My hilarious motherland

Here in France, an old-fashioned model of male underpants, with a kind of pouch to accommodate the royal jewels and scepter, has always been designated as a kangaroo slip.

For the last 24 hours, the Australian press has been running stories about an MP [member of parliament] in Sydney who's labeled "the underpants MP ". As you might imagine, to earn such a title, our Aussie MP surely had to make a slight "kangaroo slip "...

A few days ago, my article entitled Musical chairs in Sydney [display] mentioned that the NSW premier had been axed because the state is in dire economic straits. The new fellow for the job, former garbage collector Nathan Rees, had to form a cabinet rapidly. For the role of police minister, he chose the youthful elected MP for Kiama, a certain Matt Brown. Well, just as Jesus took no more than three days to change his status dramatically, so did Matt. On the third day of his new job, the poor lad was fired by Nathan. And that's where it all gets back to underwear.

Recently, an innocent and ordinary party took place in the august chambers of parliament house in Sydney's Macquarie Street. One might imagine that parliament houses are not specifically designed for partying... but we must never underestimate the power of the Aussie urge for mateship on balmy alcoholic evenings. Nobody seems to know exactly what happened, apart from the fact that Matt was probably inebriated. There's talk about his stripping down to "very brief" underpants and dancing on a green leather couch in his office. It's even said that Matt might have simulated some kind of sexual encounter with the female MP for Wollongong, Noreen Hay. A simple case of making hay while the sun shines. Maybe we'll never know the hard facts. In any case, three-day Matt is out. Crucified in his kangaroo slip.

My native Australia is an ideal hotbed for the growth of spirited politicians... like Maurice Iemma, Nathan Rees, etc. The list is long. But we seem to be short on authentic statesmen, capable of transforming the nation into a serious republic. That's another kettle of fish. And, as the former garbage collector might have said, reminiscing about his rapidly hired and fired police chief, and indulging in topical planetary metaphors: You can put lipstick on a bad fish; it'll still smell.

Cognitive dissonance

The human behavior known as cognitive dissonance is terrible stuff... or maybe I should say terribly human stuff. The background for cognitive dissonance occurs when we screw something up because we've acted stupidly, or because we have stupid beliefs. Instead of admitting our stupidity, and deciding instantly to behave more intelligently, cognitive dissonance comes into action when we decide to defend and justify our initial stupidity by adopting a new approach that's even more stupid still. It's a matter of pushing stupidity to the second degree, as it were, because our first-degree stupidity didn't work. It wasn't stupid enough.

Let me give you a personal example, in which the stupid guy at the center of the cognitive dissonance is me. At Gamone, there's an irregular spring, up behind the house, which isn't really a spring at all, but simple a resurgence of subterranean water from time to time, usually after rain higher up on the slopes behind Gamone. Now, the waters of my spring are captured by a small concrete tank, and I could normally use that stock of water around the house. But I tend to forget that this water exists. Worse still, a couple of years ago, I burned off grass and weeds in that corner of the property, while totally forgetting that there was a plastic hose there, running down from the spring. OK, that was a silly error, but hardly a catastrophe.

Recently, the mayor of Choranche and the municipal employee suggested that it would be a good idea for me to drain away excess water from my spring, because water had started to seep out of the hillside with the possibility of endangering the stability of the roadway. That's where my cognitive dissonance got turned on. Instead of saying "OK, I'll install a new hose and bring the water down to my house", I started to argue absurdly: "No, the water that's seeping out onto the roadway is certainly not the same water that's piling up from my spring. They're surely two completely different underground channels. In other words, even if I were to install a new hose, water from the other channel would still seep onto the road."

The truth of the matter, alas, was that I was too bloody lazy to get into overalls, drag a ladder and tools up to the spring, cut away all the weeds and saplings, and install a new hose.

Finally, over the last two or three days, I pulled my finger out, as the saying goes, and performed the necessary work.

The hardest part of the job was climbing up onto the embankment and cutting away all the thorny vegetation that prevented me from getting near the spring.

I always have the impression that Sophia is happy to see me working outside, manually, instead of sitting in front of my Macintosh.

Once the spring water started to flow in the newly-installed yellow hose, about a hundred meters long, I had to do something with it, so I decided to start out by sprinkling my lawn... which doesn't really need to be sprinkled at all.

Above all, I'm obliged to admit that, as soon as water started to arrive down here at the house, the seepage onto the road up in the vicinity of the spring was reduced substantially.

Tomorrow morning, if I were a decent kind of a bloke, I would phone up the mayor and the municipal employee to inform them that I can be stupid and stubborn at times. But I'm sure they know that already.

Virtual visit of places of my youth

It's fascinating to be able to use Google Maps while sitting here in Choranche, on the edge of the French Alps, to visit virtually various places in the Australian town of Grafton where I was born. I must warn you now that the rest of this blog post is likely to be more boring than watching your neighbors' color slides of their latest vacation.

Here's the house in Waterview, South Grafton, where I spent the first dozen years of my life:

My Walker grandmother and uncles lived just across the road in this charming house surrounded by wide verandas:

One of my sisters said quite rightly that it was as if our mother, in marrying our father, had never really left home, because she could return to her mother, whenever she had a problem, simply by crossing the road.

This little grocery shop was already there when we were kids, just a couple of hundred meters down the road:

It sold us basic survival food such as peanut butter. And here's a second shop, closer to South Grafton:

It was run by a friendly young woman named Shirley Zietsch. Just opposite her shop, the Royal Hotel was the starting-point for Saturday afternoon cycling races:

On the other side of the Clarence River, this is the house of my paternal grandparents:

I would stay with them every Monday night, so that I could attend the Cub Scout meetings. Later my grandparents built a new house in Robinson Avenue:

Etc, etc, etc... I warned you it would be boring! But don't you agree that it's fabulous to be able to use computers, satellites and a planetary network to waste time looking nostalgically at childhood places?

Giant atom smasher

The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene is one of the most beautiful and exciting books I've ever read, on a par with the masterpieces of Richard Dawkins. Published in 2004, Greene's book evokes with eagerness the possibilities of the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] in Geneva, whose first beam will be produced next Wednesday. Results obtained from this giant atom smasher could have either a positive or a negative influence upon the willingness of physicists to accept the celebrated theory of strings.

A nice way of getting a feeling for the LHC is to watch the following CERN rap video:



The LHC is theoretically capable of generating microscopic black holes. Brian Greene writes: "These black holes would be so small and would last for such a short time that they wouldn't pose us the slightest threat (years ago, Stephen Hawking showed that all black holes disintegrate via quantum processes—big ones very slowly, tiny ones very quickly), but their production would provide confirmation of some of the most exotic ideas ever contemplated."

Various naive observers (including certain individuals who should know better) have been trying to create a state of consternation by proclaiming that our planet Earth might get sucked into one of these tiny black holes produced by the LHC. Click the logo to read the CERN press release on this theme.

To be perfectly frank, I quite like the idea of a little black hole in Switzerland that starts sucking up the surrounding territory: first the city of Geneva and its lovely lake, then the Swiss Alps, and so on. Ideally, stuff should slide into the "throat" of the black hole sufficiently slowly for onlookers to have time to appreciate the visual show, while knowing full well that they themselves will soon be victims of the gluttonous hole. Sooner or later, though, the fat little black hole would end up inevitably gorging itself, and it would then roll around sluggishly, maybe burping from time to time, incapable of downing an extra village or mountain. Literally, the hole has stuffed itself. A brave French gendarme could then simply creep up behind the groggy black hole and smash it to smithereens with a swift blow of a hammer... and humanity would be safe up until the next time.

Gamone Creek

For the last few days, it has been raining intermittently but strongly at Gamone. Even the Cournouze mountain has a drenched look, and the Bourne River has overflowed harmlessly, as usual, at Pont-en-Royans.

Around midday, I couldn't understand why Sophia insisted on going out into the rain, in front of the house, and barking regularly, as if there were a vehicle coming up towards the house. As soon as the rain eased down, I went out to see what was troubling my dog. Once outside, I heard a regular whirring sound, and I expected to see an approaching vehicle. Suddenly I realized that it was the sound, not of a vehicle, but of rushing water in Gamone Creek. So I wandered down there (fifty meters below the house) to take a closer look. As for Sophia, she calmed down as soon as she understood the cause of the noise of the phantom vehicle.

Gamone Creek is what they call a torrent, in that it only flows when it's draining off rainwater from up on the slopes. And since the catchment area above Gamone is not extensive, the torrent is only active for short periods, several times a year... which explains why Sophia was unaccustomed to the noise of rushing water. Although I've never been outside at exactly the right moment to see and hear such a phenomenon, I believe that "packets" of water arrive here punctually, maybe twenty minutes or so after heavy showers further up on the slopes. So I suppose it's the sudden noise of rushing water that disturbs Sophia from time to time.

On my father's bush property outside South Grafton, a small waterway, rarely running, was nevertheless called Deep Creek. I'm happy to have a similar kind of creek at Gamone.

Vista blues

The first video in Microsoft's new publicity campaign, named Shoe Circus, aimed at popularizing their Vista operating system, is dull and meaningless. Unbelievably bad. Judge for yourself:



On the other hand, I found that one of Apple's recent videos on this theme is charming:



The difference in style and content between the two videos reflects the differences between Vista and Leopard.

Musical chairs in Sydney

Europeans who were up at dawn this morning [such as me], browsing through the latest news, would have learned that a political game of musical chairs is going on Down Under in the state parliament of my native state, New South Wales. Insofar as this subject is hardly world-shaking, it now seems to have disappeared from my Google News screen, but the Aussie press continues to talk about it. Here's the cover-story photo from the Sydney Morning Herald:

This banner is bad, incomprehensible, but I'll explain it as best I can. The guy with a contented grin is the new premier, Nathan Rees. The title indicates that this former garbage collector has swept away the old guard, meaning the ex-premier Maurice Iemma, and is ready to shower his total ignorance and inexperience upon the government of NSW. Big deal! As for inset in the banner showing rear views of three or four fellows, I have no idea of its sense, no doubt symbolic.

