Antipodes

Covered in snow

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 22:44:00 +0000

Snow hit us massively during the night. Nobody can say we weren't warned. TV weather reports have become amazingly precise.

Yesterday, the visiting goldfinches were basking in the sun on the tiled roof of the bird house. Today, they would need to wear snowshoes.

In the middle of the morning, just after the passage of the municipal snow plow, I ran into my neighbor Jackie walking down the road on his way to Pont-en-Royans.

In fact, I had already discovered why Jackie was unlikely to do much driving, today, on the slopes of Choranche. Early this morning, I was taking my dogs out so that Sophia could "do her business". She only defecates at a fixed place, a hundred meters up above the house, and prefers to be accompanied for the occasion.

Continuing up the road a little, I was alarmed to find Jackie's little white vehicle in the middle of a snow-covered field.

I was relieved to find footprints leading from the stranded vehicle back up to Jackie's house. So I rushed up there to find out what had happened. Jackie told me that he had an appointment this morning with his GP up in Grenoble. Having heard that driving conditions might be difficult, he decided to set out early, at 6 am, in the dark. But, before he had done 50 meters, his journey ended abruptly. The vehicle started to slide on the very first slope, and refused to stay on the road. It continued to slide in a straight line, and that line lead into the field, where the vehicle only stopped sliding because of a conveniently-placed big bump in the grassy ground.

He was lucky in that the rough terrain prevented the vehicle from gathering speed, overturning and sliding into Gamone Creek.

As for me, I simply rule out any attempt whatsoever at using my old automobile whenever Gamone is covered in ice or snow.

New unidentified birds at Gamone

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:21:00 +0000

Yesterday, a new group of tiny colorful birds arrived at Gamone. The following poor-quality photo (with my telephoto lens, there's not enough depth of field) gives you an idea of the bird's appearance:

Instead of darting into the bird house and flying out with sunflower seeds in their beaks, like the mésanges [tits], these newcomers simply hang around as a group on the roof of the bird house, and dine calmly on the seeds I placed there.

Meanwhile, on the ground, where I've also spread several kinds of seeds, finches chase each other around, as if there weren't enough seeds to go around. The little creatures give the impression, viewed from my bedroom window, that they're competing aggressively in some kind of rough soccer match.

For the moment, I haven't been able to identify these new visitors.

BREAKING NEWS: Christine just phoned to inform me that these birds are European goldfinches [chardonnerets in French].

French Rafale fighter plane

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:10:00 +0000

In my blog post of 1 March 2010 entitled Australia's choice of fighter planes [display], I suggested that, instead of waiting for the US Joint Strike Fighters ordered by former prime minister John Howard, the French Rafale would be an excellent choice.

Dassault Aviation has just announced its first foreign sales contract for this aircraft: 126 planes for India, an affair of some 12 billion dollars.

That kind of economic news is welcome in France at the present moment. One of the key arguments of the Socialist contender for the presidency, François Hollande, is that France needs to reassert rapidly and dynamically her high-tech industrial prowess on the international marketing scene.

Rivers never flow uphill

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 10:46:00 +0000

As a youth in my native Grafton, I didn't think of myself as somebody who might be particularly interested in the flow of rivers. That's because I happened to be living alongside the great Clarence River, which I used to see so regularly (usually from afar) that I finished by no longer noticing it. I had grown up in the aftermath of the tragic December 1943 drowning of 13 boys, junior (cub) members of the local troop of Boy Scouts. As a child of ten or so, I had witnessed the damage waged by the waters of the Clarence in a disastrous flood. Later, I rowed in school races (in "fours") in the shadow of the antique double-decker bridge, over which I used to ride my bicycle regularly.

To paraphrase the well-known forest/trees saying, I simply didn't see the river because of the water. Much later, in Paris, I learned that a river has a left bank and a right bank.

The common-sense adjectives "left" and "right" are so much more tangible, for people living alongside a great river, than the theoretical notions of north and south. So, I had passed my childhood in right-bank Waterview (South Grafton) before moving across to our new left-bank residence in Kent Street (Grafton).

Since arriving here at Choranche, on the edge of the French Alps, I've come to appreciate the sense of the adjectives upstream and downstream. The Bourne flows down from Villard-de-Lans. Choranche is located on the right bank, and Châtelus on the left. And Pont-en-Royans is a little further downstream. It's a bit like seasons. Back in Australia, I hardly knew what they were all about. These days, at Gamone, they determine my daily existence.

There's another realm, of a theoretical kind, in which we must be aware of the direction of flow. I'm referring to the flow of information and scientific knowledge. Just as rivers never flow in an upstream direction, information and knowledge always flow in a unique direction: downwards from X to Y, say, but never upwards from Y to X.

This was one of the great lessons taught by Karl Popper when he demolished the time-honored but absurd notion that an understanding of the laws of the natural universe can be acquired miraculously when knowledge flows spontaneously, indeed magically, from the natural phenomena being examined by a researcher up into the scientist's mind. This mysterious process, referred to as induction, was a part of established science back in my student days. Since Popper, we realize that a new understanding of the ways in which various natural phenomena unfold can arise in the mind of a brilliant scientist. This knowledge then flows down into other human minds, enabling the newly-imagined explanations to be applied to the natural phenomena that inspired the creative scientist, for verification (best possible case) or for rejection (worst-case scenario).

