Pioneer in artificial intelligence

John McCarthy, 84, died in his sleep last Sunday evening.

Computer programmers of my generation who became interested in artificial intelligence (an expression coined by McCarthy in 1955) usually tackled the rudiments of the LISP language (developed by McCarthy) by means of this slim blue book:

John McCarthy was one of the experts whom I interviewed for my 52-minute TV documentary on artificial intelligence that was broadcast in France on 25 June 1972.

This documentary is housed in the archives of the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel. Click the banner to access the website page describing the documentary.

During the shooting of the documentary, I visited SAIL [Stanford AI Laboratory] out in the hills of Palo Alto, where McCarthy and his team were working on the creation of robot arms, seen in the background of the following photo:

I recall that their most advanced arm was being taught how to build a brick wall. It used a video camera to obtain feedback on the state of advancement of the wall, and to verify that none of its bricks had been wrongly placed. In a corner of the laboratory, the robot arm, its camera and the bricks were enclosed in a kind of plexiglass greenhouse, while the computers were located on the outside. McCarthy told me that testing a robot arm could be a dangerous activity. Program bugs were capable of causing the arm to pick up bricks and start throwing them at the programmers and their computers.

At that time, McCarthy and his colleagues were developing one of the world's first autonomous robotic vehicles. It looked like a kid's cart. Visitors arriving by car at SAIL would often be surprised to find themselves sharing the road with this slow-moving vehicle, which spent its time learning how to wander around on its own through the grounds of the laboratory without running off the road.

Language example

Often, when I notice that such-and-such an old blog post in the archives of Antipodes seems to receive numerous visits, I'm tempted to explore the reasons for its apparent popularity. For example, over three years ago, I wrote a rambling article entitled Professional bias [display], and I now discover that it is accessed quite frequently. Here's why:

[Click to enlarge slightly]

Click here to visit the website in question. Reference.com is an online encyclopedia, thesaurus and dictionary. Click here to visit a Wikipedia description of this service.

Marvel of nature

This morning, while accompanying Sophia up the hill for her matinal pee, I came upon this splendid empty chrysalis, which is so light that the breeze blew it onto the road.

It's amazing to think that a splendid butterfly or moth emerged recently from this exoskeleton, and has probably already got together with a mate of its species in order to start another life cycle.

Most human observers would be enraptured by a piece of handmade jewelry imitating this shell. (The term chrysalis comes from the Greek/Latin for "gold".) I find that the real chrysalis is infinitely more mysterious, beautiful and precious than any artifact.

Lessons from Apple

I haven't yet got around to ordering an English-language copy of the biography of Steve Jobs… not even in a digital version for my iPad. Obviously, it's not that the subject fails to interest me. On the contrary, I've always been an impassioned fan, not so much of the man in question, but of the spirit and style of the computer company he founded with Steve Wozniak on April Fool's Day, 1976. But I end up feeling that I've no doubt heard almost everything that could possibly be written about Jobs.

In China, the Jobs biography is selling like hot cakes. That doesn't surprise me. It would be good, I think, if industry-oriented universities in countries such as France were to pose the question: Is there an Apple business model for success in futuristic high-tech computing? The answer is certainly yes… but the model would need to be refined and adjusted to the local environment. The efforts involved would surely be worthwhile. I can imagine future doctoral business classes and challenges on the themes of the successes of Apple Computer.

Thanks, Muammar, for the blog traffic

On 20 October 2011, I wrote a blog post entitled Stopped by an airplane [display] concerning the death of Muammar Gaddafi. As the title suggests, I was fascinated by the fact that an awesome French jet fighter had apparently appeared in the sky and inflicted a minimum of damage upon a suspicious convoy of vehicles that was moving away from Sirte: just enough damage to let them know that it would be a good idea, from a survival point of view, to halt. The Mirage 2000 airplane may have killed people in the leading vehicle, but it certainly didn't harm Gaddafi himself.

The world will probably never know the exact circumstances in which the Libyan dictator, forced to flee from the doomed convoy, was quickly captured and assassinated. Frankly, I believe that the world at large is not likely to lose sleep in an absurd quest for the missing facts. Everybody's happy to realize that the masquerade has been ended by the death of the mad clown. The Libyans themselves didn't even ask for an autopsy of Gaddafi's dead body. Instead, they put it on show for the general public, in a cold chamber designed for storing onions, and they only brought the curtain down when the corpse started to effuse nauseous odors. Then they buried it, this morning, at a secret spot. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

In the initial version of my rapidly-written blog post, I had inserted one of the photos of a blood-smeared Gaddafi, somewhere between life and death, that had been circulating all day in the French media.

