Leonardo never stops fascinating us

I shall never forget my first vision of the valley of the Bourne, on a sunny Saturday morning in August 1993. Residing in the monastic village of St-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, I had driven down into Grenoble and then up onto the Vercors plateau through St-Nizier-du-Moucherotte, the ski-jump site for the 1968 Winter Olympics. The old ramp, no longer in use, still exists alongside the stone needles of the Trois Pucelles [Three Virgins], whose  towering silhouettes are familiar to the citizens of Grenoble.

The drive across the Vercors plateau, alongside the communes of Lans-en-Vercors and Villard-de-Lans, takes no more than 20 minutes. These delightful communes are often designated as "blue/green" by tourist people, because they attract all kinds of snow enthusiasts in the winter season, before becoming a paradise for hikers during the warm months, when the skies of the Vercors are often studded with colorful parachutes.

Driving down through the narrow gorges of the Bourne, on that first day of contact with my future homeland, I was intrigued by the subtle but rapid transition of the landscape from an alpine setting into the essentially Mediterranean environment of the lower valley. In the middle of that wonderful initiatory excursion, I halted, breathless with wonder, at the level of Rencurel, whose aspect reminded me suddenly of the Aosta Valley in Italy (where I had once slid off the road on my aging Lambretta scooter, resulting in a minor foot wound, on the way back from a trip to Greece in 1964). Above me, during those magical moments at Rencurel, no less than a dozen giant birds were circling in a slow visual symphony, devoid of sound. The spectacle of the great birds, gliding slowly and silently above the green slopes, was stunning. I was instantly captivated by the splendor of the Vercors.

I know today (having lived in this marvelous valley for the last two decades) that the birds I observed that day at Rencurel were probably Black Kites [Milvus migrans].

I say "probably" because they might well have been Red Kites [Milvus milvus], which also frequent this Vercors zone (frequent sightings at Choranche), but more rarely.

When I was a kid in my native South Grafton, I could never understand the dumb adult joke (and I still don't) that consisted of telling kids that they could trap birds by putting salt on their tails. Here in the Vercors, experts inform us that the obvious way of distinguishing ordinary Black Kites and the rarer Red Kites is to observe their tails. The tail zone of the Black Kite is rigorously triangular, whereas that of the Red Kite has a slightly concave lower perimeter. I invite you to judge for yourselves, while realizing that these magnificent birds evolve normally a few hundred meters above our heads, where an observer can't simply take out a ruler and evaluate the respective linearity of tail feathers.

Now, let's look at Leonardo da Vinci. His drawings and notes have been assembled into a set of 12 cardboard boxes known as the Codex Atlanticus.

These fragile documents are housed in the Ambrosian Library in Milan, where attempts have been made to halt their yellowing brought about by age and unexpected chemical pollution.

In the Codex, Leonardo reveals a curious personal anecdote:

I recall as one of my very earliest memories that, while I was in my cradle, a kite came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail against my lips.

This anecdote fascinated an imaginative reader named Sigmund Freud. He was convinced that a little boy who dreams that a big bird has come down and struck its tail against his lips is surely of a homosexual disposition. There was a slight misunderstanding, however, in Freud's discovery of this anecdote. A German translator of Leonardo's Codex had designated the bird, not as a kite, but as a vulture. Consequently, Freud started searching for the theme of vultures in the life of Leonardo. In 1910, Freud even wrote a short study on Leonardo, in which he placed a great emphasis upon the theme of a "vulture" (I'm tempted to use Aussie baby talk, and call it a dicky bird) in Leonardo's childhood memories.

Freud was greatly preoccupied with Leonardo's painting, The Virgin and Child with St Anne, which happens to have been recently restored by the Louvre.

It's a fact that the bodies of Anne (in the background) and her daughter Mary (reaching out rapturously towards the baby Jesus) are so curiously intertwined that they almost form a pair of conjoined twins, and they certainly do not appear to be a generation apart. Freud claimed that the women taking care of Jesus represented Leonardo's "two mothers": that's to say, his biological mother Caterina, in the beginning, and then his stepmother, Donna Albiera. Later, Freud was overjoyed when a scholar, Oskar Pfister, detected in the painting the actual silhouette of a vulture, turned anticlockwise through an angle of 90 degrees. And, amazingly, the giant bird has a corner of its tail entering the child's mouth.

