Assassination of an Afghan hero

With hindsight, we can understand anything and everything. Theoretically, on 9 September 2001, the western world received a clear message that al-Qaeda was about to perpetrate a major criminal happening. On that day, in the isolated northern Afghan province of Takhar, 48-year-old Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by a pair of al-Qaeda suicide bombers who had been posing as journalists.

Massoud was the hero who, at the head of his mujahideen warriors, had played a major role in driving Soviet troops out of Afghanistan in 1989. When the Taliban appeared on the scene in 1996, Massoud opposed them in his role as chief of the so-called Northern Alliance, a stalwart of western democracy.

Today, we know that the assassination of Massoud had been programmed to take place within a time slot that would end on 9 September 2001. Beyond that date, it would no longer be possible for al-Qaeda to execute stealthily a friend of the West such as Massoud… for the obvious reason (as we now know, with hindsight) that the terrorist organization would be making a spectacular "coming out" two days later, in New York.

To my mind, in the domain of romantic 20th-century guerrilla heroes, Massoud was a far greater figure than Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Massoud was an authentic revolutionary, fighting for causes that we all cherish today. This photo shows Australian vehicles in 2009:

The memory of Massoud symbolizes the combat of young soldiers of the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) [display details] who are still fighting and dying today in Afghanistan.

No poll has ever produced a president

François Hollande is behaving correctly when he draws attention to the fact that his current success in voting-opinion polls is no guarantee that he'll be elected as French president next year.

Lots of things could happen between now and May 2012. Hollande himself could make some gigantic blunder… such as getting randy with a nasty hotel maid, for example. But this is unlikely. One of the other Socialist contenders could pull a white rabbit out of his/her hat and achieve stardom. A more plausible scenario: Nicolas Sarkozy could pull off such-and-such a political stunt leading voters to believe (that's to say, those of them who don't believe this already) that bursts of solar radiation are emitted periodically by the president's posterior orifice.

I invite those of my blog readers who understand French to appreciate the following brilliant and convincing discourse of Hollande, today, in the French National Assembly:

We see here a statesman, with a mastery of socio-economic questions, and we sense the presence of a future French president.

Rally Australia

At Coffs Harbour, over the four days starting next Thursday, this is the Citroën automobile to admire:

Here's a rear view of this vehicle:

And here's the driver, Sébastien Loeb:

For the moment, Loeb is leading the 2011 championship, but he could still be beaten by the other Citroën driver, Sébastien Ogier. Meanwhile, with three rallies remaining after Australia (in France, Spain and the UK), the Finns Mikko Hirvonen and Jari-Matti Latvala, in their Fords, are unlikely to catch up with the Frenchmen.

Click the banner to access the Rally Australia website. I've been looking at the four-day schedule and the various maps, and trying to figure out what I would do if I were a spectator out in New South Wales. On the opening day, it would be good to spend some time at the Jetty Precinct in Coffs Harbour, in the hope of glimpsing the drivers and vehicles before they actually get into action, late in the afternoon. Then, on Sunday afternoon, it would be interesting to watch the final so-called "power stage" up in the vicinity of Wooli and Red Rock.

The rally covers such a big area—of what appears to be bush country (?)—that I have no idea how spectators are expected to move from one place to another. Nor do I know how spectators can actually obtain real-time information on the results of the latest stages. Maybe by means of an iPhone capable of linking to the above-mentioned website?

Early Australian automobile rally

Starting next Thursday, Rally Australia will be taking place near my birthplace: more precisely, in several rural zones in the vicinity of the coastal town of Coffs Harbour.

I shall never forget my first contact with an automobile trial in Australia, in 1956, at a time when I was living with my grandparents at Robinson Avenue in Grafton and preparing my final high-school certificate. I am referring to the 1956 Ampol Around Australia Trial. My grandfather was the Ford dealer in Grafton, and his garage had a gasoline pump alongside the roadway in Fitzroy Street, at the spot where the entrance to an automobile business existed up until recently.

This address was indicated as an official refueling station for the Ampol contestants, who had left Sydney during the day. When the vehicles started to arrive in Fitzroy Street, it was late in the evening. I was there, alongside my grandfather's gasoline pump, participating in the excitement. After all, in quiet old Grafton, we had never before seen anything quite like this. I remember in particular the third car to arrive, with its headlights blazing. It was a charming little MG TF sports car (manufactured by Morris), much like this:

On the local radio, I had heard about this vehicle and its occupants, Les Slaughter and Bill Mayes, no doubt because their vehicle was so much more elegant than most of the typical sedans engaged in the trial: bulky Holdens, Peugeots, Fords, Standard Vanguards, etc. I was so close to the car that I had time, while it was being refueled, to gaze down into the cockpit, where I could see clearly the two drivers, both of whom were wearing woolen bonnets (because it must have been quite cool, of an evening, beneath their flimsy canvas hood). To my innocent eyes, unaccustomed to harsh sporting adventures of this kind, there was something unreal about the vision of these two fellows emerging from the darkness, and waiting impatiently to take off once again. As they drove off into the dark, I had the impression that I was watching a pair of daring pioneers, heroes of a new kind.