This image irritated me, in that I had the impression (false) that Gaddafi's head was posed against the right knee of the guy behind him. I simply couldn't understand why this fellow in the background might be straddling Gaddafi, as it were. Later on, I realized that the white blood-stained fabric on the left of the photo was not at all a trouser leg of the guy in the background. It was a corner of some kind of mattress upon which Gaddafi had been placed.

A little later, by which time it was known that Gaddafi was dead, I came upon a startling photo in the French press that showed the upper half of his half-naked blood-stained corpse laid out on a bed mattress.

In my blog post, I immediately substituted this new image for the old one. As usual, in the typical spirit of a small-time private blogger such as myself, I didn't worry too much about indicating the precise origins and ownership of the image that I had borrowed for my blog post. That's to say, I've ceased to imagine (if ever I did) the likelihood of a major press group attacking me and claiming: "William, in your Antipodes blog, you stole one of our images without acknowledging its source." Frankly, if ever this were to happen (unlikely), I would bow down instantly, remove the offending image, and accept the consequences for my Antipodes blog. To my naive blogger's mind, it's a question of practicality rather than morality.

Today, thanks to the image of Gaddafi's corpse, I'm amused to discover that hordes of internauts are being directed to the Antipodes blog. Thanks a lot, Muammar.

POST SCRIPTUM: I'm astonished, almost alarmed, by the fact that so many blog visitors are dropping in on my Antipodes because they've used the keywords "gaddafi corpse". The current cadaver-induced success of my blog has a lot to do with the fact that I've been respecting the standard English spelling "Gaddafi". Internauts find me easily. This has been a constant incitation ever since my starting to blog about Gaddafi, since spellings of the dead dictator's name are prolific.

Spaghetti dogs

My daughter Emmanuelle—who seems to imagine (rightly so) that her father is snowed down under tons of surplus stuff—is always delighted to hear that I've had the courage and determination to get rid of some of my junk. In particular, whenever she drops in at Gamone, she makes a point of examining the contents of my refrigerator, deep freezer and larder for products that have gone beyond their use-by date. This morning, I was surprised to discover that Manya had apparently failed to detect the presence, in one of my kitchen cupboards, of a dusty packet of spaghetti dating from so long ago that I'm almost ashamed to indicate the date.

Come on, William. Don't be ashamed. What's a dusty 4-year-old packet of spaghetti between you and your understanding readers?

The stuff was probably still quite good. In any case, I put it in boiling water for ten minutes, with salt and appropriate herbs, and served it up to my dogs… who've never been too concerned about human inventions such as use-by dates.

In fact, the dogs eat precooked canine pasta regularly, and they gulped down the spaghetti with enthusiasm. Sophia, of course, has always functioned with food in the style of a vacuum cleaner. She hoovers up her fodder as if it were stuff to be cleared away and cleaned up as rapidly and completely as possible. On the other hand, I was interested to observe Fitzroy trying to invent efficient ways and means of dealing with all those slippery white worms. Finally, like an imaginative and amused child, I think he mastered the suck approach.

Holy spirited driver

My mother used to tell us an amusing anecdote about a car excursion from South Grafton to the beach at Yamba. Her oldest brother, Eric Walker, was at the wheel, while their mother (whom my siblings and I always referred to as Grandma) was seated in the rear. Suddenly, on a narrow stretch of the highway running alongside the Clarence River, they were overtaken in a dangerous manner by a speeding vehicle. They noticed immediately that it was the black sedan owned by the Roman Catholic church of South Grafton. The driver, alone in the vehicle, was the local parish priest, Father O'Meara. Eric was so startled that he started to curse the priest, whereupon Grandma came to the defense of the speeding ecclesiastic.

GRANDMA: He has probably received a phone call asking him to rush to the bedside of a dying parishioner.

ERIC: Like bloody hell. He's speeding to get to the pub in Maclean in time for a beer before closing time.

I thought of that anecdote when I read an amazing article in today's Australian media. A few days ago, the local priest from South Grafton, Father Peter Jones, was stopped by police for driving dangerously on the road from South Grafton to Yamba, in the vicinity of Maclean. Alarmed drivers had phoned the police when they saw the priest's white Toyota zigzagging from one side of the road to the other.

