Place in North Sydney where I met up in 1957 with my first IBM computer

Towards the end of 1957, after my second year of studies in the Faculty of Science at the University of Sydney, my student friend Michael Arbib informed me of his recent encounter with the Australian branch of a US company named IBM. Michael had been offered a vacation job with this company, and he invited me to make a similar request. And that's how, in a brand-new North Sydney skyscraper (in 1957, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere), I came to meet up with the IBM 650 machine and a programming language called Fortran. I was therefore just over 17 years old when I started my life-long activities as a computer programmer.

The Miller Street building still exists today, looking small and old-fashioned in the vicinity of modern constructions.

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At that time, to travel between the IBM offices and the central Sydney business zone, I used to take a tram across the bridge.

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In that photo of a pair of tram lines on the eastern (Pacific Ocean) side of the bridge, we're looking south towards the main city. The tram on the right is moving northwards to the destination indicated below the driver's window: Frenchs Road in the nearby suburb of Willoughby, just beyond North Sydney. Further to the left, we catch a glimpse of the rear end of a tram moving towards the city, whose surprisingly low skyline can be seen further on. Those two tram lines were soon replaced—as Sydney residents now realize—by automobile lanes.

Today, as I sit here in the French countryside, in front of my computer, it's most moving for me to write a few lines about that distant corner of the world where I came into contact with an archaic IBM computer in 1957. In fact, I spent little time at that North Sydney address, because the company soon moved to a more convenient building in Palmer Street, Darlinghurst. It was there that I worked for much of the time (followed by a short period in the Lidcombe offices of IBM) up until my departure for the Old World at the start of 1962.

When the guest happens to be carrying a fat checkbook in his back pocket...

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The French president François Hollande makes a diplomatic effort
by wearing appropriate clothes and banning champagne:

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And how many Airbus aircraft do you wish to purchase ?

118 ! That's nice...

Genetic light starts to shine upon schizophrenia

For the very first time in the history of psychiatry, US researchers in genetics and neurology feel that recent studies might reveal the causes of schizophrenia, which has always been a widespread but mysterious affliction in our modern societies. In the USA, there are over two million victims of this psychiatric disorder, giving rise to delusions, emotional withdrawal, hallucinations and a decline in cognitive abilities. Their troubles can be attenuated slightly by medical substances, but cannot yet be cured. Well, promising research has been carried out recently by scientists from the Harvard Medical School, Boston Children’s Hospital and a research institute linked to Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and their results have been published in the journal Nature. But it is still far too early to, in the immediate future, to envisage any revolutionary methods of treatment.

Human synapses between brain neurons, with C4 proteins marked in green.

Researchers examined the ways in which genes can increase a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia. They examined a gene in our immune system called complement component 4, referred to as C4, whose structure varies considerably between individuals. It was found that certain people with specific forms of the C4 gene stand a higher chance of developing schizophrenia.

That risk is tied to a natural process called synaptic pruning, in which the maturing brain discards weak or redundant connections between neurons. And individuals whose C4 genes increase that pruning effect appear to have a greater chance of developing schizophrenia.

Christiane Taubira resigns from the French government

The French justice minister Christiane Taubira resigned this morning, and was rapidly replaced by the Socialist Jean-Jacques Urvoas.

The newspaper Le Monde stated explicitly that she had in fact "slammed the door" on her colleagues, which merely means that she had made a personal decision to leave, as opposed to the idea of being kicked out by the president and/or the prime minister. It's common knowledge that Taubira has been strongly opposed to the government's decision to withdraw the French citizenship of certain terrorists with dual nationality. Indeed, a parliamentary debate will be starting today on that subject, and it's clear that Taubira has chosen deliberately this moment for her resignation.

Christiane Taubira is an exceptionally brilliant individual who has never been accustomed to "suffer fools gladly" (expression invented by Saint Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians).

Lost children in Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marvin Minsky has left us

Marvin Minsky [1927-2016]

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

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

Sarko not necessarily a presidential candidate

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

An Aborigine talks of "the Australian dream"

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

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

Astronaut plays ping pong with a ball of water

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

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

Dawkins and his dog

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

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

Illegal to patent natural genes in France

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

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

French keyboard

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

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

Australian couple kidnapped by terrorists in Burkina Faso

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

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

Merely an imbecile… or rather a dangerous imbecile ?

For many years, in spite of tons of superb objects created by brilliant US corporations named IBM and Apple (which have changed and indeed dominated my existence), I’ve often had doubts about the quality of lots of the stuff invented in God’s Own Country. In the case of their latest curious invention, known as Donald Trump, I hear that my doubts are shared by many British politicians. In a nutshell, most of us tend to agree that this spooky fellow is an imbecile. But worse still, is it imaginable, as certain elected representatives in the UK fear, that Donald Trump might be a dangerous imbecile, capable of stirring up trouble with Muslims?

British politicians are aware that they have to combat this fellow who dares to treat Muslims as inferior citizens. But they must be careful not to talk about this big-mouthed nincompoop to such an extent that he might take advantage of the publicity. So, they prefer to limit their analysis of the Trump case to the question of hopefully barring his entry into the UK.

Reinventing the wheel: laceless football boots

Click here to see laceless football boots that the Lotto manufacturer was promoting several years ago. There’s a somewhat  déjà vu feeling attached to the invention introduced, today, by Adidas.

Hotel California has an empty room

The guitarist Glenn Frey, 67, a founder of the US band Eagles, world famous for its title Hotel California, died yesterday of pneumonia in New York. Their song was a splendid creation of what came to be known as California music.

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Human skydivers versus Airbus 380

This spectacular air stunt is senseless. It has no obvious purpose. And that, in a way, makes it all the more attractive… a little like those old-fashioned matches between a track cyclist and a trotting horse. Here's a short video of this weird winner-less non-match:

HAPS (high-altitude pseudo-satellites)

The expression HAPS (high-altitude pseudo-satellites) is a roundabout way of designating an unmanned aircraft (in other words a drone), flying very high in the sky, that can perform tasks of the kind that are normally in the domain of satellites. Now, one way of creating such an aircraft would be to start with a successful device, the Solar Impulse, and replace the human pilot by a small payload of the kind handled by satellites. And that's exactly what is planned, one of these days, by the Swiss owners of that illustrious aircraft.

On 3 July 2015, the pilots of Solar Impulse, André Borschberg and Bertrand Piccard, were obliged to terminate their last adventure at Hawaï. The aircraft had suffered considerable battery damage, necessitating major repairs, and their flight will not be resumed until April of this year. That lengthy delay seems to be giving them time to think about a HAPS project, for an unspecified date in the future...

Holiday idea for spring tourists in Brittany

I've just heard that, for the first time since the creation in 1992 of the Breton King Scallop Festival (fête de la coquille Saint-Jacques), it will be taking place this year, on April 23-24, in the marvelous little port of Paimpol, in the Côtes-d’Armor department. That's in the home land of my son François, and my ex-wife Christine and her companion Michel, where I spent time convalescing last autumn.

This superb scallop, Pecten maximus, is a species of the edible saltwater clam, a marine bivalve mollusk in the family Pectinidae. It is one of the finest foodstuffs in Brittany.

Its shell has always symbolized Christian pilgrims setting out on foot to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain.