Vue from the Vallée de Joux
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The First WHO/Europe Indoor Air Conference

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Yesterday we could of the first indoor air quality conference. It was available in French, German, Russian and English. The link is to the English language version.

This is an interesting conference to have because, as two or more speakers highlighted, we spend up to 80 percent of our lives indoors, whether at work, at school, at home or at play. Think of indoor climbing for example, or the gym, and restaurants. By spending so much time indoors it is important to think about how we aerate but also ensure that air is healthy.

One speaker said “We’re never taught how to properly aerate buildings, we just improvise”. This is interesting, and you can see this during a heatwave. A few years ago I worked in an office on the ground floor. It would get very warm. I had no air conditioning so with trial and error I learned that if I opened the window, and the door to the rest of the building I could get a nice draft to cool down. By doing this I created a draft but this brings us to the second issue.

The air from outside may not be idea. A speaker dealing with TB patients in Siberia said that when it’s -42°c outside you can’t open windows to get fresh air, without freezing, so you need to find other solutions. In other cases you may open a window for fresh air but you may get ozoneor other forms of air pollution so it makes sense not to expose yourself to the health consequences of breathing that air.

Another speaker spoke about air, in contrast to mineral water. He spoke about how we filter out some materials from water, but preserve others. Look at the info on a brita filter. “We filter these things out but we preserve magnesium and caclium” or something to that effect. The point is that some things that are in the air may be worth keeping. He didn’t specify what we should keep.

He also went on to say that we should have an air quality index, to standardise how clean air should be. Another speaker went so far as to say that we have fire regulations for occupancy in case of fire and sitting space but we should also have maximum occupancy regulations, in relation to air circulation and cleaning.

The list of Speakers

And Finally

As buildings become airtight, so the need to ensure that the air within is healthy, becomes paramount. Since we spend 80 percent of our time indoors it is critical, for our health, to ensure that the air we breath is healthy. I hope that this conference gathers momentum and becomes critical moving forward.

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Twitter, As a Joke
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Twitter, As a Joke

Byrichard

Twitter went down and I didn’t notice, yet again. According to The Verge it has been down five times in five weeks. It goes down so regularly that it feels as if they have allowed the Netflix Chaos Monkey to run freely around Twitter code. They say that they need to rewrite the entire site.


Twitter had plenty of downtime many years ago but these were growing problems that were eventually resolved. It would go for months or even seasons without serious issues. They had learned how to make Twitter reliable. Now that so many staff have been fired the people with less experienced are stuck, trying to understand the old logic, and failing.


They want to rewrite the entire website. I wish them good luck. I don’t see how they can when they’re firing people, and overloading those that are left behind, with work.


“This paved the way for a single engineer to be staffed on a major project — one that is linked to several critical interconnected systems that both users and employees depend on. “

https://www.theverge.com/2023/3/6/23627875/twitter-outage-how-it-happened-engineer-api-shut-down


Google Reader, Jaiku, and plenty of services have lived, thrived and eventually been abandonned. Twitter is not something I rely on anymore, so whether it lives or dies, at this point, doesn’t matter.


I am no longer invested in the social network. I am no longer invested in social media, because social media has shown that it is a glossy mag, rather than a social network. Glossy mags are not social networks. They are advert sellers. I loved Twitter. I expect nothing now.


And Finally


I don’t want to use Twitter anymore for the same reason I stopped using Facebook and Instagram. I don’t trust those in charge to be moral. I expect that our data and attention will be exploited. We will be used.


I am not a user. I am a community member. Destroy the community, like you did with Facebook and Instagram, and I will migrate.


My issue with Twitter is not that it goes down, but why it goes down. I also have issue with who owns and controls it. No social network should be controlled by the Far Right, especially when algorithms affect what you see.

On the Prospect of Re-confinement

Byrichard

Today let’s comment on the prospect of Re-confinement. Plenty of people, when lockdown ended, decided that now was the time to start doing group activities, without masks, and without waiting for the transmission rate to get down to zero. As a prize they had a relatively normal summer, with good memories, stories and pictures to share.


Some of us were short-sighted and silly. We thought “Oh, if we wait another month then life will be back to normal and that’s when we can have an ordinary summer, rather than a summer running on fumes.


That decision resulted in us spending a summer in solitude, which in turn means that we never de-confined. We never went back to socialising and we never did things with people. We never shook hands, never gave hugs, never did group activites outside of our family circles, and even those interactions were limited.


Since March I have been in a car with someone without masks just once. That’s seven months of privation.


Others are protesting at the thought of being confined again, of not being able to go to the bar after 2200 or 0000. They’re complaining because they can’t meet in groups of more than five, or even ten.


I haven’t been in a group of more than five since the pandemic started.


If everyone had sacrificed their social lives from March to the first of August in Switzerland then we would be out of the pandemic now because the virus would have run out of people to infect.


