Friends: television note

I've been at it again: television bulimia. This time it's Friends, on for two consecutive episodes at dinnertime; in re-run, of course. I knew it was there when it was the alleged hot show to watch years ago but somehow never zapped it. (This is the great fallacy about how myriad-channel choice segments the audience. I don't know anyone who can actually read one of those church-book sized weekly television programs. I turn on, I zap, I watch. 17 is the weather. Don't ask me to do anything more complicated).

Great acting, everybody is absolutely in character at all times. As for the writing, now that there is a strike on...

There is of course a heavy dose of fantasy fulfillment which is terrifically addictive. The sexes sleep around but continue to respect each other: those guys will actually hold poker evenings with the girls or bundle off for a week-end in Vegas on a whim (which, from New York, is actually a fair distance). The girls, for their part, are financially independent, will land an executive position at Ralph Laureen for the asking, and cook a fantastic dinner in a spotless apartment. Cleanliness is in their genes.

The true tour-de-force, though, is in the portrayal of New York city. Central Perk coffee shop is marvellous the way Disney's portrayal of Neverland is magical. The physical presence of the girls is pure Valley Girl: that hair doesn't move, the hips are reed-thin from years of egg-white omelets,everybody has a near-tan; where are the rats, where is the cold and the damp, where is New York? Life is just not like that on this side if the Jet-Stream.

Fantastic sums of money are at play with such shows. The concept is priceless; once it is well-defined, the episodes grind out like pancakes, the actors radiate joie-de-vivre and who wouldn't at those salaries. The handsome guy is waiting in the wings to marry the fat girl,once she looks like that. " Why don't you try advertising, darling?"

I've still got a lot to beef about. Like that show at eight o'clock where everyone wears Armani to the morgue.

Later!

WRONG

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is asking for money again, and looking to charging carriers for its services. All this to improve programming. I fear this whole line of argument is completely wrong-headed. In my humble opinion, the CBC should be seen primarily as a public affairs broadcaster: news, politics, investigative, cultural chit-chat. Pros in the business bemoan chatting heads as boring television and it is, or was, but in an age of cable and satellite where there is no lack of variety the CBC should not fear specializing. Let the cable and satellite companies worry about delivering variety to isolated communities. This is no longer the corporation's job. The CRTC can overlook the process, it would give them someting to do.

Nothing should stop the CBC from exhibiting a little good taste, either. If there is a really good public affairs show from the British Broadcasting Corporation, why not buy and show it. It would give them money and recognitioin, they too are struggling to redefine their role. The Brits, incidentally, have an absolutely outstanding Web presence for students and parents with blow-out your brains question sets on math, science and so forth. The historical courses for the primary grades are - grab this - clear. The games are intelligent and challenging. It is a recommended reference in Quebec private schools. Couldn't Canada produce a little something? Are we teaching-impaired?

There is of course French International Service which dilligently presents the worst of French television to the francophone world on cable. Take a French diplomat to lunch.

And if and when the CBC does produce a winner in the popular programming genre, sell it. Private broadcasters live by the sword and can't afford to venture far into the what-might-be-fun but who is crazy enough to try it. The CBC is subsidized and in the current context, they should be the ones to take risks.

As for funding the move to high definition television, it is not a broadcasting issue at all. Find its context for discussion and the money will come.

Screen

Garden

Apple a Day

DIRECTION

Eggxact

OOPS!

RIGID

CONTROVERSY

The Sunday Times on the web - and it was picked up by Der Spiegel - reported on a recent bit of social research to the effect that being around blond women made men behave dumber. Blonds are dumber because they tend to live-up to the stereotype that they are dumb and men behave dumb in their presence because they assume it is true. Even the University of St-Andrews is in on it with the notion that there was natural selection toward blond women at the end of the last Ice Age because blondness made women stand out and attract males more easily...

Gimme a break! I've been a brunette all my life and men talk down to me.

Predictions

Dimensions

Dark Moon

From the Moon

Strike

Clouds

Appeared in LE FIGARO
OCTOBER 30, 2007

by JEAN-LUC NOTHIAS

SO WHAT DO CLOUDS REVEAL TO US?

Cirrus, stratus, altocumulus, capillatus...Welcome to the major cloud families.

One sometimes sees clouds as nothing more than large pieces of cotton (more or less clean), floating languorously in the skies at the whim of the winds. In fact, they are short-lived but very dynamic entities, sometimes hyperactive, always moving and being transformed. Clouds paint for us, in a visible manner on the canvas of the sky, the state of the atmosphere. They inform us about temperature, humidity, winds, electricity, pollutants. Yet, not satisfied with being scientists, they are also poets and invite us to dream by the forms they display. Next to sheep, one finds the heads of dogs or wolves, herds of deer, ogres or giants, medieval castles...Everyone is here well-served.

For the kingdom of clouds is the atmosphere. It is 17 kilometers thick (17 at the equator, around 12 for France) and contains 5 billion million tons of air. If the earth is seen at the scale of a desk-top globe, the atmosphere is a sheet of paper.