Two centuries ago, in the domain of the evolution of living organisms, a great and ancient "river" of a physiological kind was thought of as capable, from time to time, of flowing uphill.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck considered that a living creature could transmit to its offspring various characteristics acquired during the parent's earthly existence. Take the case of a primitive giraffe, many millennia ago, at a time when giraffes still had relatively short necks, since they could find all the leaves they needed quite close to the ground. Let's suppose that a couple of giraffes were having a serious discussion about the idea of having a baby.

Mr Giraffe: There's only one thing that worries me, dear. Due to global warming, there's no longer any grass around. So, we're forced to eat leaves. But there are fewer and fewer leaves at a low level. Soon, to reach the high leaves and survive, giraffes will need to have longer and longer necks.

Mrs Giraffe: My dear husband, I agree with you entirely. But, if our future baby needs an exceptionally long neck to find food, then we must make sure that he's born with such a neck. There are no two ways about it.

Mr Giraffe: OK, but how can we make sure that his neck will be long enough for him to survive?

Mrs Giraffe: We must pray, my dear husband, and implore our Good Giraffe God to perform a miraculous intervention of genetic engineering.

So, that's what they did. And, soon after, biological information from the parched earth flowed up through the tree trunks, past the bare branches at the bottom of the trees, until it reached the level of the luscious greenery. And, from there, this precious information—dealing primarily with the complex procreative question of how to produce giraffe embryos with long necks—was consumed and digested by Mrs Giraffe… who suddenly felt a glowing long-necked warmth in her womb. The miracle was taking place!

We now know that Lamarckism was totally wrong, but it was never, at any stage, a completely crazy belief. Even today, when tourists halt for a moment alongside the lovely old thatched house in Pont-en-Royans [display], and chat with the village blacksmith and his son, they are invariably impressed by their giant strong hands, which have been photographed in closeup on countless mobile phones.

Blacksmith: My ancestors have been blacksmiths here at Pont-en-Royans for countless generations, and the blacksmiths' sons and daughters have always married the offspring of other blacksmiths in neighboring villages. And the gnarled hands of our kids, today, reveal the traces of all those centuries of hard work at the forge.

Who could possibly doubt the truth of the good man's words? His strong hands have been shaped, over the centuries, by a mysterious process of divinely-ordained genetic engineering that seems to "understand" that future blacksmiths need to inherit the hands, not merely of their forefathers, but of their forefathers' trade! This knowledge has flowed up from the forge to the uterus of every young lady chosen to become the mother of a future blacksmith. It's all a bit like the Nazarene carpenter's wife, who had received knowledge informing her that she would be giving birth to the Lord.

The only flaw in these nice and convincing tales is that knowledge about a future offspring never needs to flow into an embryo, because the zygote formed from the pair of gametes provided by the parents of a future member of the blacksmith dynasty contains all the information that it is required to forge a new human being. And, if the baby blacksmith looks as if he has inherited gnarled hands, that merely means that at least one of his parents had gnarled hands. And that characteristic had nothing to do with their daily occupations. Even if the latest generations of the baby's ancestors had all decided to transform their ancient forges into tourist boutiques, they would still have been born with gnarled hands. Inheritance specifications never flow upwards from a blacksmith's forge to human parents and their babies. They are transmitted, through chromosomes, from parents down to their offspring. Rivers never flow uphill.

This metaphor of information flow applied both to Karl Popper's views on induction and to Lamarck's views on inheritance was developed at length by David Deutsch, of Oxford.

His article Selfish Genes and Information Flow appeared in the collection entitled Richard Dawkins, How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think, Oxford University Press, 2006.

Dear old birdman

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Something has changed in the eating habits of my winter colony of mésanges [Great Tits]. Up until now, there hasn't been much snow at Gamone, and it hasn't even been really cold yet. So, normally, the tiny birds should be able to move around easily and find food. Instead of that, they've got into the habit of lining up to enter the bird house, for sunflower seeds, or pecking at the suspended cages of fatty stuff.

Their food consumption has increased to such an extent that I decided to purchase a 15 kg bag of seeds.

It's not as if the tiny creatures scoop up mouthfuls of sunflower seeds. On the contrary, a bird picks up a single seed, then it flies up into the linden tree, a fruit tree, or maybe the dense branches of my rose pergola, where it thrashes the seed patiently, for anything up to a minute, in order to remove the husk and get at its tasty interior. A visitor to Gamone might well wonder what has caused my small pear and plum trees to be surrounded by pale husks. As soon as it has finished its seed, the bird darts back immediately to the store to obtain another seed.

I would imagine that there's a good reason for this eating surge. Many of the birds that are visiting Gamone at present were probably born here either last year or the year before, following the installation of my custom-built nesting house.

When I used to watch a couple of birds flitting around to feed and guard their precious progeny, hidden inside the box, I used to say to myself that it was a pity that these native creatures of Gamone would simply disappear in the middle of spring, without my ever actually seeing them. Well, I'm now convinced that I'm seeing and feeding these birds today. And I'm happy to find that they have healthy appetites. As the lady at the agricultural cooperative said to me: "The birds know when they've found a good address."

I decided to purchase a couple of dense cylinders of bird food made in the USA.

The one in the photo is composed of a mixture of dried fruit and crushed earthworms. Sounds delicious.

When I told the lady at the agricultural cooperative about the appetite of my birds, she looked at me with a kind expression, as if she were listening to the innocent complaints of a dear old birdman, and said: "Ah, I'm sure they keep you occupied." And she asked me if I needed help to carry the 15-kg bag of seeds out to my car. I said: "No, I think I can handle it." Then I asked myself in horror: "Jeez, am I really starting to look like a decrepit old birdman, who has nothing better to do than complain about the fact that the birds are eating him out of house and home?"

I guess so. I was wearing a round woollen bonnet pulled down over my forehead, which makes the best of men look stupid. And I've got into the habit of wearing a recently-purchased snow parka, which is ideal at this time of the year, but which has the disadvantage of making me look like a plump aging Eskimo. (And I haven't even got around yet to donning the fabulous black rabbit-fur chapka that I purchased recently, made in Russia or China, which would only makes sense if Gamone were to be hit by freezing temperatures or a snow blizzard.) But I won't squabble about the impressions of people who see me. Yes, I've become an aging birdman from the slopes of the Vercors. In fact, I had got around to thinking of myself essentially as a dogman. Maybe I'm both...

Steven Spielberg of molecular animation

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:12:00 +0000

American-born Drew Berry has achieved fame as a creator of amazing animated biological videos in a celebrated scientific environment in Australia: the Walter and Eliza Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. Here's his recent presentation for TED [Technology Entertainment and Design]:

After watching that, I can almost sense the presence inside me of all those marvelously-efficient little molecular factories, working around the clock to churn out new strands of DNA. Thank God I didn't have to finance the construction of these factories, or pay out salaries to the employees. Maybe I should look into the idea of transforming some of their production into something more tangible: automobiles, say, or maybe even crisp new banknotes.

Drew Berry has also collaborated recently on the Biophilia album of the exotic Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk.

It's weird and wonderful that we have to depend now upon the artistry of graphic poets to show us the workings of marvels such as molecules.

POST SCRIPTUM: In the Biophilia video, did you notice the fleeting presence of this strange set of molecules?

Psychology of a novel kind

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:10:00 +0000

I hastened to read Thinking, fast and slow by the Israeli-born Daniel Kahneman after coming upon a description of the Princeton professor by Steven Pinker:

Daniel Kahneman is among the most influential psychologists in history and certainly the most important psychologist alive today. He has a gift for uncovering remarkable features of the human mind.

Another enthusiastic reviewer described Kahneman's book as "a big slice of sober pie". Today, having completed a first reading of the book, I'm intrigued by Pinker's appraisal. Admittedly, Kahneman's book often aroused my curiosity, but many parts of it bored and indeed irritated me. In any case, I remain convinced that if any individual deserved to be thought of as "the most important psychologist alive today" (an excessive description whose fuzziness also troubles me), it would surely be Pinker himself rather than Kahneman. But I prefer to avoid unnecessary evaluations of that kind.

The basic theme of Thinking, fast and slow is trivially simple. When humans are thinking—for example, when they're faced with questions or problems—they actually behave at two complementary levels. First, they "think fast", immediately, automatically and instinctively. Then they "think slow", calling explicitly upon reasoning processes. At the start of his explanations, Kahneman (who seems to get a thrill out of of coining new expressions) has introduced a terminological gimmick, which also annoys me. He designates "fast thinking" as System 1, and "slow thinking" as System 2. OK, fair enough. But was it necessary to write an entire book on the basis of this obvious hierarchy, which has been been a constant preoccupation of researchers for ages in fields such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence and brain research?

At times, I had the impression that the subject of Kahneman's book was closer to elementary statistics, decision-making (as in business) and games theory than to psychology. Many of his explanations are based upon personal anecdotes in various professional and academic environments, where Kahneman often seemed to arrive on the scene like Zorro, eager to correct all the mistakes perpetrated by the numbskulls who had been there prior to him. For example, there's a chapter entitled "Regression to the mean" which starts out by explaining that the author had "one of the most satisfying eureka experiences of [his] career while teaching flight instructors in the Israeli Air Force about the psychology of effective training". A seasoned instructor pointed out that praising an exceptionally high-quality flight performance served no useful purpose, because the pilot would inevitably fly much worse the following day. On the other hand, this instructor considered that it was a good idea to scream at a pilot who had flown exceptionally poorly, because he would inevitably improve his performance the following day. Now, on the surface, that situation might appear to have something to do with the question of rewards and punishment in the domain of human psychology. But Kahneman's "eureka experience" consisted of his realizing a very banal fact that has nothing to do with psychology. If a pilot flies exceptionally well one day, then he's likely (for purely statistical reasons) to fly less well the next day. And if a pilot flies exceptionally badly one day, then he's likely (for the same statistical reasons) to fly a little better the next day. So, what else is new? Kahneman is so excited about this personal revelation that he introduces another example, summed up in the following sentence:

Highly intelligent women tend to marry men who are less intelligent than they are.

Is this banal observation a pretext for getting involved in reflections about the reasons that might push a bright girl into wedding a dumb guy? No, there is no reason whatsoever to tackle the question at that level. The elementary theory of probability provides a total explanation of the situation. There are only so many highly intelligent women looking for husbands, whereas there are hordes of numbskulls ready to be chosen. So, it's inevitable, statistically, that most bright girls end up marrying relatively dumb guys.

I was a 17-year-old student back in Australia when I heard about regression analysis (the name of the approach that started out as "regression to the mean") and correlation. Admittedly, Kahneman introduces these cases of regression as counter-examples, which have nothing to do with genuine human psychology, but I find it amazing that a Nobel laureate in economics could get excited today about such everyday stuff.

