Lost children in Australia

In my native land, it's Australia Day, and Google offered computer users an appropriate "doodle" :

We see an Aboriginal lady sitting on the ground and pining for her lost children. How in fact did she "lose" them ? Well, that's a terrible chapter of our Australian history...

The art was created by Ineka Voigt from Canberra High School (ACT).

Here, from the Mirror newspaper, are some comments on Ineka's excellent painting:

Her entry, entitled, "Stolen Dreamtime" was created in response to the theme of: "If I could travel back in time I would …"

Ineka wrote that: "... I would reunite mother and child. A weeping mother sits in an ochre desert, dreaming of her children and a life that never was ...all that remains is red sand, tears and the whispers of her stolen dreamtime".

The "stolen generation" refers to the indigenous children who were removed from their families by the government and church missions.

From 1909 to 1969 the Aborigines Protection Amending Act allowed the Aborigines' Protection Board - later the Aboriginal Welfare Board - to take children away from their parents without needing to establish that they were being mistreated in any way.

The children were cut off from their Aboriginal culture and history. Many mixed-race children placed into white families were never told of their black heritage.

In a blog post, Leticia Lentini, brand and events marketing manager for Google Australia, described it as "a powerful and beautiful image" that "helps bring attention to the critical issue of reconciliation in Australia".

However, it has not been so well received by everyone.

Brisbane-based indigenous rights activist Sam Watson has labelled the artwork "enormously disrespectful" and is calling on Google to remove it immediately.

Speaking to the Huffington Post , Watson took particular offence with the topless representation of an indigenous woman, with tribal markings painted on her nude body.

He believes the representation is unacceptable and offers "very plastic caricatures" of his people.

Marvin Minsky has left us

Marvin Minsky [1927-2016]

My first discussion with Marvin Minsky took place in the grounds of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) at Cambridge (USA) in 1971, when I was looking up individuals who might be prepared to participate in a TV project that I envisaged for my French employer, the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF. In fact, Minsky never agreed to be filmed in the context of my project. Several years later, Minsky and his wife dropped in for lunch at my place in Paris.

Click here to see an article on Minsky in the The New York Times.

Sarko not necessarily a presidential candidate

In a TV interview published yesterday, the former president Nicolas Sarkozy, in charge of the political party called Les Républicains, has admitted explicitly for the first time that he will not necessarily be a candidate in the forthcoming presidential election.

An Aborigine talks of "the Australian dream"

The journalist Stan Grant is a descendant of the Wiradjuri tribe.

I love a sunburned country, a land of sweeping plains, of rugged mountain ranges… It reminds me that my people were killed on those plains. We were shot on those plains, diseases ravaged us on those plains. My people die young in this country. We die 10 years younger than the average Australian, and we are far from free. We are fewer than 3 per cent of the Australian population and yet we are 25 per cent, a quarter of those Australians locked up in our prisons. And if you're a juvenile it is worse, it is 50 per cent. An Indigenous child is more likely to be locked up in prison than they are to finish high school. My grandfather on my mother's side, who married a white woman, who reached out to Australia, lived on the fringes of town until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over the graves of the three children he buried there. That's the Australian dream. And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital giving birth to her first child because she was giving birth to the child of a black person. The Australian dream. We are better than this.

Astronaut plays ping pong with a ball of water

In this small demo video produced in the International Space Station, the astronaut Scott Kelly uses a pair of hydrophobic paddles to play ping pong with a ball of water.

If lions had guns, the world might be more harmonious and elegant

Dawkins and his dog

This short video shows Richard Dawkins in the company of his dog Tiger.

"We think we know what it's like to be a dog... and we don't. We delude ourselves. But that's part of what goes on when we love a dog. What am I doing with my dog? I'm empathizing. I'm making an imaginative leap to see the world from a dog's perspective."

Illegal to patent natural genes in France

France's higher house of parliament, the senate, adopted yesterday an amendment that prohibits the patenting of "products that are the outcome of purely biological procedures".

In the immediate future, this legislation aims to protect open research in the domain, not of animals, but of ordinary plants and crops. For example, imagine that a corporation were to be granted the right to patent a certain gene that was found, most often, in broccoli. These days, the CrispR/Cas9 method of DNA editing developed in 2012 means that a researcher might encounter this same gene in another quite different plant, without being aware that it is indeed the patented brocoli molecule. So, from a legal viewpoint, we're in a totally new ballpark, where the concept of patenting naturally-occurring genes is fuzzy to the point of being nonsensical.

French keyboard

Most of my personal writing of a creative kind (like this blog) is done in English. From time to time, though, I nevertheless have to produce documents in French. So, I've always had to decide upon the preferable kind of keyboard to attach to my Macintosh: either a Querty (for typing in English) or rather an Azerty (for typing in French). Well, I've never hesitated in preferring the Azerty keyboard, which enables me to use English as usual while inserting effortlessly, if need be, all kinds of French-language expressions into my writing. Admittedly, I have to memorize various elementary Macintosh keyboard combinations:

That has always appeared to me as simple. But certain French authorities are starting to complain about the Azerty keyboard as if it were an archaic device that causes huge problems, because it's impossible to use correctly. And they're talking about changing it. To my mind this is a case of typical French egocentricity, which evokes the silly old idea of systematically replacing English technical terms by French equivalents. You might call it a case of Gallic navel-gazing.

Australian couple kidnapped by terrorists in Burkina Faso

Doctor Ken Elliott and his wife Jocelyn, who've been settled in Burkina Faso for some 40 years, were kidnapped last Friday at Djibo by a terrorist group called Sahara Emirat, a branch of Al-Qaïda au Magreb islamique (Aqmi).

These Australians are greatly appreciated in the region, and local folk are devoted to bringing them back to safety as rapidly as possible.