By resuming life as normal we have gone from a low of eleven cases per day to 5950+ yesterday. In the Swiss press they’re writing about us being back to the same situation as we were in March, with hospitals in some cantons, very close to capacity, and in others getting there by Mid-November.


The challenge faced by governments is that they must respect people’s rights, but on the flipside people do not respect their responsibilities towards society. Governments are begging people to “wear the mask, this includes over your nose” and “maintain one and a half meters between yourself and others.” We see how little this is respected by how many new cases are emerging on a daily basis. People do not take their responsibility not to be a disease vector seriously enough so the pandemic that could have been over within two months, is now seven months old, with no prospect for an end.


People are appalled at the prospect of being reconfined but it is their actions that ensured that we would be reconfined. It is because they did not take a break from socialising during the pandemic, that the pandemic could last so long.


People keep saying that pandemics are complicated and complex, which they are, but they’re also simple. If people restrict their interactions to the bare minimum then the virus will not infect seven hundred people in a single day. There walk talk of one person infecting 115 in Switzerland. In a podcast, about another country, one person infected 6000.


Pandemics are unpleasant to live through, and it is for this reason that we should sacrifice all non-essential social interactions until the pandemic is over. The more seriously we take self-confinement, the less opportunities the virus has to spread, and the less opportunities it has to spread, the sooner the pandemic is over, and life can resume.


People want the pandemic to be over, but they’re expecting others to sacrifice, while they continue having their fun and socialising. Pandemics don’t work like that. Everyone must sacrifice, for life to return to normal, and for jobs to return.


The rules, during this pandemic are few, and simple.


  • wear a mask
  • wash your hands
  • Avoid hugs, kisses and handshakes
  • avoid groups of more than five
  • stay one and a half meters from people not in your household.


Are these rules so hard to obey, that they’d rather risk re-confinement than obey them? These are easy rules to obey. It would be a shame to be re-confined because these simple instructions were not accepted.


We go back to a question I was asked a few months ago. “Don’t you worry about being confined for two weeks?” “No, because for as long as the pandemic lasts I am self-confined anyway.” For me nothing changes, until the pandemic ends.

De-Confinement, In Name Only.

Byrichard

Until recently every time Switzerland moved from one phase to another the number of new cases per day increased slightly but with the latest phase the number of cases has increased by four or five times the number of new cases.


From March until mid June we could go to the shops with the recommendation that we should wear a mask but not the obligation. I wore a mask anyway. From Wednesday onwards masks will become obligatory for people visiting the shops, and on public transport. In theory the change is not that big. Wearing a mask to the shops and on publlic transport is not a dramatic change.


Until you consider outdoor sports, in the mountains, where car sharing is an integral part of event organisation. If a shop, with tens of thousands of litres of air is deemed to put people at risk of being infected by the virus then sharing a car with people not in your household becomes impossible.


The summer social season is now impossible. The Swiss government missed three or four opportunities to wait an extra two weeks for the disease to be eradicated from wild transmission before moving on to the next stage. Now, not only is the virus making a comeback, but the measures are stricter than at the peak of new infections in Vaud and Geneva.


Although the virus was almost eradicated from wild transmission in Switzerland the latest phase as ensured that the virus will be around until the end of summer.


For single people, like me, who do almost all of their socialising during the summer months, through summer sports this mistake in policy means that some of us will have another solitary summer, waiting until next summer to socialise.


I’m tired of getting hopeful that we will be able to do outdoor group activities, only to see the progress being nullified and voided, again, and again by the government saying “let’s open up more.”


The truth is that if I’m not driving to the mountains to socialise through climbing, via ferrata, hiking or other outdoor sports then I am not spending much money. I’m not buying petrol. I’m not buying drinks at café at the end of the activity, I’m not buying new gear.


When I walk locally I’m not using the car, I’m not going to cafés, I’m not buying new sporting equipment. I’m not buying snacks and I’m not buying funiculaire tickets.


The notion that we need to risk a resurgence of new COVID-19 cases to restart the economy is a deeply flawed one and we have seen, with every phase, that it makes things worse, at least temporarily. With the latest phase change months of sacrifice have been undone.


We’ve gone from 0-20 new cases a day to 160+ a day.


The graph is steepening again


We have gone from a moving average of 13 new cases per day to a moving average of 77 new cases a day.


For a brief window the virus no longer seemed to be out in the wild but “Le COVID-19 regagne du terrain” and now we’re back to anti-social pandemic mode. Socialising this summer is no longer worth considering.


In conclusion although we’re not in “confinement” we are confined. Until the 21st of June we could live with the hope that the pandemic would almost be over, and that we could socialise with people who like the same sports as us. Due to the government’s policy decisions those plans are destroyed, and we might as well continue studying new skills at home, and going for solitary walks, because nothing else is possible for as long as “economic recovery” gives the virus new opportunities to become virulent again.

