayed indoors. This was a good opportunity to walk along routes that I have been avoiding for weeks due to the pandemic. In the process, my trousers and shoes got soaked so I was squelching along. Even cars were not that frequent. I crossed two people during my ten-kilometre walk.
I walked through a wooded part and the trail that I usually follow was now a river. I had to step to the side of the path to avoid walking through the “stream” that it had now become. My shoes were already wet from walking through some tall grass earlier on.
I used to be a cold water diver so being wet doesn’t bother me. I was comfortable for almost the entire walk. It’s only during the last kilometre when I turned to walk into the wind that I started to feel cold and tired. By this point my trousers were soaked and the humidity was moving upwards.
I had considered making the route longer when crossing the last village before home but decided not to. I didn’t want to have to walk along the road when agricultural paths were clear of people. In light of how I felt on the last leg that was a good decision.
I’ve spent the whole day working on a report which is due on Monday but since I have to send it by post I decided to complete it a few days earlier in order to send it off. I’m in the process of printing it off now and then I can have fun with other subjects.
There’s fresh powder snow on the slopes so snowboarding could be quite a bit of fun, especially with all those unmarked runs which may have enough snow for the fun to continue.
I downloaded a lot of the hits which were popular whilst I was riding on the bus to school when I was younger. there are quite a lot of memories in these songs. they’re the songs from my generation, and I am old enough to say that. Those 25yrs old are part of a different generation than those pre 25 years old. Over the next year, many of the people I know will join my generation 😉
Today during the walk I saw an orange van moving by the side of the road slowly. It was stopping regularly. I crossed the road and looked towards it. I saw an open door and a person placing traffic snow poles into the bollards at the side of the road. Winter is coming and the roads are being made ready for when it snows. I wanted to film but I was told not to, so I didn’t.
It would have been nice to film such a scene, because it signals the change from Autumn to winter. It doesn’t matter. I respect peoples’ right to privacy. I can’t think of a security reason not to film such an event.
Mastodon
Through Musk buying Twitter, and through its swing to the Far Right people have finally decided to dump twitter to try something else. That something else, for many, is Mastodon. People are re-discovering what some of us have longed for, for a long time. Social media and the social web, without adverts, once again. For many years the web was seen as an expense, and everyone questioned whether it was profitable, so it was filled with enthusiasts, rather than others.
Today, with the slow demise of Twitter (theoretically) people have chosen to emigrate from Twitter due to political differences. Instead of going to a centralised network with a single point of failure people are migrating to the federated web where activitypub is used to share content between web servers. In theory every individual and business could have their own server.
This is good. The flaw with Twitter is that it had a board of people who decided that they would agree to sell Twitter to a single individual. This move has made a lot of Twitter users uncomfortable, me included. Social media and social networks are about conversations and communities, and what Musk has done, and those that agreed to sell to him, is show that social networks with a single point of failure, are bound to fail at some stage. Twitter won’t vanish overnight but the golden age of capital driven social media is over. Users are regaining hold of the social web, and people like Musk will have spent 44 billion, for a network where users are volatile.
I don’t mean that they’re flaming each other. I mean that if you open the jar usage stats will evaporate. As Mastodon picks up users at an increasing speed, so it will be more interesting for people to migrate from Twitter to Mastodon, and leave the sinking ship behind.
The Internet, and the web, were designed to be modular and adaptive. If one site or node is taken down, we just move to the next, and the next after that. Wordpress has provided bloggers with this flexibility for decades. Now Mastodon provides the same, for microbloggers.
It’s over, Christmas is disappearing into a pile of ashes as the last pieces of wood are combusted into nothing more than ashes. tomorrow those ashes will be fertilizing the garden.
It’s been a quiet Christmas day, nothing extraordinary to write about
When the conditions are just right fractals form on veluxes and they are beautiful. It requires the air to be cool enough for ice to form, but as thin layers, rather than thick. If the wind is just right then you end up with patterns such as the one below.
This morning all of the windows had a nice pattern so I photographed them twice. The first time when they were lit by indirect sunlight and the second time when they were. With direct sunlight you can see the structures more clearly.
If you wait too long though the patterns melt and disappear and you need to wait until the next time the conditions are just right.
This is the first frost of the season. We will have many more such sights in the days and weeks to come.
In the pattern above I like that it has a focus, and that the branches grow out of there to create a network of patterns as we see above. It’s entirely different to the other pattern I shared and just as interesting to look at.
The final pattern is another beautiful example of why good insulation is nice. With good insulation the windows are cool enough for ice to form, without freezing the people who are indoors. It also means that the heat from within the building is not escaping outwards and being wasted. This provides us with a good reason to have double or triple glazing.
And finally
It’s nice to see how different every window was. Every window is completely different from the next, so each pattern is interesting enough to study, to remark on the patterns and shapes that have formed.
Do you look at your windows and fractal patterns? Cars can provide us with the same pleasure.
Despite having a frosty morning today I still decided to go for a run in the morning rather than the afternoon. I mention the frost because I noticed that one velux had the usual frost fractals but the others were clear. This is curious.
I wore a thermal layer, a fleece, a t-shirt and some running shoes that were not waterproof. I would have run one route but a couple took the entire width of the road so I ran along the side of the road, and in the grass by the side of the road. Due to my wearing different shoes my feet and socks got wet and I could feel the dampness, a feeling that I usually do not get.
Safety
I am experimenting with running for two reasons. The first is that I don’t feel safe cycling on roads where drivers do not slow down, or give enough space when overtaking. I don’t like having to look behind me continuously to get drivers to slow down and give enough distance between me and them. I don’t know whether my fear is due to walking by the road every day for almost five years, and cycling for one and a half hours per ride. These might have amplified my sense of danger.
Easier to Dress for Running
The second reason is dressing warmly. Cycling is one of those sports where you dress to be streamlined, but by being streamlined it is easy to feel the cold. Warm cycling clothing is also expensive and although I can layer I am quite happy to walk.
Efficient
The nuance of running, rather than walking is about time. By running I can cover the same distance in half the time than I would if I was walking. This means that what would take one hour might take half an hour. That is more time to do other things. It is also easier to play chicken with the sunset, or grab a break between rain clouds.
Full Body
Running is also a full body workout, rather than a lower body workout. Running uses the upper body and the lower body. You can feel the shoulders, lower back, and pectoral muscles working. You can also feel tightness in certain running muscles after a run.
Avoiding injury
The reason for which I am careful with running, and why I am working towards a 5km goal is body strain. I found that when I pushed towards running more than 10 kilometres it hurt my knees. I want to give my body time to adapt to running, before pushing beyond 5 kilometres.
Cheap and Light
If I grow comfortable with running then I have a cheap, light, versatile sport to enjoy year round. I do need to get comfortable with hills around here. If I leave the village where I live then I have two directions with hills, one that is too short and too busy to be a workout and the other that is towards a town and civilisation. The other routes take me to the countryside.
Solitary
Aside from the points I have made above running is also a sport that you can do alone. Climbing, diving, via ferrata and other sports require at least one more person, and the relevant equipment. With running you need shoes and that’s it, if you want to be a minimalist.
And Finally
Walking and hiking for four and a half million to five and a half million steps per year doesn’t count as improving fitness after five years of routine. Cycling does, when I push myself, and so does running. I want to see my fitness go up, not down over the cold winter months. I want to feel that I am progressing, not stagnating. Running is a way of achieving this goal.
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