The wording is revealing about Aussie mentality. How would you feel about a title such as: From garbage collector to brain surgeon? Normally, running a nation should be no less complex than brain surgery. But Aussies seem to see the rise of Rees as a local lad who's just won the premiership lottery. But what a miserable lottery!

Since returning to France from my native Australia two years ago, I've often felt that I've been talking to a brick wall whenever I expressed naively my opinion that what I had seen of NSW in general, during my brief visit, and of Sydney in particular, had an antiquated run-down look and feel, as if it all needed to be rejuvenated with a few new roads, new bridges, new railways, etc. I've never felt like being too explicit about my painful disappointment with Sydney, because a lot of my dismay centered around the observable fact that this great Victorian city seemed to have been transformed overnight (?) into a dull Asian metropolis. I'm convinced that this transformation was, and will be, a lethal ethnic error... but I don't really care about the consequences, because I'm no longer a resident of the Sunburnt Country.

In any case, it would appear that the poverty of the Australian infrastructure is just as bad as what I thought. Here's an excerpt from this morning's Australian press:

Iemma's resignation after three years in power follows months of intense criticism from political opponents, media and the public over the state's creaking transport, infrastructure and hospital systems.

It continues:

The New South Wales government is unpopular after more than 13 years of Labor rule and as the state's aging infrastructure shows signs of wear and tear.

The underlying problem with NSW government is that the potential people to do the job are simply not there. Why not? Because the current sociopolitical environment doesn't bring such individuals into existence. There are no traditions of serious political education in Australia. We have no political academies, no experts in economics and political science, no great orators, no authors who have set out their visions for the future of Australia in books, etc. So, we call upon clowns... such as Michael Costa, who didn't even believe in the planetary dangers of global warming. And now, NSW is calling upon a former garbage collector. Garbage in, garbage out.

Hell's just across the street

Whenever the Tour de France runs into cold rain, icy winds, fog or sleet, you can be sure that a French cycling commentator, to describe the weather conditions, is going to drag out one of their favorite adjectives: dantesque, meaning "atrocious". The first time I heard this highfalutin epithet, I found it funny, because Dante Alighieri [1265-1321] was renowned for his vision of Hell, which we don't usually imagine as a cold damp place. Dante's literary Hell is in fact a terribly complex environment, with a little bit of everything in the way of horrible tribulations... including slippery slopes covered in wet mud.

In his play entitled No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the famous but misunderstood claim: "Hell is other people." He wasn't saying that other people drive us crazy, and that everything would be so much nicer on Earth if we were all alone. Sartre was merely making a two-step observation:

1. An individual constructs a representation of himself by "digesting" what other people seem to be saying and thinking about him. We tend to see ourselves in the "mirror" provided by the attitudes towards us of other people: friends, enemies, etc.

2. When the global assessment provided by these reflections from other people seems to be a real mess [I'm paraphrasing Sartre in crude terms], then it's as if these outside commentators have thrown us into a personal Hell. On the other hand, it might happen that other people are not formulating all that many bad ideas about you. What's more, you might not give a fuck about what other people are saying about you, be it negative or positive. In either of these two happy cases, Hell ceases to exist for you. As Sartre puts it, such fortunate folk are "condemned to be free".

I have the impression that the existentialist Sartre and the zoologist Richard Dawkins are saying much the same thing. God does not exist, so there is no divine plan for the essence of human beings. We might indeed be struck down by lightning, just as we might become the object of "evil vibrations" from other people who desire to impose Hell upon us. But our existentialist freedom to be what we wish to be remains untarnished. We are never obliged to assume a role of victims, neither of brutal Nature nor of Others.

Let's change the background. My birthplace, Grafton, Australia: a sleepy country town (locals like to call it a city) that's proud of its jacaranda trees and its aging bridge across the Clarence River. Let's nudge the background a little bit more, to talk of jails. Before Australia became a nation, it was a vast prison. In my July 2007 article History of my birthplace [display], I mentioned the excellent historical work by Robert Hughes entitled The Fatal Shore, which depicts starkly the terrible penal system that the British installed in the Antipodes. For many decades, Australia's early history was dominated by the abominable treatment of convicts and the continent's indigenous people. Later, the two strands of horror would flow together, in the sense that the majority of inmates in many Australian jails were Aborigines. [This was the case in Fremantle, for example, where I resided in the shadow of their jail in 1986-1987.]

The quiet town of Grafton erected an ominous jail back in 1893... even before they got around to building a town hall and council chambers.

The fortress is still there, inside the city, just across the street from the local hospital... where my brother was treated for a trauma after a horse accident in the 1950s, where my father died in 1978.

This jail in the heart of my birthplace has always been a striking example of an elephant in the living room. Graftonians were all aware that the jail existed, but nobody ever spoke about it. Visiting the hospital, we would make an effort to avoid looking across at the scene on the other side of the street, where the more docile inmates were working in potato fields, behind barbed-wire fences, with rifle-pointing guards observing events from corner towers. Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this kind of situation. Many great cities such as Paris and Marseille have giant prisons in their midst. This is no more shocking (indeed less so, in my opinion) than the countless Breton towns centered around cemeteries, as if the ideal motivation for building a dynamic society consisted of reminding citizens constantly that they were mortal. The only difference is that a cemetery concerns the dead, who no longer care about how they're being treated, whereas a jail inside a social entity such as a city concerns living human beings, whose treatment should remain the object of our vigilant attention. Unfortunately, at Grafton, we knew nothing about what might be happening inside the walls, and we cared even less, for this phenomenon failed to disturb our anesthetized and antiseptic sense of the distinction between what might be humanly acceptable or unacceptable in the outside world. Stupendous error: the "outside world" of tortured inmates happened to lie just across the street.

