Slave labor Down Under

In Australian speech, the word "backpacker" designates a foreign tourist, generally young, whose only luggage is a sack with shoulder straps carried on the back.

Backpackers come from countries all over the globe. An article on this subject in the French journal Le Monde speaks of more than 23,000 French backpackers.

Well, starting in July, backpackers will be taxed: a gigantic 32.5 % of their earnings! Faced with this blatant case of highway robbery, the volume of backpackers Down Under is likely to dwindle. Indeed, fewer young tourists will wish to spend time in a harsh land in the Antipodes that seems to consider them as potential slaves, particularly in various agricultural sectors, which employ 40,000 backpackers every year.

New rules for spelling in French

As a foreigner who has been speaking and writing French for many years, I've encountered two quite different kinds of problems. On the one hand, my accent hasn't evolved very much. Consequently, French people are immediately aware that I didn't grow up as a French speaker, but they're generally incapable of identifying my native language or my land of birth. On the other hand, although I'm still capable of making grammatical mistakes, my behavior in that domain is often much better than that of native French people.

At present, there's a lot of buzz about major changes to French spelling, particularly at the level of circumflex accents, as shown here

Nîmes

Up until now, the dot over the letter i has been replaced by a circumflex. But maybe this accent should be removed from now on. I wouldn't be surprised if many foreign observers, seeing this buzz, were to imagine that the task of writing correct French is about to change considerably... for the better, or for the worse.

Now, without going into details (which would be sure to bore those of my Antipodes readers who are not necessarily familiar with French), let me simply point out that this whole affair is little more than buzz. So, carry on with your familiar handling of French spelling, as if nothing whatsoever is about to change!

Prison islands for Australia

Protesters have been gathering in Australian cities to oppose cruel government plans to deport 267 refugees, including 72 children, to offshore detention in a prison island.

Australia has installed such detention centres in two foreign lands. One is located in the republic of Nauru: a remote and desolate phosphate island in the Pacific Ocean.

In this hot climate, people and their children have to live in tents, in a place where there is so little to do that many inmates tend to develop psychiatric problems.

Everybody knows that white Australia started as a penal colony for Britain, towards the end of the 18th century. Unfortunately, as a modern society, we seem to have retained certain aspects of what might be termed our "penal mentality".

Absence of birdsong: Silent Spring

The American writer Rachel Carson [1907-1964] published her masterpiece Silent Spring in 1962, describing the nasty effects of pesticides on the environment. The sense of the book's title is that birds, poisoned by pesticides in spring, had ceased to sing.

Soon after starting to work for Pierre Schaeffer at the Service de la Recherche de l'ORTF in Paris, I had the privilege and thrill of attending the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm (Sweden), from June 5–16 in 1972, which was the first major international event devoted to environmental challenges. I discovered that Rachel Carson's book had become a bible in this domain.

Last night, on French TV, I watched a fascinating and highly disturbing show concerning the present-day dangers brought about by pesticides in France. I realized with horror that the situation was indeed far worse today than when Rachel Carson first evoked the "absence of birdsong", over half a century ago. The following map (created by the TV people themselves) provides us with a good idea of the intake of pesticides in the various French départements :

It's sad to realize that the worst-hit zones are the celebrated wine regions, such as the Bordeaux area in the south-west. As for my Isère department, it's marked as light orange, which is not too atrocious. Here's a table (in French) indicating the toxic shit that hits our dear Isère:

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Click here to watch a lengthy replay of the French TV show.

BREAKING NEWS: Today (Thursday, 4 Feb 2016), the French minister Ségolène Royal has reacted briefly but clearly and courageously to the alarming news evening on pesticides in France.

