En effet, il y a à peine 4 jours, ma soeur maniaque de noeuds celtiques a trouvé sur Amazon un livre qui semblait intéressant: Celtic Folk Soul, de l'artiste Jen Delyth. À première vue, ça semblait être uniquement du bonbon visuel, un simple album d'art celtique...

Mais quand elle a reçu le livre hier, j'ai été surpris. C'est loin, très loin d'un simple album ! Chaque noeud, chaque figure mythologique, chaque thème géométrique est appuyé par des pages et des pages de texte d'un niveau de recherche époustouflant. Il y a des poèmes celtes (en version originale gaélique suivis de leur traduction en anglais moderne), des mythes et légendes où les noms des divinités sont parfois distingués jusque dans leurs petites variantes régionales, et une montagne d'information sur toutes sortes d'aspects de la vie des celtes, de la guerre à la religion en passant par la langue et l'agriculture.

Mais malgré tout ce texte, il reste de la place pour la décoration pure: des noeuds celtiques d'une complexité effarante farcis d'animaux et de figures mythiques, occupant souvent une pleine page, quasiment toujours accompagnés du thème historique ou du poème ancien dont ils sont inspirés.

Maudit beau livre. Je me demande combien Annie l'a payé ?

Toujours est-il qu'après les noeuds, il faut continuer sur le sujet des cordes. Car Annie est perméable au marketing, et quand Amazon lui a proposé la livraison gratuite si elle dépensait au-delà d'un certain montant, elle a commandé un second livre: The Black Hole War - My Battle With Stephen Hawking To Make The World Safe For Quantum Mechanics, du physicien Leonard Susskind. Une brique sur la physique moderne, qui examine la question des trous noirs sous toutes sortes d'angles pour mener le lecteur à un gros résumé de la théorie des cordes.

J'en ai lu le tiers hier soir - euh, tôt ce matin - en choisissant des chapitres au hasard et à ma grande surprise, je me suis amusé. Le physicien choisit toujours ses exemples afin de pouvoir déconner le plus possible, sortant à l'occasion des folies soudaines comme la révélation qu'un gâteau aux fruits pèse plus que la masse de Planck, que sa femme a calculé le nombre exact de façons possibles de porter un t-shirt et que ceci inclut de rouler le chandail en boule pour le lui enfoncer dans le derrière, et que BMW devrait améliorer sa chaîne de production pour qu'on ait une auto à entropie nulle... Bref, c'est un bon moyen d'aborder l'organisation microscopique de l'Univers, pour ceux que ça intéresse.

Kamasutra: gel intense excitant à 50% de rabais à Québec

Les boutiques PlanetX sont fières de vous offrir le gel intense excitant (effet de chaleur ou de fraicheur) Kamasutra à 50% de rabais  

Le Kamasutra au meilleur prix à Québec, c'est toujours chez PlanetX qu'on le trouve !

[dailymotion_videowall movie=http://www.dailymotion.com/videowall/quebec-sex-shopkamasutra&cols=3&rows=1&brand=bottom&space=3 width=303 height=104]

www.BoutiquePlanetX.com
www.MaLibido.com
www.Sex-Shopkamasutra.com

I thought you might enjoy some unusual views of my personal assistant's garden. He's an unconventional gardener. He cuts precise flower beds, but then likes things to grow crazy wild in them. Within that wildness, he likes to set up little things the French might call folies. Whims, absurdities, silliness, if you will. Here I am with one he did this weekend:

See that circle beside me? He carefully cut that bed, planted a blue fescue, and...

placed a bohisattva's foot and knee and a pine cone there.

.

Over in another bed, a wi-fi buddha quietly writes code:

I can't quite see what he's working on; maybe he's tech support at Wordpress.

.

The garden isn't all peace and fun. Danger lurks where you least expect it!

This is Albert. He really isn't mean, but I think the chipmunks give him a lot of room!

.

So that's my little tour. I'll leave you with these flowers in our front yard. Some sort of dianthus, I think. I call them purple brain flowers. Have a great week!

