Today I explored the Via Ferrata near the Fort D’écluse. It is an easy 30 minute drive from Geneva therefore can be done in the morning before an evening shift or in the afternoon after a morning shift. As a side note you can see the TGV coming into and leaving Geneva.
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I like the social media and I spend a lot of time with them. Occasionally i meet the people involved in real life and so the social media are no longer quite as interesting, although of course I still have fun with them. One of the things I’ve been thinking is the term social media girlfriend.
What would require for a person to be a social media girlfriend? What does it require in the physical world? Conversation for a start. It would entail many conversations and discusssions, so far Twitter and seesmic both provide that. I wake up in the morning, hardly able to open my eyes yet I open up the laptop and type “good morning world” to which i get a good morning back.
There are currently two social media girls that wish me a good morning. Melissah in Australia is one of them. Maggieconv in the US is the second. The three of us are in different timezones but we wish each other good meals, nice evenings, good mornings and sweet dreams. We’re friends in the same sense that flat mates may be but with one big difference. We are not within the same physical space. We’re separated by distance, over a thousand kilometers when we’re lucky, over 20,000 when we’re not.
That’s unimportant. It’s the idea that we share our daily lives through text messaging, data access on phones, websites, blogs and even facebook. To some people this is an abstract idea. Why would you want to meet people online in such a way. Well in fact chatrooms were like this a decade ago. IRC is like that today. There’s one major difference. We’re not anonymous. We know how the people look, we know how they sound. We know when they’re happy and we know when things are going well. We also know when they’re going badly.
If both physical and virtual friends are both inhabiting the same spaces nowadays then what discounts those whom we don’t know from another context? If I meet you at the cinema and we become friends then everyone would accept that. Online though people wouldn’t. Of course that is changing. For me the distinction is fading since I have met so many of these people in real life, occasionally quite a few at once.
Anyway part of the reason for this post is that I was called a flirt online, told that half my seesmic videos answering one girl’s posts were flirts. It kicked off a conversation about flirting and that’s fun. we’re using the social media and we’re flirting. That’s a great idea. The idea that we’re flirting with people across a new medium. That’s where the idea of a social media girlfriend came into place. I saw two friends flirting across both seesmic and Twitter and I thought that this was the perfect opportunity to come out with the idea.
Anyway to cut a long story short I was meaning to type @melissah but started to write @maggieconv instead. Would she be more likely to be a social media girlfriend? We added each other on Facebook so there’s a chance she c0uld be a social media girlfriend.
In recent months we have seen articles about self driving cars and ethics. The question the research asks is whether to kill, a group of people, the driver of the car or others. The question is perfectly logical if you have never driven a car. If you have never driven a car then you believe that accidents may be unavoidable.
So these guys posed these kinds of ethical dilemmas to several hundred workers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to find out what they thought. The participants were given scenarios in which one or more pedestrians could be saved if a car were to swerve into a barrier, killing its occupant or a pedestrian.
When you learn to drive in Switzerland you need to spend a number of hours being made aware of the dangers of the road. During these lessons you learn about where to look, about how to gauge people’s age, attention and intention. You are trained to look at their eyes and their body language, to anticipate their actions.
Road awareness also progresses to road conditions. Is it raining, is it snowing, are you in the middle of a drought and other such questions. The reason these questions are asked is that the stopping distance, risk of skidding and other dangers increase.
We also find that their are zones where cars are meant to be particularly attentive and may be asked to drive slower. Schools, pedestrian zones and other areas expect drivers to slow down and be able to stop instantly in case there is the need.
In light of everything that we are expected to consider as human drivers it makes sense to provide autonomous cars with the same knowledge and intelligence. If there has been a drought for six months and rain is falling then the car’s software should anticipate the longer stopping distances and the chance of skidding. The car should slow down.
