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Switzerland and Renewable Energy
Yesterday while driving the radio was on. Usually I would turn it off because people usually speak about unimportant things. Yesterday was different. Yesterday someone was speaking about solar power and Switzerland. He said that at the moment just 6 percent of houses have solar panels, when it should be closer to 20-30 percent. He also said that instead of destroying pristine nature we should add solar panels to train stations and other buildings.
He went even further. He spoke about the need for architects to think about renewable energies by default, with the addition of solar panels on new buildings and more.
This podcast is so important that I listened to it as it was broadcast, but I also re-listened to it when I got home. There is a walk I have done three or more times in the Jura that goes along the Trans-Jurassienne train lines. Back in the day it generated part of its own energy by using hydroelectric power. You can still see the building where that power was generated.
At one point there was an interview from the 70s or so where the TPG were spoken of as adding solar panels on their buildings to generate their own power. “Why do you do this, do you save money?” “No, but we’re investing in the future, for our children, so that they will have energy.”
They also spoke of a solar powered community near Zurich, where a collaboration between property owners saw them find a way to generate solar power for their own community. This was 50 years ago. Even then people were living in the future, compared to today.
And Finally
Onr of the other points that was covered was the idea that there needs to be a discussion around how to sell and buy energy from a de-centralised energy system where someone on one floor can send energy to a neigbhour on another floor. The issue is that at the moment the grid is still centered around power stations. and with solar, hydro and wind power there could be a shift towards a de-centralised energy system.
It’s actually something I said a few years ago. If every village creates and shares its own power then high tension powerl ines could become a thing of the past, as power would be within smaller nodes.
Reading The Cult of the Amateur By Andrew Keen in 2023
During yesterday’s walk I found that I could read The Cult of the Amateur by Andrew Keen as an audiobook so I listened to a few minutes. It took me back in time to 2006 when people worried about the detrimental effect that bloggers that were not accountable would have on information, disinformation, reliability and accountability. At the time people worried that bloggers and certain social networks would spread inaccurate information and manipulate people.
Fast forward today and you see that the fear we had, that blogs would be unreliable and unaccountable was wrong. We see that with Fox News, GB News, Russia Today, Facebook, Twitter and other sources of information the threat did not come from blogs, but rather it came from the people who bought media companies to control what was said and covered, and by social media networks like Facebook, which was used to gain big data in order to manipulate voters when Trump was elected, and Brexit. Read Mindf*ck for context.
Musk recently bought Twitter, so Twitter has gone from being a great source for quick news and updates to an unreliable resource used by the Far Right to manipulate the less astute into thinking along their chosen lines.
It turns out that misleading people, through blogging is time consuming. First you need people to write content, and then you need others to read it. It requires a lot of time and effort. In 2023 you don’t need much time and effort. A tweet can be read in a second or two, and troll armies can shape a conversation, and algorithms can skew what you see towards one way of thinking rather than the other.
When I was walking I thought “If he wrote an update to this book it would be called “The Religion of the Amateur” because user generated content has become ruler. Look at TikTok, Clickbait YouTube, Instagram and even Twitter, under Musk.
Years ago social media was measured in friendships, conference attended and collaborations. Today it is measured by sheep herding, rather than personal connections. People are looking for a mass audience, rather than a social network. Someone said “I’m followed by 8000 people and my tweets have been viewed 3 million times.” I see such a tweet and I see that social media has lost one of its unique characteristics. Human level personal connections.
The Cult has become a religion, and manipulation and disinformation is worse than ever. I need to finish the book to give a proper evaluation but it’s interesting to read the book with the advantage of hindsight.
That’s it for today.
IFSC Climbing World Cup Villars 2016
I will be present at the IFSC Climbing World Cup Villars tomorrow. For me climbing has always been an active rather than a passive sport. It has been a sport where the landscape is nice and the crowds are small. Tomorrow will be the first time that I go and watch as other people climb.
It’s not that I don’t watch people climb. Between climbing gyms, bouldering gyms, via ferrata and Rock climbing it is a sport that I have explored in depth. What I haven’t explored in depth is climbing with an audience, climbing as an event, climbing as a competition.
