Reactions of Dawkins to his cerebral attack

Click here to access interesting remarks from Richard Dawkins concerning his recent cerebral attack. Then click the Play button.

Who's the American presidential candidate called Watson?

Click here to access a website that's designed to promote an American presidential candidate named Watson. You'll soon discover (if you don't know already) that this Watson candidate happens to be an AI: that's to say, an artificial intelligence. In other words, of a more down-to-earth nature, Watson is merely a complex piece of computer software, capable of tackling problems (answering questions, above all) that used to be handled exclusively by bright human beings.

This AI software became famous when it succeeded in defeating a human contestant to win America's favorite quiz show, Jeopardy.

Since then, there has been a steady US buzz of superlatives aimed at convincing the people of the world (well, let's say, the people of God's Own Country) that this software tool is... well, awesome.

Personally, I got to know IBM quite well, having started my professional career in programming with that company in Australia, in the years 1957 to 1961, before working with their programming teams in Paris and London, in 1962 and 1963. Since then, I've also become quite familiar with the field of artificial intelligence. Well, in my humble opinion, much of what we hear from IBM as far as AI is concerned can be brushed aside as pure marketing buzz, business-oriented hype.

Bush brother's curious tweet

The fellow known as Jeb Bush, brother of the ex-president George W Bush, is the governor of Florida. He's also a contender in the Republican primaries aimed at the forthcoming presidential election. Well, Jeb Bush has just offered the people of the nation a weird tweet:

Maybe it's time to face the facts, and call a spade a spade.

The symbol of America is indeed a personal firearm.

Is there anything truly “Antipodean” in this blog?

Well, yes: me, the author. According to a fuzzy dictionary website, an Antipodean is “a person who comes from Australia or New Zealand”. But there’s little point in examining that kind of definition any further, because it’s neither rigorous nor reassuring.

When I started this blog, on 9 December 2006, I had the impression that my main readers would probably be members of my family back in my native land. In fact, I’ve always had many readers in France and in the USA.

Later on, I widened slightly the sense of the Antipodes concept to encompass what might be termed an upside-down world. In Europe, throughout the 15th to the 19th centuries, people were fascinated by all kinds of variations on the theme of mondus inversus, in which things would happen in quite a different way to familiar events in our real world. Animals would get humans to work for them. Buffoons would reign, while kings would be their clowns. And, in the antipodean vision of exotic lands on the other side of the globe, people would walk on their hands, with their legs in the air.

If there are readers of my Antipodes blog who might still imagine that it deals with my native Australia, they're going to be more and more disappointed. Let me explain. Once upon a time, I had a fairly good idea of what was happening in my native land, because I could regularly look at newspapers through the Internet. These days, unfortunately, that is no longer the case. There are fewer and fewer Australian newspapers, the quality of those that remain has dropped frighteningly, and the few remaining newspapers have put padlocks on their information. Even the terribly boring newspaper from my birthplace (Grafton, NSW) is only accessible to paid subscribers. I'm convinced that this crazy situation is rapidly destroying the little that remains of Australia's written press.

Nicolas Sarkozy

After 11 hours of questioning, the assessors concluded that Nicolas Sarkozy should be brought to trial for illegal financing in 2012 in the context of the presidential election.

In French law, the notion of being "brought to trial" doesn't mean that the person in question is actually guilty. Consequently, this assessment does not imply that Sarkozy will be prevented from competing as a candidate in next year's presidential election. But it doesn't render his theoretical candidacy any easier. For the moment, there are at least three powerful candidates from Sarko's party in the forthcoming competition. The cartoonist Plantu imagines this situation as follows:

Candidates in the water: Fillon, Juppé and Copé.

Latest Tim Minchin song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtHOmforqxk

Click here for some background information.

Old websites that I built in Flash

For many years, my favorite website development software was Macromedia Flash. Here is a list of various websites (in English, French or both) that I've developed in Flash:

http://grafton.nsw.free.fr/

Elements of my birthplace Grafton (Australia)

http://gamone.free.fr/don/

My brother Don Skyvington.

http://st.antoine.free.fr/

Labyrinths of Chartres and Lucca.

http://nutopia.free.fr/earth/

All the Earth is Mine [novel].

http://st.antoine.free.fr/grail/

Quest for the Holy Grail [satire].

http://william.skyvington.free.fr/carroll/

Lewis Carroll’s descent from the Skeffington family.

http://saint.bruno.free.fr/

Maître Bruno, le premier chartreux.

http://pont.en.royans.free.fr/terriers/

Terres du Royans au Moyen Age.

http://pont.en.royans.free.fr/plans/

Plans du Royans établis en 1780.

http://pont.en.royans.free.fr/

Pont-en-Royans.

http://nutopia.free.fr/

Lisa. Dialogue avec un être virtuel.

