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!

Dog days

Over the last few days, our region of south-east France has been beset by a heatwave. By the standards of my native Australia, it's probably not a particularly drastic heatwave. I just walked around to the back of the house, where there's a thermometer attached to a shaded wall, and it reads 36°. The Ancient Romans called this period of the year the "Dog Days", because the bright star Sirius (nicknamed the "Dog Star"), in the constellation of Canis Major, used to rise at the same time as the Sun. In French, a heatwave is referred to by the term canicule ("little dog"). And in English, we have Noel Coward.

My local doctor, Xavier Limouzin, advised me recently to consult a dermatologist in nearby Romans, and the lady told me, in a roundabout way, that I was behaving like an Englishman. Well, she didn't exactly say that. She informed me, most emphatically, that a fair-skinned individual such as me must never ever go out in the sun without a hat, otherwise I'm a likely candidate for skin cancer. So, I promptly bought myself two elegant Italian straw hats, and I've installed metal hat hooks on the kitchen wall alongside the door, so that I'm reminded to put on a hat whenever I step out of the house.

[Click to enlarge]

In fact, these hats are part of a general "survival campaign" that I instigated spontaneously at the time of my recent clash with the trunk of a walnut tree on the slopes of Gamone. Besides hats, a fundamental element of this campaign is optimal footwear, to replace such unsuitable things as thongs, sandals, boat shoes and old boots with lots of holes but no laces.

[Click to enlarge]

Those on the right are solid work boots, sold in the local rural hardware shops, for gardening and other outdoor operations. Those on the left (which I haven't even worn yet, since I bought them through the Internet and they only arrived here a couple of days ago) are specimens of the finest German-manufactured alpine boots that exist, and I plan to use them for hiking only.

By far the most annoying aspect of my new survival campaign is the iPhone, for the simple reason that nobody ever phones me through this device. So, I have to force myself to remember to carry it with me whenever I leave the house. I've hit upon the solution of these belt pouches, since I almost always wear a belt.

[Click to enlarge]

Now, getting back to the heatwave, let me say that my dogs don't seem to be bothered by the high temperatures, since there's a lot of shade under the linden trees, and there's invariably a slight breeze at Gamone.

[Click to enlarge]

Recently, I asked my neighbor René Uzel to use his mini-excavator to cut a wide path down from the house to the lower field of Gamone (in the direction of the Cournouze mountain).

[Click to enlarge]

For the moment, it's simply a dirt ramp, which terminates at the base of an apple tree. Later on, I'll think about whether I should install stone steps.

Naturally, in this heatwave weather, the doors of the house are often open, to let the breeze in. And, silently like a breeze, Fitzroy also likes to step inside and take a look around, even if this means climbing up my old wooden staircase.

Well, yesterday afternoon, whenever Fitzroy dropped in alongside my desk, I was intrigued to discover that he was engulfed in a warm soapy aura of fruity fragrance, as if he had just stepped out of the shower. In a way, that was exactly what had taken place. Down on the lawn, I discovered the chewed remnants of a plastic bottle that had once contained almond milk shampoo. I had let it drop on the floor of my shower, and had forgotten to pick it up and stick it on a ledge.

[Click to enlarge]

I don't know how exactly Fitzroy had dealt with the contents. Did he actually drink the shampoo? Or did he simply spill it on the grass and then roll in it? In any case, he sure smelt nice. His presence alongside my desk, on a hot afternoon, was refreshing.

POSTSCRIPT: On rereading this post, I'm amused to see that I purchased two hats, two pairs of boots, and two phone pouches. There's surely a reason why I've done things doubly...

Libyan liberation gift

If the following story (from the BBC) is true, it's wonderful.

This morning, freedom fighters storming into Tripoli made sure that the people of the city had Internet access. Besides, having taken over two state-controlled mobile phone companies, they gave every subscriber a credit of 50 Libyan dinars (roughly 30 euros).

People now consider that the possibility of communicating freely and efficiently has become a basic human right.

One day soon, instead of scattering pamphlets from airplanes flying over besieged territories, drones will drop mobile phones.

Operation Hotel Maid

The term "Mermaid" is used as a nickname for Tripoli. So, the offensive launched by Libyan freedom fighters last Saturday evening, aimed at moving into Tripoli, was designated as Operation Mermaid. Well, this evening, we have the impression that the next couple of days will be highly significant—in totally different ways, of course—both for Muammar al-Gaddafi and for Nafissatou Diallo.

One of my earliest blog posts on the DSK affair was entitled In the DSK drama, I smell a rat [display]. I got my metaphors wrong. What I really meant to say was that something was fishy.

About to surface...

BREAKING NEWS: Here in France, it's not yet 7 pm on Sunday evening, August 21, 2011. Various French media websites are talking already (prematurely?) about what Dominique Strauss-Kahn is likely to be doing within the next 24 hours. Meanwhile, the website of Le Parisien has just announced that Gaddafi has probably abandoned Tripoli, and that his spokesman Moussa Ibrahami has requested a ceasefire.

More arrows

My recent blog post entitled My paper on symbolic arrows [display] invited readers to download a paper in which I outlined my motivations as a collector of symbolic arrows.

New specimens come to light constantly. I found this fellow on the wall of my living room, in a corner of the document described in my recent blog post entitled Painted-canvas scroll from Mumbai [display]:

[Click to enlarge]

I call him DecaMan, and I reckon that he would be a great subject for comic books (if they still exist) and animation movies. To use his bow and arrow in a masterly fashion, DecaMan takes advantage of 10 autonomous heads and 10 pairs of arms and hands. Besides, DecaMan seems to be transported by a giant fishtailed dachshund. And there's a blue dog's head emerging from the top of DecaMan's normal set of human heads. A powerful well-armed fellow, indeed. I'm amused by the astounded expression of the little guy with a bow and arrow on the right-hand edge of the image. He seems to be saying, in terror: "What the fuck is that?"

And here's a simple but expert use of a pair of symbolic arrows on the cover of a book coauthored by the same man, Andy Thomson, whom I mentioned in my recent blog post entitled Eye of God [display].

Notice the arrow-heads formed beneath the outstretched arms of the lovely girl, whose slender booted legs evoke a pair of arrow shafts. [William: Stop!] I congratulate the graphic artist who produced this beautifully-eloquent sexy cover. I haven't read the book itself, but it's described as an ideal gift from concerned parents to a bipolar teenager.

The end is near… and it will be catastrophic

This dire prediction concerns the imminent end of the reign of madness of Muammar al-Gaddafi in Libya.


The warning comes from a man who surely knows what he's talking about: Mustafa Abdul Jalil, chairman of the National Transitional Council based in Benghazi.

Observers throughout the world are poised in anguish, waiting to see how the mad dog might react once he's truly cornered by his conquerors. It would be so nice if he were to go out with a whimper, but this is unlikely. Gaddafi has always displayed a scorched-earth mentality.

Ah, to be a glorious banker!

I was overcome emotionally by these spontaneous expressions of deep love towards Tan Sri Teh, the 81-year-old founder of a private bank in Malaysia, celebrating the bank's 45th birthday. The cherished old man, who is escorted into the arena in the style of a Roman emperor on a chariot, is described in an anthem as a "living legend" and a champion. This video is rather long (7.5 minutes), but I advise you to persevere to the end, to capture the mounting enthusiasm of the host of well-wishers.

Wicked European journalists described this charming gentleman and the glitzy happening as "megalomaniac" and "kitschissimo".

This Texan is a raving loony

Rick Perry (who could well become the next US president) is an appallingly dumb guy, with a big mouth and a tiny intellect, who knows fuck-all about science.

We knew that already. What we didn't know, until this morning, is that this idiot has an amazingly fuzzy conception of what is currently being taught to school kids in his home state. In New Hampshire, a little boy asked Perry what he thought of evolution. Here's Perry's reaction: "It's a theory that's out there. It's got some gaps in it. In Texas, we teach both Creationism and evolution." Well, just about everything in Perry's reply happens to be disastrously off the mark—that's to say, wrong—in a way that blows up in his silly face.

• The first two sentences—about evolution being a theory with gaps in it—are so ridiculous that we need not waste time in demolishing them.