Meanwhile, I attended Latin classes with Tom Mogan, whose father was the governor of Grafton Jail. Tom was a devout Catholic, and I imagined vaguely that this might have something to do with his desire to learn Latin. After school hours, Tom never invited any of us to his home in Hoof Street: the governor's residence. So we knew nothing about our mate Tom... who went on to become a priest, working with Aborigines in Western Australian, before his premature death.

I attach, with no comments, a public document concerning the period during which I was a high school student in Grafton and the father of my mate Tom was governor of Grafton Jail:

Australian studies in law, crime and justice
The abuse of prisoners in New South Wales 1943-76

Published in:
Wayward governance : illegality and its control in the public sector
P N Grabosky
Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology, 1989 ISBN 0 642 14605 5
(Australian studies in law, crime and justice series); pp. 27-46

The punishment of convicted criminals is an issue which has indelibly marked the two hundred-year-old history of European settlement in New South Wales. Indeed, a central purpose of the original colonisation in 1788 was to relieve overcrowded conditions in British prisons. For its first thirty years, the colony of New South Wales was little more than a military prison.

Although the severity with which the convicts were punished for various breaches of penal discipline defies precise analysis, such limited statistics as do exist depict a regime of grim brutality. Over 42,000 floggings (with an average of more than 40 lashes per flogging) and 240 executions by hanging were officially recorded for the period 1830-37 (Historical Records of Australia, vol. 1, no. 19, p. 654).

A century later, penal methods had evolved substantially - at least in theory. The beating of prisoners was proscribed by law. But well into the second half of the twentieth century, many ugly vestiges of British colonisation were still recognisable in the prisons of New South Wales.

Grafton

During World War II, increasing tensions in the state's prisons, and a number of serious assaults on prison officers, led the then NSW Prisons Department to use Grafton Gaol to house the state's most intractable prisoners. The penal methods implemented there over the following thirty-three year period were described by a Royal Commissioner as a 'regime of terror', '... brutal, savage and sometimes sadistic'. The Commissioner referred to the period in question as 'one of the most sordid and shameful episodes in NSW penal history' (New South Wales 1978, p. 108).

He concluded:

It is the view of the Commission that every prison officer who served at Grafton during the time it was used as a gaol for intractables must have known of its brutal regime. The majority of them, if not all, would have taken part in the illegal assaults on prisoners (New South Wales 1978, P. 119).

The practices in question consisted of the systematic beating of prisoners upon their arrival at Grafton, euphemistically termed a 'reception biff, and further physical assaults in the event of breaches of gaol rules during their subsequent incarceration there. In other instances, beatings were administered on a more or less random basis. In most cases, the assaults took place without violence or provocation by prisoners (Zdenkowski & Brown 1982, pp. 181-2 and 240-1).

Prisoners arrived at Grafton customarily attired in overalls and slippers, their arms strapped to their sides by a security belt to which their wrists were handcuffed. In the words of Mr Justice Nagle:

In some instances, the beatings began even before the security belt and handcuffs were removed. The beatings were usually administered by three or four officers wielding rubber batons. The prisoner was taken into a yard, ordered to strip, searched, and then the biff began. The word biff by no means describes the brutal beating which ensued. A former prison officer, Mr J.J. Pettit, described it: ,sometimes three, four or five of them would assault the prisoner with their batons to a condition of semi-consciousness. On occasions the prisoner urinates, and his nervous system ceases to function normally'. If most of the prisoners are to be believed, the officers had no compunction about beating them around their backs and heads; nor were they averse to kicking them when they were on the ground. They invariably abused them while they were hitting them, calling them 'bastards', 'cunts' and other abusive names. Sometimes they threatened to kill them (New South Wales 1978, P. 110).

The Royal Commissioner went on to quote a former Grafton prisoner, a local resident who had served a short term for failing to meet maintenance payments, and who was thereby spared violent treatment:

Later one afternoon ... I heard a commotion coming from an adjacent cell underneath in the 'trac' section. I could hear a lot of screaming and shouting and also the sound of thuds hitting against something. It went on for at least three minutes, I then heard the sound of a cell door slamming. The intense screaming then continued and its direction appeared to be moving. I then heard the same screaming coming from the yard. It lasted for some time further, and finally disappeared. The next morning at about 7.00 am I and other prisoners went into that yard. I saw what appeared to be pools of blood of considerable quantity on the concrete as well as on the path leading to the wood-heap.

He described the second incident in the following manner.