[Click the photo of Father Jones to access a newspaper article]

When a police officer attempted to use a hand-held breathalyzer to determine the priest's blood-alcohol state, his intoxication was so high that the machine was incapable of supplying a result. So the offender was taken to the police station in Maclean, where a more sturdy apparatus gave a reading of 0.341. Not only was this result some seven times the legal limit, but the drunken priest supplied one of the highest blood-alcohol readings ever recorded in the history of the New South Wales police. A specialist explained that guzzling down beer alone would not be able to produce such a high reading. So, the priest had surely been imbibing a large quantity of far more potent spirits. Thank God that nobody struck a match near the good man, for they might have all been consumed in a ball of fire.

My grandmother would have said that, in such a state of inebriation, the priest was surely being protected from an accident by the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Autumn dogs

The weather at Gamone has been mild, and the dogs have been lounging around lazily in the sun.

They get on wonderfully well together. This afternoon, a local hunter, Daniel Berger, strolled past the house, with one of his hounds on a leash. When I went out to say hello to him, my dogs accompanied me. Suddenly, Fitzroy decided that he didn't like the look of the poor docile hound, so he sprang on him. The surprise attack wasn't particularly vicious, and only lasted for half a second. I was amused in that it was the first time ever that I've seen Fitzroy lose his temper.

Thinking of Françoise

At the rare times of the year when it contains water, Gamone Creek flows down past my place and through a corner of the park of André Repellin and Madeleine. There, in a rocky corner, Tineke Bot and Serge Bellier have placed their steel montage that evokes the memory of the Repellin's unique daughter: our friend Françoise.

She was indeed a transparent young woman, whose purity and willpower had a mineral but steely luster. Today, I find it perfectly appropriate to remember my neighbor as an angular friend who—in spite of her relative youth—maintained a rigorous old-fashioned style of relationship with me (as with most people, I would imagine). Every January, she would walk up here with her dog to offer me New Year gifts of biscuits and jam. It was unthinkable that Françoise might address me otherwise than by a quiet and polite vous, never by my first name or by the pronoun tu. Then she would wander across to the slopes on the other side of the creek, and scramble excitedly and noisily through the grass, for half an hour or so, with her beloved dog Briska.

Shortly before her death (if I understand correctly), Françoise had indicated explicitly that she wished to be remembered in this splendid nook of Gamone Creek. That is the case.

POST SCRIPTUM: The cocker spaniel Briska has always been a most excitable dog. Whenever Madeleine strolls up here to Gamone, my Fitzroy is delighted to receive a visit from Briska, whose hysterical barking antics are so much more fun than the staid behavior of Fitzroy's usual companions—Sophia, Moshé and Fanette—who must be seriously provoked before they'll join in a joust. Fitzroy hardly needs to raise a paw to get Briska started. Then he gallops gaily alongside his female visitor, admiring her noisy and spectacular lunacy.

Pictures of a new kind

I first got involved in photography at about the age of 11, using a Kodak Box Brownie.

Almost immediately, I got around to developing my films and producing black-and-white prints. I remember that some of my earliest photos were of Tiger Moth and Chipmunk aircraft, on the ground, at the South Grafton aerodrome. It's possible that one of my most successful shots still survives in a family photo album out in Australia: a rear view of my kid sister Susan, with the sun illuminating her blonde hair. At one stage, I experimented with manual tinting, which is an operation that will surely go down in the history of photography as a marvelous bad idea.

Over the years, camera technology has advanced at a fabulous rhythm. Back in the '70s, I was offered a Nikon camera to produce a publicity project (about Jalatte safety footware for workers), and I've remained a Nikon adept ever since then. The most recent brutal shock consisted of replacing my splendid analog equipment by a digital device: a Nikon D70s, which soon became my faithful companion… and still is.

Today, we learn that a revolutionary US camera named Lytro is about to arrive on the market. Accustomed to myriad tiny buttons on every available surface of our familiar photographic instruments of the Nikon kind, we are startled by the external austerity of this newcomer, which resembles a security camera in a supermarket.

[Click the photo to access the Lytro website]

The general idea is that the photographer should simply shoot, while relegating to future viewers the tasks of focussing, zooming and clipping. What an astounding idea! Here's a specimen:

You simply click to adjust the image. Clearly, this is advanced Internet photography in its purest form.

What science is saying

These days, the general public is being offered countless presentations of scientific conclusions concerning the origins of human beings. The tone of some of these presentations is so clear, and their contents are so striking, that most people should grasp what is being said, and be impressed by the scope and depth of such explanations. I would imagine that most young people react seriously to such presentations, whereas many adults probably find ways of shielding themselves from the impact of revolutionary facts capable of disturbing them.