Personally, I read Freud's little book long ago (you can see that I bought it in London for three shillings and six pence), with amusement, and it was my first and last attempt to tackle anything written by the distinguished doctor, who has never been one of my intellectual heroes.

Another painting inspired by Leonardo has been in the news these days: the copy of Mona Lisa from the Prado museum in Madrid.

It has just emerged from a vast restoration process, which removed an ugly 18th-century layer of black paint that hid most of the all-important background features. Various technical details (such as minor corrections carried out by the copyist) strongly suggest that the copyist was actually working alongside Leonardo himself when the authentic Mona Lisa was being painted. Once again, the delicate question of the pros and cons of in-depth "cleaning" of great paintings has been brought into the news... to such an extent that most observers seem to be more interested in restoration techniques than in Freud's "dicky bird" theory.

Bad years, good years... for crops and offspring

From time to time, in the context of my family-history research, I've come upon the case of a child receiving the name of a baby sibling who did not survive. One can well understand the attitude of bereaved parents who must imagine in a fuzzy way that giving the name of the deceased child to a new baby attenuates their loss. Although they wouldn't normally say so explicitly, it's a little as if the second child were a replacement for the one that died. There would appear to be some kind of spiritual continuity between the deceased child and his/her new sibling. Put another way, it's as if some kind of mistake had occurred in the case of the first offspring, and it is hoped that this anomaly might be corrected in the case of the new baby. So, why not look upon the second child as a healthy substitute for the child that died? And why not therefore use exactly the same given names?

Personally, although I can understand this way of looking at things, I find it rather cruel to name a child after a deceased sibling, since the second child is likely to grow up seeing himself/herself as a mere replacement, whose basic raison d'être stems from the death of the sibling, and consists of assuming the role of a substitute for the other. It's not a particularly enviable situation for a child whose natural desire is to affirm his/her unique personality and individuality. The worst situation of all is when a baby boy replaces his deceased sister, and is looked upon by his mother as an ersatz female.

I discovered recently, at the level of my paternal great-great-grandparents, the case of two male offspring whose given names were Robert. The first Robert died at the age of two, and a second child, born two years later, was given the same name. The second Robert, born on 1 February 1860, received a weird second name: Tillage.

In old farming terminology, tillage was the end-of-winter operation that prepared land for the sowing of new crops. I hardly need to explain that the baby's parents were indeed agricultural laborers in the Dorset village of Iwerne Courtney.

Happily, 1860 turned out to be a good year for offspring, since Robert Tillage Skivington survived and grew up to be a healthy male, who married and raised a family. Was 1860 an equally good year for crops in Iwerne Courtney?

Hang-gliding pioneer from Grafton nominated for world's highest award

The FAI [Fédération Aéronautique Internationale], whose head office is in Switzerland, governs world records in all kinds of air sports and astronautical achievements.

They have recently announced on their website [click here] that John Dickenson has been nominated as a potential recipient of their distinguished 2012 FAI Gold Air Medal.

There has been considerable discussion on my blog concerning this man whose pioneering efforts in hang gliding were conducted on the Clarence River alongside my native town, Grafton, in 1963. The test pilot was a local man, Rod Fuller. To access this material, use the search box up in the left-hand corner with the term dickenson.

Fragile as a cherry blossom

Chapter 8 of Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins starts with a charming personal anecdote:

I was driving through the English countryside with my daughter Juliet, then aged six, and she pointed out some flowers by the wayside. I asked her what she thought wildflowers were for. She gave a rather thoughtful answer. ‘Two things,’ she said. ‘To make the world pretty, and to help the bees make honey for us.’ I was touched by this and sorry I had to tell her that it wasn't true.

Today, here in my Gamone wonderland, if I were conversing with a Juliet, I would ask her why the cherry tree has flowers.

And why are the cherry blossoms so light and fragile? There today and gone tomorrow. I don't imagine (although I may be wrong) that the flowers remain intact for long enough to interest passing insects.

