Google thinks it’s a bee. That’s why they have the new service google buzz. I spent some time looking at it and it makes me think of jaiku, friendfeed and other services all combined into one. It’s threaded conversations and status messages based on geo-tagged conversation triggers.
It has a good interface with google reader and of course the question which I cannot answer yet is what does the full version have to offer that will enhance the user’s experience
Today during my walk this afternoon I surprised a cat on some stairs and I moved patiently. It brushed up against me so I started to stroke it. During this pandemic the only living things I have had physical contact with are cats. During a pandemic, if you’re not living with people, you are very limited.
Yesterday I did go out for a bike ride with a group of people, virtually. Before the ride I was feeling really down, and negative. After the ride I was feeling refreshed and relaxed. For the first time in three weeks I was able to do something physical without having to avoid people, worry about routing or anything else. All I had to do was pedal to the limit of my motivation and endurance.
If we went into full lock down then I would treat it as if we were in winter. I’d train hard, on the indoor trainer, so that when we are finally allowed more freedom in the outdoors I’d be fit enough to explore new routes.
The Shopping situation
When I went to the shops they were the emptiest I’ve seen them in a long time. I didn’t even need to queue to get in, although I did have a brief moment of over-exaggerating my steps as I was behind people walking slower than me. Everyone, or almost, walks slower than me, so that’s not a criticism of the people ahead of me. It’s good for you. You can use entirely different muscle groups as you behave in an eccentric manner. Even the self-checkout was empty, just one other person.
Of course in the process I forgot to buy plain rice so now I’m going to have to cook with wild rice today. I think playing the COVID-19 lottery, by going to the shops once a day, is risky enough. Wild rice is meant to be healthier anyway.
A Slow Down In New Cases
According to the figures I see, and articles in the press, it seems that the Pandemic has reached a plateau and we may be able to feel optimistic about the end coming in two or three weeks. Of course we have to be wary. With good weather more people are going out to enjoy the conditions, and the likelihood of another flareup is high if people are not careful.
Having said this I saw a tweet that the Canton De Vaud judiciary is going to start work again today, I saw that a shop selling coffee was open again and that a pet shop was open again too. These could be seen as signs, that more people are optimistic that things are improving.
Societal Change
I see that people are discussing whether society will have changed when this is all over and I believe that it will not have because of two key reasons. The first is that the wealthy, those with the power to effect change, will not have suffered like those that do not have the power to effect change. As a result many things will remain the same.
The second factor is rate of infection. When China was infected every other nation on earth had the opportunity to react, but as we see, after Italy was infected, no societies changed. Switzerland, France, Spain, The United Kingdom and the United States did not change.
It took governments saying “stay home, and self-isolate” for people to take action. To me this is a clear sign that the societal change people idealise is just that, an ideal.
Update: Victorian England was afraid of germs and diseases, which is why they wore white gloves and tried to keep their homes clean. The problem is that the paint they used to cover their walls was poisoning them, as was makeup and other elements of everyday life.
Side Effect
I have seen the headline in French and English that according to some people, the earth is less seismically active than usual. As none of the reputable news services have written about this story I am seeing it as just a curiousity, rather than something serious. It’s more likely that with less traffic, whether cars, trucks or planes, that seismometers, may detect less background noise.
In theory now would be the perfect time to have the LHC running, as there is less background noise.
In an age where mobile video streaming is cheap in comparison to the past it’s a shame that youtube do not showcase this technology and have three hundred people streaming from one city for example. Why is it that they chose to cover live music events instead.
Of course music is cheap to cover, excluding rights issues. Get three or four cameras in a room to cover the action on stage, two or three more cameras backstage and you’ve got a program, That’s not all though. It’s something you can rehearse. The singers do their sound checks, the vision mixers and directors know the music, know the cues. Everything can be well orchestrated. The production will be flat and boring.
The BBC stopped top of the pops and now you’ve got Youtube doing live music programs. Of course it’s a different program, of course it’s a different technology, but of course it’s just one more step on the trip towards a different age of television.
I love new media and new technology but I wish they would do something more creative with their time. Look at Autumn watch for example. Camera crews went to beautiful landscapes to cover the wildlife. They even broadcast whilst scuba diving. They use the website as an addition and they’re doing some outdoor event. That’s what we need more of.