The next morning, we learned from news bulletins on the radio that Slaughter and Mayes had never reached the next town, up on the Great Dividing Range. They had disappeared mysteriously somewhere along the mountainous Gwydir Highway between South Grafton and Glen Innes. However nobody in any of the other 31 vehicles, racing through that rugged and sparsely-populated region in the middle of the night, had witnessed anything unusual. Later on in the day, an intrigued automobile specialist, Evan Green, came upon telltale tracks in the gravel, indicating that a vehicle had left the dangerous road. Police found the little MG down at the bottom of a gorge. The two drivers had been ejected by the impact, and they were lying face-down in a creek, side-by-side, where they had in fact drowned. I was no doubt one of the last people to see Slaughter and Mayes alive, in the cockpit of their beautiful little automobile. I've never forgotten that tragedy, which marked me enormously. Curiously, though, I felt that it was almost inevitable that such exotic and intrepid heroes should meet their destiny in this dramatic fashion.

Finally, the trial was won by two Australians—Alan Taylor and Wilf Murrell—driving a run-of-the-mill French car: a Peugeot 403.


POST SCRIPTUM: It's quite possible that this archaic gasoline pump, which apparently still exists today at the Fitzroy Street premises, is the place where Slaughter and Mayes fueled up for the last time.

Postman needs a vacation

This true story about a French thief is similar—on the surface—to the anecdote described in my recent blog post entitled Lovers lanes for an ex-husband [display].

In the city of Moselle (province of Lorraine), over the last ten years, a middle-aged postman has stolen 13,000 items that he was supposed to deliver. Amazingly, he stored all this stolen mail in his attic, where it was discovered in a more-or-less intact state. The most intriguing aspect of the thief's behavior was his predilection for simple postcards, of the trivial kind that tourists send back home to their loved ones.

Not surprisingly, psychiatrists concluded that the postman was a compulsive kleptomaniac, but he's thought to be totally responsible for his acts. In other words, he's by no means clinically crazy. The postman himself is incapable of explaining objectively why he committed all this theft, but he admits that he has always been fascinated by the kinds of simple family letters and postcards that he stole.

The poor guy is likely to be sent away on a three-year vacation for theft, accompanied by another three years for a fuzzy crime described as "violation of the secrecy of private correspondence". I would have imagined that, in our Internet age—where organizations and individuals are constantly sticking their noses into other people's business—the latter concept would have become somewhat obsolete.

I hope the authorities will give us the guy's address in jail, enabling well-wishers to send him friendly postcards.

This story has a happy ending. The postal authorities are in the process of forwarding all the stolen mail to its rightful receivers. Since we live in the best of all possible worlds, I'm sure that many people will be so thrilled to receive this long-overdue mail that they'll spontaneously dash off a thank-you postcard to the postman.

Figs in my yard

My friend Tineke Bot has often claimed that she can distinguish spontaneously and effortlessly dozens of different shades of green. Here in Choranche, this kind of chromatic sensibility is an asset. Without it, an observer would have the impression of looking out on a world that is homogeneously green. In the case of the following photo, for example, I've played around with Photoshop settings in an attempt (not particularly successful) to get the leaves of the fig tree to stand out as much as possible against the background.

[Click to enlarge]

For the first time ever, the tree is covered in figs, and they're truly delicious. This is the tree given to me by my Provençal friends Natacha and Alain. Two years ago, in my blog post entitled Great fig tree, but low yield [display], I said jokingly that the annual yield of the young tree had been one edible fig. Clearly, since then, it has evolved exponentially. They're small dark spheres, firm and sweet: the variety of figs used to produce tarts and cakes.

I take this opportunity of including a link back to my blog post entitled Fabulous fig story [display], in which I referred to fascinating biological information from Richard Dawkins concerning the fig tree.

Fitzroy excavator

This photo, taken this morning on the road just up from my house at Gamone, shows Fitzroy posing proudly in front of a hole that he had dug in the embankment some 24 hours earlier.

[Click to enlarge]

Yesterday, I happened to be located some 20 meters further up the road (but without my Nikon) at the instant when Fitzroy decided to carry out this excavation. I was strolling up the road when I heard a kind of dull rumbling sound behind me. Turning around, I was amazed to see Fitzroy in full action, engulfed in a cloud of dust. His robust front paws were rotating rapidly, gouging out earth and stones that flew over his head. This was the first time I had ever caught Fitzroy in an act of excavation. (Normally he works alone, stealthily, in the early hours of the morning.) The entire operation lasted less than 20 seconds, as if a powerful machine had been set in operation, and then turned off.

What in fact was the purpose of this unexpected excavation? Like any self-respecting fossicker, Fitzroy refrains from revealing details. In the case of potential seams of precious metals or gems, you don't go around town shouting out about what you're doing. You simply shut up, keep quiet about your findings, and continue to dig. I suspect, though, that my marvelous friend Fitzroy might have sighted a tiny lizard.

Gaul with a sudden urge

You probably saw the story in the world media, a few weeks ago, about the French actor Gérard Depardieu at the start of a flight from Dublin to Paris.

He informed the cabin crew that he had an urgent need to pee. Since the plane was taking off, the toilets were out of bounds. So, Depardieu was obliged to pee into a plastic bottle. But this recipient turned out to be far too small for his voluminous production of piss… so you can imagine the uncontrolled splashes and the subsequent mess.

My readers are no doubt familiar with the cunning little Gaul named Asterix, and his bulky but immensely powerful companion Obelix.

Obelix is a hearty eater, with a constant yearning for wild pig. At a single sitting, he's capable of consuming, all on his own, several baked boars. In October last year, I mentioned this meat in my blog post entitled Celtic cooking [display].

Getting back to the Depardieu incident, the actor had been in Ireland for the shooting of a film about these heroic Gauls. As in a previous movie, Depardieu was playing Obelix, and his fellow-actor Edouard Baer was playing Asterix. Well, they've just released a French-language video in which Obelix, at the start of a plane flight, is beset by a sudden urge to eat roast boar (in French, sanglier).

An excellent publicity gimmick for the forthcoming film! Besides, here's a nice CNN interview concerning the notorious Depardieu incident:

In a totally different domain, here's a curious photo that shows a wild boar, on a beach in Brittany (home of Asterix and Obelix), about to be taken for a ride on a quad bike.

Are they about to prepare a Celtic banquet? Not exactly. It's one of a dozen or so dead bodies of wild boars that were no doubt poisoned by toxic hydrogen sulfide gas emitted by a thick layer of decaying seaweeds. The seaweeds thrive at the outlet of a stream that is polluted by nitrates used abundantly by local farmers… many of whom raise domestic pigs.

Standing still requires creative effort

In competitive track cycling, there's a curious technique—in the two-person racing format known as sprinting—that consists of standing still on your bike while hoping that the other person will be forced to head off first. The general idea is that it's preferable to remain in the second position at the start of a sprint, since you can take advantage of the first rider's airstream.

Funnily enough, standing still on a track bicycle consumes quite a lot of physical energy, because the rider has to be constantly pressing back and forth on his pedals to avoid moving forwards down the track (or backwards, in certain situations). I know what I'm talking about because, back in my days of track cycling, I used to master this technique quite successfully… but mainly just for fun. Let us refer to this spent energy as status quo (SQ) energy. In other words, it's the energy you need to spend in order to stay exactly where you are.

In our everyday life, we often encounter people who appear to be spending enormous amounts of SQ energy in order to remain more-or-less immobile. I'm thinking above all of bourgeois folk who are obsessed by their status within such-and-such a peer group to which they belong. Even though the Joneses may in fact evolve imperceptibly at a social level, simply keeping up with them can be a relentless and arduous full-time job for neighbors who make this their mission. Most often, SQ energy is used in the hope of demonstrating that one is perfectly normal with respect to one's particular milieu. Members of social groups such as political parties, civic associations, religious bodies and sporting clubs will often devote a lot of SQ energy towards furthering the impression that they are ordinary trustworthy members of the group in question, with no imaginable reason to be ostracized. In another context, you might say that a young man asking for the hand of the girl he loves is often called upon to expend much SQ energy in the context of his future parents-in-law. In La Cage aux Folles, poor Albin had to exploit with talent a maximum of SQ energy in order to prove that "she" was, as expected, an ordinary and acceptable wife/mother.

It would be a mistake to consider that SQ energy is negative, or wasted, because it might indeed be important—for citizens preoccupied by their social status, no less than for a track cyclist—to remain in the same place, with the same status as before. But we would probably not be too wrong in referring to SQ energy as nonproductive, in the sense that it gives rise to nothing new. That's to say, it's not at all the kind of energy that a society might use in its quest for innovation.

Now, the reason I'm talking about SQ energy is that this question has arisen in one of the many ingenious explanations in The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch, in a chapter entitled The Evolution of Creativity. Deutsch set out to explain a puzzling era in human prehistory and history. For countless generations, humanity's progress could be represented by an almost flat graph. That's to say, there was no perceptible social or technical innovation whatsoever. In a general sense (excluding calamities, all too frequent, such as warfare, plagues and natural catastrophes), every day tended to be a copy of the previous day. Then, all of a sudden, at an epoch designated as the Enlightenment, the old world order exploded, and innovation burgeoned. Well, Deutsch envisages the existence of a common force behind the immensely long period of negligible human progress and the prolific age of the Enlightenment, and he designates that common force by an unexpected term: creativity.

• During the preliminary era of near-zero progress, individuals who were sufficiently endowed genetically with creativity were able to expend SQ energy enabling them to survive in primitive so-called static societies that abhorred all forms of innovation.

• When the tide turned with the Enlightenment, this same endowment of creativity enabled the descendants of the static societies to abandon their SQ preoccupations and to promote all kinds of innovation.

Here's the pivotal paragraph from Deutsch:

Hence, paradoxically, it requires creativity to thrive in a static society — creativity that enables one to be less innovative than other people. And that is how primitive, static societies, which contained pitifully little knowledge and existed only by suppressing innovation, constituted environments that strongly favoured the evolution of an ever-greater ability to innovate.
— The Beginning of Infinity, page 414

As in a track-cycling sprint, the same forces that have enabled a rider to stand still can then be unleashed to make him win.

Tidal-power engineering

Electricité de France (EDF), the national French electricity authority, has purchased a series of four giant tidal-energy turbines, which will be towed out into the sea off Brittany, to the north of Paimpol and the Ile-de-Bréhat, and lowered onto the sea floor.

These huge turbines are manufactured by an Irish company in Dublin named OpenHydro.

[Click the image to access their website]

Each circular turbine has a diameter of 16 meters, and will be installed on a tripod posed on the sea floor. The combined weight of a turbine and its base is 850 tons, which means that the structure is unlikely to move around.

For the moment, tidal turbines of this kind remain an experimental technology. On the other hand, France was a world pioneer in a related domain: the installation of tidal turbines in a barrier across the mouth of an estuary.

Opened in November 1966, the Rance tidal-power station in Brittany was the first such system in the world. Today, the station is still perfectly operational, and it produces electricity at three-quarters the cost of nuclear energy.

Obviously, to exploit this source of energy, you need to be located in a part of the world with a powerful tidal system. This is the case in Brittany and Normandy… where there's a well-known local saying about the tide going out "at the speed of a galloping horse". Personally, before becoming acquainted with the coasts of these two French provinces, I had never encountered the phenomenon of ports that simply lose all their water when the tide is out. I was amazed to discover vast beaches of dry sand covered in boats propped up on their sides with wooden poles.

Children's books

Some children's books can be appreciated by readers who ceased, long ago, to be children. No doubt the finest cases of such literature are the works of Lewis Carroll… but one might claim that the author imagined his juvenile readers as intellectually-endowed individuals capable of being intrigued by logical enigmas, linguistic bizarreries and all kinds of puzzling things.

I've always thought of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows as a splendid example of a children's book that can be enjoyed by adults.

On the other hand, certain books that I found extraordinarily exciting as a child had lost all their charm when I rediscovered them years later. The most disappointing case of this kind, for me, was the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome. When I was about 11 years old, these adventure stories—of a Boy Scout and Girl Guide tone—were the summit of thrilling fiction.

These days, I would imagine that many adults have derived pleasure from reading the Harry Potter books. Personally, having seen some of the movies on TV, I became rapidly bored by all that pointing of magic wands and riding of flying broomsticks. It's definitely not my kettle of fish, but I can understand that many adults might appreciate this kind of stuff.

A new book for children will be coming out on October 4, and I've just put in an advance order for it. I'm referring to The Magic of Reality, the latest book by Richard Dawkins. I'm happy to see that the author is already exploiting this forthcoming event to promote the teaching of evolutionary science in primary schools. That would be a wonderful idea.

We've already seen an excellent specimen of writing from Dawkins for a child. I'm referring to the final chapter of A Devil's Chaplain, entitled A Prayer for My Daughter (first published in 1995), in which Dawkins provides his 10-year-old daughter Juliet with various "good and bad reasons for believing".

How have I been able to walk, drive and climb stairs?