• Things become fascinating, on the other hand, when Perry asserts—off the top of his silly head—that Creationism is being taught in Texas. Everybody knows that, in educational environments, fundamentalist Creationism of the primitive Genesis kind went out of fashion long ago. It was replaced by a pseudo-scientific thing known as Intelligent Design. Genuine scientists repeat that Intelligent Design is nothing more than Creationism served up deceptively in a new sauce… and Perry's words to the schoolboy add weight to this accusation.

• Perry is totally wrong, however, when he attempts to make the boy believe that Texan schools propose textbooks that present an alternative to evolution, no matter whether it's called Creationism or Intelligent Design. The only teaching materials authorized in Texan schools today are based exclusively upon evolution.

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?

Eye of God

If God were a cyclopean creature, then his huge eye might look like this:

This artificially-colored NASA image of the Helix nebula combines photos taken from both the Hubble telescope and an observatory in Arizona. No sooner was it published by the NASA in 2003 than imaginative viewers labeled it the "Eye of God". What's more, certain believers claimed that the intense contemplation of this image could indeed give rise to miracles. So, with a bit of chance, the present blog post might cause the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk and—who knows?—the dead to rise! [Please send me feedback.]

Andy Thomson is a practicing psychiatrist in Virginia. With the help of a medical writer, Clare Aukofer, he has just brought out a "concise guide to the science of faith" entitled Why We Believe in God(s), which is less than a centimeter thick (144 pages, readable in an hour). And they've put a copy of the "Eye of God" on the cover. Besides, there's an enthusiastic foreward by an Englishman named Richard Dawkins. Clearly, these two fellows are on the same wavelength. Furthermore, they both write brilliantly.

It's amazing that so many novel ideas can be packed into such a small book, and expressed so convincingly. Thomson's basic thesis is that, since the dawn of humanity, gods have been made-made entities. Like music and, more recently, fast food. And it's often far from easy for ordinary humans to turn their back on their gods… just as it's hard, for many individuals, to resist the temptation of gorging oneself on hamburgers and sweets.

In this delightful little book, I was happy to discover Andy Thomson's constant evocations of the great Charles Darwin. Towards the end of his book, Thomson introduces the fascinating subject of mirror neurons, which have become a preoccupation of my old Australian friend Michael Arbib, a distinguished professor at the University of Southern California. I was most interested in Thomson's descriptions of fabulous neurochemical products—serotonin, dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline, oxytocin and the endorphins—which seem to play a far more significant role in religious experiences than any of the alleged holy texts. Indeed, one has the impression that, accompanied by the appropriate neurochemical cocktail, even a phone directory could appear to be a sacred text of profound spirituality.

Let's suppose that you're the sort of run-of-the-mill believer who has grown up considering that God created the Cosmos and Mankind. And all you need to know now is: Who created God? If you happen to be in that kind of situation, then this is the book you need!

Working alone

At Gamone, every outside task that I'm called upon to perform must be done on my own. For example, I decided to move this old roof beam, which had been an acceptable rustic bench, up until it started to rot.

[Click to enlarge slightly]

If there were somebody here to help me, we would have picked up this rafter and carried it a few dozen meters to the place where I wanted to discard it. On my own, though, I had to be more imaginative. So, I used a pair of rollers, which made the task simple and effortless.

This is the spirit of my American hero Henry David Thoreau in his humble cabin (constructed by himself) in the woods of Massachusetts, alongside the lake Walden, whom I've already mentioned in this blog [display]. But don't get me wrong. I don't advocate living on one's own and being obliged to invent creative solutions to daily down-to-earth problems as an ideal lifestyle.

In the photo, notice the presence of an admirer of my ingeniousness.

French cat on the booze

This photo (tidied up slightly with Photoshop), from the archives of the French national library, is a hundred years old.

[Click to enlarge slightly]

Alcoholism has been a problem in France for a long time. In a pathetic case such as this, I would say that the cat's owners (if indeed it is owned by anyone at all) are just as much to blame as the cat, if not more. When you acquire a cat or a dog, the least thing is that you instill sound moral principles in the animal, and keep it away from hard liquor.