dimanche 30 novembre 2003

Yin-yang shift? An open letter to all who've encouraged this 'experiment' BF - 1. Tomorrow sees me back in the Factory a pretty astounding 208 days since the Condition knocked me into a far longer sick leave than ever I'd anticipated. 208 days! That really sinks in now: the reckoning. And whatever people might tell me, I feel as if it's all taken so much longer than getting on for seven months, a whole summer and autumn, and yet flashed by so very fast, the score and more of medical probes and tests, getting to know the inside of almost a dozen hospitals and clinics, let alone my own insides. Four specialists and one first-rate GP. A marvellous national health system for which my admiration has grown with the weeks. Physically, these past few days, I've been back more or less where I started, the weekend marred by so many visits to toilets that I've lost count (which made yesterday's film a bit tricky). Still, the major changes in medication are working, slowly; and I know what I've got. It may seem astonishing that it took no fewer than three of those specialists, many diet experiments, plus some sensible guidance from the "generalist" doctor, bloghero Yang, week after long week, examination after shifting examination, to come up with all the puzzle pieces of the diagnosis that makes the return to AFP -- if never a total recovery -- possible. And yet when one of those eminent doctors, the "gut expert" Vincent de P., had all the results in and moved on to the holistic assessment of the Condition, he told me that it could have taken a good year or more to determine its complex causes and their interaction. So I'm nowhere even remotely near the same places in mind and in body as I was back in May, and I've learned infinitely more about "hands-on" psychology, the workings of people's digestive systems, the immensely delicate chemical balances in our brains, and some realities of psychosomatic medicine than ever I could have imagined six months ago. There are so many things I'll never take for granted again in this unfinished process. The intelligent, perceptive feedback I've had during these months -- sometimes sympathetic, sometimes far from it -- from many friends, AFP colleagues, one or two family members, and some of the Loyal 4 ¾ who've followed my adventures in this experiment of a 'blog has been immensely important to me. My true love, the Wildcat, is among the particularly special people who have turned out to be quite remarkably acute in their insights and help. Really I should name them all, from Rainer way over there to the southwest in Brazil, to Jo the English desk chief at the Factory, my father in York, my wise old friend Tony in Odessa Street, Natalie in London, Jean-Paul and three or four others who have become close friends in the local community with the Canteen for its centre, Béa now in Nairobi ... people from all kinds of places, living quite different lives; but it would take me all night just to do this and to say an individual "thank you" to each and every one. Of myself, I've learned so very much that I realise it's not nearly enough, that I'll go to my grave one day, as we all do, not so very much wiser than when I was born. All the different bits of me, the several lives that have made up these past 48 years, are coming together now, nevertheless, in a way I can sort of understand and ... accept. Enough. I'm not sure that I'm making the slightest sense in this monumentally self-indulgent entry to anybody but myself. Some people have told me that getting back to work at AFP will reintegrate me socially, as a functioning and contributing member of the society they call the "real world", but not one of the mind and body physicians or a majority of the very few friends who really seem to understand me has ever said anything so utterly absurd, idiotic and misconceived. The Real World, indeed! As if there's only one, our shared, sick illusion. The physicians have helped me to see that these past months have been the most extraordinary period in my life, a time where I've been phenomenally fortunate, reintegrating the bits and pieces of myself, recovering parts I should never have sacrificed on the altar of my "career", re-focussing all my deepest interests, priorities and abilities in ways my regular readers must have noticed in the strange pilgrim's progress of this weblog. When I declare that during these "months off", I've learned to be more socially integrated as an animal than ever before, that makes sense to such people as these, they say. I was a very angry -- and fragmented -- person when the Condition took me off the job. Not that I realised it then; that took several months. As did an understanding that my gut functions had fallen apart partly for purely physical, chemical reasons (their strange constitution shown by the tests), but -- far more importantly perhaps -- because some unconscious genius in the workings of my mind had made the most vulnerable part of my body the battleground for a fight that would otherwise have plunged me deep into mental anguish, strife and depression. The realisation that this was not unusual, that I wasn't crazy, that this was simply my way of dealing with things that are conflicts in every one of us, a part of our shared human condition, pushed over the decades to the point of unmanageable self-contradiction, came even later. My friend François was most wise in saying, quite a while back, that I was simply working through, as best I could, the profoundly insane, unbalanced, deeply inhuman follies of the high-speed, information-overloaded, stressed-out, artificial urban clockwork existence we've given ourselves. The inner conflict was exacerbated in my case by a genetic, inherited predisposition to certain ways of reacting, combined with an avoidance of most of the common safety valves, such as alcohol and some social activities others enjoy but I don't. Anyway, that's really enough. I'm as ready as I can be to return to the Factory, my whole centre of gravity changed, probably for good, prepared to be more patient in some things -- but far less so about several others I had tolerated for years against every crying decent gut instinct in my being, so much bullshit nobody will ever make me swallow again! Oh yes, because anger, resentment, a hatred of injustice and hypocrisy are still there, but to be channelled, made positive in new ways. I still get the morning panic attacks, knowing them now for what they are -- and even the start of how to deal with them, dispose of them for the shadows they are. And somehow, I'm going to have to go on learning how to stay as profoundly empathetic with other people as the "shrinks" have shown me I am, without allowing this sensitivity, which many rightly see as a gift and a blessing I have, to tear at my system through over-identification with the hardships of others, the taking of appalling news stories into myself. This I can learn to do, with the humility now to know when to ask for help. Make of this entry what you will. Perhaps best ignored!! Even ridiculed. But tonight is a turning point, the end of a strange time, a new start. All of the rest of my life begins here. While my Africanist career remains important, the music, literature, other arts and scientific interests where I started my quarter-century in journalism are back now at the very centre of this life and shall never be discarded again. I like to think that the path I've travelled since this journal began has sometimes been, and still is, of assistance and of use to others, wherever my readers may be. For maybe what happened to me, and the luck I've had in being allowed to make the time to confront it, may find a resonance of comprehension in others. As well as fulfilling my other goals for the "experiment", to serve as a meeting point for people and ideas, share as many interests as possible, maintain my communications skills, and above all, I hope, to entertain. Even occasionally enlighten. As so many others in the blogosphere and elsewhere on the Internet have done for me, their worlds really no more "virtual" or less "real" than the ones we all fabricate for ourselves. I guess I'll be writing less here once I'm back in the Factory. But this experiment is most certainly not going to stop. 9:32:23 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 29 novembre 2003