Something about Kahneman's style makes me consider his book as a specimen of popular psychology of the kind you often meet up with in magazines and training seminars. He reminds me of Edward de Bono and his thinking hats, or Nassim Taleb and his black swans. In any case, one of these days I promise to reread Kahneman's book, to see if I maybe missed out on something during my initial reading.

Virtual house in Pont-en-Royans

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 18:59:00 +0000

I've been pursuing my investigations into the possibility that a thatched house drawn in 1870 might have actually existed in Pont-en-Royans, in the vicinity of Blackbird Street [rue du Merle].

If this were indeed an ancient scene at Pont-en-Royans (as I firmly believe), then the main structure in the foreground would have been located on the lower slopes of Mount Barret, on the left bank of the Bourne, whereas the line of buildings in the background would have been located on the other side of the river, in the center of the village of Pont-en-Royans, on the lower slopes of the mountain (vaguely visible in the background) called Les Trois Châteaux. If we don't actually see the Bourne in the drawing, that's because it was hidden behind lots of trees and vegetation that lie between Blackbird House and the river.

Notice the presence of part of a second building behind the main house:

I shall refer to the main house as Blackbird 1, and to the second building (whose roof appears to be tiled, not thatched) as Blackbird 2. Both structures have ample balconies, supported by hefty wooden beams and diagonal props. This is an architectural feature of the so-called "hanging houses" (maisons suspendues) that have made Pont-en-Royans famous.

Clearly, there was no water beneath the balconies of Blackbird 1. But the balconies of Blackbird 2, as well as those attached to the line of buildings in the background, probably all jutted out over the Bourne, like the balconies and lofts that we find on today's hanging houses.

Residents and shopkeepers have always been preoccupied by the challenge of finding as much usable space as possible (both for living and for storing wares) on the precious real estate in the vicinity of the bridge linking the Vercors mountains to the plains.

To ascertain the likely locations of Blackbird 1 and 2, I was guided above all by the angles of the background buildings in the drawing.

Today, to be able to see the façades and the side walls at that angle, you have to move to an observation point quite close to the Picard Bridge. Finally, when I take account of all relevant factors, I'm convinced that Blackbird 1 was located on allotment #127 of the Napoleonic Cadastre.

Blackbird 2 would have been located on allotment #128, quite close to the edge of the Bourne, and the woman and child were seated on the grassy slopes of allotment #126. The stone wall in the drawing corresponds to the curved path leading down towards the river, which still exists today. Here's a view of the Picard Bridge from an upstream vantage point:

Blackbird Street rises behind the car on the left, at the place where a blacksmith's forge was located for ages, and up until only a few decades ago. (My neighbor Madeleine told me that, from her grocery shop at the other extremity of the Picard Bridge, she looked out over the blacksmith's place for 30 years!) The pair of buildings, Blackbird 1 and Blackbird 2, would have been located (preceded by a short row of hanging houses on the allotments #102, #103 and #104) within the empty space that I've encircled.

There have been several fine illustrations of the blacksmith's workshop, at the southern extremity of the Picard Bridge.

The following nice illustration in color is no doubt a relatively recent copy of the monochrome engraving:

Notice that the central part of the building forming a portal over Blackbird Street has disappeared by the time the Napoleonic Cadastre was drawn, leaving only a narrow fragment overhanging the Bourne.

Normally we should be able to find representations of the Blackbird Street buildings in other old drawings. That's to say, we need to find drawings done from roughly the spot, in the following photo, where Sophia's tail is located.

Here is such a drawing:

I would say that the building in the upper right-hand corner is probably Blackbird 2. Notice, too, beneath the arch of the bridge, on the left bank of the Bourne, the presence of hanging houses that have long since disappeared. In the following engraving by General Bacler d'Albe [1761-1824], we've moved our vantage point a little further downstream:

In the upper right-hand corner, we're still looking up (I think) at Blackbird 2, with the balcony of a hanging house a little further back. The stone arch in the wall supporting Blackbird 2 can still be seen, in the photo of Sophia's tail, above the fisherman. The following elegant illustration was possibly inspired by the Bacler d'Albe engraving:

Finally, I have to admit that there seem to be no other illustrations in which I can clearly distinguish a house that would appear to be Blackbird 1. In a way, this is a positive conclusion, in that it suggests that my drawing of 1870 might in fact be a unique document.

Here's a montage in which I've tried to place the drawing in a modern photographic context:

My attempt to insert a distorted version of the drawing is rather clumsy (the image would need to be transformed magically into a three-dimensional representation, and then rotated in an anticlockwise sense through a third of a circle), but it gives you a rough idea of the location of the old house.

In the early hours of an Australian morning

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:18:00 +0000

Urunga is a small seaside town to the south of Coffs Harbour (Australia), not far from my native Clarence River region, and the Pacific Highway runs through the municipality. Over a year ago, I wrote about that notorious road [display], which is regularly the scene of terrible accidents, often due to the presence of giant lorries on a narrow undulating road that was laid out back in the days when the traffic was sparse and lightweight. As I've often said, it was a great road for bike-riding.

Here's a typical curve in that highway, in the middle of Urunga, looking towards the south:

This is in fact a rear view from the Google vehicle, which was actually moving northwards. But let us carry on as if we were driving to the south. As we move into the bend, we notice a white house on the right-hand side of the road.

As we drive past this house, we catch a glimpse of an automobile parked alongside the front verandah. There's a palm tree in the front garden, but it hasn't yet reached the height of the electricity pole near the edge of the road.

