Schall_und_Rauch

Namen sind Schall und Rauch...

[Teej. @TJLang70]

I can’t get a response from @BBulaga but I think we are all still alive.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

Just woke up from a nap in my hand towels and doesn’t know what year it is

[Franz Branntwein™ 🍀 @FranzBranntwe10]

😂😂😂

[Schall_und_Rauch @effemwaage]

True. 😂

[Schall_und_Rauch @effemwaage]

@realnexnelsrent @DDRMondbasis Gute Frage. Ich vermisse sie auch. 😥

[Schall_und_Rauch @effemwaage]

🧐

[moose @mooseincrisis]

someone tried to scare me by banging pots together. i stared at them until they got embarrassed and went back inside. never bring cookware to a psychological battle.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Google would not send a Street View car to the Faroe Islands, so in 2016 a Faroese woman strapped a camera to a sheep and mapped the country herself.

The grievance was legitimate. Eighteen islands in the North Atlantic, some of the most spectacular road in Europe, causeways and tunnels and single track cut along the edge of a cliff face, and none of it on Street View. Google had been up Mont Blanc. Google had been to Greenland. Google had been above the Arctic Circle in half a dozen countries. The Faroes had about fifty thousand people and a coastline, and they were simply not on the list.

Durita Dahl Andreassen worked for the tourist board in Tórshavn. Her reasoning was straightforward and, in its way, unanswerable. There are more sheep on the islands than people. They walk freely. They go everywhere. They have no schedule and no other commitments.

So a fellow islander built a harness. Onto it went a 360 degree camera, a mobile phone and a lightweight solar panel to keep the batteries up, the whole rig weighing under a kilo. The camera was set to fire every minute. Five sheep in five locations were fitted out and released to do what they were going to do anyway, which was walk about eating grass on the edge of some of the most photogenic drops in the North Atlantic.

The images came back tagged with GPS coordinates, over a mobile signal, from a sheep. Andreassen uploaded them to Google Maps.

They called it Sheep View 360. Her job title, for a period, was Sheep View 360 Project Manager, which remains one of the finest lines ever printed on a business card.

The one technical hitch, reported by the tourist board with total sincerity, was motivation. The sheep had to be encouraged to go to the interesting bits, which meant somebody standing behind them doing the thing you do to move sheep. The technology worked perfectly. The talent needed direction.

Then it went round the world, because of course it did, and thousands of Faroese signed a petition asking Google to please come and do this properly.

Google saw it, called it shear brilliance, and folded. In August 2016 they shipped over a Street View Trekker and a set of 360 cameras on loan, and the islanders went out and mapped their own country with them: on foot with selfie sticks, on bikes, in cars, on horses, in kayaks, off the back of ships, and, at least once, with a wheelbarrow. The Google Maps team turned up in person in 2017.

The Faroe Islands are on Street View. You can go and drive those roads from a laptop tonight, and the reason you can is that a small nation with no leverage whatsoever pointed at the one asset it had a surplus of and put a camera on it.

Worth remembering what that asset is called, in the local telling. The Norse name for the place, Færeyjar, means the sheep islands. The oldest surviving document in the country is a set of laws about sheep, written in 1298.

Named by sheep. Governed by sheep. Photographed by sheep.

Everyone in this story was willing except Google, and even the sheep only needed a shove.

[J Stewart @triffic_stuff_]

🔥 The Gallagher brothers are fully aligned on this one.

Liam just told the croc-wearing flag-waving brigade to calm the fck down, and Noel also once had a go at “fcking idiots waving flags”.

Here’s how Noel once described “woke” Glastonbury:

“Don’t get me wrong, I fcking love Glastonbury. It’s getting a bit woke now, that place, and a bit kind of preachy and a bit virtue-signalling.”

“I don’t like it in music, little fcking idiots waving flags around and making political statements and bands taking the stage and saying, ‘Hey guys, isn’t war terrible, yeah? Let’s all boo war. Fck the Tories man’, and all that.”

“It’s like, look, play your fcking tunes and get off. It’s too much. Donate all your money to the cause, that’s it, stop yapping about it.”

“Everybody knows what’s going on in the fcking world, you’ve got a phone in your pocket that tells you anyway. What is the point of virtue-signalling?”

Brilliant! 😂

Take note, all you flag-waving “idiots” 😭

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Sicily has a four-legged early warning system for Mount Etna. It has a beard, it eats gorse, and it is beating several million euros of monitoring equipment by half a day.

The shepherds have known this for as long as anyone has kept goats on that mountain. The herd tells you. No drama about it, no bleating, no rearing up and pointing at the summit. They simply decline to go up the hill that morning, and if the goats will not go up, neither do you. Oldest volcano warning system in Europe. Costs nothing. Runs on scrub.

For most of history the scientific response to this has been a polite nod and a change of subject.

Then in 2011 a German turned up with a box of trackers.

Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behaviour has an unfashionable habit of asking local people what they already know before deciding they are simple. He collared goats living year-round on the slopes and started logging where they went, and when, and how fast.

On 4 January 2012 the data went peculiar. The animals turned down the high pastures they use every day of their lives, all of them, and headed for the trees. The seismometers were quiet. The gas monitors were quiet. In a control room in Catania, a great deal of very expensive equipment was reporting a perfectly ordinary Wednesday.

That evening Etna started throwing lava and ash into the sky.

Six hours.

The same signature has now turned up before eight major eruptions, and at the extreme the goats move fourteen hours ahead of the mountain. Ahead of the tremor. Ahead of the gas. Ahead of everything the volcanologists are paid to watch.

Nobody knows how they do it. The best guess is sulphur dioxide and hydrogen sulphide venting beforehand at concentrations no human nose could ever find, which would mean the animals are smelling the future and declining to comment. Wikelski's own summary is that they know in advance, we have no idea how, but they do.

The institute says there is not yet enough data for a formal warning system. More eruptions, more animals, more species. Which is the correct scientific answer and a very funny one, since the shepherds reached sufficient confidence somewhere around the Bronze Age and have been acting on it every day since.

Rome had geese who saved the city by making a racket when the Gauls came over the wall, and honoured them for it every year afterwards.

Etna has their spiritual successors, doing the same job by refusing to walk uphill.

We have a word in English for a man who behaves like a goat. It means he eats anything, wrecks anything, and understands nothing.

The goat currently outperforms a seismograph.

[In Otter News @In_Otter_News2]

BREAKING NEWS: Health and safety otter refuses to take job seriously.

[Wile E. Coyote @WileECoyoteToon]

Don't call me crazy. Even you learnt physics from my cartoons.

[🎸 Rock History 🎸 @historyrock_]

"I think young people need to start thinking what kind of world they're going to leaving to me and Keith Richards"

- 93-year-old Willie Nelson

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

Un. Real.

[Andrew McCarthy @AJamesMcCarthy]

My favorite capture of the night: The moment the moon's shadow split the sunset in half, leaving a diamond ring in the sky and a breathtaking view. I call it "Shadows on the Balearic Sea".

I'll have prints available for this one linked in my bio for a few days only.

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

Some say his genius knows no bounds…👏🏻

[Steve Howey @stevehowey]

I'm 50 and just went on a hike. Now I get why they use sticks. Next hike I'm bringing a mule.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

https://t.co/4SIAULhruT

[NHS Million @NHSMillion]

Was Brexit all for nothing? 🤣