Yesterday, a strong breeze sprung up at Gamone, and the cherry blossoms disappeared within 20 minutes. Afterwards, their petals were strewn across the grassy slopes and the roadway like vegetal dandruff. Dawkins's daughter might have explained that the ephemeral cherry blossoms were put there by God's angels to remind people who are fond of cherries (such as me) that there'll soon be a great crop of fruit.

Incidentally, last year, I put a big bag of cherries in the deep freezer, to see how they might survive. Well, once they're thawed out, they're a little lifeless, naturally, and their red color has changed to brown. Their texture is altered, too, as if they might have been cooked. But their taste remains excellent. And it's nice to be able to savor last year's cherries at the end of winter.

I might receive a technical reaction to this blog post from my old friend Bruce Hudson in Young, Australia. Farmers of Young are apparently some of the world's leading producers of cherries. On the other hand, I've never heard whether these Young folk know the secrets of distilling cherries to produce the 48° alcohol called kirsch, which happens to be the specialty of the Guilhermet family in St-Hilaire-du-Rosier (Ratafia variety of cherries), 20 minutes down the road from Gamone.

Good place to get pissed

I must be careful with blog titles like that, containing slang. I shouldn't take it for granted that Russian and American readers of Antipodes, for example, are aware that, in my native Australia, "getting pissed" means drinking an excessive quantity of beer... where the sense of the adjective "excessive" is rather relative.

One of my ancestral relatives in Dorset, living at Blandford St Mary, was described in the 1841 census as a brewer... but I have no idea yet of the nature of the beverage he brewed, or the place where he worked.

Incidentally, other records have enabled me to verify that, in the second quarter of the 19th century, in a tiny rural village in south-west England (Winterborne Stickland), a 40-year-old woman, Jane Woolridge, the wife of her younger husband James Skivington, could indeed give birth to a healthy son. As you can see in the census data, the name of this son was William Skivington. He became a cabinet maker, and married a local girl named Martha Coffin. (It takes all kinds of cabinets to make a world.) Later on, William became a piano tuner. Then he set up a prosperous business in Salisbury Street, Blandford Forum, with a shop on Market Place that sold pianos, organs, harmoniums, etc.

A few years ago, I visited the local museum in Blandford Forum. This excursion was described already in a blog post titled Dorset ancestral anecdotes [display].

Inside, I was thrilled to find myself face to face with a pump organ from  the Skivington music shop.

The museum curator knew all about this family, and he gave me photocopies of notes about my relatives. He even seemed to appreciate the musical qualities (or was he merely being polite?) of an ancient Anglican hymn, When I survey the wondrous cross, that I succeeded—more or less—in playing on the instrument. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Christian sounds I produced woke up all the Skivington ghosts in the neighborhood, who were surely charmed by the idea that an Antipodean member of their family might attempt, crudely, to breathe some audio life back into the old organ.

Incidentally, for readers who have been following closely all the trivial stuff I'm relating, here's a correct version, played by a competent unnamed organist, of the simple but catchy tune (from my childhood) that I was attempting to reproduce—with strenuous non-stop treadle pumping—on the archaic instrument in Blandford Forum.

Let's get back to beer. In the Blandford region, a tiny river, the Piddle, looks more like a piddling man-made canal than a real river.

Various local place names incorporate either "piddle" (Piddlehinton, Piddletrenthide) or "puddle" (Puddletown, Tolpuddle, Affpuddle, Briantspuddle, Turnerspuddle). Philosophical question: When does a piddle become a puddle? And can puddling be thought of as the same activity as piddling? The case of the Thomas Hardy village near Dorchester is amusing, in that it has been known officially both as Piddletown and Puddletown.

If you'll just bear with me for a second, I promise that I'll talk at last about beer. I still don't know what kind of stuff James Skivington might have been brewing in Dorset in 1841. But, a few years ago, two Piddlehinton lads got involved in a thriving business—more lucrative than selling organs—by creating the Dorset Piddle Brewery.

Click here to visit their website, enabling you to appreciate some of their inevitable play on words inviting you to this good place to get pissed in Dorset. I must drop in there, the next time I'm visiting my ancestral region, when I feel like a Piddle.