One afternoon ... I was marching through a walkover near a small yard, and looking towards the pound. I saw officer Wenczel and a prisoner, who was against a wall. Mr Wenczel was flogging him with his baton across his back and shoulders. I saw five to six blows, and the prisoner turned and was struck heavily across the head. Blood spurted from his forehead which was split. He fell on to the ground. The prisoner had his shirt off and blood was appearing on his body. I walked away from the scene (quoted in New South Wales 1978, p. 115).

It was clear, moreover, that the beatings in question were in furtherance of departmental policy; prison officers who testified before the Royal Commission conceded as much (Findlay 1982, p. 46). Departmental correspondence referred to the desirability of 'robust officers' to staff the institution, and for thirty-three years prison officers at Grafton were paid a 'climatic allowance' (New South Wales 1978, p. 108) - certainly an ironic euphemism, as the climate in the Grafton area is arguably the most equable in Australia.

Love me tender... or I'll destroy you!

I don't claim that Pif reasons like that. In fact, as an outcome of my daily training under the guidance of animal experts such as Dawkins and Pinker, I would no longer claim that Pif really "reasons" at all in our everyday human sense. But I believe that his brain functions just as perfectly, just as imperfectly, as mine. I have an immense respect for Pif's brain. And I would be delighted to think that the feeling is reciprocal. Loving Pif tender consists of stroking his belly and associated genitals while he lies stretched out on his back, like an upside-down client in a massage parlor. As for his destructive power, it consists of attacking such objects as wicker dog baskets, cotton and woolen dog blankets, etc. Extrapolating, I believe that Pif might easily destroy either an entire automobile or a rural residence if ever his lovely little mind were to decide that these human artefacts didn't love him tender, as they should. The solution to all these dire possibilities, of course, is to love Pif tender.

Maybe McCain's the father!

I'm aware that I have no grounds for making suggestions concerning the paternity of Mrs Moose's offspring. But there's an odd chance that I might go down in Internet history as the first blogger who hit upon the truth of the great US 2008 Vice-Presidential Affair. [Please keep a copy of this post, indicating the exact time at which it appeared on your computer screen... just in the case the Wikipedia or Guinness Book of Records people ask me for evidence concerning my revelation.]

Now, if ever John McCain were to attack me for drawing fuzzy conclusions about things I ignore, my lawyers would insist that McCain and all the leggy Moose clan must render public their DNA signatures. That would be a modern way of going about things. Public figures have always been expected to reveal the true details of their personal state of health... or illness, as the case may be. Ample DNA data would have the advantage of letting us guess beforehand what might possibly go wrong with the candidate. Now, don't try to tell me that personal data about a potential American president and vice-president concerns only the citizens of the USA. Even such a simple thing as the IQ of George W Bush turned into a planetary catastrophe that has affected us all.

Juicy publicity

Before this sexy ad was aired, few people were aware that all kinds of exotic creatures have a craving for orange-flavored soda water:



It makes you feel like saying: "Yes please, I would like to have some of the same stuff." Apparently, in Britain, this video was judged to be far too sensually explicit. In France, it didn't raise an eyebrow.

Childhood paradise

We all need a vision of Paradise, with a capital P, otherwise we would surely be tempted to step out of the rat race, in one way or another, politely if possible... like Amy Winehouse not turning up to sing in Paris. Return to sender, address unknown. Nobody's home...

Here's a fuzzy scene from one of my childhood visions of Paradise:

At the Mulligan's property at OBX Creek, among other things, I discovered a magic macadamia nut tree. There were three brothers in the vicinity: Athol, Stan and Norman. A small sawmill near the house had produced timber for the dinghy in the above photo, which had the sweet aroma of shellac. The brothers fiddled around with souped-up motor bikes that they raced on a dirt track at Bawden's Bridge over the Orara.

When I returned to Australia in 1967, with my wife and daughter, I was proud to cook dinner for everybody, in my parents' house at Southampton Road in South Grafton. I chose chicken. Athol Mulligan, observing the dish, said: "Billy, your chicken looks like it's been run over by a steamroller." And everybody christened my dish, instantaneously, Continental Chook.

Here at Gamone, in the company of Sophia, I still serve up Continental Chook from time to time... and I've often dreamt that the Mulligans of OBX Creek might drop in magically, one evening, as guests.

Nightmare: Mrs Moose governs the globe!

Here's a terrifying thought experiment. Hypothesis: John McCain is elected president. Now imagine: In the exciting high-altitude post-electoral atmosphere, while screwing over-energetically his golden girl Cindy, the 72-year-old war hero ruptures some kind of bodily aeronautical valve, fails to manipulate correctly the bail-out device, and crashes in flames to his death. Oh my God! It's youthful Mrs Moose, 44-year-old Sarah Palin from Alaska, totally inexperienced in worldly affairs and primed with primitive religious beliefs, who would then take the reins of the most powerful nation of the planet...

Let's be optimistic. In selecting Simple Sarah as his presidential running-mate (she strikes me as the sort of earthy backwoods creature who knows both how to run and how to mate), John McCain has surely removed all barriers on Barack Obama's highway to Washington.

Professional bias

The expression "professional bias" designates a mental conditioning brought about by the particularities of one's job. A contrived example is that of a race-car driver, say, who overtakes dangerously when he's out driving in the family automobile with his wife and kids.