Near the start of The Magic of Reality, Richard Dawkins presents readers with a spectacular thought experiment: that's to say, a virtual project carried out, not in a laboratory, but in your imagination. You're asked to stack up portraits of your father, your father's father, your father's father's father, and so on: that's to say, all your paternal male ancestors. The huge stack of images—extending backwards in time—might be laid out on bookshelves, enabling you to browse through them in an orderly fashion to examine the portrait of any specific male ancestor.

If you browsed back to the portrait of your 4,000-greats-grandfather, you would discover a bearded dark-skinned fellow not unlike men you might see today, say, in a Moroccan village. If you browsed back much further, to the portrait of your 50,000-greats-grandfather, you would come upon an individual who looks like the proverbial caveman. Dawkins then asks you to browse all the way back to your 185-million-greats-grandfather. What might he look like? With the help of brilliant illustrations from Dave McKean, Dawkins supplies an answer, which might shock certain readers:

This portrait of a grandpappy is far removed from the typical paintings of distinguished oldtimers in the portrait galleries of aristocratic families. The ancestor who most impressed me was our long-snouted 45-million-greats-grandfather, shown here having a snack:

To appreciate these ancestral illustrations and explanations, you really must get a copy of this splendid Dawkins book, which is packed with all kinds of fascinating tales (including myths) and science stuff.

A few evenings ago, on the Arte TV channel, I watched an interesting documentary on population genetics. Viewers were introduced to the fabulous possibilities of examining DNA specimens to determine the genealogy of various ethnic communities. Personally, I prefer to acquire my knowledge of population genetics and large-scale genealogy through reading books, articles and Internet stuff rather than depending on TV. I would imagine however that this documentary must have been an eye-opener for viewers who were unaware of state-of-the-art findings and thinking in this complex domain.

The subject was tackled in a controversial style (rightly, I believe) by insisting on the fact that the old-fashioned concept of human races is totally rejected by modern research. All human beings who exist today on the planet Earth are the biological descendants of a small group of Africans who were probably similar to the community known today as South African Bushmen. In a sense, therefore, we are all Africans! This poetic declaration charmed 80-year-old Desmond Tutu.

Certain facts are likely to amaze white-skinned Europeans and citizens of the New World, and maybe make us more humble. For example, there is no doubt whatsoever that our prehistoric ancestors were black-skinned, and that our present whiteness is a freakish new-fangled affair brought on by the physiological fact that fairer ex-Africans survived better in cold climates. So, alongside "black is beautiful", we might proclaim that "negro is normal", whereas "white is weird".

These days, research in population genetics is advancing so rapidly that certain major breakthroughs have occurred in the short time since the French TV documentary was completed. For example, there have been amazing revelations concerning the early date at which the ancestors of Australia's Aborigines left Africa. In the 1920s, a lock of hair was taken from an anonymous young Aboriginal male near Kalgoorlie. Well, this DNA specimen was sufficient to enable, recently, an analysis of the subject's genome. And it became obvious that the ancestors of Australia's Aborigines had in fact left Africa at least some 50 millennia ago: that's to say, well before the exodus that gave rise to communities of Homo sapiens in Asia and Europe.

A tribal elder described this DNA-based breakthrough as "just a white-fella story", and said he would continue to believe in the tribe's mythical creation legends.

Stopped by an airplane

Details of events culminating in the death of Muammar Gaddafi have fluctuated throughout the day. It appears that the small convoy in which he attempted to flee from his home town of Sirte was stopped by a French Mirage 2000 fighter.

Here are the charred remains of Gaddafi's final convoy, photographed later on in the day:

Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Gaddafi had emerged from his damaged vehicle and raced across the sands to seek protection in a drainpipe running under the road.

That's where rebel fighters found him. Apparently Gaddafi was wounded but still alive… but not for long, for there were too many revengeful onlookers in the vicinity of the captured dictator.

Nearly 23 years ago, in the skies over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, another aircraft had been a terrible symbol in the tyrant's career.

A Libyan terrorist bomb that exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 killed 270 innocent victims.

Now that Gaddafi has gone, there is no doubt that the Mediterranean world will be a slightly better place, maybe even a vastly better place. Throughout the evening, I've been impressed by the countless images of happy Libyan faces displayed in the media.