'Kill Bill, Vol. 1': appallingly good fun The Kid and I have just immensely enjoyed 'Kill Bill, vol. 1', released in France this week. If enjoyed is the word for the Kid, who half-buried her face in my shoulder for bloody chunks of the film, systematically turned back to the screen at the "wrong" moments -- "wah, yuk!" -- and wanted to walk out slightly less than she was exquisitely scared enough to stay. This was our first Tarantino and I had little idea what to expect, apart from being told it was very violent, gory and remarkably well shot. So it was: quite appallingly funny and brilliantly derivative, a flamboyant exercise in spaghetti Kung Fu. We hear but scarcely see Bill (David Carradine) in "vol. 1", though he's the ultimate "Death List" target for exterminating angel Uma Thurman, perfect in the role. Four years after fellow members of Bill's Deadly Viper Assassination Squad gave her carnage for a wedding present, Thurman as The Bride and sole survivor snaps out of a coma bent on vengeance. That's enough for the storyline of a movie which benefits from fragmented, surrealist plot-twisting -- shock start through to the closing samurai showdown between Thurman and Lucy Liu in a wintry Japanese tea-garden. Reading one or two other reviews afterwards, I liked and learned from a knowledgeable one at Blogcritics by Alan Dale, who generally lives at 'The Kitchen Cabinet'. Going by the queues, this Tarantino fellow I've previously missed out on (even 'Pulp Fiction') is name enough to pull the French crowds away from the shops even on a Saturday afternoon. Somewhere I read that he excels in what Molière recommended and did, summed up as "Don't copy -- steal!" This proved true, to the director's credit, in some stunning camera work, a clever DJ's soundtrack, and a handful of the best bad script lines I've relished in a good while. Italy is the only country where the Kid would be "allowed" to see it at 14 (says the IMDb); she had to pass for 16 even in tolerant France and doesn't regret it, describing it as "petrifying and excellent. "But I'm not sure I want to see 'Vol. 2'." 11:30:39 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 28 novembre 2003

Bejan on design: a friendly follow-up from a brilliant mind I scarcely expected somebody as stratospherically clever as Professor Adrian Bejan to find time to reply to a slightly nervous e-mail where I expressed the hope that I'd made some sense of his "constructal theory of shape and structure". So when the fellow swooped down yesterday not only to thank me for writing about it but to add that I'd done a "wonderful" job in so doing in 'Nature's "intelligence" & design revolutions,' (Nov 18) I was as flabbergasted as I was flattered. The professor has indeed been busy, picking up a honorary doctorate last weekend during a large international gathering of minds at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich -- more details here, but only for people who can read German (ETH Life: Tagesberichte). That came less than a month after Bejan gave an international symposium on his remarkable theory at Portugal's University of Evora (Eng.; fetching another honorary doctorate while he was there...) Enough of the accolades, though. The prof's letter, which he's confirmed I can publish, swiftly shows that while the honours may be nice, he's far more concerned with developing his ideas and breaching artificial barriers. Remember C.P. Snow, the novelist, physicist and thinker who told us back in 1959 what a bad idea it was to make of science and the humanities separate worlds in 'The Two Cultures'? Bejan gives us a contemporary echo of this false divide in education and outlook when he says that his "only correction to what you wrote is that my book was reviewed, extensively and very positively (about 10 reviews, I think [...]), but, unfortunately, only in the engineering literature. This is why what 'Science & Vie' and you did is extraordinary: to tear down the fence between 'science' and engineering is a most worthwhile and timely activity." What my closer friends know is that my own hatred of such barriers dates back to a youthful realisation that some people who considered themselves intelligent and cultivated were fools who appropriated things like "classical" music and poetry as part of the odious class system that marked my English upbringing. It soon become one of my missions in life to try to demystify such supposedly arcane arts and help, as best I could, to make them accessible and "user-friendly" to everybody, including those on whom the con trick worked, believing that such matters were "over their heads". Bejan thinks on similar lines, going by his comment on the debate my article triggered at 'Blogcritics', which while interesting, strayed a long way from the theory I was writing about. "Regarding the discussion that your article has generated, I just hope that they read what I wrote," he says, rather than taking off from "their own preconceived ideas and fights. And I am very sorry to see that some believe that 'engineer' means 'not qualified' to speculate, to theorize. Such people should remember Sadi Carnot [MacTutor History of Mathematics]. In the book "Shape and Structure, from Engineering to Nature", I stated a 'constructal' principle of flow access maximization (pages xvii and 62), and then I used it to construct flow architecture in many domains. The coincidences between what I deduced and what all of us observe in nature, justifies the speculation that the principle can be used to account for (to reason) the occurence of macroscopic flow structure everywhere, anumate, inanimate, engineered (the latter are us, 'man + machine' animals, not machines alone). Darwin observed that the fittest survive. This is a circular statement, not a theory, not a mental viewing that predicts reality. The survivor is the most fit, and the most fit is the one that survives. The question that should have been addressed is "the most fit to do what?" What do we mean by fit? Without an answer, there is no physics in Darwin. The constructal principle provides the missing physics, and, among other things, it accounts for why 'darwinian' selection/optimization works now everywhere, in inanimate and engineered domains as well. In my book, I also noted that the same physics principle was missing from fractal geometry. Now, based on principle, one can deduce the algorithm, not postulate it. And so we have a theory of why trees are everywhere (animate, inanimate, engineered), and why they are euclidian not fractal." Adrian loses me in those very last lines, since geometry and mathematics have never been my strong points, but I don't worry too much about that. What intrigues me the most is the sheer range of practical applications furnished by his theory. In essence, the man invites us to reconsider our thinking about the design of our world, while the way his theory provides a "missing link", of sorts, to complement Darwin was a point I'd not touched on in the previous piece. Anyone seriously interested in hearing more of what the remarkable Bejan has to say might want to take a look at the distinguished lecturers programme currently on offer from the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, covering the next three years. Adrian is one of 16 people who have made their keen minds available on subjects ranging from the "thermal treatment of cancer" to the "Flight Mechanics of a Spinning Dimpled Spheroid" -- more generally known as ... a golf ball. 8:03:24 PM  link   your views? [] Mindblown by hi-tech: Sam, clever Swedes, Bluetooth and X My leap into 21st-century communications began with radical measures to slash what has become an intolerable 'phone bill. After 35 minutes, I'd had almost enough of queuing at the local France Télécom agency, but once I had the attention of an agent, there was no looking back. A big bad bill did have a surprisingly good side. I'd acquired so many loyalty bonus points that I could change my mobile 'phone at no great cost for a T160, which would otherwise have been well beyond my means. Bluetooth? I've been reading about Sony Ericsson's new wireless invention for months. Now that it's being promoted on Macs, it occurred to me that a Bluetooth technology (explained by Apple) might be the answer to the cable outages that have plagued people in the weeks since my ISP began renewing its whole network. This was just the beginning. It was only a 'phone I wanted, but the new toy caused total chaos in the Canteen once Sam got his uninvited hands on it. You'd think he was the one on the Royal Jelly! "It's a camera," he squealed. "Your 'phone's got a camera in it." "I know, but I haven't got the remotest idea how it works. I haven't quite finished the manual. It's 95 pages long." Well, the patron of the Pizzeria soon found out how it worked. The T160 probably takes better pictures than his first batch shown here, starting with a ghastly ghostly self-portrait of Sam, principal purveyor of my lunches for the past six months. Baudier, grumpier than ever, did his best to ignore Sam, who meanwhile had become all but oblivious to customers clamouring for dessert and coffee. The literary lion was so disgusted by the day's French news that he was asking me whether I thought he would be allowed to renounce his nationality. I suggested that this would mean taking on another one, which he'd probably find just as bad. Even in France, I doubt that "citizens of nowhere" are allowed. "Then I want to renounce my right to vote," he said. "Abstaining isn't a strong enough gesture to express how it feels to be an internal exile!" With Baudier droning to the left of me and Jacques the sage (in the corner to my right) deeply engaged in a different conversation with a couple of newcomers I was also trying to follow, I didn't stand a chance of getting my 'phone back. Taking not the slighest notice of my insults and entreaties, Sam was behaving like an overexcited kid and had by this time drawn the whole restaurant into his antics. It was a good job I'd arrived even later than usual, so there weren't too many victims around. I'd spent a long morning on my first Christmas shopping spree of the year. A couple more forays today and I can do the rest online. He got me too, sitting at "taliesin's table" struggling to concentrate on my tagliatelle campagnola. "You should be grateful, not peeved!" Sam said when he was finally done. "Now you know how your camera works." Well, the pictures may not be very good, but I suppose Sam's timing was, since this, as Jacques will hasten to remind me soon, is BF-day -3, to be marked shortly by the last of my lunatic weekday lunches with this bunch and the other denizens of the Canteen. Once back at the Factory, I'll do better than the sandwiches that had been my daily fare there for years, but I shall miss the inventiveness of Sam's puddings. As for the madder side of these meals, returning to AFP strikes me as walking back through the door to a different kind of frenzy. Such is life. Once I'd recovered the camera, this little device, a Mitsumi Bluetooth adaptor, plugged into Panther, took me into a whole new world last night. Apple has made Bluetooth so easy in Mac OS 10.3 that I'd managed to get the cutting edge of communications up and running within about half an hour. France Télécom asked me to call them back this afternoon to sort out the last technical tweaks, if they're able to keep yesterday's promise about getting the eMac linked up their end by then. Meanwhile, I swiftly discovered Sailing Clicker, an astounding Swedish piece of software. It's so remarkably clever that I paid for it within 10 minutes of trying it out. With its help, the T610 is no longer simply a camera. It also runs several programmes on the Mac by remote control, including the iTunes music player. This got automatically put on pause by the telephone when the Wildcat called, reminding me why I'd swapped mobiles in the first place. 12:55:09 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 26 novembre 2003

Reporting in from the hot spots "I've seen my first giraffes, at the roadside, yes right beside it. Zebra too, a whole herd, and monkeys on the road. It's MAGIC!" Béa's e-mailed a host of people a latest round-up of "niouses" from her first Africa posting for AFP, where she revels in being "paid to play the tourist". She's had her breath snatched away by the magnificent Ngong Hills beloved of Karen Blixen, "green mountains spilling down into the near desert of the immense Rift Valley, broken up by volcanoes." She's met the proud Masai people, who gave her little eggs and fresh milk from their cattle. The pic is not yet one of Béa's; I stole it from the online gallery of Brian D. Kohl, an American with much travel under his belt and a fine eye for photos that break with routine. Hers is a letter full of fresh delight, but Béatrice hasn't just been getting to know Kenya. "I spent 10 days in the Democratic Republic of Congo (ex-Zaïre and Tintin's Congo (...) Went in haste after a massacre by machete of 65 people in Ituri, the north-eastern province rich in gold and prized timbers. Since 1999, 50,000 people have been killed in inter-ethnic violence in this region. And since September 2003, UN peacekeepers have been deployed to re-establish security. Met those who survived the slaughter, with the 10-year-old children wielding Kalashnikovs who maintain a reign of terror, to loot -- just to live. Talked to other kids who spend their day down at a stream and in the mud, trying to pan a little gold to get food, held to ransom by other child-soldiers. Then there were the kids who fought each other to grab my small, unfinished bottle of water, to empty it and just have a container. Because they've got nothing left (...) Yeah, 50,000 deaths in five years in this region lost in the heart of Africa, say 20 times as many as in the Near East, and nobody gives a damn, the media media first and foremost." Béa won't be including the Iraq war and its aftermath in that count of hers. The BBC this morning broadcast the first international interview given by General Jay Garner, the man the Americans put in charge there for the first weeks after taking Baghdad. In Garner's talk with Gordon Corera (a 7'38" RealAudio clip), the general discloses where he thinks reconstruction went awry and tells us how he had to remove one expert he'd asked to join his team because of ever-present rivalries in Washington. Well, Iraq won't be any of my direct concern, but Africa will, as ever, and no doubt I'll be reading Béa's latest on the incoming so-called "wire" from Nairobi long before she has time to e-mail us all another update. This is BF-day -5 -- "Back to the Factory". None too soon now, I was told yesterday when I dropped into AFP at the end of a busy afternoon's preparations. "They're clamouring for you across the continent," a kind-hearted desk chief said. "Ah, they want their court jester back!" "No, that's not it..." Hmm. That came straight after the second meeting with the psycho-somatic shrink. In episode three, she promises, we'll finally get on to stress management and how I can learn to identify just a little less with the people I talk to out on the "front lines". zzz Natalie, as yet I've little more of significance to say on the "food of queens". It might be worth noting that now we've clearly established that I'm as influenced by the waxing and waning of Gaia's satellite as the tides, this is the first new moon time in months I didn't spend several days in a deep low. That change, however, might be related more to the chemical shift in serotonin-level adjustment (more at, ahem, 'Depression Depot') of the past few weeks than the mystery three percent in the make-up of Royal Jelly. It could also be that I feel more alert for longer stretches of the day, and there's no doubt that my dreams have become more vivid with each night since the weekend. 1:38:55 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 24 novembre 2003

