In the age of drones this is how shark reporting should be done. The Coast guard or local surfing schools should fly a drone around and check to see whether there are any sharks present. If and when they spot a shark or groups of sharks they could temporarily close the beach until the threat is gone. It reduces the need for shark nets. It also reduces the need and desire to kill any shark that is spotted as people are informed ahead of this time.
The report tells us that the sharks in the video are juveniles and that the reason for which they are on this section of beach might be linked to a dead whale floating “about eight miles away in that direction”. There is no sensationalism. We are given the facts. The report then tells people that if they do want to swim or surf and be safe they should stay near the lifeguard tower.
When a whale dies it provides sharks with enough food for days or even weeks. It provides them with food until it looses buoyancy and sinks to the bottom of the sea where crabs and eels eat the remains. I’m sharing the second video because we see divers photographing and filming sharks as they eat a whale carcass. We see how close they get without any difficulties.
There are a number of interesting documentaries to learn more about sharks and I recommend watching Sharkwater because it shows that rather than sharks being a threat to us it is us that are a threat to sharks. By taking a calm and rational approach to sharks we are helping preserve the ecosystem. By learning to cohabit with these animals we are allowing future generations a chance to see these animals. With today’s technology we can monitor risk, especially on calm and clear days.
The title of this post is a joke, not a serious delusion of isolation. I saw that a few sunflowers had come out but that they were looking away, rather than towards me. They are looking at the morning sun and I was walking in the afternoon. They are still in the process of coming out.
Today I was asked if I wanted to go to a restaurant and I automatically said no. Given the data about the rising number of cases in Switzerland it makes no sense to go to towns or cities, and to eat in a crowded place, rather than to continue self-isolating. If I was okay with crowds at this stage in the pandemic I would have gone to the IFSC World cup. I am not fine with crowds, when the number of sick is rising.
One issue is that there seems to be no data for the Canton de Vaud for the last week or two. I don’t know whether that means that there are no cases, or that they have not been counted. Haute Savoie and Geneva are going up, so Vaud should follow.
The table above illustrates why it makes sense not to meet people in towns, cities, restaurants or other places. There is a chance that you could continue as normal, and be fine, but if enough people think that way then large crowds form, and what was safe, in small numbers, becomes a breeding ground for large numbers. At this point, it’s better to walk in the countryside and be ignored by sunflowers.
If I had been asked “Do you want to come over” then I would have said yes, without hesitation. I said no because in my opinion, and according to the data I see, it is not safe to risk spending time around crowds, for now.
When the pandemic ends I look forward to meeting new people to do new things, but for now the likelihood of this happening is low. Yesterday’s solo bike ride was good. I avoided the roads where traffic is aggressive as much as possible, and kept to the more rural, quieter paths. The weather was perfect yesterday.
Today, during the entire walk I felt that it would rain at any minute, but it didn’t. It stayed dry, and that’s good because I was not equipped for the rain.
Catching the train to Geneva and back to Nyon costs about 14CHF per day, depending on whether you have paid 180 CHF for the half fare or not. In contrast two Continent GP 5000 tires cost about 110CHF and you can go to Geneva and back a few hundred times.
The loop from Nyon to Geneva is about 20-30 kilometres. This is a very easy distance to cycle once you get to the right level of fitness. I have cycled to Geneva and back multiple times recently because I want to habituate myself to the journey but also because I want to prove to myself that I don’t need trains and other forms of public transport.
I often caught the train to Geneva and back when I was working for three or more employers. I got used to the journey but eventually I learned that the journey took about two and a half hours a day. Around an hour one way, and one and a half hours the other. Cycling to Geneva takes 40-50 minutes but at least I’m working out while I’m commuting. If I catch the train then my workout is a 20 minute walk, and then I wait for a train, fiddle with the phone, and then feel frustrated that Swiss commuters walk so slowly.
In the reverse direction I hated waiting 15-20 minutes for a train to take me to where I wanted to go. That’s where the bike comes in.
If I have somewhere safe to store the bike, and if I can shower and change clothes, then commuting by bike would become a pleasure, rather than a chore. Cycling is enjoyable. Commuting by train, and by car is a chore.
We need more people to see cycling as an option, rather than buses and trains. Buses and trains are as much of a problem as cars, because they encourage people to be lazy. The other flaw of buses and trains is that they are inflexible.
If I was unlucky commuting home then I would miss the bus, have to wait an hour, and the bus journey would take 50 minutes. I’d waste two hours, for a one hour walk. It was as fast to walk, as to take a bus. That’s why I hate buses. Between the time you wait, and the time the bus takes it is very often just as fast to walk, especially for small hops.
We need cycling to become a serious and viable option. Cars, buses and trains are keeping us prisoner. If we move around by bike then we gain our freedom. Bikes are fast, have minimal carbon footprint, and open up the world.
Today’ I’d like to discuss stricter measures. Coop and Migros both have online shops set up for home delivery but the system is overloaded by people ordering at the same time. They don’t have the truck fleet or staff to cope with the demand so I suggest a better solution.
Both Digitec and Galaxus allow people to order online and choose which shop they want to pick up their purchases. This idea is relevant today because Migros, Coop and other shops are now forcing people to queue outside shops before being allowed to go in and make their purchases.
Queuing, whilst keeping shops from getting crowded inside, will increase the risk of propagation of the virus outside the shops. People have a tendency not to stand with the minimum of two-meter distance separation. The larger the crowd the longer the queue, and the longer the wait the higher the probability of contagion.
If we could shop online and request distribution from a specific point the time we spend at the shops would be cut down to a minute or two and it would have the added benefit that we would not even need to go into the shop. I don’t want to go to the shops at all if I need to queue but there is no choice.