She started by revealing that she had often been in arguments with agrochemistry multinationals. "I ran into problems when combating the aerial spreading of pesticides. It was quite difficult." After mentioning her ban upon the Monsanto product Round-Up, described as a "very violent" pesticide, she concluded: "The lobby of the production of pesticides is very powerful in France." She then invited people on the land to reduce their use of pesticides "in their own interests, when we see the number of cancers among farmers who use pesticides." Then she concluded on a positive note: "We are now aware of the existence of substitution products in the case of dangerous pesticides. France could become the first nation for the production and consumption of substitution products that do no harm to public health."

Are Dutch policemen as smart as they think they are?

I've watched with amusement a small video that shows a few smart Dutch policemen using a trained eagle to attack and destroy a drone. If I understand correctly, no eagle has yet had its head chopped off by a drone propellor.

The policemen surely know what they're doing. But I think they're encouraging a deadly arms race. The next thing we know, smart drone engineers will invent some kind of eagle-killer device. Truly, this is not what I think of as the march of science and technology.

Happy birthday, Mr President

Last night, I spent the evening watching two excellent TV programs about American women who used to be weighed down by their famous husbands. The first one was Grace Kelly [1929-1982], who slipped into the real-life role of a fairy-tale princess which imprisoned her for life... up until a fatal car accident.

The second American lady was Jackie Kennedy [1929-1994], whose husband consumed sexual partners in the same way that an ordinary American might eat donuts, regardless of whether he's really hungry.

I suppose that Jackie may have been a little annoyed when she heard Marilyn Monroe warbling a sexy birthday song to her husband, in front of all America.

Here in France, my own birthday wishes to our 90-year-old ex-president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing are short and simple. Since Giscard has been around now for quite some time, his birthday provides me with a pretext to include his delightful farewell video (over 34 years old) in my blog:

I guess he imagined that all of France

would be weeping tears of blood...

Everybody roared laughing!

Mortal snow fun at night

In the upper left-hand section of that photo, you might notice that the concrete pylons of the ski lifts are surrounded by protective rubber mattresses, in case a skier happens to bump into them.

In the middle of the night, at the Deux Alpes station, three employees were celebrating the end of a happy day for the restaurant Le P'tit Polyte, which had just been praised in the Guide Michelin 2016. Maybe fueled by alcohol, they had decided to detach a protective rubber mattress and use it as a sled on the steep slopes. Alas, in the dark, they crashed into a tree.

The following photo shows how the body of one of the joyous trio was brought down into the valley.

Normally, sledding in the Alps is by no means a dangerous pastime, provided you've got good brakes.

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British scientists get the green light for human gene editing

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in Britain—often referred to as the "fertility regulator"—has just given scientists a go-ahead to genetically modify human embryos. Research of a purely experimental nature will be carried out at the Francis Crick Institute in London. Scientists will nevertheless be prevented from implanting such modified embryos into women.

Experiments will be carried out in the first seven days after fertilisation, using the developed structure of the fertilized egg called a blastocyst, composed of several hundred cells.

The concept of gene editing came into existence through an experimental method known as clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats, abbreviated as CRISPR, and pronounced as "crisper". It is generally referred to as the CRISPR/Cas system, where Cas is the name of a protein. The following short video provides us with a summary of this fundamental and all-important methodology in genetics.

Omo, a delightful white giraffe

Here's a fascinating photo of Omo, a white giraffe, from Paul Allen (philanthropist, investor, entrepreneur, author, Seahawks & Blazers team owner, guitarist, neuroscience supporter, space pioneer and Microsoft co-founder):

Hard to believe that this vessel can't be tugged

I know nothing about the task of attaching a cable to an abandoned ghost ship, the Modern Express, and then tugging it to a desired location. But I hardly imagined that it might be rocket science...

The vessel has been drifting around now for six days and nights in the Gulf of Gascony, and we're told that the weather has been too rough to grab hold of the stricken ship. There's a vague possibility, if the weather calms down, that a cable can still be attached to the Modern Express, enabling it to be towed away. If this is not the case, observers believe that the vessel is likely to run aground on a sandy French beach between Monday evening and the following day.