Resonant voices, rich volumes Ahh. Enfin! A fortuitous technological development in another part of the world means that the Loyal 4 1/2 will be spared tonight's planned entry about the usefulness and importance of being paranoid. (Augustine pretends that I have at least 1/2 a more faithful reader than my reckoning, but she forgets that the PC pair leave every time I put up a picture of a naked woman.) Instead of the virtues of paranoia, then, consider this: 'To a Sad Daughter' "All night long the hockey pictures gaze down at you sleeping in your tracksuit. Belligerent goalies are your ideal. Threats of being traded cuts and wounds --all this pleases you. O my god! you say at breakfast reading the sports page over the Alpen as another player breaks his ankle or assaults the coach. When I thought of daughters I wasn't expecting this but I like this more. I like all your faults even your purple moods when you retreat from everyone to sit in bed under a quilt. And when I say 'like' I mean of course 'love ' but that embarrasses you. You who feel superior to black and white movies (coaxed for hours to see Casablanca) though you were moved by Creature from the Black Lagoon. One day I'll come swimming beside your ship or someone will and if you hear the siren listen to it. For if you close your ears only nothing happens. You will never change. I don't care if you risk your life to angry goalies creatures with webbed feet. You can enter their caves and castles their glass laboratories. Just don't be fooled by anyone but yourself. This is the first lecture I've given you. You're 'sweet sixteen' you said. I'd rather be your closest friend than your father. I'm not good at advice you know that, but ride the ceremonies until they grow dark. Sometimes you are so busy discovering your friends I ache with loss --but that is greed. And sometimes I've gone into my purple world and lost you. One afternoon I stepped into your room. You were sitting at the desk where I now write this. Forsythia outside the window and sun spilled over you like a thick yellow miracle as if another planet was coaxing you out of the house --all those possible worlds!-- and you, meanwhile, busy with mathematics. I cannot look at forsythia now without loss, or joy for you. You step delicately into the wild world and your real prize will be the frantic search. Want everything. If you break break going out not in. How you live your life I don't care but I'll sell my arms for you, hold your secrets forever. If I speak of death which you fear now, greatly, it is without answers. except that each one we know is in our blood. Don't recall graves. Memory is permanent. Remember the afternoon's yellow suburban annunciation. Your goalie in his frightening mask dreams perhaps of gentleness." If you don't think that's marvellous, truth-telling writing, you too can go and say something silly and dismissive at the Plagiarist, whence I stole it. Until this weekend, I knew virtually nothing of Michael Ondaatje (Thomas Friedman's fine fan site, be warned, triggers a QuickTime movie on launch), who wrote that poem as well as 'The English Patient'. Somehow, I have also managed to remain ignorant of the existence of 'Village Voice', an excellent Anglo-American bookshop tucked away in the pretty little rue Princesse in the Saint-Germain district, though it's been here for two decades, almost as long as me. A friendly place, where they say they're more Anglo than American, the Village Voice specialises in modern fiction and other literature, poetry and the social sciences. It's far closer to me than W.H. Smith's, Brentano's or the increasingly grubby Shakespeare & Co. I am indebted to She who can Only be Adored for an intro both to Ondaatje and to the shop, which lies in a part of the district I'd thought entirely given over to high French fashion rather than prose and poetry. I went there only for Ondaatje. Or so I thought, but as ever in such spots, I was wrong... In gratitude, here's another priceless place, a work in progress where anybody can contribute. The Open Poetry Project is a "wiki database". If you don't know what a "wiki" is, don't worry, it's easy and it's well explained on the site. Today's floral gift for the Wildcat, chosen by Michael Ondaatje, comes from Leaf Peeper's Dream (All Creatures Org). Any connection there between one God's sixth day and how many days now remain twixt me and my long-awaited return to the Factory is, again, purely fortuitous. 6:59:56 PM  link   your views? []

dimanche 23 novembre 2003

Tips and boobs (OS X + nude) Since the O'Reilly people have published an updated set of upkeep items for Mac OS 10.3 which might change a few entrenched habits, this is a day to target two birds... What's new in the Panther maintenance tips (MacDevCenter) by François Joseph de Kermadec are most notably this: "Defragmenting a hard drive is a way to make a computer go a bit faster by rearranging the information that is written on it. Some Mac OS 9 users and PC switchers remember that defragmenting was an essential step in their maintenance processes. (...) The news gets better with Panther. It defrags files (those less than 20 MB, which should be most of yours) on the fly" and this: "Here's a Panther-specific tip: at the bottom of the Disk Utility window, you will see a line called "S.M.A.R.T" status. No, this doesn't check your disk's IQ! "S.M.A.R.T" technology is a monitoring system that allows your hard drive to perform self-checks and to warn you when it is about to fail. If you see "verified," your disk is doing well. (...) If you see "About to fail," your disk will fail, and will do so sooner than later. Immediately backup your files and replace the hard drive [~] or contact your nearest Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider." I once learned something else that De Kermadec warns about the hard way: that a popular third-party disk "repair" tool, supposedly OS X-specific, can do far more harm than good. The new operating system has already dropped me a few hints that the Panther largely looks after itself when it comes to defragging, which was a regular part of my routine. No longer. These tips from an Apple forums "helper" provide welcome confirmation of that and also make for a swift refresher course. On being informed of how search engines work, A. Non (who goes nowhere near the Internet and thought we submitted our work to Google and the like), set me a little linguistic and pictorial challenge. Had he specifically asked for Panther, I would have been lost. But... ...I said he could use up to six of the terms I'd employed during the previous 35 minutes of cross-lingual wordplay. His list: "boo-boo" (as in "mistake"), "cage" (as in "John"), "cyber", "feline", "playboy" and "tweak". "And 'boot-up'," he added. "That's my joker, like in the Loto." Ok, I admit, this kind of tweaking is stretching it a bit, but do I win? Thank you, GraphicConverter ... and Kristin Novak, who is a Playboy "cybergirl". 9:39:05 PM  link   your views? []

