Cows And Trees In The Jura
A Swiss rural scene in Switzerland.
Today I saw a picture of a frog sitting in a sauce pan on a cooker speaking to another, saying “I Know the water is heating up but that’s the next generation’s problem” and this can be a comment on a few things. The first, linear comment is of course about global warming and its consequences for current and future generations. Every generation, we, as children, want to make a better place when we grow up. The realities of adulthood make this more of a challenge than we had anticipated.
The second comment, and the one I leapt to is about the habit of saying “We’re safe, everyone can remove their masks and meet in big groups this summer, before, when winter comes, seeing that there is a huge new wave of Covid cases. In my eyes summer is the best time to work towards Covid Zero and be like most of Asia, New Zealand, and before recent changes, Australia.
The existential part of today’s blog post title comes, from knowing that the pandemic will get much worse again, and that we are windmilling towards another wave. Data I saw today suggests that the next wave is already on its way back. If this is true then self-isolation is not absurd.
In Summer it does feel absurd to self-isolate but at the same time there is evidence that it is not absurd, that it is rational, and normal. Another existential question is whether I want or need friendships anymore. It has been at least five years since I have had any. Any need, or deep desire has been muted years ago. Years ago I cried with pain, due to solitude. Now I think I’m blazé about solitude. I feel that if I wasn’t growing older I would be completely fine with the pandemic solitude I am currently living with, as well as the solitude I felt before the pandemic.
We couldn’t live in self-isolation for two years, going into the third if we were convinced that we needed to have a social life and all that other crap. People will think this is posturing but I’ve been solitary since some of my earliest memories. The pandemic doesn’t help. Neither does job insecurity, and neither does having to drive to see people who will never return the favour.
One of my reasons for not wanting to do things, either alone or with people, is that if you do things with people you need to walk close to other people who are not wearing masks. If you go to walk a mountain path it will be narrow and people will not be masked. If you wear a mask you will looked at as if you were swearing at them whilst playing a bagpipe. You do get strange, disapproving looks when you wear masks.
I don’t mind in the shops when I buy food, but in stairwells and other places it is uncomfortable. This discomfort is the government’s fault, for spreading disinformation about the pandemic being over, when it clearly isn’t.
Trevor Noah was at the correspondent’s dinner two nights ago and called it a super spreader event. This morning I saw multiple reports of people testing positive for covid, and aranet4 readings in the 2000+ range of c02 parts per million. Western countries are constantly selling the lie that the pandemic is over, when all of the data and previous seven waves prove are premature. The Northern Hemisphere should work towards Covid Zero but has chosen covid denialism instead, so the window of opportunity to stop covid before window is being missed. Spring and summer are the ideal opportunity to get to Covid Zero with the lowest social cost.
We have provided the virus with a pilot light of opportunities to spread this summer and we will pay the price in September, yet again.
When I check glocals I see that no events are planned anyway, so i am not missing out at the moment. Those that do sports where groups meet, and use cars, are still self isolating. it is only the alcoholics and others that are meeting and socialising without masks during a pandemic.
And that’s it for today. Less euphoric than sometimes, but this situation induces a level of fatigue that we just have to get used to.
On Google Plus, one of my muses, I saw that instead of Street photography someone suggested Village photography. I like the idea because villages are such an integral part of my life.
Life in villages is a privileged one. Every time we go for a walk we cross people we do not know and say hello. We walk from field to field and along paths. We see which crops have been planted and which ones are being harvested. We see frequent horses and dog walkers. We also see families. We hear the sound of rifle practices at the local gun range. The practice is for military service most of the time.
We also have fountains and old buildings. We hear the church bell every half hour and hour. We see the fountains with wooden chalet to protect from the cold in winter.
Villages are seasonal. In summer the sounds of children playing, of fireworks and of barbecues can be heard. In Autumn the sound of wind blowers can be heard. In Winter we see lights on as the neighbours prepare their evening meal.
In the mornings we see parents bring their children to school before the bell rings and they head in to their classes to sit and wait impatiently for the school day to be over so that they may go out on adventures.
That’s why village photography captivates my imagination. I know villages well. I appreciate them. I look forward to looking at images from the past, and preserving today for future generations.
