A Warm Octobre

A Warm Octobre

Byrichard

This morning I saw someone walking in shorts and a t-shirt and I saw more people in t-shirts. Switzerland is currently 8°c warmer than it should be at this time of year, and drier. The sun is shining and it rarely rains. The weather is stable and sunny, every single day, for weeks or even months at a time. We had a few minutes of rain recently but no more than that.

The Swiss Weather service wrote a blog post about how hot and sunny Septembre was.

The Mont Blanc lost two meters in height and glaciers have shrunk at record levels due to the heat on one side, and the complete lack of precipitation on the other. I saw a few articles this morning about how drought is affecting hydroelectric dams. Without rainfall there is no water to pump through those generators.

I think I cycled by a water wheel that I had not seen turning for months. I cycled by, and one day I noticed that the wheel was turning. It had rained recently so the waterwheel finally had water to generate hydro-electric power. As soon as it rains that wheel can spin, and power is generated.

The wheel is in a rational place. It’s in a valley, where the sun doesn’t shine for as many hours a day, so it makes sense to let water and gravity do some work.

And Finally

As I walked I looked at some trees and you clearly see the line on trees between where the sap has stopped flowing, and where it is still flowing. It’s as if there was a water level. In effect there is. I had not noticed this before.

Road Side Fires and Hashtags

Road Side Fires and Hashtags

Byrichard

There is a level three risk of foresst fires at the moment. Now is a time when smoking and other forms of fire should be forbidden. Now is the time of year where the sides of roads catch alight easily. Forests are at risk.


Yesterday when driving home I spotted a fire by the side and I reported it on Waze. They don’t have a “warn about roadside fires” option yet. I have now added it as a suggestion.The sooner a fire can be reported, the sooner firefighters or other emergency services can put it out.


Hashtags


I hate hashtags. I have tweeted my hate for them since they came out in 2007  or 2008. I hate them because I came to the web when meta information was meant to be hidden in the meta data of a page, not plastered as white text on a white background to spam search engines.


I was playing with the Pixelfed iOS app yesterday and I wanted to explore the social network. I gave up within seconds. I scrolled down and I saw that rather than sub groups that were for cats, dogs, lemmings, landscapes and more the sub categories, or categories were hashtags.


Why Hashtags are crap


Hashtags are crap for two reasons. The first of these, as I argued back in 2007-2008 is that it makes it easy for spammers to look for a hashtag and start to spam a conversation with little to no effort. It neutralises the possiblity of good engaged conversations, especially around some topics.


The second reason is that with WordPress, Hugo and other content management system style services you can generate pages with tags and categories directly.


The Origin of the Hashtag


People forget that the hashtag was developed when Twitter was an SMS compatible system. Hashtags would allow people to quickly and easily see the topic of a tweet withing having to read the entire text. Now though, in the age of dedicated apps, the hashtag is obsolete, and should be destroyed.


Threads Wants Hashtags


I’m writing about this topic because I saw that Pixelfed uses hashtags, rather than tags or categories, which I find absurd, but also because I see that Threads wants to implement hashtags.


So Called Ugly URLs


The same culture that calls hyperlinks with extentions ugly is fine with #tags. That’s absurd. As an archivist and Media asset manager I think that having /topic/index.html that resolves to /topics/  is much uglier than /topic/ducks.html because when you want to find a file you need to sort through thousands of index.html files that mean nothing if you don’t read the front matter of the files.


Hashtags are Fashion Over Function


Hashtags, in my eyes, are fashion over function. By adding a tags text field, you could add keywords/tags, and have the software create relevant hyperlinks. Tags work extremely well on Hugo,and categories work well on WordPress. We don’t need to use ugly hashtags, when proper meta data practices would do the same thing, without wasting characters.


An Alternate Solution For Idiots Like Me


The alternate solution, to keep idiots like me, happy, would be to see that someone wrote hashtag keyword, and have the website parse the hashtag and turn it into a hyperlink to that keyword automatically. We have had href tags for decades, and that’s why hashtags are so absurd.