samedi 22 novembre 2003

XRay. Creativity. In Style. (OS X Panther) Rainer's not only decidedly got past that developer's block. With XRay, v. 1.0.8, he's done so with class! Fighting off the Xcode gremlins (Solipsism Gradient) (b'rolled). Giving us a "batch mode" change option, to boot. If you're not already hooked, your Panther might well need XRay. Nice one, Mr. B. Again! 11:06:56 PM  link   your views? [] Jelly Report 1 - Blogosphere Wrap 6 Still battling the blues. Wildcat again trying to persuade me to write novel! Me refusing. Wildcat, however, unaware until now that I have already penned two (obviously hasn't ever read "sketch" page somebody wrote about me, where only one of these got a mention. I now recall that it was 'Womb of Fire'. "To lose one novel is carelessness, to lo--" "Yes! I know.") Twice asked this morning whether I've given up smoking. Also notice over lunch that I haven't even thought about a fag until the second coffee arrived. "That's because you're relaxed," Jean-Paul says. "Have you already taken some of the royal jelly?" "Two tiny spoonfuls this morning, while still fasting, as prescribed. Two last night. I couldn't wait." "Well then!" J-P notes, before accompanying me back to fetch his own fix. "Aah!" he observes. "Now that's the real thing!" I also explain over our pizzas that I had very vivid nightmares this morning. "What about?" "The sums of all my fears! Plus a bit about the Wildcat." "Did I not tell you that you should not take gelée royale before going to bed, in the evening?!" "You didn't tell me it tasted really revolting either." "I didn't think I needed to. After all, you were brought up on English cooking. The multi-processor is beginning to work. It's hardly surprising that your unconscious put in overtime! Let me count the days... Saturday, Sunday, Monday. It's probably on Tuesday that you'll find yourself suddenly cruising. Your brain will be wondering what happened to it." "Oh, that's just great. It's on Tuesday I've got my next rendez-vous with the psychosomatic shrink." "So much the better!" cuts in François, his first words for a while. zzz Random pickings from a catch up on the Net news, mainly via Netnewswire RSS feeds (all of these I planned to say a bit about, but probably it's best just to bung them up): "Language is a virus." A famous phrase. In the wake of my Robinson book review: 'Sliced Bardo'. A very good memorial to William S. Burroughs, compiled by Levi Asher (1997) of 'Literary Kicks'. (I'll add LitKicks to the roll, but Blogrolling is currently down again); "Note to Self: Never -- Ever -- Piss Drezner Off (or Lileks, for That Matter)" (via Priorities and Frivolities). Salam Pax stirs it up, no end. No end in sight at all... Note to self: there's nothing quite like angry Americans; Real-life potty 999 calls. The Avon & Somerset Constabulary have put some of the barmiest "emergency" calls they have to put up with on to their website; Frederic Latour's Panther weblog. An enterprising and accessible chap in Montréal launches the first bilingual 'blog I've seen on and about Mac OS X 10.3; "Autistic savants are born with miswired neurons - and extraordinary gifts. The breakthrough science behind our new understanding of the brain." Another splendid piece of Wired reporting: 'The Key to Genius' by contributing editor Steve Silberman; It's a good idea to have an online Safari tech bookshelf at O'Reilly. It's even better once you know how to do 'Effective Searching in Safari' (by Allen Noren); 'Concentration en vue dans le cable français' (NetEconomie, Fr. only, technical) says a lot about what's been happening behind my recent ISP glitches. I have François (Demeyer.net) to thank for this one; Mandolux is a very neat place to go for more computer desktop pix. Attention: quality and class; "(2003-11-21) -- Insiders at the Democrat National Committee (DNC) have reportedly urged Michael Jackson, the composer, choreographer and international statesman, to consider a White House bid." Scrappleface (blogrolled) in savage shape (see also 'London Freed from Tyranny, Bush Statue Toppled'); "Two years after the United States dispatched the Taliban and set Afghanistan on a path toward freedom and democracy, that country risks reverting to a 'failed state'." In 'The Other War', MotherJones inconveniently writes about things many would prefer to forget (via J.D. Lasica, b'rolled, along with his own 'How not to get fired because of your blog'. I'm gonna need that soon); Sunday is Doctor Who's 40th Birthday (an obsessive Spatula at Morons.org); "Tonight I discovered that I’m currently the number one hit in Google for 'hoppy toad' and the number two hit for 'happy dance.' Great juxtaposition!" Liz at mamamusings gets self-reflexive. Are you listening, Wildcat?...; 'Inspired by the terrorist attacks in Istanbul'. At Vacuity, Michelle (b'rolled) gets "focused on other stuff than my own world" ad writes a particularly moving piece; in 'Buying Used Underwear' the J-Walk Blog (b'rolled) offers us Shock-Horror. The Wildcat will next week get the Galeries Lafayette catalogue, plus the other things she had me search Paris for today tonight. We cannot, darling, afford all those pages in Vogue. Yet. Even for you! 10:07:49 PM  link   your views? [] The French comic touch Why write 1,000 words more when one picture says it all? Paris in winter: mood portrait - The variation on a theme by ©Bicol Fru is from 'Minimal' inside 'Fluide Glaciale'. I'm happy to see that one of the Kid's staples, awaiting her arrival, devotes a little of its December issue to variations on another theme: the official fear pack campaign. One I liked was "Rire donne les pieds plats et provoque des fuites urinaires". If you can't understand, run it through Babelfish. Or "Se suicider peut provoquer des graves troubles des fonctions vitales". By request, a baker's half-dozen sites relating to that high French art form, the cartoon strip: Bande Dessinée (major portal) La BD & Angoulême International Festival BD Paradisio (includes good link page) Bande dessinée.info Univers BD des Bulles Bizarres Alkemya (la 9ème art). That should save somebody 10 minutes' googling. (In Maëster's Emmanuelle cartoon, the excited editor is, yes, Serge July of 'Libé' (a Foreign Affairs ministry interview in English... of the system, by the system, for the system. Minus cigar.) "Smoking kills!" "'specially if you burn first..." 7:38:59 PM  link   your views? []