Divination à l’aide des cartes Tarot.

http://st.antoine.free.fr/tinos/

Mes contacts avec Tinos (Grèce).

A few years ago, in accordance with the politics of Apple's Steve Jobs, I decided to abandon Flash and replace it by the latest HTML approach. Today, I no longer have access to any Flash development software. Consequently, all the above-mentioned Flash websites are in a state of limbo, since I have no means of modifying any of their elements whatsoever. So, if I wished to modify one of these websites, I would first have to translate the code into HTML.

Alas, for the moment, I have better things to do with my time and energy. Therefore, it is highly likely that these old Flash websites will remain in their present state of limbo for quite some time... They provide excellent examples of what are called legacy websites.

Dangerous creatures in my native land

I was shocked yesterday by a banal story I came across in a local newspaper in Australia. The tragic news article involved this common reptile known simply as a Brown Snake.

A snake of this kind had bitten a six-year-old girl and, in spite of rapid medical attention, the child did not survive.

When growing up in rural Australia, I was perfectly aware of the dangers of various specimens of wild life such as snakes and spiders... not to mention more exotic beasts such as crocodiles and sharks. But I was never greatly stressed by such threats. Funnily enough, my everyday rural existence here in France has made me aware of the various kinds of behavior that would be unwise if Gamone were in fact located in my native land. Here, for example, when I catch sight of some kind of snake, I certainly don't think of killing it.

Once upon a time, in the land that would become Australia, there was a particularly dangerous beast known as the Marsupial Lion.

To put it bluntly, this animal was about as bad as a wild beast could possibly be. But I'm joking, of course. Maybe it was a charming companion... if only you didn't upset it, particularly when it was hungry or angry, or both.

Still more right-wing candidates to come

In the context of next year's presidential election in France, this is an updated presentation of right-wing candidates from the group associated with the ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy. You'll notice that Sarko himself is not yet present in the list.

From left to right: Alain Juppé, François Fillon, Hervé Mariton, Frédéric Lefebvre, Jean-Frédéric Poisson, Nadine Morano and Jean-François Copé.

We're also awaiting the candidacies of Bruno Le Maire and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet.

One of their left-wing opponents said that Sarko's crowd will soon be big enough to make up a football team. But can we be certain, when the new season starts next year, that the former captain will still be running around excitedly on the playing field?

Personally, I wouldn't bet on it. Not at all...

CIA chief: "Paris was a failure of intelligence"

Hopefully, French politicians and security folk will listen attentively to these words from CIA chief John Brennan, who used the CBS show "60 Minutes" to judge the recent terrorist affairs in Paris. He was interviewed by the CBS correspondent Scott Pelley.

John Brennan: Paris was a failure of intelligence. All but one of the eight terrorists were French citizens, trained by ISIS in Syria. They returned, unnoticed, and attacked six locations killing 130 people.

Scott Pelley: What did you learn from Paris?

John Brennan: That there is a lot that ISIL probably has underway that we don't have obviously full insight into. We knew the system was blinking red. We knew just in the days before that ISIL was trying to carry out something. But the individuals involved have been able to take advantage of the newly available means of communication that are--that are walled off, from law enforcement officials.

Scott Pelley: You're talking about encrypted Internet communications.

John Brennan: Yeah, I'm talking about the very sophisticated use of these technologies and communication systems.

Scott Pelley: After Paris you told your people what?

John Brennan: We gotta work harder. We have to work harder. We need to have the capabilities, the technical capabilities, the human sources. We need to be able to have advanced notice about this so that we can take this-- the steps to stop them. Believe me, intelligence security services have stopped numerous attacks-- operatives-- that have been moved from maybe the Iraq to Syria theater into Europe. They have been stopped and interdicted and arrested and detained and debriefed because of very, very good intelligence.

I hardly need to point out that John Brennan was not referring, in that last sentence, to French intelligence.

Poor-quality fuzzy drawing of a boat

This low-quality drawing is so amateurish that it looks like the fuzzy work of a child. So, I would understand you for thinking it's worthless.

Well, it is indeed an uninteresting work of art... but I was prepared to pardon its weaknesses when I learnt that this was an authentic sketch of the barque Caroline which had reached Rottnest Island near Perth (Australia) in 1829, conveying the Henty brothers James, Stephen and John, accompanied by a few Spanish merino sheep. Four years later, on 6 August 1833, my great-great-grandfather Charles Walker had been employed as a steward aboard that same ship when he arrived in Sydney.

