Sunday, September 16, 2007

Christian the Lion- Reunion!

A lovely video where a man is reunited with the lion that he raised as a cub. While it's amazingly cute, I can't help but wonder how disturbingly unnatural it is. On a lighter note, I have no idea how you stand your ground when a 200-kilo perfectly-designed-to-kill carnivore leaps at you, albeit with benign intentions. :-)

Saturday, September 15, 2007

A Week in St. Nectaire - 1

Last week was interesting in many ways. Despite living in France, albeit in a remote corner of the country, I have seen pretty much nothing of the country. Save for a sightseeing Saturday I spent in Lyon last winter, nothing (I'm saving Paris for an occassion). Last week, there was a collaboration meeting (I work in an experiment collaboration at CERN that involves institutes and researchers from all over the world, and we meet once a year off-site from CERN) in St. Nectaire, a really small village in France.


This
is the route we took to St. Nectaire. It was a lovely route through the Jura mountains on to the other side, through and over villages located in and between the mountains.



After a while, it got flatter, and pretty boring. :-)



We were put up in the most luxurious hotel in St. Nectaire. On arrival, we took a walk around the town. In a 45-minute walk, we met _one_ local inhabitant. This continued over the next few days, over which we met a handful of locals, and hardly any young people.

I read about rural depopulation in Europe before I came here. This is a phenomenon where the population of villages reduces because younger people apparently have no reason to stay back, since tourism and agriculture are not lucrative enough as careers. Lots of buildings were for sale, some sadly going into ruin.

The French food over the next few days was great overall. Apart from the one disappointment where they served the boiled remains of an animal massacre, the food was great - the French have learnt a thing or two about flavour and do a good job (between bouts of amnesia).

The area is full of volcanic craters and mountains. It doesn't concern people much because the latest eruption in the region was ~7000 years ago. However, the craters still look like craters (more pictures to follow). The mountains are also famous for an old Roman temple (~2000 years old) and as a popular paragliding site. After climbing one of the neighbouring summit, looking at the town of Clermont-Ferrand from a height of 1400 metres was . . . satisfying. Of course, this was also the site of Blaise Pascal's famous experiment where he measured the effect of altitude on a mercury column (to prove atmospheric pressure).

Here's the first batch of photos.
St. Nectaire

Friday, September 07, 2007

Moore's Laws

Michael Moore's films are great. Sure, some people could argue that the facts are not completely true, and that his films tend to be somewhat sensationalist. But one thing we can learn from the Americans (despite all their numerous flaws) is that an outspoken journalist like him can actually voice his opinions. He has lots of opponents, who have websites such as moorewatch.com. Without leaning one way or the other, I think that it's important that we have a healthy intellectual environment where free-thinking and free-speaking journalists can go head-to-head and provoke the masses into some thinking of their own.

I'm sure everyone's read something or the other about the RIAA (The Recording Industry Association of America) and its move to combat file sharing. They've done things like sue a 6-year-old girl and her single mother, a little boy and his grandmother, campuses full of college students, and basically anybody who cannot afford a hotshot lawyer to defend themselves. To sum it up, these guys act like vultures preying on the weak. These guys don't really experience serious losses in any way, and if they were serious about pushing up their sales, they could drop prices and see the effect. Oh, just so you know, the RIAA is not some ghost organisation that does all these evil things - it's a consortium, whose members are Sony, EMI, Warner, and Universal. They would have you believe that for every movie you steal, another underpaid Hollywood star or impoverished Sony executive starves to death. The truth is somewhere in the middle - it's bad to steal movies, but they can fix it by a) getting rid of the obscenely high prices of media (movies/music), b) getting rid of region codes, proprietary media formats (I hate Sony), DRM, and c) basically try to not be the greedy bastards that they are.

How does Michael Moore fit in here? Well, I saw a two-minute snippet of an interview with him on file sharing and movie stealing. I'm not really pasting from a transcript, but he said something to this effect. "Movie sharing? Well, meaning what happens if you buy a DVD of my movie and give it to your friend, who sees it without me making any money from it? That's called sharing, and it's been happening for a long time now for lots of things, not just movies. I do quite well, and I don't think I'd mind that - it's just sharing, something we've been doing for a long time. So long as you don't sell my movie again for a profit, I don't think that's bad." He may be controversial, but there are things you gotta learn from the guy.