Archive for the Uncategorized Category

At 09:09:09 on 09/09/09

Posted in Uncategorized on September 9, 2009 by xi'an

09/09/09

A fairly silly and completely uninteresting post: given that I was born on a 09/09, this is a special birthday since this is the year of the six nines! (I cannot explain this irrational appeal digit alignments have for me since those are arbitrary divisions of time, nothing more, since I am not turning 99 in any basis, and since I could not see the point in celebrating the turn of the century in 2000…) Obviously, I am not the only one to see this date as a bit special, as shown by this post and that post.

Influenza, anywhere?!

Posted in Statistics, Travel, Uncategorized with tags , , , on June 30, 2009 by xi'an

Everyone should take everyday preventive actions to stop the spread of germs, including frequent hand washing and people who are sick should stay home and avoid contact with others in order to limit further spread of the disease [CDC Public Guidance].

As I am getting ready to take my plane for the 3rd Rimini Bayesian workshop mentioned on that post (no, I haven’t yet changed my slides!), I am [rather idly] wondering why we do not hear more about the H1N1 pandemic. Checking on the site of the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows a widespread repartition of the flu since most countries are hit (I spotted Haiti and most of Africa missing from the list, but this may be due to a lack of proper reporting rather than no case so far).

Novel influenza A (H1N1) activity is now being detected through CDC’s routine influenza surveillance systems and reported weekly in FluView [CDC Surveillance].

While I see the point in not panicking people by adopting extreme measures like those taken in Mexico (too late) during the first weeks of the outbreak, it seems to me that nothing is done at the moment, at least as perceived through my everyday life. I do not see people wearing masks when they cough, washing hands more regularly and so on… It sounds like the [maximum] Phase 6 level announced by the WHO has no visible impact. Is it because the disease actually has less impact than previously thought? Mais que fait la police?!

Will greenhouses “save the Earth”?!

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on June 8, 2009 by xi'an

A series of pictures showed a urban greenhouse in Le Monde today showed a proposal for a spiral greenhouse that would grow vegetables next to cities. The greenhouse is presented as a way to recover lost arable lands and “to grow local and eco-friendly crops in an urban environment“. I do see some appeal in producing vegetables nearby cities since this would reduce transportation costs and in using greenhouses to efficiently muster water utilisation and recycling, and to take advantage of the sun. However, I do not see mentioned some obvious difficulties with the project:

  • having greenhouses within cities is a cool look, but nobody mentions the potential quality of the products delivered by those greenhouses. Artificial air (I would not want car exhaust and heavy metals to enter my tomatoes), artificial soil (recycled compost?), artificial nutrients, and artificial water (in that it would be delivered via pipes from recycling plants, not by rain). Some tomatoes are already tasting very poorly (like those delivered from the Costa Plastica during winter) and I am not optimistic about the futur products of those greenhouses!
  • arable lands are getting scarser, true, but land plots in cities are also getting more and more expensive. The economic worth of the venture may thus be limited (even though nothing prohibit to build those greenhouses further away from cities). The journal mentions a cost of 21 million euros per structure, amounting to 2 million euros per hectare, and this does not include the price of land. Even with one production per month, this is very unlikely to be worth the expense for basic products.
  • given the current adverse reactions to the installation of wind turbines, I fear neighbours won’t welcome those greenhouses so warmly! Especially because they will involve traffic, in and out, as swell as nuisances (noise, garbage)…

This may sound grumpy and all that, but using much more efficiently water and soil in natural environments would seem much more useful…

Passiflores

Posted in Uncategorized on May 30, 2009 by xi'an

Passiflores

A passiflore (or passion vine) is growing in my garden and producing the weirdest flowers. It is just too bad those flowers are very short-lived but, given their intricate beauty, why complain?! (Reading the Wikipedia entry about those, I found that the name stems from Spanish missionaries in South America who found its unusual shape full of connections with Jesus’ last days…)

Back swans

Posted in Uncategorized on May 9, 2009 by xi'an

“Traders to Teachers is designed to turn unemployed finance professionals into math teachers in three months.”

Ok, an easy pun related to earlier posts… There is an article in The New York Times of yesterday about unemployed traders turning into math teachers with the help of a New York State program. This is quite interesting in that (a) it shows an ability to react quickly both on the State side and on the traders’ side (it would take years for the French education system to agree on that sort of scheme, with actions about “Kapital entering schools” and this kind of things!) and (b) it prefigures a more evolving job vs. age topology in that older people may have/want to move from an intensive and stressful job like trader to another [still intensive and stressful] job like teacher, where past experience may be a true asset to motivate theory with fact. Given the growing pressure on retirement plans, this may even become compulsory, something like young retirees having to teach part-time in connection with their earlier job…