A few meters further along, we have a view of the front lawn and façade of the house, behind a small leafy tropical tree with a delta-shaped bunch of slim trunks.

A few days ago, in the early hours of the morning, a giant B-double truck (full of bananas) had been driving southwards and plunging into this bend. Suddenly, the truck driver found himself face-to-face with a north-bound utility vehicle, which had drifted onto the wrong side of the road. A collision was inevitable. The utility was demolished, and its driver killed. Before the truck came to a halt, it had careened off the road and destroyed half of the white house.

A 14-year-old boy, on holidays, had been sleeping in the front corner bedroom of the house. He died instantly, the innocent victim of a real-world nightmare. And the next day, a local politician was quoted as declaring that, really, it was high time to do something about that notorious Pacific Highway...

Antipodean exploits

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:02:00 +0000

The first exploit is simply an unbelievable catch in a game of cricket in New Zealand. The ball was about to touch the ground beyond the official boundary of the playing field, in which case the batsman would have made a substantial score. To avoid such a happening, a fieldsman in the other team leaped into the air at the last moment, and grabbed the ball. Then, during the half a second that he was still in the air, this fellow tossed the ball to a fellow fieldsman who was located well inside the playing field, and this second fieldsman had no trouble in catching the ball. So, theoretically, the batsman was caught out. Here's the video:

The second exploit concerns an Australian girl who went bungee jumping in Zimbabwe, on the edge of the Victoria Falls.

When she was down near the surface of the water, the cord snapped, and she got carried away (her ankles still tied together) by the rapidly-flowing Zambezi River. Miraculously, she survived with no more than a few bruises. Here's the video:

King Fred was a female

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 23:14:00 +0000

Last night, when I started to watch a fictionalized documentary on Frederick the Great, King of Prussia [1712-1786], I had no idea what it was all about… and it took me quite some time to figure out what was happening. The German director Jan Peter had made the curious decision to call upon two female actresses for the role of the celebrated monarch. The aging king is played by Katharina Thalbach.

And Katharina's real-life daughter Anna plays Frederick as a young prince, before the death of his harsh father, Frederick William I.

For the old king to look so much like the prince, I kept on saying to myself that the makeup artists had done a splendid job. And it was only much later, when I read an article on the movie in Télérama, that I learned that the roles had been played by a mother and her daughter. Funnily enough, Jan Peter's weird choice works superbly, maybe because there was indeed a refined feminine dimension in Frederick's character. He was a gifted musician, versed in French culture, who seemed to prefer the company of men.

This excellent film is not only enjoyable; it is quite didactic, providing uninformed viewers (such as me) with a view of that early phase of Hohenzollern royalty in Prussia.

An aspect of the movie that amused me was the way in which Frederick dined regularly with his distinguished French guests Voltaire and La Mettrie. The latter philosopher—whose famous L'Homme Machine (Machine Man) inspired me when I was working on my Machina Sapiens—actually died in Potsdam after stuffing himself with delicious pheasant and truffle pâté.

Uncle Peter

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 19:01:00 +0000

I've always looked upon my maternal aunt Nancy Walker (8 years older than me) as a kind of big sister. So, when she married a Sydney gentleman named Peter Smith in 1954, he too became, for me, a kind of brother-in-law, rather than an uncle. In any case, for well over half-a-century, Peter and Nancy welcomed me constantly into their family environment on countless occasions… even as a house guest at times, as if I could look upon their home as my home. Retrospectively, I believe that I tended to overplay my pseudo-sibling status at times… but Peter and Nancy never suggested overtly for a moment that they might have been a little fed up with my constant presence.

I thought of Peter as a link between two quite different worlds: the city (Sydney) and the bush (Waterview, South Grafton). Nancy and I were both country kids, who met up with the "big smoke" at the end of our adolescence. Peter, on the other hand, was characterized by the relative sophistication that came from being brought up in a prosperous North Shore context. His father owned a butchery business named Leroy. Peter, when I first met up with him, was actually an accomplished butcher… who once gave me a blue-and-white woolen butcher's apron. He had attended a prestigious Sydney Presbyterian school (Scots College). When I first met up with Nancy's future husband in Grafton, he drove around in a superb sports car.

In July 1982, in Bangkok, Emmanuelle, François and I encountered a new facet of the existence of Peter and Nancy. Peter had abandoned the butchery business and moved into marketing with a multinational pharmaceutical corporation, which had promptly sent him on a mission to Thailand. Back in Sydney in 1985, when my children and I disembarked in Australia, we were promptly welcomed by Peter and Nancy. Frontiers between our generations dissolved permanently when I found my uncle and my son, clad in plastic bags to keep themselves dry and warm, participating side-by-side in the City-to-Surf foot race on 17 August 1985.

Last week, after a startlingly rapid decline, Peter left us. And there are no longer any men of his generation in our family.

Cursed existence

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:06:00 +0000

Jeanne d'Arc

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:22:00 +0000

Jeanne d'Arc. In English, Joan of Arc. Her family surname was d'Arc. And her given name was Jeanne (pronounced jun in French, like fun, so much nicer than Joan). She was born six centuries ago, on 6 January 1412, in Domrémy (Lorraine). As a pious rural maiden, Jeanne d'Arc was horrified by the wounds inflicted upon the brethren of her village by the Anglo-Burgundian forces.

While minding her sheep and spinning wool, Jeanne heard the celestial voice of Saint Michael the Archangel exhorting her to create a rebellion aimed at kicking the English out of France.

It was a long combat, during which Jeanne behaved with the military force of a male. A successful combat. But Jeanne paid with her life.

And the tragedy of Jeanne d'Arc is expressed in a quiet noble style by Leonard Cohen and lovely Julie Christensen.

Totally operational once again

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:48:00 +0000

My iMac running under Lion is once again in a perfectly operational state. For the moment, I don't know what it was that knocked out my machine on the evening of 1 January 2012, and I may never know. But, contrary to what I suggested in my preceding blog post, this was not a hardware bug. It was a mysterious software glitch that seemed to manifest itself in the middle of the night, when I was no longer using the Mac. Was it something to do with the New Year? Maybe…

A guy at the Fnac store in Valence succeeded in erasing the memory of my machine. Funnily enough, that operation thrilled me, because I've been operating inexcusably, for ages now, in a totally stupid way. I've had a nice explicit list of all my confidential codes in a folder named CODES sitting in a remote corner of the memory of my computer. This was most convenient when I wanted to consult my bank account, or order a book from Amazon, say... but it was totally crazy from a security viewpoint. Yesterday, I finally rectified that stupidity... and that might well be a positive lesson from this mysterious crash.

When I took my iMac home, I set about reinstalling the system from scratch, using my original CDs. Unexpectedly (for me, in any case), the installer suddenly asked: "Would you happen to have a Time Machine backup, which could be used to reboot your Mac?" I said yes, with enthusiasm. And that's exactly what happened during the next ten or so hours. Slowly but surely, my iMac was restored, magically, to its pristine state! Thank you, Time Machine!

My advice to all Mac users: If you don't have Time Machine yet, think about acquiring it. Meanwhile, it was reassuring, too, to know that Carbon Copy Cloner had done its daily job, providing me with a perfect copy of everything in my iMac at the moment it crashed.

The two backup tools constitute a tandem, apparently with a bit of overkill… but it's better to be too safe than not safe enough.

Computer crash

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 22:54:00 +0000

This morning, my Macintosh computer refused to start up. All I've got on the screen was a gray apple icon and a little revolving circle of dashes. Clearly, my Intel iMac (purchased in April 2010) had crashed. The people at the Fnac store in Valence had kindly warned me, 20 months ago, that Apple products are now manufactured in China, and that they seem to break down more often and sooner than before. So, they advised me to take out insurance, to cover repairs. I'll be depositing my machine with them tomorrow morning, and I should have it back home in a fortnight. And repairs will be covered by the insurance.

Meanwhile, I'm using my old iMac, purchased in 2005, which still runs perfectly (using the Leopard system). This is the machine I've been using already, regularly, to run the precious FreeHand tool for genealogical charts, which does not exist for the latest Mac system.

I've already hooked up the external disk that was being used for automatic daily backups on the iMac that crashed, and I'm relieved to see that everything is there, intact. Normally, on my Time Machine disk, I should have copies of the most recent stuff I was writing (about the famous thatched house in Blackbird Street) just before I went to bed last night. So, I won't have lost anything at all... apart from time spent driving to Valence and back. And it's unsettling to have to move back to an older computer system for a while.

Awaiting a weighty book

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 17:16:00 +0000

At the end of my blog post of 16 July 2011 entitled State of things [display], I suggested that readers might sit down quietly for an hour to watch a splendid talk by an outstanding American theoretical physicist, 57-year-old Lawrence Krauss.

I've just been pleasantly surprised to learn—in a note from Krauss himself, published yesterday [display]—that this talk actually took place some two years ago, at the instigation of Richard Dawkins and Robin Elisabeth Cornwell [Executive Director of the US branch of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science]. Later, the Foundation decided to post the talk video to YouTube… and it went on to log over a million views. This doesn't surprise me at all, since the subject is awesome.

Not surprisingly, friends of Krauss soon got around to convincing him that he should write a book on this fascinating subject of the way in which "nothingness" transforms itself constantly (with no help from any gods, just pure science) into "somethingness". When you think about it, it's a bloody good pretext for a book, to say the least: the sort of stuff that the Holy Bible would refer to as "good news". (I'm joking, of course. The authors of the poor old Bible wouldn't know what the fuck we were talking about.)

This momentous book will be coming out on 10 January 2012. Meanwhile, you can download (from the above Foundation link) the text of a splendid Afterword written by Dawkins for the imminent Krauss book. Inspired by the famous biblical words "Jesus wept" [John 11-35], I feel like summarizing the situation: Dawkins wondered. Wondered in awe at the words of a fellow scientist… without claiming that he (or many of us, for that matter) might be capable of following all the mathematics and physics that culminate in such mind-boggling conclusions. In any case, the words of the science poet Dawkins (who speaks from my level) are beautifully inspiring. And I'm awaiting eagerly the weighty words of Krauss.

Two for my cup of tea

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 12:59:00 +0000

I'm convinced that I've found the finest possible teapot [display] and my favorite jasmine tea [display].

On the other hand, I still hesitate concerning the ideal cup. My choice has been narrowed down to two quite different models. The white porcelain bowl on the right (a gift from my daughter) is a sacred chalice that seems to add a spiritual dimension (whatever that might mean) to the simple act of drinking a cup of tea. Whenever I drink tea from this delicate bowl (like a pyramid poised upside-down on its tip), I have a funny feeling that I should also be praying, meditating or listening to monastic chants emerging from a temple.