Long ago, I started to suspect the existence of professional bias due to computer programming. I recall seeing a case of this, for the first time, in the conversational behavior of a colleague in Paris. He would periodically abandon the current topic about which he had been speaking in order to explore such-and-such an aspect in detail. Then, at the end of his detailed exploration, he would return to what he had been saying earlier on. On such occasions, he would inform his listeners that he was implementing the familiar programming concept referred to as a stack. He would do this by pointing out explicitly the moment at which he was about to "push down" (hide momentarily) the initial topic, and then, later on, the moment at which the hidden topic was about to "pop up" (reappear) once again. Insofar as a stack can be composed of multiple levels, which might be exploited in an irregular order, it can quickly become tedious for a listener confronted with a conversationalist with this kind of professional bias.

I soon realized that I myself was afflicted with this professional bias, which happens to infuriate my ex-wife and our two children. I have an even worse affliction due to the same causes. Faced with an ordinary real-world challenge such as building a kitchen cupboard, say, I tend to consider that the task has been satisfactorily completed as soon as I've convinced myself that I know how to perform the task in question, rather than when the intended outcome of the project has indeed become a reality. I conceal this strange outlook, unwittingly, behind a verb that also infuriates my ex-wife and children. I speak of "mastering a situation", which is a synonym for knowing how to do something. Inversely, whenever I'm reprimanded because I haven't actually done something I should have done, I get upset by the suggestion that I might not "master the situation" in an ideal fashion. In my mind, the fact that the job has not in fact been performed yet is of lesser importance than my conviction that I know how to do it. These reactions are of course pure symptoms of professional bias due to excessive immersion in computer programming activities, where the only thing that counts is the existence of adequate algorithms for performing tasks, no matter whether or not the algorithms in question have actually been applied to solve specific problems, or carry out particular computational jobs. I would be a hopeless boss of a small company (or a big one, for that matter). When the employees complained that they hadn't received their pay checks, I would say: "What's all the fuss about? Everything's in perfect order, and our computer can print out the payroll rapidly at the flick of a switch! "

Sometimes I felt a little ill at ease to realize that my mind might be warped by my work. I was reminded of a brief image in a film where you have a rear view of a sexton who kneels down piously on his right knee every time he passes in front of the altar. When the camera swings around to provide us with a front view of the dear man, we discover that he has worn a knee-level hole in the right leg of his trousers. I wondered whether excessive computer thinking might not have worn a hole in my mind.

Things have advanced rapidly since the time when I had such qualms. From one end to the other of a book such as How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker, which is already over ten years old, the author—a professor psychology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology—exploits the so-called computational theory of the mind, according to which everything aspect of human thinking can and must be explained in terms of computing-programming paradigms and machine metaphors. When I wrote Machina Sapiens back in 1976, I thought at times that I might be a bit reckless in imagining that computers might get around, one day, to "thinking" in a more-or-less human-like fashion. Today, on the contrary, I realize that I didn't go nearly far enough in suggesting that, since Man is a kind of machine, it is quite feasible to imagine machines that will end up behaving much like human beings. We realize, though, that the task will be extremely difficult, and probably take a long time, not because there's anything of a non-mechanical nature in a human being, but because Evolution has had an immensely long time to put together the spectacular machine called Homo sapiens.

This man, named Douglas A Melton, is a US researcher in genetics, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, whose goal consists of creating cells that are missing or defective in certain patients, particularly those suffering from diabetes. Yesterday, the journal Nature revealed that Melton's group has made a great step towards modifying the function of adult cells. This operation is designated, by means of a pure computing metaphor, as reprogramming the function of the cells. The Washington Post described the breakthrough as follows:

Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive.

Here, the notion of molecular "switches" being "flipped" sounds like electronic engineering. In fact, it is computer talk, reflecting the fact that the DNA in a cell can be considered as a purely digital storage device, like the memory of a computer.

Up until last year, researchers in medical genetics were obliged to work with authentic embryonic cells, and this disturbed religious folk who felt that scientists were acting unethically. Then there was the welcome discovery that adult cells of any kind could be transformed into an embryonic state, enabling them to be coaxed into developing into any kind of desired cell for experimental work. The outcome of the Harvard work is that it will be possible to avoid the necessity of returning to the embryonic level, since adult cells will be reprogrammed in such a way that they actually become cells of a related kind.

For the moment, Melton and his fellow researchers have been working only with the cells of mice. So, a lot of work still remains to be done before the successful creation of a revolutionary branch of medicine that might be referred to as genetic surgery. In that future domain, based upon the notion of reprogramming human cell functions, it's likely that the technicians will talk among themselves, to a large extent, in the jargon of computer programmers.

No need for talk

In a recent blog post, Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, wrote:

As most of you know, I draw a comic featuring a guy who inexplicably has no mouth, who lives with a cartoon dog that inexplicably has no mouth. And I end up with Spasmodic Dysphonia, a condition that prevents me from speaking.

I'm reminded of an anecdote back at the time, thirty years ago, when I was writing a tourist guidebook about Great Britain. I asked for permission to use a comic strip [display] I'd seen in Paris-Match drawn by the French cartoonist Pat Mallet, who happens to be a few months younger than me. The authorization came by return mail, and the letter included a personal phone number. So I decided to phone up Pat Mallet to thank him. A friendly male voice told me it was a pleasure to collaborate in a book about the folk on the other side of the English Channel (known, in French, as La Manche).

