Archive for Basse-Terre
La Lézarde
Posted in Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags amber beer, Basse-Terre, chili pepper, Guadeloupe, Lézarde, local beer, microbrewery, Parc National de la Guadeloupe on November 20, 2025 by xi'an
is there a doctor on board?!
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Air France, Basse-Terre, doctor on board, Doctors without Borders, Guadeloupe, internship, medical doctor, Orly, oxygen, playmobil, residency on November 9, 2025 by xi'an
When our daughter flew back from Guadeloupe during her residency, a few weeks ago, she heard midway (i.e. in the middle of the Atlantic) the dreaded (?) call from AF flight attendants for doctors in the plane to contact them. She did and, since she was both the most senior intern and with specialty the most suited to handle emergency cases, she ended up caring for a passenger suffering from respiratory issues. Fortunately, the flight was carrying medical oxygen tanks that proved enough to support said passenger all the way to a Paris airport. Once landed, an emergency team evacuated the (mostly recovered) patient in priority (but not Doctor Robert!). Amusingly, since she had purposely (!) left her doctor card in her blouse at the Basse-Terre hospital, she first needed to have a colleague on duty there to send a picture for the flight attendants to let her handle the patient!
a journal of the cha(ca)os (and fig) year
Posted in Books, Kids, Mountains, pictures, Travel, Wines with tags Adam family, Basse-Terre, Black Plague, book reviews, buckwheat, cast iron pan, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Celtic noir, Chamonix, Chennai, chili pepper, cocoa, Cold Case, COVID-19, crêpes, cuisine, Daniel Defoe, domestic violence, E.M. Forster, Edinburgh, fantasy, galettes, gardening, griddle, Guadeloupe, gun violence, homegrown, India, Japan, Journal of the Plague Year, kako, Outer Hebrides, Paris, Russian invasion, Scotland, Scoville scale, The Cramps, Ukraine, whey on October 1, 2025 by xi'an 
Read the last part of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell, which still takes place in the early 1800’s at the Dutch East India Company trading post Dejima in Nagasaki, as the historical aspects—like the attempt by a British ship to take over the outpost—beat the weakest features of the story. The end does feel rushed.
I made my first attempt at a chocolate tablet by mixing the cocoa—cacao in French—paste (kako in Créole) I brought back from Guadeloupe—made from the cocoa seeds I had bought at the market, roasting and crushing them—with crushed biscuits and a tiny bit of butter. The result was keeping with the bitter chocolate flavour I enjoy in 100% cocoa tablets, if presumably richer in fat and sugar, and more on the chocolate biscuit side! As the fig tree is now delivering at full speed, I am making compotes and office deliveries on most days, along with picking great tomatoes (which survived the heat waves) and the second chili pepper that grew from the chili tree this summer—sadly so low on the Scoville scale that it didn’t much differ from the peppers that also grew there—. In a bountiful year, the only failure was the buckwheat attempt, since no single flower came to deliver. Expert advice is thus sought for next year! This did not prevent me from resuming cooking whey (from skyr) and buckwheat, rye, or chestnut crêpes (on the Amazon iron griddle that no longer sticks!).
Watched and enjoyed the series Dept. Q, a gritty, depressing, and engrossing detective story that mixes cold cases, domestic violence, PTSD, sexism, several levels of guilt, and a variety of Scottish accents, from Edinburgh to the Western Isles. Despite the captivity thread in the scenario that I always dislike as a weak option in this kind of story, albeit making more sense as the episodes unfold. The grey areas surrounding most characters keeps the series at quite an acceptable level of engagement, as does the range of personalities thus displayed. This includes most victims that could have fallen into the poor-dear trap, but remain ambiguous and equally guilty to maintain the balance. Looking forward new seasons (not in the Scottish sense, where most days usually cover all four of them!). Also watched the second season of Wednesday, enjoyable enough if on the light and repetitive side. With Jenna Ortega still running the show, along with a stronger presence of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Just missing the Cramps moment of Season 1!
Nature tidbits [28 Aug 25]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Travel, University life with tags AI, antivaxers, Basse-Terre, biobank, chocolate, climate modelling, cocoa, Congo, drainage, forcing dataset, generative models, image generator, Jules Verne, Mars, moon, Nature, Parc National de la Guadeloupe, quantum physics, rainforest, Svalbarði, theories of cognition, urban gullies, variational autoencoders, Vincent Van Gogh, volcanoes on September 24, 2025 by xi'an
- an editorial call for “hazardous” research, namely the relevance of studies on urban gullies that endanger surrounding populations and have unpredictable dynamics, albeit scientists alone cannot provide solutions.
- a Columbian study on how the microbial communities acting during the fermentation of cocoa and could be controlled towards finer chocolat).
- the alas now usual articles on the impacts of Trump.2.0 on science and academia, with US Minister of Health Kennedy launching a call for finding the environmental cause of autism. When most researchers blame primarily genetics and associate the rise in cases with a rise in detection and awareness. And pointed out at the earlier drop in NIH funds for autism research, the overall balance being negative.
- plus a useful debunking of five quantum theory myths! Along with the story of a 2020 Science paper by Vaitiekėnas et al. on Majoranas that raised enough questions for Science to publish an expression of concern, now lifted after the publication of a long correction.
- (a video of) rappelling robots diving into a lava tube!!
- a Verne-esque proposal to create a lunar biodepository, a (dubious imho) mix between Noah’s Ark and the (unscientific) faith in cryogeny
- a more sobering call for more frequent data inputs (forcing datasets) to calibrate climate models, with no mention made of statistics or machine learning…
- an operative “mind-reading” device… with a protection password (and a 74% efficiency)!
- two research articles on AI unification of cognitive theories.
- Another one on the (revolutionary) construction of an optical encoder-decoder network towards generating images.
Fuji [and back]
Posted in Mountains, Running, Travel with tags Asics, Basse-Terre, Fuji-san, Guadeloupe, Hoka One One, Japan, running shoes, Soufrière, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, trail running, volcanoes on September 19, 2025 by xi'an
Following my enjoying a lease of Hoka shoes during a half-marathon last year, with some noticeable improvement during the race but a highly specialised design preventing its use in other circumstances, I took again advantage of a running brand offer for free trial of one of their shows. Indeed, Asics offers a 90 day trial period on their gear, provided a registration, and I tested their (top model) MetaFuji Trail shoes during our trip to Guadeloupe, both on coastal paths and hiking trails. They proved rather light, well-fitted to my feet, pretty (with a picture of Fuji-san!) and sturdy enough for a month of daily runs (with no noticeable wear), but not particularly reactive on road (where was the carbon plate!) and both unstable and slippery on rocky trails as those around Basse-Terre. In fact, I ended up the vacations with a sharp return of my hamstring pain, possibly connected with relying on that shoe the whole time (and possibly due to heavy volumes since May!) I thus cleaned the pair and sent it back when I returned home (under the 90 day limit)…