Amazing demo

This Israeli demo is so weird that it looks like a magician's trick:

And so it should. That's normal whenever quantum physics appears on the scene. If a quantum phenomenon doesn't look like magic, then it hasn't worked correctly… or maybe you haven't grasped what's happening. Quantum physics presents us with an upside-down world in which nothing is "ordinary" in a common-sense way, everything is totally weird…

Once upon a time in Vienna

To people who have read and admired Edmund de Waal's family-history document, The Hare with Amber Eyes, my recent blog post entitled Potter's heritage [display] probably appeared lopsided, since I spoke almost exclusively of Charles Ephrussi, the prominent Parisian dilettante. Meanwhile, I said nothing about his uncle Ignace von Ephrussi in Vienna, who built the vast banking headquarters on the Ringstrasse known as the Palais Ephrussi.

Nor did I mention Ignace's son Viktor, the head of the family on Kristallnacht—November 9–10, 1938—when Nazi thugs terminated forever the power and glory of the Ephrussi dynasty in Austria.

Charles had given his netsuke collection to his cousin Viktor as a wedding gift in 1899. Edmund de Waal's book reveals the amazing way in which these precious objects survived the aftermath of Kristallnacht.

My short blog post was by no means an in-depth review of this splendid book. I merely wished to evoke in a few words the two personages who impressed me most: the Parisian Ephrussi who actually collected the netsuke, and the potter/author who is currently protecting them.

Among the other wealthy Viennese Jews who lost almost everything after Kristallnacht, I might mention the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [see my previous post, entitled Dawkins gives Miss Anscombe a role], who happened to be a friend of the Ephrussis.

I was greatly interested by an earlier minor theme of The Hare with Amber Eyes. I'm referring to the five-year epistolary relationship that existed between the author's Viennese grandmother Elisabeth Ephrussi [1899-1991] and the Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke [1875-1926]. Elisabeth was almost a contemporary of another of Rilke's young Jewish female friends of a literary disposition, Claire Goll [1890-1977], whom I was privileged to meet in Paris not long before her death.

Dawkins gives Miss Anscombe a role

I've just started to read with enthusiasm the latest book by Richard Dawkins, The Magic of Reality, which might be described as a science-oriented picture book for youngsters from 8 to 80. I was amused to discover that the excellent graphic work by Dave McKean depicts a casual conversation between two individuals whom I mentioned six months ago in my blog post entitled Voices from Vienna [display]. I'm referring to the Vienna-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951] and his English disciple Elizabeth Anscombe [1919-2001], who was both a professor of philosophy at Cambridge and a devout Roman Catholic. As I mentioned in that blog post, I had an unexpected opportunity of meeting up with Anscombe in Brittany, at the home of Christine's parents. Members of the Mafart family, including Christine, had frequent contacts with a Dominican priory in Staffordshire known as Spode House, which had also become a regular retreat for the Anscombes.

Here's the drawing of Elizabeth Anscombe and Ludwig Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein was intrigued by the fact that people had once believed, unanimously, that the Sun went round the Earth. He wondered why this belief was so universal. Anscombe replies—with a massive dose of common sense—that people no doubt found that it looked as if the sun went round the Earth. Wittgenstein hits back with an interesting rhetorical question: "What would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?" In other words, what kinds of visual impressions would have been needed to make people believe spontaneously in a heliocentric theory?

We can find plausible answers in the ordinary experience of air travel. When a plane hits turbulence, passengers never have the impression that it's the Earth and its atmosphere that are being jolted up and down. They're convinced intuitively that the aircraft, which had appeared to be calm and motionless just a minute earlier, is now being shaken by disturbing forces. So, that suggests an answer to Wittgenstein's question. If only the planet Earth were to run into zones of turbulence every now and again, humans would have surely been more ready to feel that their planet was indeed turning on its axis and moving around the Sun.

Air travel provides another striking experience of rapid movement. When an aircraft, preparing to land, plunges down obliquely through wispy layers of cloud, passengers are suddenly made aware of the great speed at which they are moving. Ideally, we might imagine vast rings of dust, orbiting the Sun at roughly the same distance as the Earth, with trajectories that intersect at right angles with ours. Periodically, Earth-dwellers would notice that we were about to run into such a dust ring, since it would be visible in the sky above us. Then, as we whizzed past the dust in a kind of near-miss encounter (hopefully surviving), we might well observe a parallax phenomenon—involving the alignment of the Sun, the dust ring and our planet—suggesting that we are indeed moving around the Sun.

It's preferable, though, to judge such affairs using the methods of scientific reasoning. If Karl Popper had been eavesdropping on the conversation between Ludwig and Miss Anscombe, he might have suggested wisely that they should abandon their jobs in the philosophy department and enroll humbly as science undergraduates…

Potter's heritage

Friends and family members know that I've been an adept, for ages, of genealogy. This fascination blends in with my passion for genetics. Recent Skyvington and Walker ancestors were humble folk, nothing to do with our fabulous Skywalker namesake.