It encourages me to see that not everyone puts hashtags in every post on Mastodon.

Muddy Shoes and a Drought

Muddy Shoes and a Drought

Byrichard

Every morning the landscape is covered in frost. That frost melts and turns to water, which in turn, turns to mud, and cakes my shoes. Unfortunately there has been no rain for weeks, and there is no rain expected for weeks. We are in another drought although most people will not call it that, yet. They prefer to enjoy the sunshine and ignore the deeper problem.


This risk of drought is recognised. The RTS wrote about how people are getting water tanks, due to the regularity of droughts. The problem is so bad that aside from the article about people buying water tanks to store their own rain water there is another one speaking about how the underground water table is at risk. “Il faudrait donc qu’il pleuve quasiment non-stop jusqu’à fin mars pour que les nappes phréatiques retrouvent leur niveau normal”. It would need to rain non-stop for two weeks for the water tables to find their required levels.


I miss the rain. I miss the rain because when it rains it feels like a treat to have good weather. I miss the rain because I like the sound it makes on the roof. I miss the rain because it fills the rivers and makes them interesting to watch. I miss the rain because without rain the sky becomes boring. There is no reason to look at the sky, or to look at weather apps when the weather never changes.


One of the most flagrant changes, when there is enough rain, is how the grass and other plants grow, by the side of the road. Paths that were easy to walk along, before rain, would become more challenging to walk along, when the rain has given the plants the water they need to grow. It means less grass cutting, it means fewer plants growing. We’re in spring now, and without rain we will not see plants germinate in the usual way.


I miss bad weather because the pandemic isn’t over, and there is nothing to be gained from the weather being good. Good weather is monotonous.

A Tractor Ploughing A Dry Field in Switzerland

A Tractor Ploughing A Dry Field in Switzerland

Byrichard

Today a tractor was ploughing a dry field. A cloud of dust was not that visible but you can see that rain would now be welcome. I walked by the usual river and looked down and the rocks in the riverbed are uncovered. There is no water running over them anymore. I notied that in another field pumpkins seem to be ready.


A dry Field In Switzerland
A dry Field In Switzerland


https://twitter.com/meteosuisse/status/1432303148119560193
Lack of rainfall in August


MétéoSuisse note encore qu’après les deux mois d’été très humides de juin et juillet, des précipitations inférieures à la moyenne ont été enregistrées dans la plupart des régions de Suisse en août

Météo – Un mois d’août plus frais mais avec moins de pluie – 20 minutes


Years ago I used to use weather apps to see when it would rain and I would even do things extra early to avoid being caught by the rain. Now I use weather apps for the opposite. Now I even consider driving to somewhere where I could be caught by the rain. I am bored of never seeing rain. I like rain. I like the sound. I like the smell, I like that it cleans everything. I also like that being indoors when it’s raining feels cosy.


Rain would also break the monotony of being able to go for a walk every single day without questioning whether the weather the weather is good enough. The weather is always good enough. The weather is so good that rivers are running dry. The climate has changed.


For several weeks I did not touch YouTube and as I have time to spend time there again I found that I am repulsed and don’t want to use the service anymore. Between the sensationalist content that is pushed on us, the non stop adverts and a general feeling of malaise the site is one I think I should now avoid. Its golden age is over, and now it’s time for it to become Yahoo or flickr.

Signs of Drought

Signs of Drought

Byrichard

Today as I walked I could see clear evidence that Switzerland is now dry. As you walk by the side of the road you see that it is yellow, and that there is no growth. Crops are withering away and water gauges are now filling with dust, rather than rain.


We now go for weeks without rain. If I wanted to pick up the soil it would crumble in my hands and blow away as dust. I see that one of the local rivers is drying up again.


  • A dry water meter
    A dry water meter – There is very little rain
  • View of Grass and the Alps
    View of Grass and the Alps
  • Dry grass by the river side
    Dry grass by the river side
  • Dry grass by the river side
    Dry grass by the river side


La Suisse bientot à court d’eau


Malgré la pluie, la forêt valaisanne est déjà en danger d’incendie