As for Rottnest Island, that was a lovely playground for my son François and me when we used to go sailing on the Zigeuner in 1986. So, at a personal level, this fuzzy drawing is a precious document.

A few years ago, I was surprised to learn that an Australian lady whose maiden name was Sheridan Henty had purchased a house in the neighboring village of Pont-en-Royans. She was a descendant of the Henty pioneers who had reached Western Australia aboard the Caroline. Sheridan showed me a book on her Henty ancestors by Marney Bassett, and that's where I found the fuzzy drawing.

Learning how to splash around in the sea

Who are these people, splashing around like water babies? Are they holiday makers? Is this their initial contact with the gear they're wearing? Well, they're medical staff, attached to the French organization Médecins du Monde (Doctors of the World).

They've jumped into the cold water at Concarneau (Brittany) with the aim of learning, in a hands-on fashion, how to intervene in saving refugees who've been thrown into the sea. Within a week or so, at Marseille, they'll be getting aboard a German patrol boat called Aquarius and sailing to the Italian island of Lampedusa, to await the arrival of refugees fleeing from Libya.

Click here to visit the English-language website of this exemplary French body.

Phone spam

In France, we often receive phone messages from crooks who leave a fake phone number (which generally starts with 0899 or 0892) and ask us to phone back. This has been the case, for example, since a new law about compulsory smoke detectors came into existence.

Citizens in France can complain about this costly rubbish by calling

0 811 02 02 17

or by contacting the French government website at

internet-signalement.gouv.fr

Click here for a short article on this subject.

Darwin Day

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809.

It's wonderful that this birthday of one of the greatest scientists falls just one day after one of humanity's greatest scientific discoveries.

What counts above all is belief

The day before yesterday, this nice-looking American cattle rancher named Cliven Bundy was arrested in Portland (Oregon). The Federal criminal charges against him were contained in a 32-page summary. It’s all a very American story, so I’ll let my readers use the Internet to look up the facts for themselves. In any case, I would imagine that Bundy will be protected and brought to salvation by a guardian angel of one kind or another, for he's a Mormon and he surely has God on one side… along with arms on the other.

Busy intellectual might calm down a little

I often have the feeling that our hero Richard Dawkins works too much. Why doesn't he set aside some of his multifarious preoccupations (for example, atheism) and simply calm down a little? Of course he surely knows personally what he's doing, and why.

This morning's news indicates that Dawkins suffered a mild stroke, last Saturday, leading to the cancelation of his planned trip to Australia and New Zealand. Readers might have noticed that Dawkins is already back on the Internet, suggesting that his stroke was fortunately quite minor.

Biggest declaration ever of big science

This afternoon (in France), we were told that the gravitational waves imagined long ago by Albert Einstein were indeed a reality.

I watched the press conference of representatives from the European team.

Birth of a black hole...

All the data concerning this gigantic discovery is amazingly complex and largely incomprehensible for ordinary people. We do however realize that our universe, an incredibly astounding entity, can be grasped by the minds of scientists. By the brains of godless human beings. And that alone is a thought that makes me proud to be an atheistic specimen of Homo sapiens.

French military liquor

That document was made available through the Gallica website (owned and operated by the national library in France). The alcohol-inflamed declaration dates surely from the end of World War I. Here's my attempt at translation:

Strong liquor, victory liquor

Anti-alcoholic weepers, with fake philanthropy and make-believe pity, have nothing to do with the opinions of our new France, victorious and ready to allow her armies to suffer inevitable revenge from the defeated.

Pinard and Gnôle are military liquors, ideal for French armies facing conflicts that will emerge inevitably from the rigorous application of peace treaties.

If the money owed to us by our former enemy is not in fact paid, then we shall never be moving towards peace. Liquor flasks from the military mess must not be filled with water.

Something got screwed up at the end of the jewellery holdup

Something went seriously wrong with a jewellery holdup in Paris. Click here to watch the video. Instead of taking French leave with the sack of treasures they had just unearthed, the two bandits got locked up in the cylindrical glass doorway. And this little problem drove them as mad as a couple of cut snakes. (Aussie slang, hard to explain.)

Let's hope they took advantage of the comedy, for they're unlikely to have an opportunity of participating in this kind of fun for the next 20 years or so, from inside their prison.

Year of the Monkey

I feel reassured (God knows why) by the fact that Chinese astrologers consider that we're moving into the year of the Monkey. Better still (although I'm not sure what it means), the year of the Fire Monkey.