Program
Friday 15th July
9.00 – 16.00 Men & Women’s lead qualifications
17.00 – 19.00 Men & Women’s speed qualifications
21.00 Speed Finals Women & Men (LIVE)
22.00 Award Ceremony (LIVE)
Saturday 16th July
10.00 – 12.30 Lead Semi-Finals Men & Women (LIVE)
20.00 Men lead Finals (LIVE)
21.00 Women lead Finals (LIVE)
22.00 Award Ceremony (LIVE)
Instinct tells me that lead climbing should be the more interesting discipline as it relates directly to the climbing I do. Speed climbing could be fun and interesting to watch but it has less practical applications in ordinary climbing life. If I want to be lazy then I could go up on Saturday and stop asking questions.
On Saturday from 1300 to 1600 there is the concours populaire, That’s when amateurs can try their hand at speed climbing.
Villars Sur Ollon is a place that I have visited a number of times but for once we should be welcomed by summer rather than winter temperatures. It will also be for climbing rather than skiing, hiking or après ski. I will take pictures and let you know what the experience is like. It’s nice after organising satellite distribution for sporting events finally to go on location. We’ll see how energetic the crowd is.
Pi-Holes and Cloud Syncing
Two evenings ago I was trying to sync files from Kdrive to the local drive and it kept getting blocked. I wasn’t clear as to why this was happening until I saw that Pi-Hole had throttled the IP address of the computer that was attempting to sync from Kdrive. It did this one in the morning, and the second time in the evening.
I suspected that for some reason the computer might go to sleep when it isn’t used, but a Pi doesn’t sleep, so that wasn’t it.
Temporarily Disable Pi-Hole
When I disabled blocking by the Pi-Hole and tried to sync once again it worked flawlessly. It took hours but the data was transferred from the remote machine to the local machine over the next twelve hours, or so.
Rate Limiting by Pi Hole
Pi-Holes will tolerate up to 1000 requests per minute from a device under normal circumstances. Usually a system would make a few dozen requests at a time depending on the website being visited. When you’re synching gigabytes of files via a cloud client it might send several thousand requests as it receives requests, and provides status updates on whether packets are received and when to send the next one. This is a generalisation. I could not find specifics for Kdrive.
The Wrong Assumption
Aside from considering a computer going to sleep and stopping data transfer I also considered that the cloud provider would throttle download queries, and speed. When I tried to download data from iCloud I did encounter a similar problem and when I tried from one or two other providers I seemed to have the same problem.
Interesting to Know
When I tried to download several 2 gigabyte files manually with the Raspberry Pi I found that it sometimes saturated its 8 gigabytes of ram before slowing down to a crawl. It doesn’t like downloading large files in bulk. I came across this bug several times.
And Finally
In normal circumstances cloud synching is a few files at a time, rather than several hundred gigabytes at once, so you don’t run into this issue. If this was a normal situation then I would modify Pi-Hole to have a higher rate limit, but for now I will leave it as it is.
A Day In The Clouds
Today was a different to recent days because we spent it within the clouds, rather than beneath, or above them. It is hard to be above the clouds when you are near lake level. SRF has two nice time lapses of clouds flowing over a mountain as if it was water, or dry ice. Choose the one you prefer.
It is estimated that a tenth of the Swiss population could be sick with covid-19 at the moment. If a tenth of those people had long covid then Switzerland is faced with 87,000 people with long Covid.
“Environ une personne sur dix a contracté le Covid ces dernières semaines en Suisse, a dit Urs Karrer, vice-président de la task force scientifique de la Confédération devant la presse à Berne. Les nouvelles infections se concentrent actuellement surtout chez les enfants de moins de 10 ans.
One million one hundred thousand cases of Covid have been detected in Switzerland, out of a population of around eight point seven million. In theory that’s an eighth of Switzerland that has fallen sick, if we ignore second and third infections of the virus.
There are two challenges to face. The first of these is to see whether we can get through the current wave without being infected, and that’s unlikely for parents of children and people who are exposed to others. The second challenge, it to see how much longer this pandemic will last. At the moment, with the speed at which new variants arrive. Three, within a matter of weeks, it looks as though new variants will emerge faster than vaccines and as if we will have many more waves.
Some countries stand out by the way in which they are not trying to make things better.
And Finally
I am still studying and learning. I will continue to study for as long as the pandemic lasts, because it is the one thing that is guaranteed not to be taken away from me. It also provides me with a sense of accomplishment every day.