vendredi 21 novembre 2003

Royal sustenance & warm music for chilly times It's hard to stay gloomy forever with an iPod. Mine is now full, so it will take me a long while to listen to all those CDs I bought during a frenzied period in preparation for my old age. I was going to send a flower to the Wildcat just as she called and asked me whether I was ready to "stop that nonsense about..." I am not ready to stop it, no. And have no intention of being ready at any time in the foreseeable future, since I really can't think of anybody else with whom I'd rather share that old age. We're not there yet either. This she now knows, but I don't know why she considered the way I made it clear worth tape recording, except that she couldn't. I forgot to add that if she thinks I'd make a rotten father and all that she had better say so forthwith, but you can't fit everything into one rant. Anyway, that's by the by and she gets her flower, which I culled in Buckinghamshire -- as far as I can make out. The Coreopsis, I learn, is the "official wildflower" of Florida. Somebody may know whether this particular kind is a 'calypso' or a 'tinctoria', or both... Darkness has fallen and even if I've been afflicted by days of light deprivation, rather the dark than the damp grey. Even where the Wildcat is, nasty as well as cold weather is coming and she was sitting on a train because her boss had informed her that she was welcome to spend another night somewhere nice, "at your own expense." He, of course, can afford to be mean... "This isn't what it was meant to be about," she moaned, meaning the job, life in general and intolerable parts of the world in particular. "It's meant to be about edible food, sunshine and remotely friendly people!" Dream on, darling, and take me with you! I should have taken you with me on a trip to the rue de Rocher, which now has three distinctions. It's the only street I know in Paris with buildings making each end of a bridge crossing another road. Life must be fun for the postman since the ground floor in one building is on one road while the second storey is on another. It is where wise visitors can find a little restaurant called 'Capriccio', where Enrico greeted me with the warmest 'Ciao!!' I've had in many a month and made me regret already having eaten my dessert. This generally cheery fellow is the best Italian cook in Paris. How do I know? Because he has never ceased to tell me so ever since the Kid and I first made acquaintance with him, his wife and their daughter in Morocco many years ago. And because it tastes true. And Rocher Street is where I found the honey shop at the crest of the hill. What a honey shop, too, every conceivable variety of the substance, I had no idea there was such a range! "I've come in quest of royal jelly," I told the elderly lady in charge, who was a robust advertisement for her fare. This was the search my friend Jean-Paul launched me on several weeks back. I found the honey shop by way of the French beekeepers' society. The woman and her husband looked appalled when I said that I'd already tried royal jelly in powder capsules from a chemist (at considerable expense), confirming that such products were confidence tricks in which all active ingredients were long since deceased, including the mystery three percent. The real thing, in small bottles from the fridge with even tinier dosage spoons, was also horrendously expensive, but I bought three. One for J.-P. himself, since if what he said was right and I shall be flying after three days of it I'd rather he came with me. And one for the Wildcat, if it works. I'll let you know what the food of queens does (or doesn't) in a few days. She also needs a miracle. "Royal jelly consumption has recently been linked with acute asthma, anaphylaxis and death," warns PubMed from Hong Kong, while Britain's Food Standards Agency advises against consumption of such produce from China. One health site at Columbia University says it's probably a scam. But I don't care. J.-P. swears by it and he's a very sensible, down-to-earth kind of chap. Even when flying... The iPod took me up with Curved Air ... 'On Air'. Not till '97 were the BBC sessions of this fine band released on the Strange Fruit label, but they were recorded between 1971 and 1976, which meant I was there for the last of these live performances. "Progressive, Marianne, that's what we used to call this kind of music when I was a kid and John Peel was the late-night DJ to listen to," I've told the Kid, who shakes her head in pity. All she knows of John Peel is the mellow fellow who presents 'Home Truths' and is married to Sheila, "known affectionately as the Pig." Largely passed over by critics, 'On Air' is a bit dodgy for the first two tracks including their famous 'Vivaldi' (in recording quality too), but takes off with the third number, 'It Happened Today,' and then simply soars, like Darryl Way's electric plexiglass violin and Sonja Kristina's wonderful voice, which sometimes flies and sometimes gets too raunchy and gutsy for the tender, impressionable youth I was then. Another gem off the iPod comes from Terry Riley, who gave that band their name with his Rainbow in Curved Air. I treasure a recording of the first piece of minimalist music I ever heard, In C, which is only a few years younger than me. Riley's trend-setting piece gets a performance as striking as it is original from the Shanghai Film Orchestra, no less, on traditional Chinese instruments (Celestial Harmonies label). The third of four (re)discoveries to mention comes from Africa, because I have one thing in common with Lee in Picadilly Circus, who was "completely shocked when I think that I had once lived without knowing Fela's music" (Odessa Street). Me too. When she typed that, most of her collection of the late great Nigerian was on vinyl, she says, but one of my favourite Fela CDs lives up to its name, the 'Best of the Black President'. My own copy of this superb double album has a nicer cover than the one at Amazon, but of course it's scarcely the packaging that counts. Today's final choice to set me flying comes from the chill north. I don't think guitarist and composer Terje Rypdal has cut a bad album yet on the ECM label, and Jon Christensen is one of the most brilliant but subtle drummers around. When these two get together with trumpeter Palle Mikkelborg the results are very special. If you're lucky enough to catch them live, they and their friends are priceless modern jazzmen, but the studio album Skywards is already, like one of the tracks on it, 'Out of this World.' 8:30:54 PM  link   your views? [] I want to hibernate This morning's mail delivered a surprising batch of comments on the Natural "intelligence" story on Bejan I also submitted to Blogcritics. A good debate took off there on what the clerics used to call "the argument for design". As to the rest of the mail, apologies to the handful of people I've yet to answer. Now that my ISP seems, touch wood, to have sorted out most of its technical glitches, I was inundated yesterday by a big backlog. The Wildcat didn't sound best pleased last night when I for a while gave answering most of these priority over the need for us to talk. But she's a lucky lass, has gone off on a brief mission to one of her favourite capitals well to the east of here, where it's apparently even sunny! I'm not at my best; it's that horrible time of the month again, a new moon imminent. I felt like it was for tomorrow, but it seems it's not until Monday. And the weather is grey gloom, has been for days now... Beurk! Oh well. The Kid won't be coming this weekend. The grippe has arrived. I've not seen much sign of it in Paris, but both the Kid and her mum have been confined to their abode near Versailles since the start of the week by a bad bout of 'flu. Best that the Kid's not around when the plumbers are, anyway. Yesterday they punched a nice little hole through my bathroom wall from the stairwell outside. When they're working on some new sewage tubing on the stairs, this hole gives them a good view inside the bathroom. It will be there for at least a week. At the canteen (update), Sam is disgusting. He needed the hole truth. All right. The role of the hole is to receive a pipe which will in due course evacuate... you know. It's thus just by where you ... you know ... sit for a read. Which means, yes, that when I just can't wait any longer and the plumber won't go away, I have to put a warning note through the hole. "Bombs away!" Ca suffit, non? 1:07:31 PM  link   your views? []