Several years ago I needed to download TomTom and I needed the latest map updates if I wanted to drive from Switzerland to England or from Switzerland to France, or to Spain. Thanks to roaming I now have a much broader choice.
TomTom was good in another era, when we had to pay roaming fees. We downloaded the relevant maps. We set off, and the GPS would guide us from A to B and that was that. I tried doing the same with Waze, hoping that the entire map would be downloaded when I set off, only to find that eventually I went off of the downloaded map and I had no more information due to a switch from Spanish to French roaming on a Swiss contract. I made it home, but it showed the limitation of roaming at the time.
Recently I drove from Switzerland to Spain, using roaming, but this time with 30 gigs of data on the current contract. I used just 200 megabytes, according to my recollection, with no issues. This was with Waze. Waze and Google maps are the same today, so I could just cut the middle app, and go straight for the behemoth. I can also play and experiment with Apple maps. They have had time to fix teething problems.
The issue that I have had with both TomTom and Waze is at night. Neither of these apps automatically switches to night mode. I couldn’t find that option. Driving at night, with a map in daylight mode is inconvenient. This is a good reason not to use both of the traditional apps, and move towards Apple Maps and Google Maps. Both have plenty of settings to make navigation less distracting.
I want to support TomTom Go because it is 12 CHF per year, and it’s European, but I can’t find a way to pay them directly, rather than going through Apple so I may drop them when the contract runs out. As to Waze, I lost interest the moment it was bought by Google, since it meant that we were helping a wealthy behemoth, rather than a small startup.
I have been playing with GPS since I was a child, but initially I was using hiking GPSs with no proper display. I then played with car GPS before moving on to mobile phones, and since a few weeks I have been playing with in-built GPS. I find the in-built GPS experience is easy, and I like that the passenger, I haven’t had a passenger, since we’re in a pandemic, can set up the routing options from the comfort of the phone. Concurrently, I can set off the nav system from my home, and then walk down, plug in the phone, and then use it for navigation, from A to B.
Back in the day I sometimes printed out instructions, to navigate… things have really changed since then. When you’re used to GPS apps navigation is simple. Now to play with two new apps, and see how they compare to the two apps I have prioritised, until now.
It is important to know that you are in Justified Self-Isolation. Over the last three or four days I have felt like an idiot for self-isolating, but I now see that this is entirely justified. The R number for some canton went from 0.70 or so up to 1.4 or higher in recent days. This is for Bern, Geneva and Vaud, and it should spread more with the weekend.
As tough as it is to keep self-isolating and not meeting people the change of this board from light orange to dark red has been very fast. What’s worse is that this data is from the 25th of June. This isn’t data from today.
The R number for Switzerland is 1.45 and the Delta Variant, at the time of their data was 40 percent. This means that we are in for another autumn and winter of self-isolation. There is talk from Pfizer of a third booster shot. It seems that the effectiveness declines after 6 months.
In the past when I heard about pandemics, and highly infectious diseases, I was always under the impression that the aim was to contain and prevent the spread of a virus. During this pandemic, this was definitely true during the first few months of the pandemic. As we move forward though the aim of getting to a transmission rate of zero for two weeks in a row, before easing restrictions seems to have been abandoned. This does not make sense. Containing a virus makes sense, because as we have seen, if it is given enough opportunities it mutates, again and again, and each time the danger and threat level increase.
This time from the lifting of sanctions to the R number increasing has been short. Within two or three weeks of the lifting of restrictions, we see that active self-isolation is justified. It is a shame that more people do not watch the news, and react appropriately. It feels as though, if the government does not give people orders, they will not protect themselves, or each other. Furthermore, it is a shame, as self-motivation is better, than having to be told what to do.
Today I played with the Iphone 3g and was left indifferent. That’s because aside from having the same design as both the ipod touch and the 1st generation iphones it doesn’t offer anything innovative. What really interests me is the idea of more data.
Last month i did quite a bit of data streaming. 100 megabytes inclusive of my current setup. I also used quite a bit of extra data. With the Iphone 3g Plan I’d get 1 gigabyte of data per month, ten times more at relatively little extra.
When I can get the Natel Liberty Grande paired with the Nokia N95 then I’ll be happy. Until then I’ll feel that they could do better.