The system they put in place yesterday will result in more, rather than less hoarding and increase the amount of time people spend in proximity to others.
Having said this the graph for Vaud has flattened but I don’t know whether this is because they ran out of test kits or whether they have failed to update the figures at the time when I wrote this blog post. I hope the worst is over for this Canton.
Today I could have taken the scooter to some shops but I went for a walk. The result of that walk is that I reached twenty one thousand five hundred steps. I often take a lot of steps per day. I wish I was walking somewhere more interesting than in circles.
According to Sports tracker my daily workouts saved 4.74 kilograms of CO2 this month.
I was amused during this walk. The wind is so strong at the moment that as I tried to play the Harmonica as I walked into the wind I found that the wind itself was playing my harmonica. If I blew then I won, but if I drew then I was competing against the wind. Boring people get wind chimes. I think that people should get harmonicas instead of wind chimes. Wind chimes are audio kitsch. Harmonicas are not, because they’re rarer.
This recording is from yesterday’s walk in the wind rather than today’s. The audio was recorded from the airpods, I think. I wasn’t sure you would hear the harmonica over the sound of the wind but it worked.
The wind has to be going at, at least, 25km/h if I remember correctly for the reeds to resonate enough to make noise.
In other news I have read more than once that trawlers are now trawling for krill within superods of whales. I read a few days ago about how fishermen are hoovering the sea of krill to feed farmed salmon. Humans are destroying the sea to such a degree that they are now hoovering up krill, leading to whales and other mammals to starve. We should not be wasting money and fuel to farm something in a juvenile state. It’s bad enough that humans destroy other parts of the marine food chain but this is a step too far.
As a diver people always asked “But what is there to see when you dive” and the truth is “nothing, because of overfishing, in Swiss lakes and the mediterranean. The paradox is that with a marine reserve aquatic life comes back and thrives quite easily. People fly to Fiji and other locations to see plenty of fish but if Europeans, and others, worked to preserve their marine diversity, through marine parks then we would have more fish to see underwater. The marine eco-system needs us to leave it alone, to recover, so that fish reach maturity, so that we see large whales, fish and more.
We’re in day 29 of ORCA in Switzerland and I have an ever increasing desire to go for a hike. During today’s walk I listened to two podcasts about hiking and I walked yet another variant of my usual walk. Apple tree blooms are increasing in number and the Colza looks almost ready to harvest.
We’re also going into a dry summer. During this pandemic we have hardly had any rain for a month. The whole of Switzerland is either yellow, orange or red with the risk of fire. I’ve been walking outdoors with a t-shirt.
We could be under the illusion that Switzerland has beaten the virus but that’s an illusion, because the risk of a new center of contagion is possible. We have to continue self-isolating. Today two children cycled too close to me so I crossed to the opposite side of the road because they stopped and would pass me again.
Today I’m getting to grips with the new normal. The new normal is queuing like people did before self-checkout and other technology. We also need to queue to get into shops and you either need to take a trolley or a shopping bag if you want to buy things. No more baskets as they are harder to disinfect and keep clean.
“Pardon me, miss, but you can’t use these trolleys, you need to use those trolleys. This is the column of trolleys that still need to be disinfected.” That’s the scene I saw when I went to the shops around lunchtime. That’s a mistake you only make once during a pandemic.
Normally I go to one shopping centre that I need to get to by scooter rather than by foot, to avoid food being out of the fridge for more than 15 minutes. As pandemic measures have been added I am now considering another shop that is smaller and with a smaller maze when getting into the shop for food.
There is a visible change in the streets and on the motorway. You see that traffic density is decreasing and that the number of people walking are lower. People are settling into a new routine, a new way of life, a new culture. Pandemics do force society to adapt to new cultural norms.
As you see from the Swiss weather app the level of air pollution has gone down as people go from a routine that required a car for almost everything to a routine that no longer requires the car. There is no need to commute to socialise and there is no need to commute for work. Train services have been reduced two or three times as demand declined, and then declined again.
We are going back to a “village” life. We are walking locally and people are discovering the routes that I have walked for two or three years by now. If Google or Strava show a heatmap of walking patterns I am sure that we would see that people are living within a six to ten kilometre radius of home, where leaving the house for walks in the sun is still allowed.
France, England and Spain are forcing people to stay home now, so life in those countries is going to shift in the next three or four days. There is a lag from the moment the restrictions are put in place and the moment when people have no opportunity to flout the rules.
Traffic did not decline in a single day. It took a few days. The motorbike groups that we saw during the first week have stopped and so have the columns of cars. Petrol stations now seem to be quiet. People are driving less, so refueling is less frequent.
I have walked 276km of the 298.8 kilometre walking challenge for this month and I’m tired. I’m happy that the goal is now just 3.1km a day. I can reach it by walking to the food shop, shopping and walking back. when the challenge is finished I will probably revert to using the indoor trainer.
At the start of quarantine, I thought that I would cycle a lot but advisories came out saying that people should avoid activities where they could be injured and I injured myself cycling last spring, so I’d rather avoid the same injury when there is a good chance that the wait in a hospital may be time-consuming.
I was wrong to think that this would be over quickly, and now that I see we are in it for a while I will adapt my goals accordingly. Things I thought I could get away with not doing will now be done. This includes looking for work again more than anything else. My other daily goals are going well. Writing a blog post is consistent, studying German is on day 197. My daily walk is still going and finally listening to podcasts in German is still going.
Quarantine is about developing habits and keeping to them, and then adding new goals as you go, so that despite life being strange (link to the game by that name unintentional) we continue moving forward. Who knows, we might even start to thrive.
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