ME: For months, I've been faced with the daily task of finding words to describe Great Britain. In the case of your comic strip, I'm terribly impressed by your skill in describing a typical aspect of London without using any words whatsoever.

VOICE AT THE OTHER END OF THE LINE: I must point out that you're not speaking with Pat Mallet himself. I'm his father, and I handle his phone calls. Pat himself has been totally deaf since the age of nine, and unable to communicate by speech.

I love this wordless cover from a Pat Mallet album of 1985, published by Glénat, called Ainsi est la vie (Such is life):

This marvelous drawing of a poetic dog admiring the sunset from the parapet of a luxurious seaside restaurant, while all the humans are lost in conversation, is a perfect illustration of the frivolity (at times) of speech. [And there I've gone again, adding unnecessary words.]

New school year for French diplomacy

The transition period from the end of August to the start of September is referred to, in French, as the rentrée: the return to work and serious affairs, after the summer vacation (for the fortunate few who can afford vacations). Certain observers might consider that diplomats, like retired employees (such as me), are on full-time vacation, in that they don't have to trot off to a dull office in a French city every weekday. Fair enough. You might recall that, in my Guinea pig article of 17 July 2008 [display], I joked about the fact that my weekly dose of experimental pills constitutes a primitive calendar. This morning, at my annual checkup at Romans, the Inserm guy asked me how I was coping with their pills, and I told him that story. He replied: "In any case, your entire daily existence is composed, now, of weekends." The poor bastard must be overworked.

Every year since 1993, the French Republic has been organizing an annual get-together in Paris of its 180 ambassadors and senior administrators of the prestigious Quay d'Orsay ministry of Foreign Affairs. Here's a photo of last year's class:

The 16th Conférence des Ambassadeurs has just got under way, and it will last for three days.

The diplomatic role of France in the world has been enhanced, since July, by the fact that the Republic has been presiding over the European Union. Obviously, the primary preoccupation of the present conference is the situation in Georgia. In his opening address, today, Nicolas Sarkozy insisted upon the necessity of Russia's immediate retreat from the occupied provinces of Georgia.

Meanwhile, the foreign minister Bernard Kouchner has a grand planetary vision for French Foreign Affairs. He would like to see the the Quai d'Orsay evolving into a "ministry of globalization". This change should lead to both modernization and cost-cutting in France's 158 embassies and 21 multilateral representations throughout the world. If and when these reforms are enacted, there'll be less glitter in French diplomacy. Ideally, the glamor, foie gras and champagne will be replaced by sound suggestions about making the planet a more peaceful and pleasant place for humanity. We'll see...

Black is tricolor

There's no doubt about the fact that France supports Obama. The blue, white and red colors of the French tricolor are designated in French as bleu, blanc, rouge. But, in the joyous days of France's soccer victory in 1998, a new color system emerged, designated as black, blanc, beur. What's this new color, beur? It's inverted slang for "Arabe". Effectively, French society today is a mixture of dyed-in-the-wool oldtimers named Dupont or Martin, or something like that, and all kinds of exotic newcomers from diverse backgrounds. A new melting pot has come into existence.

France is unlikely to retain fond memories of George W Bush and his old pal Donald Rumsfeld, searching for illusive weapons of mass destruction in their Axis of Evil. What stupidity, shared by Blair in the UK and Howard in Australia. The less said, the better...

Traveler with baggage

Even when the journey's only a couple of hundred meters long (the distance between our two houses at Gamone), the voyager will travel with his basic luggage. For a human, this might start with a toothbrush and a change of underwear. For Pif, it's his plastic "bone", which squeaks when it's bitten.

Our canine neighbor Pif, belonging to Alison, intrigues Sophia and me. For a start, he often runs around in circles trying to catch his tail.

Pif doesn't quite know what to make of the smelly billy-goat Gavroche, roughly his same size, when he drops in at the house for his daily dish of cereals.

The two animals share a common fascination for photographers, and look upwards with a view to understanding what's happening.

In such situations, Pif's floppy ears bend backwards, revealing their pink interior. There's no such problem for the rigid ears of Gavroche. Meanwhile, the great canine queen of Gamone resides calmly, as usual, in an ethereal domain, well above such trivial earthly agitation.

It's eleven o'clock on a sunny Monday morning, and Pif has just arrived at Gamone, full of smiles, and jumping (literally) with joy. There can be problems, of an evening, in persuading the delightful dog to go back home with Alison when she returns from work (as a waitress in the restaurant at the famous caves of Choranche) on her scooter. Let's say, to simplify, that Pif takes pleasure in having two homes. I'll be sad when Alison takes him away to Spain in a few weeks. It goes without saying that Pif will be traveling, as usual, with his squeaking bone.