We're told that there'll be no oil spill, since the vessel is carrying a huge stock of timber (which surely shifted during the rough weather, causing the vessel to lean over) and merely 300 tons of fuel. Local people seem to be awaiting stoically, almost calmly, the impending shipwreck. And I keep on wondering what's going to happen to all that splendid timber, as soon as it floats ashore...

BREAKING NEWS [Monday 1 Feb 2016 14h30] The crew of a Spanish tugboat named Centaurus has succeeded in fixing a cable aboard the Modern Express, which is now being towed successfully in a westerly direction towards Spain at a speed of over 5 km/h.

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English Channel seen from space

Here's a photo of the English Channel, looking towards the east, viewed from above the tip of Brittany. The image was obtained by the first official British astronaut, Tim Peake, aboard the International Space Station, orbiting the Earth at an average altitude of 350 km.

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Here are some helpful geographical labels:

I'm not good at identifying landmarks in photos taken from space, but I would imagine that the big dot at the bottom of the photo, above the "o" in Astro, is lighting from the city of Brest. Above it, one of the dimmer dots on the coastline would indicate the city of Saint-Brieuc.

During my recent convalescence with my son François at Plouha (Côtes d'Armor), I was constantly intrigued by our splendid vision of the English Channel, whose waters lapped the base of the granite cliffs just a few hundred metres in front of the house. We were charmed by the presence of all kinds of small vessels: mainly pleasure yachts and fishing boats. But I often wondered why we never caught a glimpse of giant cargo ships and tankers moving along the busy lanes of the Channel. François showed me how to use my powerful binoculars to get a glimpse of an exotic place near the horizon known as the Roches-Douvres Lighthouse.

Inevitably, since this name means "Dover Rocks", I immediately asked my son a naive question: "Is that old lighthouse located in the vicinity of the English town of Dover?" François said no, not at all. So, I never understood (and still don't) why the name of this shelf of rocks, off the coasts of Brittany and Normandy (between the islands of Bréhat and Guernsey), should evoke the distant town of Dover. In the following map, the lower tip of the red blob indicates the location of the Roches-Douvres Lighthouse, whereas a green star marks my viewpoint at Plouha in Brittany.

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This map of the English Channel makes it clear that, from my son's house in Plouha, I was unlikely to catch sight (even with powerful binoculars) of the stream of great vessels moving along the wide sea-lanes between France and England.

The fist-shaped peninsula of Cotentin, jutting out from Normandy, includes a pointed finger that seems to be saying "piss off" to any ship's captain moving too close to the French coastline. Fortunately, no courageous Allied commander was led astray by this warning on D-Day, 1944, when the outstretched hand formed rather a sign of V for Victory.

Earth collided with another planet, Theia, creating the Moon

About 100 million years after the creation of our planet, a collision occurred between the Earth and a baby planet, Theia, The smaller planet disappeared inside the Earth, but fragments of the amalgam flew off into space, where they coagulated into a new body: the Moon.

A recent study carried out by researchers from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) has revealed that the collision was strictly head-on, which explains why the chemical composition of Moon rocks is quite similar to that of Earth rocks. If Theia and Earth had collided obtusely, then much of the Moon would have been composed mainly of Theia, meaning that the chemical compositions of the Moon and the Earth would have been significantly different.

Dragon robbers in France are thrown into jail

Four people accused of stealing a young specimen of the Indonesian Komodo Dragon have been thrown into jail, to await their trial.

The accused robbers found their innocent victim in a well-known reptile park in Pierrelatte (Drôme). It appears that their sole motivation for stealing the young lizard was their eagerness to keep the reptile as a pet. However the dumb buggers had no idea of how to look after a Komodo Dragon, and they locked him up in a cellar where he soon died.

There are countless sad tragedies of this kind, which reveal that idiotic specimens of Homo sapiens ignore the elementary nature and needs of certain exotic cousins from the animal world.

To my mind, there's an obvious golden rule:

If you don't understand the animal, don't touch it !

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.