In an age where everyone walks around with a video camera, whether flip, mobile phone or other so the broadcaster, especially when it comes to entitities like youtube, should reflect their user’s method of covering the world. They should get out of the studio and get twenty cameras in a city, and cover everything that’s going on in real life, nothing setup. Just capture life as it happens.
If that’s too boring then do some research, see of a live event that you could cover, whether it’s a car show where you’ve got lot’s of drifting, a festival where you’ve got hundreds of things happening at once or a ski resort where you’ve got snowboarders, skiers and other activities taking place.
You could have cameras at the telesièges, at the teleski, you could have some at the summit and some on the other side of the valley filming as people ski down. You could have dynamic cameras.
Just get out of that studio and give us something that’s not an advert for someone’s latest single. That’s just dull.
The Worldcommunity grid is a datagrid style project where almost half a million people are offering computer cycles to help advance scientific research in a number of fields such as health, nutrition and more. One of the most recent projects to be added to the collection is the one for Influenza. If you so chose you can help speed up the process of finding a solution to the influenza problem.
Two or three weeks ago they said that it may take up to four months to find a solution to the Swine Flu virus. Now take into account the WHO’s effort to get a number of research labs to work in collaboration against the SARS virus and it’s interesting. Apparently it took four days to learn everything there was to know about the nature of the virus but not how to cure it.
That’s where the World Community grid Influenza project comes in. The more computers are used to run models to see which are the best solutions to research the quicker we may have a way of dealing with this new virus.
The project is free and here are the projects you can currently help with;
Help Fight Childhood Cancer
Influenza Antiviral Drug Search
Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy – Phase 2
FightAIDS@Home
Human Proteome Folding – Phase 2
Discovering Dengue Drugs – Together
Help Conquer Cancer
Nutritious Rice for the World
The Clean Energy Project
I have just three kilometres to go before I reach the Activity goal of walking 298.8 kilometres in a month. Reaching the goal in and of itself is relatively easy. What makes it a challenge is doing it during a pandemic when you need to keep a safe distance from everyone. Some days I got tired of avoiding people so I felt like giving up but I kept at it and now I know I will succeed.
298.8 kilometres is shorter than the distance you cover for the Via Alpina from Lichtenstein to Montreux on the Via Alpina. I didn’t have much vertical travel walking locally but I did get to know the local countryside better. I’ve explored even more variants than over the last two years.
I avoided the shops entirely today. I know they will be busy and that it will be impossible to avoid people. It’s not worth the frustration. During COVID-19 as a single person you have all of the pressures of society without any of the advantages.
It’s a fantastic time for couples. Imagine being with your loved one 24 hours a day, imagine not having to see each other’s friends. It’s like a couple’s retreat or a honeymoon but rather than lasting for a weekend, or a week it’s lasting for up to a few months. Such a rare and privileged position to be in. I’d have found it so good when I was in relationships not to have to go out and see their friends sometimes.
During my walk I saw this sign from a theatre along one of my routes. I also saw that the Barbecue and Flammenkuche place is still going. I’d like to think that rather than ordinary life being frozen as Chappate joked in one of his cartoons life has been reset and now it’s time to adapt to a new way of being.
If we’re lucky enough not to be trapped at home then this is the time when we invent new careers, new way of doing things. We can be early adopters and alpha testers of a new model. If I wanted I could eat Hamburgers and Flammenkuche and I could even have some flowers to go with the meal. Of course, I’d do it in solitude for now.
Solitude is not hard. It’s not having opportunities to have more that’s hard. A woman said “I’m feeling lonely on twitter, I lost six followers” and an army of men started following her and suddenly she had a crowd. By then I had unfollowed. I want to be a conversation, not a statistic.
I should prepare dinner now. The sun is setting and I’m terrible at eating at a reasonable time at the moment. The meal is quick to prepare anyway.
The lac de Joux eventually froze over completely. As a result of this you could walk on the ice. Some people were kitesurfing whilst others were having Marrons chaud. In one or two places you could see that the water level had decreased as a result of which the ice sheet had broken.
Walking across the ice was an interesting experience. The ice can be seen through. Due to recent snow melt on the ice you were walking through a few centimeters of water in place. The feeling is disconcerting.
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