ADDENDUM: Well, it certainly wasn't difficult to find facts concerning the context in which my ancestral relative James Skivington was employed as a brewer, in 1841, in Blandford St Mary. In the middle of the village, there's a big and ancient red-brick brewery:

It's the home of Hall & Woodhouse, known today as Badger Brewery, whose foundation dates from 1777. Click here to visit their excellent website.

I'm embarrassed. There was an elephant in the sitting room, and I didn't even see it. This simply means, in fact, that I've never had an opportunity of strolling around Blandford St Mary (just alongside Blandford Forum). So, on second thoughts, when I'm next in Dorset, and thinking maybe about getting pissed, I won't even bother going to Piddlehinton. I'll simply look around for a pub in the ancestral Blandford context.

Unfortunately, all the old Hall & Woodhouse archives were lost in 1900 when a fire destroyed the original brewery buildings.

Talking about ancestral Blandford pubs, look at this nice place:

Known today as the The Dolphin, this ancient establishment was formerly the White Hart Inn, in West Street, Blandford Forum, operated by three successive generations of 18th and 19th century gentlemen named William Skivington.

Change is now

François Hollande has just released his official electoral video for the presidential campaign.

A constantly reoccurring concept is égalité (equality): the middle term in the motto of the French Republic.

Donkey neighbors

This is the first group photo I've ever succeeded in taking of all the five donkeys of Gamone.

From left to right: Fanette, Moshé and the three female donkeys acquired by my neighbor Jackie last year. The two donkey families are not in direct physical contact, because their respective paddocks are separated by a couple of electric strands. So, they observe one another at a short but respectable distance... which is fine for everybody. Donkeys are aware of their precise territory, and they prefer that things stay fixed at that level.

Imagining today as if it were tomorrow

I've just been reading a news article that mentions a street in Paris, the rue des Francs-Bourgeois, that has apparently become so crowded with tourists that it is periodically closed down to traffic. Well, that street is in fact the continuation of the rue Rambuteau, where I lived for ages. It was like my backyard: a quiet place where I would often wander home after an evening at the nearby Petit Gavroche, or go out on my bicycle of a Sunday morning. A place becomes so familiar, so banal, that we take it for granted. Then, one day, it becomes so sought after that the authorities have to close down the road traffic.

Sometimes I think that this might happen, one day, to Gamone. For the moment, I'm the only person in the world who has the extraordinary privilege of existing here—day in, day out, in the sole company of my dogs and donkeys—in this magnificent setting. But one day, Gamone will surely be discovered, and the authorities will have to close the road to keep out tourist buses.

Yesterday, when driving back from Romans, I literally ran into a rainbow. It followed me all the way back to Gamone, where I had a few precious minutes to take a photo before it dissolved into thin air.

As I say, the funny thing about that rainbow was that it followed me all the way back home here, as if it were taking care of me. As soon as it saw that I had arrived safely at Gamone, the rainbow disappeared.

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In memory of a dog named Gamone

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Cheerless festivities

At yesterday's annual spring "plowmen's festival" at St-Jean-en-Royans, the atmosphere was so gloomy (in spite of the sunny weather) that I hardly felt inspired enough to take many photos. For the first time in years, the carnival float conveying the festival queen and her two maids of honor was so dull and unattractive that I didn't even bother to point my Nikon in that direction and push the button. One of my shots has a vague Diane Arbus flavor:

They guy at the wheel of the tractor seems to be wondering (like me) what the hell he's doing there, and hoping that the punishment won't last too long. The grim expressions on people's faces, totally devoid of smiles, suggest an absence of joy, bordering on some kind of pervasive anguish. Even the polar bear doesn't seem to be particularly happy.

The participants in this Portuguese folkloric group appear to be totally dispirited, and dancing robotically:

Among the onlookers, there's not a single smiling face. As for the following guy, dragging a stunted Eiffel Tower through the streets of the village, he seems to have fallen asleep with boredom:

I have no idea what was happening to produce such a dismal mood. Is it the economic crisis in Europe? Or maybe the lethargic effects of global warming? Or might it simply be that old-fashioned village festivals of this kind are inevitably winding down in intensity, and dying a natural death? Seriously, if I were the mayor of St-Jean-en-Royans, I would take the initiative of suggesting to my fellow-members of the town council that they abandon the antiquated "plowmen's festival" and ask the young people of the region to invent some new kind of happening...