Two months ago, my left leg was pinned to the ground by a branch of a felled walnut tree that I was cutting up with a chainsaw. A few weeks ago, I included in my blog a photo taken by my doctor [display]. I seem to have recovered well and rapidly. However, a month ago, during my first and only medical consultation since the accident, my general practitioner Xavier Limouzin decided that I should obtain further images of my knee (ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging) to make sure that everything was OK. A few weeks ago, the ultrasound image confirmed what the initial X-ray photos had suggested: namely, that there was no fracture anywhere and no thrombosis. Well, this morning, at the hospital in Romans, I was most surprised to learn what MR images revealed.

I've just taken this photo of my legs. I'm still attired as I was for the MRI session: shorts and sandals. Well, although these two rather ordinary knees appear to be fairly similar, there's a big difference. The left knee has in fact been fractured, without my realizing it, for the last two months. (I'll be interested to learn why the X-rays didn't reveal this fracture.) To demonstrate what he was telling me, the friendly specialist at Romans clasped my left kneecap between his fingers and said: "I'm squeezing my fingers at the place where your knee was broken. That's probably painful. No?" I had to tell him that I didn't feel a thing. Maybe I'm becoming an insensitive zombie. I asked him what I should do, to stimulate the healing process. He replied: "Lots of rest. No hard work. Keep off your knees. There's nothing better than long hours stretched out on a sofa watching TV."

While at the hospital, I thought that I might return the brand-new blue splint they had given me on the day of my accident. It's much the same form as the leg-protection worn by cricketers. I only wore this splice on the first night, then never again. So, I imagined that I would be acting as a good citizen in returning it to the hospital. Since the MRI unit is located just alongside the emergency ward, I walked in through the landing where ambulances pull up, and promptly found myself in exactly the same hall where I had waited for treatment two months ago. The staff were handling a fellow whom local firemen had just wheeled in on a trolley, parked just alongside me. It took me a few minutes to realize that the middle-aged fellow, wrapped in a white sheet from which his head and bare feet protruded, and lying limply on his left side, was in fact dead. I was fascinated to realize (for the first time in my life) that the behavior, speech and attitudes of professional people dealing with a corpse are quite unlike situations in which the patient is still alive. Several tiny details (such as the fact, for example, that nobody seemed to be concerned that the fellow's face was pressed hard against the metallic edge of the trolley) sent out messages indicating that the patient was no longer alive. Meanwhile, a secretary informed me that I could hang on to my splint, since they did not seek to recuperate such items. I was happy to jump into my car and drive home.

Jesus walked on the waters of Irene

I can't help loving Americans. [And I promise not to use a single swear-word in this blog post.] They're innocent childlike observers of the calamities of the universe, and they're especially skilled in Biblical stories concerning the Deluge. Jesus Christ is constantly just around the corner. Often, a delightful word seems to describe adequately the attitudes of certain descendants of the Founding Fathers: dumbfounded.

The journalist Jojo deserves deserves some kind of prize for perseverance. He should be sent off immediately to a front-line war zone in Libya. I have a gut feeling that Jojo would rapidly unearth Gaddafi, because Jojo wouldn't be deterred by side-effects and noise. Outstanding US media professionals like Jojo tend to talk well in front of a microphone, but we may not necessarily learn much from what they're saying.

Back to the studio for further last-minute news…

Diligent Socialist

To be perfectly honest, I haven't yet actually paid my fees to become a genuine member of the Parti Socialiste, but this will no doubt happen one of these days. Meanwhile, I follow with enthusiasm their activities. Here's a portrait of my preferred presidential candidate, François Hollande.

Intent upon behaving in a politically-correct manner, I invite my readers to click the portrait of my candidate, enabling them to hear and appreciate our party's new hymn, entitled Il est temps (It's time). I'm sorry that I don't seem to be able to offer you a more attractive video version of this rousing anthem, with dancing Socialist girls and guys and all that kind of nice stuff. Meanwhile, I trust that everybody realizes—if ever there were any doubts on this question—that I'm a normal diligent Socialist.

BREAKING NEWS: The Socialist "summer university" has just ended at La Rochelle, on the French Atlantic coast.

As the curtain came down on their convention, the candidates for the forthcoming presidential primary clapped their hands and sung with joy... in unison, of course. Ah, what a pity I wasn't there!

That's what great about being a Socialist in France. It's almost as much fun as being a Boy Scout or a Girl Guide, or a merry member of a Catholic youth movement.

Empty station and an old song

Once upon a time, when I dropped in to Grand Central Station to see what it looked like, I recall that it wasn't quite as empty as today.

When I was a kid in South Grafton, I heard the Weavers' version of Goodnight Irene on the radio, and I used to thump out my personal rendition on my grandmother's piano. This evening—a strange Saturday night in New York—imagine Johnny Cash singing this nice old song in the emptiness of the Manhattan subway.