jeudi 20 novembre 2003

O cunning cartoon! There's wit even in the "secret name" of this delightful recommendation proposed by my fave cartoon at Blaugustine: Just as I write cheeky picture titles for those of you lucky enough to see them with a mouse-over and a Web browser which can cope with them, Augustine called this shamelessly stolen thought "jacuzz.jpg". Think different. Think French. As to what she's on about, it was her November 14 notion about putting 419 fraud to good use you need to check out. Ah, the astute lass! 7:46:33 PM  link   your views? [] Two quick OS X tips, one especially sound Before I forget, I shall soon be letting the clever Octiv people know what I think of their Volume Logic plug-in for iTunes. As a rule, I prefer to trust recording engineers to get the sound right in the first place, without resorting to such gadgets as equalizers, boosters and the like. Good hi-fi should not need them if it's to be worthy of the name on a decent sound system. Volume Logic is, however, an excellent bonus, beta or not. To my ears, its options are a striking improvement on the equalizer that comes with Apple's iTunes. If such tweaks are necessary at all, and they can help with some recordings or in some listening conditions, such as late and with regard for the neighbours, this is technology well worth trying. Octiv, based in Berkeley, California, are looking for beta testers' comments and comparisons through to the end of this year. zzz To "enable journaling" for the new cat or not -- a question I've twice been asked now, but in fact installing Panther on your computer does so by default. With Jaguar, I wouldn't enable journaling because of a marked hit to the overall speed of the operating system, but the arrival of Mac OS X 10.3 has persuaded me to keep a slimline Panther installed on my external firewire disk journaled. The revised disk utility in Panther gives you the option. I'd say "Go for it". In a nutshell, what this means is that if you enable journaling on a hard drive, the operating system logs every change made to the disk as you work and play. Thus, if your Mac should crash or be struck by a power cut, the cat knows what state your machine was in before trouble struck and it will use this data for a swift fresh start-up. Since Apple released the first, 10.3.1 update, I've seen no hint of the kind of trouble mentioned in the 'VirtMem' 'blog late last month when Bob declared that his "Panther honeymoon is over". I even experimented for a couple of days, using my newish LaCie Pocket Drive -- such sweet luxury, those extra 40 GB! -- as a boot disk before settling on the configuration set to keep me happy in coming months. If there was any slowdown by enabling journaling, I sure didn't notice it. 7:13:11 PM  link   your views? [] 'Rice & Salt': Robinson's rich antidote to blind supremacy Democracy as a religion? In Dubya's eyes, anyway: that, in short, was an analysis by Dr Youssef Choueiri of the University of Exeter's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, heard on the Beeb. I never thought to see it quite that way myself, the fundamentalist fervour of the Washington administration. Choueiri is good at dissecting fundamentalism and its strength in today's Arab world. Some of his writing came my way a few years back, and I'd suggest that 'Islamic Fundamentalism' (Continuum International Publishing, 2002) remains a good read for anybody trying to see beyond current conflict and the so-called war on terror. George Mitchell, who for six years took the vote of bipartisan peers as "most respected member" of the US Senate and founded an academic institute on retirement in 1995, said "Vietnam" this morning, when he meant Iraq. That woke me up, coming from a politician and scholar of his renown! Picked up by Jim in 'Today' -- the uncharacteristic lapsus is now on the 'Today' website (RealPlayer clip, 9'22") -- the Senator was swift to apologise and stress the differences. It was the kind of slip the lugubrious local philosopher Baudier would leap on with zeal, along with Choueiri's view of the American "crusade" in Iraq, which is what the war currently is, despite all bids to keep that dangerous word out of it. The other George, spouting on about the export of democracy as if this "religion" was some commodity made in the USA to be bestowed on cultures worldwide like Coca Cola, divided this morning's British papers (BBC news) more than ever. Kim Stanley Robinson's history of a world without Europe and the United States couldn't have been more apposite bedtime reading for the past few weeks, with its insights into Islamic and eastern cultures, other deeply varying ways of living and seeing in our world. So many rave reviews greeted 'The Years of Rice and Salt' (HarperCollins, in paperback this year) when Robinson published it in 2002 that I almost hesitate. Like the Mars trilogy and 'Antarctica', it's a monumental achievement, but one I found uneven. Some stretches bored me, but Robinson regularly revived any flagging interest with the next episode in his saga of events since the Black Death wiped out European civilisation 700 years ago. Discussing the book with a couple of friends who beat me to it, I find that the passages that I raced through as tedious were those that most fascinated one or other of them, just as we have different "favourite" periods in the "real history" of the world. This can only be a tribute to Robinson's imagination and the scope of his gifts as an artist, thinker and narrator. Some like the way he interweaves his character threads down the centuries by means of reincarnation, sending his disparate group of souls into the Bardo, the in-between (bar) landing stage, island (do) of Tibetan Buddhism, with its panoply of gods, demons, judges ... all ultimately illusion. Others find this artifice an irrelevance. For me, it worked best when an inevitable clash for power and dominance between Muslim and Chinese civilisations plunges the whole planet into the 'long war', so long, so hellish that soldiers whose eyes we see it through finish by not knowing whether they are alive or dead, which worlds they are in. Such sections hold images and ideas of striking brilliance. Having a mind strongly influenced by decades of amateur but still profound study of Asian and African religions, philosophy and cultures -- far less so by Islam and the other monotheistic faiths -- I admire Robinson's grasp and deep insight into these civilisations, extending to what we called the Americas and some splendid passages in India. There are so many layers to 'The Years of Rice and Salt' that it's undoubtedly become one of the handful of books I shall return to, finding new connections and more discoveries in an evolving reader's interchange with an involving and immensely compassionate writer. Why so many reviewers have labelled Robinson and reckon the novel is set to become one of the great classics of 21st-century science fiction escapes me. Such an enterprise simply cannot be pigeon-holed to the SF or even "alternative history" shelves of any library. It is great and -- relatively -- mainstream modern literature in any class. 'The Years of Rice and Salt' is a challenge to anybody who imagines that, say, a George Bush's simplistic, sublimely ignorant faith in US-style democracy and free market capitalism as models to be exported all around the planet, often enough through the barrel of a gun, is much more than a wretched, neo-imperialist insult to societies the remaining superpower would like to mould to its own convenience and interests. If this book reminds me of any other, it's the magnificent 'Creation' (republished by Vintage Books), by an often far more openly political animal, Gore Vidal. He in the early 1980s crawled right inside the skin, not without humour, of a Persian who manages to meet and confront the views of the likes of Socrates, Confucius and the Buddha. Some critics see weakness in the way Robinson's alternative vision of where humanity might be without Western civilisation sometimes closely parallels the history of our own. I consider these temporal bridges across from his world to the one we live in a strength of his writing, one manifestation of his skill in asking the reader to reconsider the all too familiar markers of our "progress" as a species from novel perspectives. Bereft of such parallels, links and twists, Robinson's world would be "just" another piece of original fantasy writing, not what it is: a superbly polished and multi-faceted mirror casting back different lights on our contemporary cultures. Well, I hope I've managed to say one or two things others haven't yet. Often have I seen Robinson accused of being too didactic in his life's work, but it's precisely as a gentle and subtle teacher that he shines apart from other stars in modern writing. I found patience with 'The Years of Rice and Salt' well rewarded by the fresh thought it stimulates on who constitutes the real terrorists and where the true horror stories are in these troubled times. 4:17:32 PM  link   your views? []

mercredi 19 novembre 2003

'Better safe than sorry,' is that it? Security people must be hopping. It's not good, is it really, when some hack from the Daily Mirror claims he could have given the Queen and that Bush fellow a few slugs for breakfast? A brave chap, Ryan Perry, to give this us world-exclusive-shock-horror scandal (Mirror). He had to spend two months as a palace lackey, which isn't something I'd fancy doing in the name of our bizarre profession. The Beeb says protecting the president is costing five million quid. The Mirror, of course, doubles that, giving the equivalent of 14.34m euros, which here would be 17.2 million if you added French VAT. And all that expense and waste for nothing! The Brits shouldn't have invited Bush on a State visit in the first place; I can't see that they've got anything to be grateful to him for, can you? Really? But it's now even more pointless since we've been informed he isn't going to do or say anything interesting, and what he will say we've been told in advance on the radio news! I don't approve of killing heads of state, however little respect I have for them. Such radical methods almost invariably leave a worst mess in their wake than we've got already. Since he's in London, though, one man and his wife who can wreak as much disruptive havoc as an all-out Tube strike, Bush might have the courtesy and decency to drop in and say a word or two to all those MPs and Lords. After all, some of them must have kids out there in Iraq like other families. But it would seem he's scared of Dennis Skinner, who's "unique, part parliamentary court jester, and part leftwing crusader," the Grauniad claims. Tucked away in the bowels of my Mac, at the end of a file "path" so long it's almost a blog entry, I found this icon called "angry" (blown up here to three times its real size). What the Apple people stuck it in the system for I've not the foggiest, but no doubt it has its uses. I also nearly fell into a huge "BlackPit" image and stumbled across this piece of virtual paper, equally bizarre and unexplained: Not in all the years with OS X has that thing flashed up to remind me that I can put my faith in Steve Jobs & Co., in spite of all the unkind things I say about them sometimes. I damned well hope I can trust Apple, since last night, rendered twitchy by a whole afternoon of French bureaucracy not worth recounting, I took my mood out on the Mac and crossed the Rubicon with the Panther. No looking back. Now I want oodles of spare hard disk room and storage places for the years to come, I definitively wiped all traces of Jaguar and its OS X predecessors into re-usable space. Beyond recovery. And I even finished tweaking operating system X 10.3.1 into something I'm happy to look and work with. Those wizards at Unsanity have made tweaking some things less fun but also far less dangerous than total DYI. Yesterday, they released ShapeShifter, another of their brilliant "haxies". ShapeShifter does "themes". We're not talking about just desktop backgrounds and icons here, we're talking about everything - the look of windows, menus, buttons, absolutely everything. You don't wear the same clothes everyday, your house doesn't look exactly like your neighbor's - why should the computing interface you use everyday be any different. You personalize your physical workspace to suit your tastes and whims, so why not your Mac? Since you've got 15 days to see whether you like it before paying for it, I started playing with the couple of themes so far on offer. The GUiPod one from Swizcore is quite fetching, partly because it's more Mac than Apple's own default Panther look, which has too much in common with Windows XP for me. I've mentioned this at TS (blogrolled), while at the forums the Unsanity page links to, the safety issues are pretty well covered already. What I've not started playing with yet is Panther's new FireVault encryption feature, since I read some slightly alarming first reports on it. Before hiding any of my top secret stuff, I'll look again and make sure it is "safe, secure and speedy". Some might think a few journalists ought to be locked up, the key thrown into a black pit. But I don't plan on doing that with my data. 1:49:40 PM  link   your views? []

