“Main train line” what is that supposed to mean exactly?

What about Lausanne-Yverdon-Neuchatel-Biel-Solothurn-Olten? What about Basel-Olten-Luzern? What about Zürich-Zug-Bellinzona-Lugano? What about Lausanne-Montreux-Martigny-Sion-Visp-Brig? What about Bern-Thun-Spiez-Visp-Brig? What about Zürich-Pfäffikon-Sargans-Lanquart-Chur?

Basically just look at this interactive map if you want a fuller picture, or at this PDF if you want to see a reduced view about the long distance lines only.

And to everyone saying: “Well obviously it follows the valley!” The Mittelland is not some valley, it’s a plateau between the Alps and the Jura mountain ranges and it contains about 30% of our area. Besides, you should know about the longest railway tunnel in the world, the Gotthard Base Tunnel and about the Lötschberg Base Tunnel and about the Simplon Tunnel. The Swiss rail system doesn’t give up because of some mountains in the way.

Who here really has the time to stand, think and waste in the shower?

People not in a drought. It’s been quite wet here in Switzerland recently :-D

Anybody got any, like, advice?

Be happy you didn’t find 250 home burnt DVDs of porn in the attic.

I’m not sure in which direction your sarcasm is actually going there.

I wouldn’t say they are a monolith, with all those different sects and the fatwas where you basically have to choose which person or group of muftis you trust to issue binding ones.

On the point of brainwashing… well depends on how you define it, I’d say. I think all Religion at its core is supposed to influence your thinking profoundly and most religious people are brought up into their belief system. What is just socialisation and what is brainwashing I don’t know how to distinguish.

Oh I see, I did not expect that. Thank you!

Very interesting, thank you

I wonder what her Imam would say to that. I haven’t heard of a Muslim sect that accepts transgender people under their chosen gender. But maybe they are out there, if anyone knows of one I’d like to know more.

Whatever

Sometimes it really annoys me if a perfect spot for a proper “whom” is missed. Even worse though is a misplaced “whom”. Both instances are easy for me to spot because we decline pronouns quite a lot in German.

Edit: Sorry that’s not a construction, so much as just an error. For constructions one thing that gets on my nerves is if you try to tell someone about your previous state of mind to clear up a misunderstanding like “I thought the water had boiled already” and then they say “no” to tell you that your assumption was incorrect. This is annoying because first of all the information they are conveing is already known to you by the time of this discussion and secondly in the grammatical sense they are actually disagreeing with your state of mind, not the content. I always have the urge to say: “Yes, actually, I’m telling you that’s what I thought, you can’t disagree with me about what I was thinking.”

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

It’s so creepy because you read the repeated sexual abuse of a minor through the eyes of the perpetrator who continuously justifies his acts and misrepresents Lolita’s reactions. He’s a very unreliable narrator. First he even becomes her stepdad to have better access to her. Then her mother dies, through a car accident just before she can call the police on him. Again this is recounted through Humberts eyes, so I’m thinking it was actually murder.

I haven’t finished the book yet, it’s kind of hard to read. It’s been a few years, and I should be somewhere in the middle IIRC.

Weird, I find them rather useful. How else do you calculate angles of things?

To check some flat-earthers I recently calculated the angle between an upright person and some skyscrapers 60 miles away.

1988 TAT-8 already went into productive use as the first transatlantic fiber optic connection. So the lab work must have happened in the 80’s already.

First of all some corrections:

By constructing a device called an optical processor, however, researchers could access the never-before-used E- and S-bands.

It’s called an amplifier not processor, the Aston University page has it correct. And at least the S-band has seen plenty of use in ordinary CWDM systems, just not amplified. We have at least 20 operational S-band links at 1470 and 1490 nm in our backbone right now. The E-band maybe less so, because the optical absorption peak of water in conventional fiber sits somewhere in the middle of it. You could use it with low water peak fiber, but for most people it hasn’t been attractive trying to rent spans of only the correct type of fiber.

the E-band, which sits adjacent to the C-band in the electromagnetic spectrum

No, it does not, the S-band is between them. It goes O-band, E-band, S-band, C-band, L-band, for “original” and “extended” on the left side, and “conventional”, flanked by “short” and “long” on the right side.

Now to the actual meat: This is a cool material science achievement. However in my professional opinion this is not going to matter much for conventional terrestrial data networks. We already have the option of adding more spectrum to current C-band deployments in our networks, by using filters and additional L-band amplifiers. But I am not aware of any network around ours (AS559) that actually did so. Because fundamentally the question is this:

Which is cheaper:

• renting a second pair of fiber in an existing cable, and deploying the usual C-band equipment on the second pair,
• keeping just one pair, and deploying filters and the more expensive, rarer L-band equipment, or
• keeping just one pair, and using the available C-band spectrum more efficiently with incremental upgrades to new optics?

Currently, for us, there is enough spectrum still open in the C-band. And our hardware supplier is only just starting to introduce some L-band equipment. I’m currently leaning towards renting another pair being cheaper if we ever get there, but that really depends on where the big buying volume of the market will move.

Now let’s say people do end up extending to the L-band. Even then I’m not so sure that extending into the E- and S- bands as the next further step is going to be even equally attractive, for the simple reason that attenuation is much lower at the C-band and L-band wavelengths.

Maybe for subsea cables the economics shake out differently, but the way I understand their primary engineering constraint is getting enough power for amplifiers to the middle of the ocean, so maybe more amps, and higher attenuation, is not their favourite thing to develop towards either. This is hearsay though, I am not very familiar with their world.

Here, I found the original, unfortnuately on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alwaysyzy/p/C5KdNvmrJiT

Edit: I forgot, we’re on Lemmy! I can just post the picture here: