Saturday, October 22, 2016

Random morning message

There’s a nice French expression to designate a sudden urge: une envie de pisser [wish to pee]. That’s what happened to me a moment ago, leading up to the present message. It’s a philosophical viewpoint that has been pursuing me ceaselessly for a long time. So, here it is.

Our outlook on existence is totally biased by the particular dimensions of our observations, which define a mere window. We remain incapable of adopting windows that might be more macroscopic or microscopic.

• The first weakness means that, in spite of our gigantic windows out into space-time, we remain like ants who imagine their anthill as the entire universe.

• The second weakness means that, in spite of our fondness for elementary particles and string theory, we humans are not very good at dealing with things that are far smaller than what we see through our eye-glasses.

Besides, it’s funny that we introduce a direction into these two scale differences. What right do we have to say that, in the macroscopic case, existence appears to get bigger and bigger, whereas it’s smaller and smaller in the microscopic case? Maybe we should simply say that the differences are no more than changes in our two kinds of viewpoints, without claiming that one change is “bigger” and the other “smaller”.

For the moment, it’s primarily the second weakness that has inspired my matinal philosophy message… but nothing really changes when we move to the first weakness. All our human conclusions about what is good or bad, and what is right or wrong, have been concocted from within our familiar everyday window, at the level of human organs and our devices such as eye-glasses. For example, people use their normal viewpoint to encounter all kinds of happenings, from peace and love up to war and terror. This suggests that our above-mentioned human conclusions would no longer have the same sense if we were to modify our viewpoint, by moving in an up/down direction. In other words, morality is not a universal phenomenon. It’s rather a purely relative viewpoint-based affair.

Personally, I am both awed and frightened by this conclusion. For the moment, therefore, I avoid the temptation of accepting it completely.


Ah, if only our existence were to be nothing more than watching a rugby match! Sadly, at no instant in my existence has my life ever moved an instant into such a nirvana. That has always been my major problem...

New Yorkers love French art and France


Spencer Hays and his wife Marlene have just announced a huge future donation to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris: 600 paintings from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th. This is the largest overseas donation to a French gallery since 1945.

Early arrival of a future Oscar winner


Click here to view a TV-studio performance
of Jean Dujardin in December 1996.

Friday, October 21, 2016

We all know that cheese stinks

So, why do we want to eat it? There must be some kind of logical answer. Well, there is… but it’s not necessarily a simple affair.


First of all, there are many people who love cheese. But there are also a great number of folk—roughly 6% of French society—who simply hate the stuff. So, what’s happening? Click here to access a French-language article and video on this subject.

Neuroscientists at the CNRS in Lyon and a biology laboratory in Paris have published a study, here, indicating that your appreciation or your hatred of cheese depends upon a small like/dislike gadget in the centre of your brain known as your globus pallidus. When your tastes are normal, the pallidus turns on a like icon. If not, it turns on a dislike icon. Now, insofar as your pallidus seems to work a little as if it were using FaceBook, I suggest that we refer to this cerebral organ as your CheeseBook gadget.

Iraqi forces at Mosul advance more rapidly than planned


Positive news from the Iraqi prime minister Haïder al-Abadi reached a high-level Franco-Iraqi meeting in Paris via a video link from Bagdad. An Iraqi diplomat, presiding over the meeting, warned however that victory in Mosul would not end completely the war against Daesh.

Thursday, October 20, 2016

New DNA found

 Omar Raddad in 2008

Newly-analyzed biological traces related to the murder of Ghislaine Marchal data would appear to confirm the presence of a previously-unknown individual whose data existed already in the automatically-updated French National File of Genetic Profiles [fichier national automatisé des empreintes génétiques — Fnaeg]. The official outcome of this spectacular discovery will be released in the next few days. We can hope that the identity of the real murderer will at last be known, proving the total innocence of Omar Raddad.