Glorious salt marshes of France

The product known in French as fleur de sel is a prestigious gastronomical salt composed of white crystals formed by the evaporating effects of wind upon the surface of salt marshes. I didn't even know that such a product existed until I arrived in France.

The expression fleur de sel might be translated into English as "flower of salt", but those words don't mean much. Besides, I don't believe that anybody talks of "flower of salt" in English. So, I'll stick to the French expression. Here's a packet I bought a few days ago:

Think of it as super salt. The fleur de sel crystals are expensive, of course, because they're collected manually. When you sprinkle these extraordinary gastronomical gems on meat, for example, they add a wonderful salty crunchiness to the eating experience. Chefs add fleur de sel to their preparations at the last minute, so that the crystalline structure is not destroyed by the cooking.

The most celebrated French salt marshes are those of Guérande in Brittany. For countless ordinary shoppers in France, salt and Guérande are synonyms.

But the most ancient salt marshes are those of the Roman city of Aigues-Mortes, on the edge of the Camargue delta of the Rhône.

Most often, the salt marshes are a dull blue.

Their geometrical splendor stretches to the horizon.

Periodically, harmless algae add a glorious pink hue to the salt marshes.

Who would have said so: Salt is beautiful! And tasty, too.

Raspberry Pi basic computer

Normally, if all goes as planned, I'll be able to place an order tomorrow morning for a Raspberry Pi computer, for 40 euros. Click here to visit their website, to see what it's all about.

If I understand correctly, the development of this low-cost computer was masterminded by a fellow named Eben Upton and several colleagues at the computer laboratory of the university of Cambridge.

I couldn't agree more with Eben's belief that young hobbyist programmers need a gadget of this kind if they wish to become hackers... in the original noble sense of this term: skilled specialists capable of getting computers to perform amazing tricks.

Long ago, I remember hearing an American designate the primitive French 2-horsepower Citroën as "basic car". Well we might say that the Raspberry Pi is basic computer. When you pay your 40 euros, you get the bare minimum, with no frills. To get it to do interesting things, you're expected to add on all the necessary bells and whistles, which will inevitably involve creating your own software. And that's exactly what makes the Raspberry Pi an ideal gadget for bright individuals who are determined to master computer programming.

Dogs and stars

For the last two days, my memories have been dominated by images of Christine's dear dog Gamone. In the stark clarity of the death of a dog, I find a distilled paradigm of the tragic brevity of our human existence. I am shocked by the abrupt flight into nothingness of the simple beauty and nobility of the departed animal. It is a theme of immense melancholy, of celestial emptiness. And yet the cosmic messages of a dog's existence are no less real than those that emanate from us humans. Their existential photons end up hurtling towards the stars, just like ours. We're all on the same wavelength, as it were.

Sophia pursues her calm existence, apparently oblivious of the fact that her daughter Gamone has now been totally metamorphosed into a burst of something heading out towards the confines of the Cosmos. As you can see from this photo, Sophia looks quite slim and alert. In fact, in spite of her advanced age, she's in good shape. As for Fitzroy, he remains relatively earthbound for the moment, in the sense that he is capable of meditating deeply, for long periods of time, on the mysteries of a jet of water emerging from a hose.

But a canine philosopher is capable of interrupting his cogitations, maybe in the twilight zone of a warm spring evening, to go out hunting. The following morning, I admire the catch:

That's the first time I've ever seen a gray rat in the vicinity of the house. It's reassuring to know that Fitzroy can apparently find and destroy such a pest.

Calculating for dummies

Some of my readers might not get very far into this blog post, because calculating is not exactly an exciting subject, particularly when it's "for dummies". That's a pity, though, because the demonstration that I'm about to provide is really quite amazing. I'm going to show you how to obtain a relatively precise value of pi without having to perform any serious mathematics whatsoever.

