Damages of death

The following blog post is dedicated to friends who have suffered—recently or less recently—from the death of loved ones. Unfortunately I'm aware of an unavoidable problem in my reasoning. The basic idea that our human brains were never designed to handle philosophical and/or scientific thinking is best understood by those who've read a science book such as The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins. If you've never encountered such a book, then my elementary reasoning might fail to convince you.

It is pointless to think of a deceased individual as “damaged”. He/she has simply disappeared. My use of the word “damages” refers to those who are left behind: relatives and friends of the deceased. Often they will have called upon subterfuges to weaken the blow of the death of their loved one. But this “solution” might not work successfully in the immediate future, if ever. In the past, religions provided the best subterfuges. But, with the disappearance of profound religiosity in society, this subterfuge is losing its force, if not totally disappearing.

To bear the unbearable, I know of only one powerful subterfuge, which has been dominating my personal existence for several years. I adopted it when I became totally atheistic. That was after my encountering, above all, the writings of Richard Dawkins. My subterfuge is quite simple. It consists of admitting that we humans are indeed terribly weak creatures. Our brains were created long ago, at a time when the only ambitions of primitive Homo sapiens were to survive and procreate. This involved tasks such as hunting for food, combating many enemies (including other humans), and recovering from sickness. But the cerebral mechanisms of that archaic creature were hardly designed to grasp challenges that would finally culminate in logic, reason, philosophy and science. The highest level we’ve ever attained consists of realizing in a fuzzy fashion that we’ll never move close to anything like a greater understanding of our existence. So, the best conclusion is to give up searching. Our quest is doomed, and all attempts to pursue this quest will inevitably hurt us. We must simply learn to abandon all such desires.

In The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, people for centuries have shunned the terrible inscription at the entrance into Hall:

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

The Barque of Dante by Eugène Delacroix

My personal reaction is totally the opposite. We must indeed abandon all hope for, in doing so, we free ourselves of the pain of trying to understand things that we were simply never built to understand! Consequently, instead of descending into sadness, we can spend the rest of our existence doing only the things we were designed to do, and thinking things that we are capable of thinking.

There is a corollary to my formula for happiness. The consequences of following the river Styx to Hell are not only abominable; they’re also clearly absurd, and therefore impossible. I don’t know where the Homo sapiens invention is located in the panoply of possible creations, but I have the impression that it’s not too far up the ladder. Today, we’ve almost attained a point of implosion… which makes me feel that the end is near. Up until now, the animal world seemed to have advanced in several splurges, none of which ever got anywhere near lasting for a lengthy period. Dinosaurs were probably the greatest happening on Earth… but they were wiped out long before they might have started (?) to to build science laboratories and write books. And it’s most likely that Homo sapiens will do little better than the poor old dinosaurs. So, I can’t possibly imagine how or why the processes of Nature might get involved in building creatures that end up constructing real-life creations of the kind of medieval rubbish described by Dante. If they had the skills to tackle creations of that kind, they would surely be far more interested in building spaceships…

There is another corollary to my formula for happiness. I might describe it as “mind-boggling”… but that would be wrong, because this corollary is so simple and obvious that it doesn’t boggle my little mind in any sense whatsoever. Here’s my second corollary: Everything that makes up the universe as we imagine it (fuzzily) today has been here forever, and will continue to exist forever. Not only is it difficult to imagine that what we call “time” (an invention of Homo sapiens) might have a beginning and an end; it’s totally absurd. So, we should abandon such silly ideas, in the same way that we abandon Dante’s “hope”. That leaves us with the bare necessities of a Good Life freed from archaic rubbish of the kind that fascinated earlier specimens of our race… and faced solely with the pursuit of human happiness and goodness.

If you wanted a model for our existence, and you were prepared to accept a fictional one, I would highly recommend the Sermon on the Mount, which is surely some of the finest literature ever written.

Xmas gift for me

Here’s an excellent suggestion. Since this French issue of Blake & Mortimer volume 24 is a comic book, I’m sure my momentarily degraded eyesight wouldn’t be a problem.

Some observers claim that the hero of this tale is an archaic writer named Shakespeare. That can’t be true, of course, because we all know he didn’t even exist.

Google software improves its own translation process

                                                                           [photo Manuel Burgos/Getty]

Click here to read a New Scientist article about an improved approach to automatic translation... invented spontaneously by the AI system itself [artificial intelligence] that had been handling this activity. That’s a fascinating idea. An AI designs its own approach enabling it to do a better job.

Website names don't attract visitors

People imagine that it's a good idea to give a new website a name that's likely to attract visitors. In fact, search engines don't gravitate towards such-and-such a website because of its name. They do so because of complex algorithms that remain trade secrets.

In the old world, before the Internet,  the founders of a new company usually adopted a name for subtle reasons. That's to say, they didn't simply choose a name at random. Let's look at a few examples.

• A celebrated case of a name with no obvious meaning whatsoever is Kodak. It came to be associated onomatopoeically with the sound "click clack" made by the shutter of an old camera. But that wasn't the reason for choosing that name.