To be quite honest, I'm starting to get a bit bored by all this talk about the US tornado. I can't help wondering whether it might not be a bit of overkill. We'll see…

BREAKING NEWS: This frightening video reveals the fury of Hurricane Irene as it hit the shores of North Carolina:

Further up the seaboard, ordinary citizens and businesses made preparations for the arrival of the hurricane.

Photographers attempted vainly to obtain images of the hurricane.

Meanwhile, countless hundreds of thousands of Americans prayed...

Ultimate science book

In my recent blog post entitled Wonders of the world [display], I evoked the 58-year-old Israeli-born Oxford scientist David Deutsch.

Deutsch has presented several excellent TED talks, which can be found by means of the Google argument "david deutsch ted". Well, his latest book, The Beginning of Infinity, has just been published.

The first book from Deutsch since 1997, it's a precious event. I only received my copy a few days ago, and I've started to read it slowly, savoring each page, seated under a giant linden tree, looking out over the sunny valley, with my dogs lounging on the grass alongside my deck chair. While weighing my words, but without having had enough time to step back and reflect upon this claim, I'm already starting to wonder whether Deutsch might have possibly written the ultimate science book… at least up until somebody produces a challenger.

Deutsch—whose specialty is the quantum theory of computing—has a dazzling capacity to look out upon the world, detect the presence of a small number of fundamental principles, and then employ these principles to explain to us what our existence is all about. The verb "explain" is basic in Deutsch's approach. Besides, the subtitle of this masterpiece is Explanations that Transform the World.

The themes of The Fabric of Reality remain intact. The essential approach is still based upon the four celebrated strands represented by Karl Popper, Hugh Everett, Alan Turing and Richard Dawkins. Deutsch still hits back constantly, fiercely and profoundly at the infamous words of Stephen Hawking (1995 interview): "The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting round a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies." And Deutsch's readers are certainly not invited, in the bibliographies of the two books, to read anything from Hawking. Incidentally, I agree entirely. The otherwise brilliant theoretical scientist Stephen Hawking has never been what I think of as a significant general-science author. In Deutsch's latest book, the Hawkings statement is referred to as the Principle of Mediocrity: There is nothing significant about humans.

Deutsch evokes the so-called Spaceship Earth phenomenon, which is a reflection of popular current ecological and environmental thinking and actions: The biosphere is a limited life-support system for humans. When confronted simultaneously with Hawking's "chemical scum" allusion ("We're less than nothing") and the Spaceship Earth metaphor ("The planet Earth is the only way out"), what the hell can we do? With our trash boarding passes, should we nevertheless try to scramble aboard the Spaceship Earth?

Hold on a moment. There's a reassuring surprise. David Deutsch explains that these two syndromes—"chemical scum" and "Spaceship Earth"—are both demonstrably false. Instead of trying to navigate between the Scylla of scum and the Charybdis of the Earth's limited resources, Deutsch's book offers us—as it were—an extraordinarily positive way out of this enigma. There's a new kid on the street: knowledge. Through knowledge, we are anything but scum, for we humans can indeed imagine the universe, almost as if we had created it. And through this same knowledge, we do not have to depend exclusively upon the poor little planet Earth, for we can think our way to the stars. In a nutshell: knowledge is the beginning of infinity.

Needless to say, in my humble blog, I can only scratch the surface of Deutsch's exciting and beautifully-written book. For the moment, I find it too early to say whether or not this is indeed the ultimate science book. Let's say that I've short-listed it as a most likely candidate.

POST SCRIPTUM: In a recent blog post entitled Happiness is a great science book [display], I evoked the latest book by Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality, in which the famous string theoretician embraced massively the multiverse theme, so dear to Deutsch. In fact, I was a little overwhelmed by the highly speculative nature of Greene's otherwise excellent book. Without claiming to understand the subject at a mathematical level, I have the impression that all the string-theory stuff remains, for the moment, totally hypothetical… and that it might not even be good science in the Popperian sense. In any case, I was intrigued to discover that Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity makes no mention whatsoever of strings. On the other hand, Deutsch's remarkably short bibliography includes Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (certainly one of the most mind-boggling books I've ever read), the fabulous Just Six Numbers by Martin Rees, and a couple of well-known books by Douglas Hofstadter, not to mention Plato's Euthyphro and the Funeral Oration of Pericles. When I look upon this exotic bibliography, I have the nice impression that I'm browsing through the required credentials for becoming a member of a highly-exclusive club: the David Deutsch Society.

Lovers lanes for an ex-husband

This true story, in yesterday's French press, is sad but strangely beautiful. Late on Monday evening in the city of Albi (south-west France), police came upon a 67-year-old man perched on a stool by the roadside, busily unscrewing a sign bearing the name of a nearby locality. When they got around to inspecting the fellow's house, the police found a room in which a hundred or so local road signs were neatly stacked.