Tatsächlich merkt man allerdings von Tschumis komplexem Gedankengebäude, das hinter seinem Entwurf für den Park steckt (3 sich überlagernde Schichten, siehe den älteren Beitrag zum Thema), vor Ort nicht viel - wie das meist so ist, mit theoretischen Konstrukten. Andererseits: muss man denn oder kann man überhaupt eine Theorie sichtbar machen?

Wie dem auch sei, hier ein paar Foto-Impressionen:

My very first folie... ;-)

North-South-Gallery + "Quick"Folie (have a "quick" eat...)

North-South Gallery, view Northwards, Maison de la Villette

Canal de l'Ourcq with East-West-Gallery + Folies

Folie, Prarie ronde

Folie - not that top in shape anymore...

Themes Garden: Bamboo Garden

Grande Halle, Folie - le foot!

Folie "du Bar"

Grande Halle, Folie meets Theatre

Entrance Folie, North-South-Galerie Cité de la Musique...with ballett dancers having a break

Cité des Sciences et de l'industrie, la Géode... and Folie

La Géode again - great for photo experiments!

Dragons on the loose? - No, it's a ... ...playground slide!

'The Wisdom of Crowds'

The title speaks a bit for itself - it's a book written by James 'the consumer' Surowiecki, columnist for 'The New Yorker'.

His book, 'The Wisdom of Crowds' comes as a tribute to a 1841 book written by Charles Mackay - ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and Madness of Crowds'. See, probably I'm the only person weird enough to have actually read a book from 1841 but at the time (meaning about four years ago) I thought it was an interesting overview on folies of English people from beliefs in haunted houses, witches and stupid things done in the name of religion such as crusades and other intriguing fits of craziness.

'The Wisdom of Crowds' is Surowiecki's answer to Mackay's hypothesis. In a few words and being very blunt, Mackay was trying to illustrate that 'masses are asses' - that when put together, people will believe all sorts of stupid things and that individuals are a lot more intelligent taken separately. His 'madness of crowds' term was a bit exaggerated - crowds can be stupid if not organised properly.

Surowiecki gives a lot of examples to prove Mackay wrong - he shows that collective thinking can bring better and more accurate results rather than piling up 'specialists' and asking them to produce something close to perfection. Answers are only accurate when crowds are diverse, when highly capable individuals mingle with common people and when particular 'thinking' conditions are met.

His best example was the Challenger Space shuttle disaster in 1986. The event was extremely well covered by the media, 85% of Americans saying that they had found out about it in less than one hour from the explosion. The interesting part about the story is how the stock market guessed or, better put, predicted the company responsible for the tragedy. Out of four companies that participated in the construction of the space shuttle, only one's stock dropped twelve percent in six hours from the disintegration compared to a three percent drop for the other companies. Why was this? Morton Thiokol, the company that provided the solid-fuel booster rocket was close to bankrupcy. This meant that the stock market had identified them as the ones guilty for the accident only a few minutes away from the disaster. No media, no information from the outside, it just happened.

Newspapers didn't shed any light on why the Challenger exploded nor did they point out the guilty company. Only six months later the mystery was elucidated:

‘The O-ring seals on the booster rockets made by Thiokol - seals that were supposed to prevent hot exhaust gases from escaping - became less resilient in cold weather, creating gaps that allowed the gases to leak out. In the case of the Challenger, the hot gases had escaped and burned into the main fuel tank, causing the cataclysmic explosion. Thiokol was held liable for the accident’

According to Surowiecki, this is a very good example of how collective wisdom works - the stock market knew exactly they were the ones guilty. Lucky guess? Could be, but the crowd met all the conditions in order to produce an accurate result: diversity of opinions, independence in thought, decentralisation and aggregation - the perfect balance between knowing too little and knowing too much.

I think it's a very interesting read to anyone, it's very well written and it covers a lot of aspects of day-to-day life that we've never really considered before. It doesn't tell you how to make groups think if that's what you're looking for, it just shows how collective thinking is far superior. It doesn't tell you how to organise a focus group but it could give information about what makes them work better. For £4, it's a lot better than any other piece of s*it like 'tragic life stories' or self help books.

Heureusement, nous n'avons pas eu d'enfants ensemble... Parce que j'aurais sérieusement compromis la Race humaine avec mes gênes de merde et ma méchanceté, mon imbécilité surtout.

Ses gênes valent mieux que moi.