• In France, the communications agency named Australia has never had anything whatsoever to do with my land of birth. That kind of situation is quite rare.

• Talking about Australia, a celebrated hat-manufacturer chose a delightful name for his product: Akubra. As far as I know, this name has no known meaning whatsoever.

• In the Internet world, the name Facebook was chosen because the founder was thinking of yearly school albums. But the company's present preoccupations extend well beyond that small world.

• The celebrated IBM name was chosen back in the old days when it designated "International Business Machines".

• The well-known IKEA name has its origins in the Nazi era. The store was created in 1943 by a Swedish Nazi sympathizer, Ingvar Kamprad. The last two letters stand for the farm where he grew up, Elmtaryd, and the town where the farm was located, Agunnaryd.

• What about Google? I was persuaded that it was a pure nonsense word. Not at all. It's a mathematical term that designates a very big number : 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

• And Amazon? Founder Jeff Bezos wanted a word that started with an "a", so that it would appear at the top.  Besides, since the river of that name was the longest in the world, he hoped that his new company would also become one of the biggest.

• The term Skype was surely nonsensical. Not at all. It once meant "Sky-peer-to-peer".

In other words, it's quite difficult to find a successful name that means strictly nothing at all.

Well, here's an item of personal news. I intend to keep Antipodes for what it is: an essentially English-language blog of my personal jottings. On the other hand, I'm thinking of starting a new blog for French-language jottings of a similar kind. You'll see it shortly. I promise you that its crazy name has absolutely no meaning whatsoever!

Base jumps can go wrong

Tineke Bot sent me a photo of land at Châtelus, taken from their house in Choranche.

                                                                         [photo by Tineke Bot]

Click the photo to enlarge it slightly.

A base jumper had taken off from the cliff above Rochemuse : Tineke's property, located behind the photographer. He was blown onto the top of a tree in Châtelus. A rescue helicopter arrived on the spot. It was a complicated and risky affair, and it took many people several hours. The fellow's life was at stake, as he could have slipped to his death at any instant. Happily, the base-jumper finally managed to get down safely out of the tree by his own means. All's well that ends well.

Plantu says goodbye

What exactly is that white object that the president is waving?

Is it a handkerchief... or maybe some kind of female garment?

The barrister's past-tense words are hard to understand:

"You know, he was a good fellow."
Good for whom?

Sewage power to handle drinkable water

A city in Denmark will be the first place in the world to use domestic wastewater and sewage to handle their system of drinkable water. Now, don’t get me wrong. Danes are not going to be asked to consume technologically-improved shit! The dirty muck is to be used solely to create electrical energy to drive the machinery that pumps pure crystalline-clear water into Danish homes in the city of Marselisborg.

Energy generator (photo from Aarhus Water)

Comparable approaches to electricity generation could be imagined to drive desalinization factories. The principal source of power and energy is, not human sewage, but rather... human imagination.

Looking for something to do in Paris?

Drawings in every imaginable state

by Plantu

Meditating and thinking for quite some time

In the Marais of Paris, I used to eat often in a small couscous restaurant in the Rue des Archives, just up from the BHV department store. An entire wall was occupied by a marvelous comic-strip painting that presented years in the life of an old desert-dweller who did nothing other than meditate. In the beginning, as he started his meditation, the desert was totally bare. Then a few people started to appear in the vicinity… but they did not obstruct the fellow’s intense meditation. Soon, there were nomadic camps around him, but he paid no attention. Neither did they. LIttle by little, the perpetual meditator was surrounded by villages, which were transformed into huge cities. The meditator, as usual, did not notice these changes. Finally, the cities started to crumble, and turn back into dust. The desert recovered its original forms… and the meditator finally stopped meditating, stood up, and greeted us with a smile and a summary of events: “That was one of the richest meditation sessions I’ve ever experienced.”

In the city of Yehud near Tel-Aviv in Israel, archeologists recently unearthed a Bronze Age sculpture of a little seated man. Deeply engaged in meditation, he has one hand holding his head in the pose of the Thinker of Rodin.

                                                              [photo Menahem Kahana / AFP]

Those three mythical individuals—the Meditator in the Marais, the Penseur of Rodin and the Thinker of Yehud—symbolize my existence at Gamone. True enough, I've been that way for quite some time.

New chemical elements

 Dmitri Mendeleev [1834-1907]

While the world at large is preoccupied by ridiculous or uninteresting themes, I’m impressed to find that the Inorganic Chemistry Division of the IUPAC inserted officially, yesterday, four new elements into Mendeleev’s table:

          • Nihonium and symbol Nh, for the element 113,
          • Moscovium and symbol Mc, for the element 115,
          • Tennessine and symbol Ts, for the element 117, and
          • Oganesson and symbol Og, for the element 118.

When I started my studies of chemistry at Grafton High School in 1952, this table terminated down in the vicinity of neptunium, symbol Np, whose atomic number was 93. Named after the planet Neptune, it came just after uranium, symbol U, number 92, named after Uranus.

A lot of radioactive water has flowed under the bridges of inorganic chemistry since then.