When they decide on the ethics of self driving cars they should spend time writing code that is friendly and safe to cyclists using the roads. The software should be written to slow down and wait for a safe place to overtake. The software should be written to overtake from a safe distance. The same is true of cars near horses and other animals. You don’t want self driving cars to scare animals.
As a driver it is expected of me to anticipate all dangers and threats to life. It is for me to decide to drive at or below the speed limit. It is for me to assess the risk of someone crossing the road, of someone turning left on a roundabout and more. If I was to make a mistake that would cost someone their life then it would be my fault, according to insurance because i had failed to adapt to the situation. Self driving cars should be programmed to anticipate all problems and issues and be held to the same standard as humans.
These problems cannot be ignored, say the team: “As we are about to endow millions of vehicles with autonomy, taking algorithmic morality seriously has never been more urgent.â€
Self driving cars should in no circumstance cause death. They should never face the decision. If they face the decision then the programmers have not spent enough time consulting with drivers, emergency services and road safety professionals. Death should be eliminated from the equation.
The three common forms of climbing are Rock, climbing, via ferrata and bouldering. Rock climbing is an excellent and amusing sport that requires living in the right place, having the right equipment and knowing the right people. I enjoy the sport but have not found a group to go with. Via Ferrata as I love to call it is Rock climbing for tourists. The equipments and routes are set out and prepared so that those with the correct experience, head for heights and equipments can explore the landscape in an interesting and dynamic fashion. The last of these is bouldering. Bouldering is a form of climbing without ropes. In the wild it requires finding a bit of rock and studying the rock to find a route.
On Sunday I noticed on Facebook that a new indoor climbing place was opening in Gland. Totem Escalade is an indoor bouldering place where you can practice climbing indoors. As autumn and winter approach this is welcome. It is based by the bowling in Gland, next to where a night club used to be. It has a central structure off which are four climbing surfaces with coloured paper to mark the grade of the climbs. As you progress you can attempt harder and harder routes.
Bouldering is physically demanding and develops upper body strength. You need to use your arms, fingers and back muscles to hold on and make progress along the route you have chosen. As you try a number of routes a number of times so your strength will begin to fade. After two hours of enjoyment my hand muscles were done. I can still feel them as I write this blog post.
I love that a climbing wall is so close to Nyon. For years I have been looking for this. Now that I know about this climbing wall I will be a frequent visitor. I want to improve my technique and I want to increase my strength so that for the next via ferrata season I will be that much more comfortable.
I am tired of the Facebook monopoly. While Google gets fined for helping people shop websites like Facebook do the opposite. Instead of increasing the diversity of content on the web and the sharing of ideas it has helped create silos of like minded people. Likeminded people is a polite way of saying brainwashed in the case where opinions are based on opinions rather than facts.
Shorts on Facebook are usually very short. You skim through dozens, even hundreds of posts but none of them have much value. Compare this to blogging. When you blog you need to develop ideas that you can expand to at least three hundred words. With those three hundred words you can include images, video, tables and more. You can tell a complete story. On Facebook you post some text and people might read it.
People use twitter both privately and publicly. People I follow have their accounts set to private so I am careful not to answer to certain comments to preserve their private sphere. Other people see no value in having a public chat. They don’t remember the chatrooms on the late 1990s in the same way that I don’t remember party lines. Whatsapp and Messenger are used instead. Both of them allow private group chats from the comfort of a computer or with the mobility of a mobile phone. Ingress, Pokemon Go and others are happy to experiment with other platforms but mid to late adopters are stuck in the Facebook universe. They have a monopoly.
Instagram is a great image sharing app but it’s owned by Facebook.
Almost every event you go to these days has a Facebook events page. Many events only have a Facebook page. Unless you are a Facebook user you miss out on a lot of events.
The World Wide Web offers such a breadth of opportunities for creativity that it’s a shame that people are spending time on Facebook rather than on more malleable social networks. I’m thinking of Wordpress as one example. We will see whether people go back to blog friendly social networks.