A more down-to-earth solution, when I'm working in front of my computer screen, is one of the delightful glazed stoneware cups I bought down in Moustiers. I've always agreed with the opinion of an aged Payne neighbor in my childhood Waterview, who amused my mother (unaccustomed to the expression of such refined sentiments) by saying: "I always feel the tea tastes so much nicer in a fine cup." The elegant forms and beautiful hues of the Provençal pottery certainly add something to the commonplace experience of consuming tea. But it's primarily a simple matter that I would designate as drinking comfort.

Baby mammoth

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:49:00 +0000

Last night on French TV, I watched a fascinating 95-minute documentary about the discovery in Siberia, in 2007, of an intact carcass of a baby woolly mammoth named Lyuba, who died at the age of a month or two—probably by drowning or being suffocated by mud— some 40,000 years ago.

The video I saw was a compilation of documentary fragments from several sources, but it tells the story of Lyuba in a complete and constantly interesting fashion. As far as I can tell, it was a French-language version of a product made by National Geographic whose title is Waking the Baby Mammoth. In any case, this afternoon, I was able to order a copy of the French version from Amazon.

Some viewers might be shocked by a cute gimmick of a Disney kind exploited haphazardly throughout the documentary. A highly-realistic virtual representation of little Lyuba is seen scampering around, from time to time, in the real world context of modern scientists who have been examining the unique carcass. Personally, I was never annoyed by these brilliantly-created excursions into fantasy, which seemed to reflect dreamlike visions that might indeed have been present in the minds of the scientists. At times, though, it was weird in the sense that the lovely little beast seemed to be invited along to participate in her own autopsy.

I appreciated greatly the performance of the US paleontologist Daniel Fisher of the University of Michigan, who appeared to have a deep philosophical empathy both with the scientific phenomenon of mammoths and with the traditions of the Nenets herders who survive today in the icy Arctic world that was once the lush domain of Lyuba and her kin.

Exceptional entry into Pont-en-Royans

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:34:00 +0000

When Fitzroy became a family member at Gamone, a year or so ago, I was obliged to abandon my pleasant old habit of strolling down to Pont-en-Royans on foot, because looking after two dogs would not be easy, particularly on the stretch of road that runs alongside the Bourne, where's there's nothing you could call a pedestrian pavement. Here's a Google Street View presentation of the main road into Pont, a hundred meters after the Rouillard Bridge over the Bourne (midway between Gamone and Pont), which runs down the valley to the right of the road:

Pont is located not far beyond the bend at the far end of the main road with the white lines. In the vicinity of the point from which the photo was taken, if I were walking to Pont, I would be using a track through the woods up to the left, at the level of the tree line. Notice the knob up on the crest of the mountain to the right, the Trois Châteaux. You could see this knob clearly in the second photo in my recent blog post entitled Virgin Mary of Pont-en-Royans [display]. That's the ruins of the medieval watchtower enabling a few guardsmen to look out over three feudal castles located further down in the valley, to make sure that no assailants were moving towards any one of these castles.

The above photo contains another interesting detail. Notice the existence of the narrow road, with no signs whatsoever, that runs off to the left, and up the slopes, towards the woods. Let me ask you a trivial question. If you were a motorist, heading towards Pont-en-Royans (a few hundred meters down the road), is there anything that might tempt you to leave the main highway and drive up along that unmarked narrow road? Well, of course, there's always the possibility of an urgent need to relieve oneself in a natural setting. Apart from that, I shall explain in a moment that there's another theoretical reason, apparently, for setting off on a wild goose chase along a narrow wooded mountain lane. It's called GPS: the Global Positioning System. And this fabulous system can lead you into big trouble...

The pedestrian track joins up with that narrow road, a little further on, and you soon reach an entry into an ancient neighborhood of the village of Pont-en-Royans called Villeneuve (literally, "new town"). Here's the first house up there in the Villeneuve neighborhood:

Although the portal itself has disappeared, you can still see its traces to the left and the right of the road.

This tiny neighborhood came into existence in the 17th century. The year 1674 is engraved in the stone window frame of one of the houses:

Residents of the three or four dwellings at Villeneuve can drive up here along the narrow road that you saw in my first photo. The owner of this red vehicle has then turned his car around and backed into this convenient parking spot, at the top of the stone stairs that run down to the Picard Bridge.

Last summer, an English tourist was driving down towards Pont-en-Royans. When he reached the place shown in my first photo, he seemed to receive curious advice from his GPS device, which told him to turn to the left. He interpreted this as meaning that he should head off up the hill along that narrow road leading to the Villeneuve neighborhood. At that time, when he drove through the narrow portal and past the house with the date 1674, there was no big block of stone at the spot where the red car is now parked, since the handful of local residents all knew that the road stopped there. However the English tourist didn't know this. And, since his GPS device reassured him that Pont-en-Royans was just a hundred meters down the hill, he kept on driving. When he started to bump down over these stone steps, the tourist must have felt that the road was extraordinarily narrow and in pretty bad shape:

But his GPS kept on telling him that the Picard Bridge and the entry into Pont-en-Royans were less than 50 meters away. Besides, it would have been particularly difficult to back up over those steep stone steps. So he kept on driving. Halfway down, he must have been an expert driver, and taken great pains, to get through this narrow passage:

After that ultimate difficulty, the tourist's downhill drive ended here, at the bottom of the Villeneuve stairway.

His automobile and his faithful GPS system had at last brought him to the village of Pont-en-Royans... or almost. Unfortunately, there was no way in the world that he could drive his car through the narrow opening at the level of the two final steps. So, his car got firmly wedged in between the stone walls. And he had a unique opportunity (for a tourist at the wheel of his automobile) of viewing the terrasse of the Picard bistrot from an unusual place and angle.