mardi 18 novembre 2003

Nature's 'intelligence' & design revolutions: Bejan's 'constructal theory' From the door frames to the computer game boxes, the shelves and tables to biscuit packets, the heaps of magazines to CD cases, my flat is full of straight lines, squares, ovals and rectangles. Just like your home. These shapes have never troubled my eye. I find them generally pleasing, part of the way objects fit together into the rooms, a harmonious contrast to the irregular curves of other furnishings, machines and containers, the rounded corners of a mirror and the mathematically complex forms of the ink-jet printer, lamps and the beds. Never has it occurred to me since the measuring, often down to the nearest millimeter, that preceded the refurbishing of my small home, that the use of the space available is anything short of optimal. Manmade rectangles and hard lines dominate the increasingly dire warnings the government has imposed on cigarettes, reminding us what fools we smokers are as it rakes in the constantly rising taxes on the cancer sticks. 'Fumer tue' was direct enough, but the fear offensive now targets our sex and family lives too, as the latest messages show. Of course the form, the stark heavy font and the thick black border, recall death notices. In essence, that's what these messages are. They work. Where restaurants allow smoking, as most still do, fewer people thoughtlessly leave the packet in sight, not when eating, not when 'Smoking kills' reminds you that you're about to follow good healthy food with a complex blend of poisons to accompany the coffee, and not with a child's eyes moving from the message back to your faces with the 'Why?' question as evident as it can go unsaid. I'm not the only one, I've observed, often to hide the packet in my pocket now, think a bit each time I light up. The shape of these warnings we take totally for granted, their funereal symbolism scarcely subliminal, just a part of the cultural baggage making up our 'Ways of Seeing' (in "Notes on 'The Gaze'", Daniel Chandler makes interesting comment on John Berger's influential 1972 book). Now, what of nature? What of the shapes, form and design of what's left of the natural world through our oblong city windows? The trees, the dogs, the bees and the birds. At the level of most objects we can see without a microscope, nature abhors a straight line as much as it does a vacuum. Our rectangles, right angles, cubes and Roman roads may strike us as harmonious, part of a natural order established by humankind, but just how natural are they really? And is our way of optimizing the use of space -- the fitting together of the bits in my flat -- of necessity the best, the most rational, the path of least resistance, the most aesthetic? Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University in North Carolina, published 'Shape and Structure from Engineering to Nature' (Cambridge University Press) in 2000. Nobody has reviewed it at Amazon UK yet, and there's only one comment on the US webstore site. Five stars from Satish, who speaks of a "revolutionary book", "a must read for every engineer or scientist or any creative artist." The Romanian-born Bejan has given us 'constructal theory'. Who cares? So what? So, we have a new way of seeing, a new way of understanding, and most importantly in its far-reaching implications, a new theory of design already in the process of changing the shapes, efficiency and optimization of the myriad artefacts that are part of our daily lives, from a huge jumbo jet to the refrigeration system in your local store. This month's 'Science et Vie' (Fr. website) devotes its cover, editorial and a riveting, worldview-changing 20-page dossier to Bejan's theory and the impact it has already had in the scientific and engineering communities, particularly in the United States, France and, it would seem, Romania. Bejan's "equations prove it: nature creates forms that are ... perfect. And mankind can henceforth strive for such perfection. Devised by an American thermodynamics specialist of worldwide renown, a completely novel theory gives us the key to the conception of ideal objects, machines, habitations, networks... Until now known only to a few initiates, 'constructal theory' promises to revolutionize the career of engineering. And also to alter our outlook on the world," the magazine reports. From the very shape and functioning of our lungs or those of the tube serving as "stem" of a bird's feather, to the complex patterns of the weather, the natural world we live in has never been anything other than the optimization of form, process and engineering efficiency. Nature distributes imperfection to the most perfect possible end. Modestly, Bejan tells 'Science et Vie' that he finds it a "mystery" why nobody came up with his ideas earlier. "This theory uses equations more than 150 years old and generally doesn't call for heavy-duty calculations," I translate as best I can from the French. "It's particularly astonishing since the 19th century was still under the influence of the intuitions of Leibniz, Maupertuis, Euler and Lagrange, for whom of all possible processes, the only one that really occurred was that requiring the least cost. This was a grand vision, integrating optimized process in a way very close to the constructal approach. But instead of that, modern physics embarked on a study of the microscopic, leaving the macroscopic world we live in to one side." The dossier includes interviews with and comments from a range of scientists and engineers in different countries, but notably France. They are pursuing the study and applications of Bejan's reportedly "simple" but comprehensive theory with enthusiasm. While mathematicians are among those to describe his equations as simple, even evident once grasped, they're quite beyond my reach. But not, apparently, that of lay readers with greater mathematical skills turned on to his work and writing. Scientists tell the magazine that the domains where Bejan's discoveries will have a direct impact on our world and the objects we make are almost beyond count. The theory "promises to rethink the structure of aircraft, the distribution of energy flows, to envisage new architectural structures making optimal use of the mechanical forces involved, to conceive of new buildings facilitating the movements of people, to structure the Internet and its information flows, to optimize money circulation networks and those for consumer goods, to study the form of genes, even to refine military strategies." Initially sceptical, geophysicist Heitor Reis of Portugal's Evora University, explains that he was "very surprised by the results" of bringing Bejan's theory to bear on the study of heat transfer and other patterns in the atmosphere, and by its potential contribution to an understanding of meteorological processes. Jocelyn Bonjour, an engineer at the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts in the French capital, describes constructal theory as "a new state of mind, which has already changed my whole outlook on my job." Practically, he adds, he used structural theory for the optimal design of a device which absorbs polluting gases in the environment which contribute to the greenhouse effect and global warming. In revealing a key to the "intelligence of nature" itself, Bejan's work also has implications for biology and nanotechnology, the magazine reports. And next time I set fire to a cigarette, I'll know that Adrian Bejan's sets of equations shed light on why the smoke so often inconveniently threatens to drift in the direction most calculated to annoy others in the vicinity. For English-speakers interested in pursuing this, Bejan has 'Constructal Theory' pages on Duke University's webwork. At the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, where the man studied through to his Ph. D, a brief Adrian Bejan lecture page sums up his findings: "Optimal distribution of imperfection is the principle that generates form. The system is destined to remain imperfect. The system works best when its imperfection (its internal flow resistances) is spread around, so that more and more of the internal points are stressed as much as the hardest working points. One good form leads to the next, as the constructal principle demands: objective served better while under the grip of global and local constrains. There is a time arrow to all these forms, and it points toward the better." ______ Also submitted to 'Blogcritics' (blogrolled). 1:07:42 PM  link   your views? []

lundi 17 novembre 2003