Over the last week or so, I've been fascinated by a genealogical book with a strange title: The Hare with Amber Eyes. And in this family history, unlike my own, all the ancestors are extraordinary individuals.

It's the family history of a young English potter, Edmund de Waal.

He's a descendant of the famous Ephrussi family: Russo-Austrian Jews who made their fortune on the international wheat market. The central personage of Edmund's book is Charles Ephrussi [1849-1905], who spent his life in Paris. I've assembled the following fragment of a family tree showing the relationship between the potter/author and his celebrated ancestral relative:

Using the family's immense wealth, Charles Ephrussi collected works of art, and became a benefactor of French painters. At that epoch, boater-hatted oarsmen and associated revelers would gather together on the banks of the Seine and the Marne to eat, drink, dance and talk about business of all kinds. The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre-Auguste Renoir [1841-1919] evokes this lifestyle.

Charles Ephrussi appears in the background, wearing a ridiculous black top hat: surely some kind of humoristic and symbolic artistic license on the part of the painter.

And where does the lovely hare with amber eyes enter this story?

It's a specimen of a 19th-century Japanese form of sculpture called netsuke. In the beginning, these tiny pieces of sculpture were designed to be used like sliding beads, to fasten the ends of cords around robes such as kimonos. But they soon became precious and priceless collectors' items. And the ivory hare belonged to Charles Ephrussi's collection of a few hundred netsuke items, finally inherited by the English potter, author of this family-history book.

This delightful book, sent to me by my ex-wife as a birthday gift, has been written by an English potter, disciple of the great Bernard Leach [1887-1979]. Behind Christine's invitation to read the marvelous book by Edmund de Waal, I sensed constantly, in a vague way, the spirit of two exceptional individuals who were present in the lives of Christine and me: the potter Maurice Crignon and the editor/benefactor Albert Richard. At times, curiously, knowing full well that there were no wealthy Ephrussi people among my humble Skywalker ancestors, I had the impression that I had received nevertheless, in a way, the same kind of human heritage as Edmund de Waal.

Walnut harvest

As usual, I've harvested a sufficient quantity of walnuts for my personal needs, which consist primarily of making walnut bread.

Stocking walnuts at Gamone has always been a problem, since certain unidentified furry creatures—maybe Alpine field mice—find their way into the cellar and steal them. They gnaw into the synthetic mesh bags holding walnuts, and actually carry the walnuts away with them. Apparently, they operate silently, during the night, just a few meters away from one of my sleeping dogs, Sophia. Afterwards, all you find is the empty bag, with a big hole in it.

Walnuts can't be stored in a totally sealed container. They must be aired, otherwise they become spoiled. So, I was thrilled to discover yesterday a new folding plastic container, made in Luxembourg.

I'll need to glue in pieces of flat plastic to patch up the two big slots in each crate, and I'll also have to insert a lid on the top crate in the stack.

Simple problems

There's an amusing article in The Wall Street Journal [display] about a Nobel Laureate in economics, Daniel Kahneman, who's a professor of psychology at Princeton.

Apparently Kahneman is intrigued by the fact that many people are surprisingly irrational… which would seem to be a polite way of saying that they often react in a foolish manner, as if they were incapable of reasoning correctly. Kahneman has the habit of asking allegedly smart individuals to answer extremely simple questions. Here's a specimen:

A bat and ball cost $1.10.
The bat costs $1 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

According to the article, about half the students of Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology give the wrong answer. That's amazing! Personally, although I'm not particularly bright (as friends and members of my family know), it took me no more than a dozen seconds of mental arithmetic to obtain the right answer.

How about you?

I'm a little troubled, though, by the fact that, in handling questions of this kind, I immediately resort to basic algebra, rather than trying to find a solution intuitively, using so-called common sense. I'm disturbed because I have the impression that I'm cheating. I know beforehand that, as soon as I say "Let's refer to the unknown as x", I'm absolutely certain to find a solution, rapidly. Funnily, I would feel more like an honest citizen if I were to force myself to stagger around in the sludge of common sense for a while, waiting for a solution to drop down upon me like the gentle rain from heaven. In using mental algebra, I feel like an exam student who's exploiting stealthily his iPhone to obtain vital data.

Am I an abnormal cheat?

CORRECT ANSWER: The ball costs 5 cents and the bat, $1.05.