I can hear a wag saying that you can merely look up the value of pi in Google! Fair enough, but I'm talking here about a method of actually calculating pi, from scratch, rather than simply looking up the value. The final calculation involves little more than a bit of counting followed by a multiplication operation. So, let's go.

To perform the operations I'm about to describe, you'll need a device that fires some kind of projectiles in such a way that you can clearly distinguish their points of impact. An ideal device, for example, would be a so-called air gun that fires birdshot pellets, known as BB slugs.

Having made this high-tech suggestion, let me point out immediately that you can perform the required operations using far more down-to-earth resources. For example, you might use some kind of sticky goo such as chewing gum, or children's putty.

The only requirement is that you must be able to determine precisely the point of impact of each projectile. Marbles or pebbles have to be ruled out because it's almost impossible to determine their points of impact when thrown at a target. So, let's suppose that you've obtained some kind of suitable device...

• Obtain a big square of white cardboard, the bigger the better, and place it flat on the ground beneath a tall tree. Make sure it doesn't move, maybe with the help of a couple of metal spikes.

• Armed with your airgun, or whatever, and a good supply of projectiles, climb up into the tree, high above the square of white cardboard... which will be used as your target. [I forgot to point out that you should probably let your neighbors know beforehand that you're conducting a scientific experiment in computing... otherwise they might become unnecessarily alarmed.]

• Now, here's the essential part of the calculation procedure. You're expected to fire projectiles (slugs, chewing gum, goo, whatever) in the vague general direction of the square of white cardboard down on the ground. Above all, you have to fire at the cardboard in a totally random fashion, without ever aiming deliberately at any particular region of the square. In other words, your projectiles are expected to produce impacts that are scattered all over the cardboard in a completely random fashion. Indeed, if ever you aimed carefully, and you were such a good marksman that all your projectiles hit the middle of the cardboard, then the method I'm describing would not work at all.

• You're expected to carry on bombarding the target with projectiles for as long as possible, until the cardboard is completely covered in impacts.

• When you've produced a huge number of randomly-located impacts (let's say, to be generous, a few tens of thousands), climb down out of the tree and examine meticulously the bombarded square of cardboard. You will have understood by now that my method of "calculating for dummies" is a little weird. Call it a thought experiment, if you prefer.

• Using a corner of the cardboard as the center, draw a circle whose radius is equal to the length of a side of the square. Your big square of cardboard should look something like this:

• In the above representation, we've introduced a color code, to simplify our explanations. Points of impact inside the quadrant of the circle are indicated in red, and the others in blue.

• Start out by counting the number of red impacts, inside the quadrant, which we shall designate as Q. Then count the total number of impacts on the cardboard square, red + blue, which we shall designate as T.

• Divide Q by T, and multiply the result by 4. This will give you a value of pi.

It's easy to understand why this counting procedure should provide us with the value of pi. Consider the ratio of the area of the quadrant and that of the square. Elementary geometry tells us that this ratio is pi divided by 4. And, provided the impacts are scattered randomly over the entire square, then we can see intuitively that Q divided by T should be a good approximation to the value of this same ratio. To put it in simple terms, the quantity of impacts in any particular zone indicates, as it were, the relative area of that zone.

This approach to calculations was named in honor of one of the world's most prestigious gambling temples: the Monte Carlo casino in Monaco, on the French Riviera. When you use the Monte Carlo approach on a computer, you no longer need an airgun and BB slugs to produce your set of arbitrary points. You simply use an application capable of generating random numbers.

The Monte Carlo method of problem solving was invented in 1947 by John von Neumann and two of his colleagues, Stan Ulam and Nick Metropolis, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. A small group of brilliant scientists, many of whom had recently arrived in the USA, had come together with the intention of designing the world's first full-fledged electronic computer, named Maniac, to be used primarily as a development tool for the hydrogen bomb.

When I started work as a computer programmer with IBM Australia in 1957, the Monte Carlo method had reached the zenith of its popularity as an almost magical problem-solving approach, which fascinated all of us. Today, over half a century later, Monte Carlo computational algorithms are still in widespread use in many simulation contexts.

The Monte Carlo method is entitled to an entire chapter in the middle of George Dyson's interesting and instructive history of computing, Turing's Cathedral.