ADDENDUM: Just after finishing the above post, I received an unexpected visit from my Choranche neighbors Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier, who stayed here for a delightful outdoors lunch in the shade of my giant linden tree. Among other things, they were able to observe the case of Pif at first hand. Their conclusions: It would appear that Pif has moved in at my place, heart and soul. And he seems to lead a joyful existence here. Be that as it may, we all feel that it would be unwise for Alison to set off to an unknown lifestyle in Spain, in three weeks' time, with Pif in tow. Tineke suggested that I should write a letter to Alison offering to hold on to her dog up until she gets settled in Spain, and is ready to receive him. I think I'll do this. On the other hand, I don't wish to appear dog-matic. Insofar as it's obvious that I'm fond of Pif, it would be incorrect to think that I simply wish to hang on to this little creature. On the contrary, it would be great if this dog were to discover the exciting atmosphere of a horse ranch in Spain. But it would be wrong if Pif were to be more or less abandoned by Alison in Spain, as has been the case at Gamone.

Homo faber

Man the tool-making animal. Here in France, "faber" has given rise to the surname Fabre and its variants. In medieval times, blacksmiths received this name. They could be thought of as inheritors of the Greek god Haephaestus (Vulcan for the Romans).

Homo faber was one of the favorite expressions of my mentor Pierre Schaeffer. He liked to imagine that God had made Man "in his own image", as a maker, so that imaginative individuals would spend their time on Earth inventing tools to make more and more things, as a kind of end in itself. It doesn't really matter all that much what you actually make (with obvious exceptions such as nuclear weapons, anti-personal mines, etc). The important thing is to become a maker, a tool-wielder. I often thought that Schaeffer looked upon his invention of musique concrète (musical compositions made by assembling real-world noises) as a pastime for obsessional makers.

In recent times, we've discovered that humans are not the only creatures capable of using tools. Chimpanzees and their sex-obsessed cousins the bonobos learn from their elders how to use stones to crack open nuts, or sticks to catch termites.

You might imagine that, by now, human inventors have come up with every possible tool that could possibly be imagined. I only have to open a kitchen drawer to find all kinds of simple but marvelous tools. Here, for example, is the world's finest corkscrew:

You would never guess the purpose for which the following exotic implement (roughly the size of a small spoon) was invented:

It's a spoon of a special kind, used for soaking a cube of sugar in absinthe liqueur. Don't ask me why its form should be so complicated. Maybe all spoons get to look that way after you've imbibed a few glasses of absinthe.

My daughter recently gave me a tiny German instrument designed for opening walnuts:

One of these days, I really must remove the silver key from its card and get around to trying it out. For the moment, like an ape, I carry on using one of humanity's most ancient inventions for this purpose: the hammer. Maybe the Munich invention could be used to open oysters, which would be really great.

Talking about walnuts, I've probably said already on this blog that I often produce a delicacy using a recipe from the Australian pioneering days: pickled walnuts.

In that context, I'm in need of a tool that hasn't been invented yet. I'm thinking of a device to facilitate the initial step in the recipe for making pickled walnuts, which consists of piercing the green fruit to produce dozens of punctures. Why do we need to puncture the walnuts? In the next step of the recipe, the pierced walnuts are soaked in brine for a fortnight, and the holes allow the liquid to seep deep inside the fruit, to neutralize their toxicity. For the moment, to puncture the walnuts, I use a primitive method: a steel-spiked dog's comb.

You can imagine that this technique is inefficient, because I have to hold the fruit in my left hand while piercing it with the comb held in my right hand, then I have to withdraw the hard fruit from the spikes to repeat the operation from another angle. I do this about half a dozen times for each walnut, while trying to avoid wounds to the fingers of my left hand. What I need is some kind of device to pierce the walnuts rapidly and efficiently. Now, whenever I evoke the desired tool, people invariably react by saying that it should be easy to invent such a device, and they start talking about a pair of spiked rollers, or maybe spiked plates. But the problem is more difficult than what it appears, for the simple reason that the walnut, when pierced, tends to stick to the spikes. So, in the case of spiked plates, there would have to be an associated pair of metal plates with holes, which could be used to withdraw the walnuts from the spikes. Then there's the problem of ensuring that each walnut is pierced all over its skin. This would necessitate some kind of "intelligent" system for turning each walnut around so that it gets pierced all over. This is surely possible, in theory, but we're likely to end up with blueprints for a complicated device. So, is it worth it? Maybe the dog's comb can still look forward to a long and healthy future existence.

There's a second tool that I need at Gamone. It concerns my latest kind of electric fence, seen here:

The fence is composed of a steel rods surmounted by white nylon insulators, referred to as pigs' tails, to hold the electric ribbon:

Periodically, I need to withdraw the stakes from the ground so that I can remove the grass and weeds, and then I might decide to change the location of the fence. In the rocky earth at Gamone, it can be difficult to remove such rods. I need a tool of the following kind:

Here, the clasp would need to grasp the stake securely, enabling me to use the tool like a lever in order to unearth the stake.

No sooner had I drawn this diagram than I invented a way of using successfully a heavy-weight wire-cutter and a sledgehammer (the same tool I use for fixing the stakes in the ground) to unearth stakes.

Admittedly, this solution is imperfect, because it's hard to exert downwards pressure on the outstretched wire-cutter while squeezing the arms together in order to grip the stake. There's still room in the modern world for Homo faber.