Auswanderer Quatsch

Hey, I got Mlle V. to watch the first Star Wars movie a couple weeks ago (first movie… number four… the one with no JarJar around… the first one… huh!).

To give you an idea, its was kind of like talking a healer into running forward – alone – to tingle a big angry dragon. Having the choice between StarWars, Bridget Jones and some stupid reality show, she gave it a try… and kind of liked it… I guess.

Let’s see if I can make her watch another one in a near future (Björn do you still have the DVDs?). Anyway, you saw it V. never say never, haha!

The Cryptonomicon from Neal Stephenson is a book that took me a really long time to go through. Not that it was not interesting, oh no! I read it slowly because this is a heavy 1000 pages condensed piece of science with more details than the panorama picture of Paris I currently have as a Windows background.

The story takes place in two different time frames with related characters.

1. The first part follows the actions of Bobby Shaftoe and Lawrence Waterhouse both soldiers, respectively a US Marines and a US Navy Cryptographer, as they fight their way through the Second World War. Lawrence is a first class code breaker working directly with (among others) Allan Turing, the inventor of the “Turing Machine”. But he is also responsible for analyzing Allies actions and organizing “dummy/cover operations” in order to try to hide the fact that the Allies have broken German and Japaneese cryptographic codes. Bobby Shaftoe is part of the team used for those cover operations which will drive him all around the globe and specially in Asia where most of the story takes place.
2. The second part takes place nowadays as Randy Waterhouse (grandson of Lawrence and a modern computer scientist) and Avi Halaby build a new company. The company, named Epiphyte(2), operates in both cryptography and Internet and rapidly becomes the center of a financial/political shareholder battle. Both partners are later joined by Doug and Amy Shaftoe (son and granddaughter of Bobby) as the “old and new” storylines begin to merge.

I cannot tell you much more than this without risking spoiling some key elements. I found the science part of the book  being the most interesting one. Everything is plausible if not mathematically proven in the book, no special technology appearing “to serve the story”,  no shortcuts used to hide a weak technical point…  this is true mental masturbation material for a scientific mind like mine >_<. The modern story, even if not as interesting as the old one “at first”, ends up being really exciting when we finally understand how the first storyline serves the second one.

Unfortunately, switching from one chapter to another is a real mess. It’s not unusual to wait a couple page before being certain of which storyline it belongs to…  which is kind of annoying. A simple date with the chapter title would have been enough to help the reader feel at home. This is mostly true at the beginning where the names are still a mess in one’s head and when new characters are constantly popping up.

Nothing more to say: overall this was a great book that I really recommend… to scientific minds :]

(Img Griffey on Flickr)

As already stated somewhere in a previous post, we were in Brittany this summer. One of the places I wanted to go to was the “Pointe du raz”, a spike of land looking west a couple miles south from Brest that would be France’s westernmost point if the “Pointe de Corsen”, located a few kilometers north, did not exist. Anyway, accessing the place was a fun long drive on a narrow road. We parked a few kilometers back and walked for a couple hours on the “Sentier des Douaniers” - a walking path following the coastline along the whole French coast – to reach the place.

With such a great weather we had a wonderful line of sight. The Island of Sein that you can see in the back is only visible with such a great weather.

As you can see, Mlle V. is carrying the backpack, that’s why I only took the Lx3 there although the weather was so gorgeous. Why is that? Simply because I had messed up my shoulder pretty bad playing silly on the beach a couple days earlier (did not require any stitches but that was a close call) and could not carry anything on the right shoulder without risking to open the flesh again. So we walked “light” leaving the reflex and its objectives in the car…

Below is the view looking west, you can see La Vieille’s lighthouse and the Sein’s Island.

The view looking north. This view, with a couple boats, clouds geometry, strange cliffs and one lonely fence was nothing less enjoyable!

Definitely worth going there

… and yet almost just another picture post!

This summer I had the opportunity to wander around in Paris with German friends again -  which is always a good reason to “do” the tourist-stuff once more and show the city I almost grew up in. We had not planned to visit the cathedral “Notre-Dame” but when we walked by and noticed that there was no queue at all in front of the church (I think we luckily showed up right at the end of a service, when the doors just reopened), that was too great an opportunity so we stepped in.

Last time I went inside the cathedral was maybe 15 years ago for a Religious Scouting Ceremony after some kind of Parisian Scouts meeting. The memory I have of it are really confused… and mostly unpleasant. I remember sitting on hard cold stone for hours in a cathedral packed up with kids, most of which wished they were somewhere else. I remember nothing at all of the service…  which let me think it was no special at all. Anyway, the memory of it must have deeply shocked me since  I never wanted to go back in after that… but as I said, the opportunity was to great  so for my guest’s sake, step in we did!

The church not as full of people (obviously) but still loud as it can be. I had forgotten how impressive the architecture is, the light games, the arches… the cathedral is indeed beautiful. I tried to take a few pictures, but with the low light, without a tripod and with people constantly walking around me… I did not expect much results.

That proved itself about right, most of the pictures are blurry and have a lot of chromatic aberrations due to the strong outside light.  This picture is not an exception, the quality of it is far from good… but I love the atmosphere, the global look of it, the warmth yet coldness of it… the kind of feelings I personally get in churches nowadays actually.

During the Summer, I spent a few days in Normandy with Mlle V.’s family and friends before touring Brittany to visit my parents, attend a family wedding and show Mlle V. this part of France she had never been to. Being around the Mont Saint Michel, we could not resist crossing the bay during low tide (with a guide of course).

We started with a pretty nice weather, gray but sunny, and ended up soaked to the bones. I had done it twice before, once with my family and once with a group of kids I was looking after during a summer camp. It’s a  pretty easy 4 hours walk back & forth. The bay is well known for both its quicksands and the tide described as “fast as a running horse”… of course you can imagine that experiencing the latter being trapped in the earlier would be deadly unpleasant.

Speaking of quicksands, I had never experienced them that well during any of my previous walks. It started with nice quicksand ponds, only half a meter deep but still “quick” enough to let you feel being “swallowed”. We then experienced more “watery” quicksands, which surface remained hard as long as you only step on it and never stop (that was already scary enough). At one time, the guide left the obvious path, probing with his stick right and left and started running, the surface moving under his feet like a giant rubber ball. That  was definitely cool to see and the horde of teenagers that followed him obviously enjoyed it ; so did Mlle V.’s sister and best friend.

I was a bit apart from the group taking pictures when the guide suddenly shouted “don’t follow me”, I did not have enough time to react and translate what he said to the two girls who were dashing after him. They ran for a dozen more meters, laughing at how he surface was reacting… until it broke ; really fast. In about two seconds, L. had mud thigh up and A. was in it to the knees… life&death reflex, I had the camera in hand, I just shot :]

… it turned up pretty nice didn’t it?