Limited Bandwidth and Twitter
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Limited Bandwidth and Twitter

Byrichard

Let’s take a step back from today, and let’s remember the 2006 tech landscape. In 2006 we had Symbian phones, GPRS, text messages. We used the world wide web whilst sitting at computers usually via wifi. We would tweet until the moment we left home, and then we had to rely on SMS to keep in touch with people that we either wanted to meet or communicate with.


At the time phones were small, with just a few lines of text at a time, and little to no media content. We used Twitter and Jaiku because they allowed us, in a time of limited bandwidth, to have a conversation either, sitting at a computer, or by SMS.


Eventually bandwidth and data plans improved and increased, especially with the arrival of the iPhone, but blackberry users had lived in the future for years beforehand.


Twitter benefited from the iPhone, and it was favoured over Jaiku, so it won, but Jaiku offered everything that Twitter took years to offer, in turn.


That twitter has only a third of a million users tells you about the niche that it has, and the use cases that it fails to provide to its users. Medium was spun off from Twitter and others a blogging variant. Facebook, Reddit and two or three other solutions offer web forum style websites.


Twitter lost its niche back in 2007 when it went from being a network of friends of friends, who come across each other, and talk between each other to a hashtag driven, celebrity following mess. It’s when I read this vox article that I thought of the topic.


The web of today is mature. Everyone, or almost, has a smartphone and uses the web for information and staying in touch. Bandwidth is unlimited for many. What we need is not another twitter. What we need is a local, social web, where people that are in the same village, town or country, chat together. For too long the web has been about talking with people thousands of kilometres away. We need to progress towards a local social web.

The Absurdity of Driving Culture
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The Absurdity of Driving Culture

Byrichard

For a long time I thought that driving would give me freedom. I was impatient to be old enough to drive, and then I was impatient to pass my driving test. I failed the theory three times in Switzerland, zero in England, and the practical in England once, and once in Switzerland. Eventually I did pass my driving test in England, on Valentine’s day. I then drove to see the girlfriend of the time.

Driving has given me the freedom to go to and from work without waiting for trains. It has given me the freedom to live according to my schedule, and shifts, rather than other peoples’.

It has also cost me my freedom. The absurdity of driving is that you are responsible for getting drunk friends to their home, and you are responsible for driving people from A to B when you’re hiking, climbing and more. Having a car means that you have to drive to see people who don’t have a car. Driving a car means that you have to make the effort to see others, but they will not make the effort to see you.

The Necessity of Cars

Having a car is about remoteness from work, from play and from more. It’s about always having to get into the car, to do anything:

  • seeing friends
  • shopping for food
  • commuting to work
  • going for a walk
  • going for a bike ride
  • going to snowboard
  • going to a restaurant
  • going to the cinema.

Tonight I have to drive for at least an hour, if I’m not unlucky with traffic, to have a dinner, and then drive home. I have to drive at rush hour by Morges, one of the most awful places for traffic at rush hour. A few years ago I would arrive an early for rock climbing, slightly after Morges, because of how awful traffic was. I got told off by the cashier at the climbing place, for being to early for the special deal the group had. As if that wasn’t enough I eventually struggled to find parkings and got a fine. After that I stopped making the effort.

What sealed the deal was “let’s meet to climb in Gland” and a person answered “no way”. It was fine for me to face traffic but people weren’t ready to do the same for me. All of my friendships died when I decided that I was tired of driving.

When you drive, and when you have space for others it iss assumed that you are ready and willing to drive others,and sometimes you are volunteered, without being asked. This is especially annoying. Picking people up often adds half an hour to an hour to travel time. You become their chauffeur. In one case someone just went to sleep, as if I was a bus driver. It’s great to be so trusted. It’s unpleasant to be so used.

Building More Homes Without Adding More Buses

Recently Vaud has busy building new houses and apartments anywhere with a garden. They have destroyed old single family homes and replaced them with apartment buildings. The result is that there has been a surge of car traffic. This is bad for two reasons. The first reason is that villages that were once filled with green gardens have been turned into tarmac hells. The trees and the grass is gone, replaced by buildings with underground parkings.

The Daily Traffic Jam

Recently I have noticed that the A1 motorway that passes by Nyon is blocked in both directions consistently, as the number of cars and local population increases. They’re happy to “densify” people and villages, but they forgot that densification increases traffic. What were once quiet roads are now saturated with cars.

This morning, due to the motorway being blocked, local roads were blocked too. By increasing housing, without increasing public transport infrastructure there are more cars than ever, using a road network that is not suited to so many cars.