Cooking experiment

Last Saturday, my daughter took me to a wonderful restaurant in Tain-l'Hermitage, Le Quai, on the banks of the Rhône.

That was the view from our table. The old suspension bridge enables pedestrians to stroll across the river to the neighboring right-bank town of Tournon. In doing so, you move from the Drôme department into Ardèche. These two communes—Tain l'Hermitage and Tournon—are located at the heart of an exceptional viticultural territory, whose wines are labeled Côtes du Rhône.

Emmanuelle and I order the same main dish: carré d'agneaux (lamb cutlets) and gratin dauphinois (sliced potatoes roasted in cream). It was delicious. Amazingly, although that celebrated potato dish bears the name of the ancient French province in which I've settled down, the Dauphiné, I realized (with shame) that I had never actually cooked it at Gamone. So, I had to make amends for that laxity.

Inevitably, by the time I got around to preparing a dinner of lamb cutlets and potatoes at Gamone, my daughter had returned to her busy existence in Paris. So, she'll have to evaluate my culinary achievements solely from the following photos. For the lamb cutlets, I adopted a recipe based upon breadcrumbs, mustard, olive oil and aromatic herbs.

The authentic recipe for gratin dauphinois is surprisingly simple. The essential ingredient is Charlotte potatoes, which are particularly firm. (I must admit that I don't know if this ideal licensed variety exists outside France… and, if so, under what name.) And you need half-liquid cream of the kind sold in plastic bottles.

Slice the potatoes as thinly as possible. In an ovenware dish, place a layer of sliced potatoes, apply salt and pepper, and cover with cream. Repeat this to obtain four or five layers. Roast slowly: an hour at 150°. So, if you're cooking the lamb and the potatoes in a single kitchen oven, you'll need to insert the potatoes well before the lamb.

The sauce is obtained by the usual technique of déglaçage (deglazing). This consists of scraping up everything from the ovenware dish in which the lamb was roasted, transferring it to a frypan, applying heat for a few minutes in order to get rid of grease, and finally adding a bouillon concocted with a vegetable cube of the Maggi or Knorr kind.

My cooking experiment was totally positive. But, at Gamone, two elements were missing: the company of my wonderful daughter, and the view of the Rhône. On the other hand, Sophia and Fitzroy each got a bone and a bit of sauce.

Closed valley

I took this photo this morning:

[Click to enlarge slightly]

French air-force jet fighters often fly low over Gamone and head towards the horizon at the far end of the valley, in the direction of the Vercors plateau, the Alps and finally Italy. Such fighter pilots would do well to resist the temptation to swoop down, for fun, through those low-floating fluffy clouds at the end of the valley. This is the scene on a less cloudy day:

I guess they have gadgets enabling them to avoid crashing into concealed cliff faces.

Elegance and responsibility

Those are the lovely words—elegance and responsibility—employed by François Hollande as a reaction concerning the electoral exhortations of his ex-wife, Ségolène Royal, who encouraged her political supporters to give their votes to the leading Socialist candidate, who happens to be her ex-husband.

Marital divorce, despite its inevitable bitterness, should never be the end of the world. On the contrary, I'm convinced that Ségolène's explicit gesture will go a long way towards replacing the tears that overwhelmed her, Sunday evening, when she learned that her former voters had dwindled to a handful.

I've always believed that she's a splendid woman, even though she probably never had the mettle to become a president of the French République. Her courageous gesture in coming out affirmatively in favor of the father of her children is an act that will surely guarantee the endurance of Ségolène Royal on the French political scene… where we'll need, of course, the presence of wonderful women.

My brother

If Don Skyvington were alive today, he would have turned 70.

Our father Bill Skyvington happened to die at this same date, four days short of his 61st birthday: October 12, 1978. In other words, I see myself today (absurd arithmetic) as ten years older than my father at the time of his death.

The last time I saw Don was in 2006, at the same pleasant place in Brisbane—the Georgina Hostel at 694 Wynnum Road, Morningside (destined to receive indigenous oldtimers)—where Don would finally die of fatigue (brought on by a mysterious affliction that had pursued him for decades) on June 7, 2009.

[Clicking the image won't, unfortunately, remove the telephone post.]

I've always considered this song by John Williamson as a perfect celebration of Don's life:

Today, most of the actors in Don's existence seem to have disappeared, apart from our sisters Anne, Susan and Jill (all residing in NSW) and my cherished friend Bruce Hudson (in the NSW town of Young). And me, of course.

One more thing…

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. [Wired, February 1996]

Click the graphic to watch an insanely-great video:
How to live before you die.