The man told the police that, since his recent divorce, which had been a particularly painful event in his life, he had been vainly attempting to recover the romantic sensations of his married days by collecting all the road signs indicating places associated with that happy epoch of his life. And, whenever he came upon a signpost indicating such a place, he had got into the habit of unscrewing it and taking it back to his house as a souvenir of those happy days. Since his married life had been full of joyful events (at least from the husband's viewpoint), his collection of signs had become quite large.

The police informed the fellow that he would be charged with unlawfully removing public property, then they let him return home. Before the trial, he'll be receiving a summons to spend a few hours with a court-appointed psychiatrist. Indeed, the police suspect that the poor fellow is crazily in love (literally)… with his ex-wife, or with road signs, or maybe with both.

Elephants no longer "grand"

In my recent blog post entitled This Texan is a raving loony [display], I said I look upon Rick Perry as an idiot. Richard Dawkins has just reacted publicly to Perry's description of evolutionary science as "a theory that's out there" which has "got some gaps in it". The Dawkins response appeared on Tuesday in On Faith, the Washington Post's forum for news and opinion on religion and politics [display].

Dawkins starts out by declaring that the GOP nickname has become "ridiculous", because the party of Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt can no longer be looked upon as "grand". Then, in a single devastating sentence, he explains the behavior of Republican voters:

Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.

I ended my above-mentioned blog post with a rhetorical question that has often intrigued me:

How is it possible that a great nation such as the USA, with its vast resources in the domain of scientific knowledge, can give birth to, and encourage the ascension of, a shitty gutter-level specimen of shallow stupidity such as Perry, who doesn't even know what's happening in his home-state schools?

Dawkins (whose writing style is more refined than mine) seems to be puzzled by this same kind of question:

The population of the United States is more than 300 million and it includes some of the best and brightest that the human species has to offer, probably more so than any other country in the world. There is surely something wrong with a system for choosing a leader when, given a pool of such talent and a process that occupies more than a year and consumes billions of dollars, what rises to the top of the heap is George W Bush. Or when the likes of Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann or Sarah Palin can be mentioned as even remote possibilities.

It's interesting to note that Dawkins blames this situation on the Republican "system for choosing a leader". I wonder what kind of alternative system of choice would get the Republicans more credible (less stupid) leaders.

Wonders of the world

Humans have always liked to draw up lists of the most marvelous things in the world. In Hellenistic times, a famous list of this kind contained seven items, including public gardens (Babylon), a lighthouse (Rhodes) and a tomb (Halicarnassus).

From this assortment of world wonders, the only one that still exists is the pyramid of Giza.

Meanwhile, even this marvel has recently been depleted of much of its mystery thanks to the ingenious findings of an amateur archaeologist, the French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin, presented in my article entitled How did they do it? [display].

Periodically, people get excited about drawing up new lists of the world's wonders, often using Internet polls, but the outcome is generally of little interest, if not biased. For example, one such list, proposed by a Californian fellow named Matt Rosenberg, includes space exploration (which is a rather fuzzy wonder), the engineering phenomenon of telecom and the Internet (even fuzzier still), the tunnel under the sea between France and the UK, and the modern state of Israel (whose creation is said to be "nothing short of a miracle"). And I wouldn't be surprised if my Australian compatriots, asked to draw up a revised list of world wonders, were to include instinctively the Sydney Harbour Bridge and their opera house.

At the start of his 1997 masterpiece entitled The Fabric of Reality, which I presented briefly in a blog post of 2007 [display], the Oxfordian physicist David Deutsch included a dedication:

Dedicated to the memory of Karl Popper, Hugh Everett and Alan Turing, and to Richard Dawkins. This book takes their ideas seriously.

Richard Dawkins, alive and well, needs no introduction, at least not in my Antipodes blog, which celebrates constantly the insights and writings of this great Oxfordian intellectual. Concerning the other three, most people know that Karl Popper [1902-1994] was a Vienna-born philosopher, mentioned in my recent article entitled Voices from Vienna [display]. And Alan Turing [1912-1954] was, of course, the English mathematician who worked in the bunkers of Bletchley Park (Buckinghamshire) during the war years, designing primitive "computers" to crack Nazi codes.

But who's the third guy, Hugh Everett? Well, he died in 1982, at the age of 51. Today, his 48-year-old son Mark—singer, writer and performer with the band Eels—is no doubt better known than his father.