The only way of extracting the tourist consisted of calling upon a local guy with a backhoe loader to knock down the stone wall to the right, and nudge the car onto the road.

As you can see, the wall has now been repaired. I believe that a local newspaper has a photo of the trapped automobile at the foot of the staircase. Later on, if I can obtain a copy, I'll add it to this blog post. Meanwhile, I'm told that the English tourist was furious to discover how hard it was to drive down a quite ordinary road whose existence was indicated explicitly by his faultless GPS device. Back in the UK, where roads and road signs are impeccable, it would be unthinkable to get into such an annoying predicament. Bloody Frog highway authorities!

Google-based review of major events in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 13:08:00 +0000

For me personally, this short video has the merit of evoking one of the ways in which I find out what's happening out in the wide world.

But I have to admit that I'm not a typical Google user, otherwise I would have discovered—all on my own and months ago—the following specimen of US youth:

Apparently, throughout the world, more Google users looked up pea-brained Rebecca Black and her stupid ditty than any other individual, happening or phenomenon on the planet Earth. As they say in the classics, it makes you think.

Silent night, holy fight

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:15:00 +0000

In Jerusalem, fights have been erupting for ages between different Christian denominations inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This Christmas, the fighting broke out in a different but equally distinguished place: the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. And the belligerents were Greek Orthodox and Armenian clergymen. Parts of this video remind me of ice hockey games that have been transformed into brawls.

Let there be peace on Earth...

Praise be to magic Cheeta

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 18:07:00 +0000

My title is meant to evoke the refrain of the delightful Tim Minchin song that I presented a few days ago [display].

A crazy story about the death of a chimpanzee has been taken up by media throughout the world. According to this story, the animal that has just died in a Florida primate sanctuary was the famous Cheeta, who was present in many of the Tarzan movies starring Johnny Weismuller. That's to say, the deceased animal would have been 80 years old… which would have made it some 25 years older than the normal life span of a captive chimpanzee.

This story should be taken with a grain of salt, because quite a few different chimpanzees were employed for the role of Cheeta. They are listed in the Wikipedia article on Tarzan and Cheeta [access]. For the story of another chimpanzee that was alleged to have been the real Cheeta, read an article by R D Rosen, Lie of the Jungle: the Truth about Cheeta the Chimpanzee, which appeared in the Washington Post in December 2008 [access].

This affair illustrates the amazing gullibility of countless media organizations. They all seem to have relied on a single source for this story: the lady in charge of chimpanzees at the Florida sanctuary. She appears to have claimed, incidentally, that the deceased chimpanzee could be "soothed by Christian music".

Virgin Mary of Pont-en-Royans

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 21:33:00 +0000

In my quest concerning the drawing of the thatched house in Blackbird Street, I had imagined that it might be a good idea to obtain a bird's-eye view of the houses that appear (I believe) in the background. So, I set off on a lonely morning excursion along the slopes of Mont Barret on sunny Christmas Sunday morning. A friend from Blackbird Street, strolling around with his dog, directed me towards the Virgin of Pont-en-Royans. After a rough climb along a track through unkempt shrubs, I finally found myself at the lady's feet.

I was thrilled to meet up with an effigy of the lady and her son on the very anniversary of the birth of the latter. This was surely my closest contact ever, and maybe forever, with the solitude of heavenly bliss. Taking advantage of this extraordinary moment, I took this photo of the nearby mountain that separates Choranche and Pont-en-Royans.

As attested in the Napoleonic Cadastre, this mountain, on the territory of Choranche, is called Trois Châteaux (three castles) because an observer, from this exceptional viewpoint, could clearly distinguish three medieval castles in the valley: Flandaines, La Bâtie and Rochechinard. Today, the first two have almost totally disappeared from the surface of the planet Earth, whereas vestiges of the third castle exist splendidly, as I explained recently [display].

When I started down the slopes from the Virgin Mary of Pont-de-Royans, I had the impression that our encounter had not proved anything much at all concerning my primary preoccupation: the identification of the thatched house of Blackbird Street. But nobody (and, least of all, a lusty heathen such as me) should ever begrudge a passing encounter with a replica of the Holy Virgin.

Dorset censuses

noreply@blogger.com (William Skyvington) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Since much of my 19th-century Skivington genealogy was located in Dorset, I finally decided to purchase a set of CDs with the contents of the UK censuses for 1841, 1851, 1861 and 1871.

I believe that purchasing these CDs—expertly produced by a small private company—is a less expensive and far more user-friendly solution than subscribing to one of the companies that provides you with access to censuses through the Internet. But I've reached this conclusion primarily because my 19th-century preoccupations are focussed essentially upon the single county of Dorset.

The researcher still has to spend a lot of time and effort in locating relevant individuals. In the case of my ancestral relatives named Legg, I've more or less given up researching, because there were hordes of them in Dorset at that time. Maybe, if I were courageous, I would decide to get further involved in research concerning these Legg folk, with the help of big family-history websites that we used to refer to as "message boards"... which I tend to avoid these days. But I've discovered that my great-great-great-grandmother Eliza Legg, when she married Charles Skivington, had two out-of-wedlock sons of which Charles wasn't the father. And I'm wary of the inevitable rock 'n' roll that would accompany an incursion into Eliza's family background. So I'm inclined to let sleeping Dorset rockers lie.