Demoiselle or dame, that is the question

The great Jacques Brel (in my humble opinion, one of the most amazing French-language artists of all time) once created a song that was based solely upon the Latin declension of the word for rose, rosa.

When I started to learn Latin, I was an 11-year-old kid at Grafton High School. Funnily, I've never forgotten my first lesson. Our teacher, Robert Sinclair (whom I met for the last time when I was out in Sydney in 2006, not long before his death), taught us the declension of the noun dominus, meaning master.

Now, if I had been brought up in the Roman Catholic church, I might have encountered the term dominus as a familiar reference to the Lord Jesus. As it was, I learned that a dominus (master), in the Roman context, was a man in charge of a domus (household). In modern English, we have everyday words from these two origins: the adjective "dominant" is derived from dominus, whereas "domestic" comes from domus. On the surface, it looks a bit like a chicken and egg situation. Which came first, the dominus or the domus? A master only comes into existence when there is a household over which he rules. But a household only exists as such when it has been created by the presence of a master. The Roman statesman and orator Cicero evoked the relationship between these two concepts: nec domo dominus, sed domino domus honestanda est (It is not the house that must honor the master, but the master who must honor the house).

Ever since I've been living in France, I've admired a basic feature of French language usage: the existence of convenient words that normally enable anyone to speak directly and politely to any other person. If the latter person is an adult male, you address him as "monsieur"; if an adult female, you address her as "madame". If you wish to speak to an officer with captaincy rank, say, you address him as "mon capitaine". Back in the days when religion was an omnipresent phenomenon in France, you addressed a priest as "mon père", and a nun as "ma sœur". In all these terms and expressions, the "mon" and "ma" prefixes mean "my", but this use of a possessive adjective is a mere sign of politeness, as in the old-fashioned English terms milord and milady. In a French context, when a citizen addresses a high-ranking military man as "mon général", that usage does not imply that the citizen is truly under the orders of the general. In the same way, an atheist such as myself sees no conflict in addressing a priest as "mon père". He's certainly not my personal reverend father (as if I were a member of his congregation), but rather a professional churchman, often of a friendly disposition, with whom I sympathize to the extent of recognizing, at least, his social status as a priest.

Unfortunately, in certain administrative sectors of French society, there's a nasty habit of retaining the term "mademoiselle" for female adults who don't happen to be officially married. This situation is blatantly wrong, since the marital status of a woman or a man should not impinge upon their social identity. So, I agree with French feminists that there are solid grounds for eradicating, in a draconian manner, the term "mademoiselle". But it would be a great pity to throw out the baby with the bath water. What I'm trying to say is that terms of address such as "monsieur", "madame" and "mademoiselle" have an etymology that deserves respect, since they are mirrors of a certain history of France.

Indian summer

Here at Gamone, certain leaves confirm by their color that it's well and truly autumn.

But the recent weather has been splendid. I'm too far away from the sea to go bathing, but I don't suffer unduly from that privation. I've always remained a little wary of the sun, sand and surf ever since my childhood experiences of getting severely sunburned at Yamba. If ever I were to go bathing today at a sunny beach resort, I would be obliged to wear constantly some kind of hat. So I guess my surfing days are over. Meanwhile, the dogs and I are perfectly happy here in the mountains.

As usual, Sophia spends her nights inside the house, in her vast wicker basket (lined with a new hessian mat purchased recently at Ikea), while Fitzroy sleeps outside, in his self-made bed beneath a wisteria and a wild rose bush. In a July blog post [display], I included a photo of Sophia occupying Fitzroy's splendid abode. Meanwhile, during the warm season, Fitzroy uses his luxurious kennel solely as a dining hall, where he can eat calmly, with no danger of having his food stolen.

Of a morning, when I open the kitchen door, Fitzroy leaps with joy to find Sophia and me emerging from the house. For months, he used to jump up at me, in his typical manner (which I've never tried to discourage). These days, I'm thrilled to discover that Fitzroy's morning bounds are aimed exclusively at Sophia. It's the presence of his great-aunt Sophia that provides Fitzroy with the enthusiasm to start off a new day, just as his prancing and gentle biting seem to wake up aging Sophia, who growls with mock anger, while snarling sufficiently to let the young male know that she's still the chief of their two-dog pack.

In this beautiful season, I learned this morning that my great friend Tineke Bot slid on a rocky ledge in her magnificent botanic park just up the road, and broke a bone in her left shoulder. So, I've spent part of the day lending her a hand.