[Click the image for an article on Hugh Everett]

If Deutsch mentioned Everett Senior in his dedication, it's because this man introduced into science one of the weirdest ideas that a human brain has ever imagined, if not the weirdest idea: the existence of a multiverse. That's to say, the everyday universe to which we've grown accustomed could well be just one of very many coexisting universes.

Getting back to wonders of the world, I agree totally with David Deutsch that they number four, and that they can be represented respectively by the four individuals mentioned in his terse dedication. We are speaking here neither of natural marvels (such as the Great Barrier Reef) nor of spectacular worldly constructions (such as the Taj Mahal). Deutsch has indicated four stupendous intellectual creations, built by identifiable humans, which surpass infinitely the splendors of pyramids, palaces, temples, tombs, skyscrapers, etc. They are wonders of the world in the sense that (a) we might well wonder how humble human beings have acquired the wisdom to create such knowledge structures, and (b) the nature and consequences of these wonders leave us spellbound, as if we were gazing in awe upon the divine faces of angels. Except for Philistine observers who don't give a screw about anything, these four intellectual wonders of the world designated by Deutsch demand respect and admiration. To put it bluntly, we would seem (for the moment) to have no more profound sources of wonderment in the Cosmos.

And what in fact are they, these four Deutschian wonders of the world? Well, reduced to simple words, they don't necessarily sound all that marvelous and mind-boggling alongside the gardens of Babylon or even the dull foyer of the Sydney Opera House (which shocked me because of its charmless mediocrity, light years away from the splendor of the illustrious opera houses of Paris, Vienna and Venice, just to name a few, when my friend Ron Willard kindly invited me there in 2006).

• Let's start with the intellectual theme represented by Karl Popper. In a nutshell, this is the extraordinary observation that humble human scientists on our tiny planet Earth can in fact find explanations concerning the Cosmos. Before Popper, science was conceived as an affair of diligent workers in dull laboratories, analyzing the data revealed by Nature. Today, thanks to Popper, we realize that the great scientists have been starry-eyed creators, artists, poets, visionaries, quantum monks and madmen, who have nothing in common with docile laboratory employees. God was not a chartered accountant, a bank manager…

• Deutsch's second wonder of the world is the multiverse thing, which I've mentioned. Here, of course, from an understanding viewpoint, it's every man for himself. Personally, I had the good fortune of growing up in contact with 20th-century physics, so I've always had a vague idea of what was happening in domains labeled relativity, quantum mechanics, cosmology, etc. Frankly, I don't know to what extent the multiverse discourse might be fuzzily comprehensible, if at all, by a total novice in physics. In talking like that, I realize that I might be accused of intellectual elitism, but I can see no way of "sweetening" the hard facts of scientific knowledge.

• The third wonder of the world is closer to home: computing, symbolized by Alan Turing, the pioneer thinker on artificial intelligence. Now, if you happen to think that computing is basically a matter of shit stuff such as Microsoft Window and Facebook, then you're unlikely to understand immediately why the concept of digital computing (defined precisely through the metaphorical Turing Machine, described in my Machina Sapiens) might be imagined as a wonder of the world. Today, computer programming is synonymous with DNA coding. We now know that everything, including what we once thought of as our cherished "minds", is digital.

• Finally, the fourth and final wonder of the world is life, animal evolution, represented by dear old Charles Darwin and his living guardian angel Richard Dawkins. In a way, life is perhaps the easiest marvel to access, in the sense that few mysteries remain, apart from (a) how exactly it started, and (b) how it produced the strange epiphenomenon of consciousness… without which I wouldn't be here today, writing this blog post.

Things were hugely simpler back in the days when humanity could marvel at lighthouses, gardens, tombs, temples…

Contempt of court

No sooner had Nafissatou Diallo left the office of Manhattan District attorney Cyrus Vance, who revealed that he intended to dismiss charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, than the alleged victim's attorney Kenneth Thompson made a public speech:

"Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has denied the right of a woman to get justice in a rape case. He has not only turned his back on this innocent victim. But he has also turned his back on the forensic, medical and other physical evidence in this case."

In the USA, this kind of behavior on the part of a lawyer is tolerated. Admittedly, the alleged victim is a black woman, defended by a black lawyer, in a nation that still suffers from racial tensions, in spite of the presence of a black president. Terrible background visions of the slave trade are present eternally in the conscience of modern Americans.

Here in France, I would imagine (although I'm unskilled in law) that the outspoken behavior of a Kenneth Thomson would be stigmatized as an understandable but blatant case of contempt of court... which is, of course, a crime. Thomson's job should normally consist of defending his client, not of criticizing the laws of the land and the ways in which they are administered. He comes through as a hot-under-the-collar guy of a provocative nature who's prepared to try anything at all. Contemptible!