For roughly six hours the tide will take the swimmer ‘up’ the Channel, and then as the tide changes direction, the following six hours will take the swimmer ‘down’ the Channel. This up and down movement of the water is relentless and unavoidable.
When traversing the English Channel, the boat pilot pays respect to the aformentioned tides when heading for France, which means the tidal affect will be perpendicular to the direction of the swimmer. It is incredibly rare for a swimmer to ever be swimming with or against the tide.
The moon’s position relative to the earth and sun changes, creating different strengths of tide. The smaller tides are called neap tides, and the bigger ones are spring tides. Historically, swimmers have made their attempts on neap tides, as the belief is that this reduces the effect of wind against tide. It also reduces the risk of the swimmer missing the land target of Cap Gris Nez in France.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I fucking hate the way Facebook changed how the site works so that clicking on an image no longer puts it in your browser history. Earlier today I saw a post where the swimmer whose track was shown in this specific image responded to the comments. It was actually quite an amusing interaction and I wish I could go back and share it here.
But also: the swimmer was a she, not a he.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Also, there was this hilarious comment under the original image:
Matthew Bowen: Fucking idiot. Obviously he couldn’t go straight for completely obvious reasons that I’m completely familiar with, as I assume everyone is too. What a loser
ruuster13@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
“They’re replacing the internet with something else” is literal. It’s harder and harder to find what you want because you’re not allowed to have what you want anymore. You’re allowed to work hard till you die and hope Big Tech shares its merciful bounty with you. You can’t spell “social media” without “soma.”
purplemonkeymad@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
In case you are interested, facebook now opens links in a site of thier’s, but it contains an embedded window of the site you were linked to. This means that facebook can follow any other links you follow while on that site. It has the site effect of you not visiting that site but instead facebook’s “hidden window” shows in the history.
It has no practical reason to exist other than allowing them to gather more data.
Some mobile browsers might have an add-in to auto-break you out of the window.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I’m not actually sure what you mean, but if I’m understanding it correctly, uhh, what? No they don’t. If you click an external link on Facebook they send you to it with a redirect, so they know you went to that site, but they don’t know of any further links you might click.
But anyway, that’s not relevant to this here, because it was a photo shared on Facebook, not an external link.
Psythik@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Why are you using Facebook?
stevedice@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Imma go on a limb here and guess it’s because they want to.
caurvo@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
I’m still in it for niche hobby groups. Unfortunately the kind of information I’m looking for is hard to come by elsewhere. Even Reddit was not as good a source of community knowledge for these activities.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Why are you being judgy about what websites someone uses?
CoolThingAboutMe@beehaw.org 3 weeks ago
There’s a sports scientist, I’ve forgotten her name but she wrote a book called Women are Not Small Men. In her book she says that long distance swimming is one sport that women actually outperform men in.
jsomae@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
It would be more amazing if it were a he, not a she; all the best long-distance swimmers are women. Women have a significant advantage at this level.
Zagorath@aussie.zone 3 weeks ago
Eh, not really. It’s more that at this level the difference in performance between men and women closes significantly, with some ultra swim records being held by women. For the English Channel specifically, the current record for speed of crossing is held by a man. So it’s not particularly amazing that it was a woman (though it is amazing that it was a physically disabled woman!), but neither would it have been amazing had it been a man.
muzzle@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Can someone explain the “I did it for charity” angle? I never understood why would someone do a sporty thing, that they clearly woyld do anyway, motivate me or anyone else to donate money to a charity. To be honest it always felt quite performative and self serving to me.
itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Think of it the other way around, doing extreme athletic feats (even for fun) is a great way to attract attention, and using that momentum to attract sponsors for charity is a nice extra to do some good
droans@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
You get people to “pledge” donations. It’s partly about raising awareness for the charity and partly because a lot of people are more likely to donate to these types of drives versus donating just because.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
thanks for finding the source, pretty interesting!