Buses and Bikes Make More Sense

That’s where frequent buses, and dedicated cycle routes would make a huge difference. If it was safe to cycle, rather than drive, then people commuting from villages to Nyon gare could take bikes. With an increased bus schedule people could leave their cars at home and ignore their cars until the weekend, and even then cars could remain parked.

Dormant Start/stop

For context, I have a car with stop/start technology. If I stop at a traffic light the engine stops. When I drive the car it never works, because I use the car twice a week. When other people used my car, this summer, I finally experienced that it starts and stops when it’s at a traffic light.

Before having two summers without a car, and before the pandemic, I didn’t think anything of people’s over-reliance on cars. During the honeymoon of lock downs, when the car was dormant, I got to see how fantastic the area where I live is, for hiking and walking, without getting into a car. I miss the freedom of living without the need to use the car.

Unwanted Journey

Tonight I need to use the car. I need to waste petrol with at least an hour of driving, if traffic is good, and two hours or more if traffic is bad. I don’t mind driving during the day, to do something. I do mind driving at night, to do something that brings me no pleasure.

Escape

If the cleaning Gremlin comes tomorrow afternoon for example, I would be happy to have somewhere to flee to. The point is that today I’m destroying the environment, for nothing.I wouldn’t mind driving for a walk, but I really mind driving for a dinner.

And Finally

At the moment they’re increasing carrying capacity for the motorway entries and exits, and they’re speaking of increasing the motorway to three lanes in each direction. I think this is absurd. I think that rather than encourage more car use they should diminish reliance on cars. More buses, more trains, more safe walking routes. All of these would help reduce traffic, rather than encourage it to grow.

This evening I face the absurdity of driving culture, yet again.

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Another Pandemic Weekend Without Plans

Byrichard

Normally at this time of year, as the snow melts and the temperatures increase the opportunity for spring and summer sports returns. These sports are via ferrata, outdoor climbing, hiking and more. This year is different because although today is Friday no plans have been made for the next two days. There is a excellent chance that I will either hike or cycle alone. Usually I avoid cycling on Saturdays because that is the day when people are anxiously driving between their homes and their shops.


Walking feels like the safer option on such days. It’s usually on Sundays that I like to go for a bike ride, to range a little further than when I am on foot, and to enjoy different sensations. During this pandemic my favourite route is not possible because it crosses the Franco Swiss Border in two places and I prefer to avoid crossing the border unless it is essential.


At the moment the prospect of everyone being vaccinated, and of everyone being able to meet in groups of ten to fifteen to do via ferrata, hike or climb seems unlikely. It would seem that this is another year of relatively solitary sports. Hiking and cycling are good solitary sports because we often go at our own speeds anyway. These are also sports with almost no carbon footprint. You just walk out of your house and enjoy.


Scuba Diving, Climbing, Via Ferrata and other sports sometimes require a two or more hour drive to go to and come back from the activity location. With cycling and local hiking you burn no petrol, except for the rubber soles of your shoes but those wear out quite slowly. We’re speaking grams, rather than litres.


During my walks I often visit the old phone boxes that have been converted into libraries. I browse through the books. Some villages have a good selection of free access books. No one has thought to block access to them during the pandemic.


If I wrote a blog post for every walk or bike ride at the moment it would either be a clockwise or an anti-clockwise loop that always begins and ends in the same place. The main change are the crops, the animals and people I see, and the weather.


Yesterday I did meet someone in the physical world, for a walk, and I came to the conclusion that I much prefer to meet people for bike rides. The problem with walking with people during a pandemic is that you don’t have the freedom to walk into a field or patch of grass as you’re walking “with a person” rather than alone. You’re also working on set paths.


I like to walk along roads and other paths, and I like to change route as soon as I see people come the other way, or to climb up an embankment, or to choose a path between two fields. When I walked in Geneva yestreday I decided to take off my mask because I thought that there would be an opportunity to always be two or more metres from people but this wasn’t the case. If I was alone I would have put the mask on. In this context I didn’t feel as free to do so.


Cycling, during a pandemic, in contrast is excellent. The first reason for this is simple. You’re going at 20 to 30 kilometres per hour so whatever you breathe in or out is going to be diluted into the turbulence that is behind you. The second reason is that you’re on a road or path and the pedestrians you encounter are close for just a second or two, not even two breaths.


The other advantage is that you’re on some type of agricultural or normal road and there are usually not that many people on the same path so it provides us with greater freedom. People are cautious of bikes, but not of other pedestrians. Being on a bike makes us safe.


During my walks I often see people on bikes. Today I was surprised to see three women riding alone. Usually it’s two or three guys at a time, riding together and talking. It makes a nice change. Having said this the conditions today were unpleasant for cycling, a cold strong wind. These are the right conditions to make cycling cold and tiring.


I hope that Sunday will be good for cycling.


How far will we cycle in pandemic solitude? We will have to see.


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