The business of clouds, is, like for a refrigerator, all about transfering heat. Clouds make use of all the forms of heat transfer possible to form and transform themselves. Convection first of all is the manner in which hot air, lighter than cold, will rise creating ascending currents. Conduction is the transfer of heat through contact, the source of certain fogs at the end of cold nights. Refrigeration is also operative as for, when invisible water vapor condenses as a cloud, the passage from gas to liquid will create heat.

Also active is light from the sun, what are called radiation effects. The combination of all these elements as a function of circumstance constantly "clouds up" the atmosphere, from top to bottom around the planet. One could say there are as many clouds as places and circumstances. Which is not enough for man, who needs to classify and label. Clouds as much as anything, are taken to task. In 1802 a British pharmacist, Luke Howards, amateur meteorologist, proposed a classification system inspired by the classification of living things put forth by Carl von Linne. A clever enough system in that it allows one, starting from three (then four) basic categories, cumulus, stratus, cirrus and nimbus to mix these categories to define intermediate clouds. One thus has cirrostratus, altocumulus or cumulolimbus. And for specialists more subdivisions such as humilus, capillatus or mediocris...

THE FLEETING CUMULONIMBUS

The classification system is based on the altitude at which clouds form. The lowest are the stratus (less than 2000 meters), stack able clouds. Next come the cumulus and their cousins, those little round cottony ones (between 2 and 7 kilometers) and, at the very top, the cirrus (from the Latin "curly hair"), between 5 and 14 kilometers. And the first consequence of these different altitudes is that the forms and contours of these clouds are very different. Thus, a cumulus has very clear contours, because there is a distinct frontier between its humid interior and the drier air surrounding it. A cirrus, in turn, situated much higher, is composed of ice sequins and hence has more imprecise contours.

The least likable cloud is the one to which Baudelaire refers to in the verse "The low and heavy sky weighing like a pot-cover". This is the stratus, characteristic of grey and overcast skies. It won't bring heavy precipitation, but is generally opaque and obstinately hides the sun. The stratus nonetheless has an interesting side. It sometimes tires of flying and prefers to skim the ground. It is thus the only cloud in which we can actually walk. Even if we call it mist (less than one kilometer of visibility) or fog (from 1 to 5 kilometers of visibility).

The cumulus is also called the "nice weather cloud". It is incapable of crying, because it does not contain much water it is estimated that a great big summer cumulus several hundred meters in length contains a mere hundred litres of water. But there is a black sheep in the kingdom. It is the giant cumulonimbus bringer of heavy rains, lightning and thunder. Its base, somber and menacing, can be found at between 1 000 and 1500 meters and its immense body can range up to 12 000 - 13 000 meters. This "king of clouds" can move alone, but most often it is part of a group. Thus, the lifespan of a cumulonimbus might be approximately one hour, the storm, though, will last longer if there are many.

For more information: (reference is made to a French-language translation of a work by Gavin Pretor-Pinney of the U.K.)

Opacity 20

Done Right!

Cosmic Rays

From Le Figaro, November 9, 2007
Marc Mennessier

THE MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS OF COSMIC RAYS

The Pierre-Auger Observatory in Argentina partly lifts the veil on the question of where the most energetic particles ever observed in the universe might come from.

What are they? Where do they come from and how do they manage to reach us? In spite of strenuous efforts to find answers since their discovery in 1938 by French physicist Pierre Auger, these three questions were without answer: ultra high-energy cosmic rays which provoke on contact with the atmosphere large bouquets of particles (electrons, photons...) had finally become one of the most fascinating enigmas of modern physics.

Without resolving everything, the study which is currently headlining the American publication Science, by the Pierre-Auger consortium of scientists of more than 300 researchers from 17 countries, is still a scientific landmark. 'We have come a long way towards resolving the mystery', indicated, in a release, physics Nobel Prize winner James Cronin from the university of Chicago who was, with his colleagues Alan Watson from Leeds (Great-Britain), and Murat Boratav, from the CNRS (national research) at the University Pierre et Marie Curie, one of the instigators of the Pierre-Auger Observatory. Thus from the greatest scientific instrument dedicated to the study of these strange cosmic phenomena, already operational, although the installation, well into the pampas, near the city of Mendoza (Argentina), has yet to be completed.

"We have managed to demonstrate that high-energy cosmic rays formed outside our galaxy, the Milky Way, that they probably emanate from galaxies with active centers relatively close to earth ( still at a distance of some hundreds of millions of light-years nonetheless...) and that they are mostly protons", summarizes one of the authors of the publication, Antoine Letessier-Selvon, research director for CNRS/IN2P3 ( the National Institute for nuclear physics and particulate physics) who was, as early as 1992, with Murat Boratav, one of the promoters of the Pierre-Auger Observatory in France.

To fully appreciate the importance of this discovery, one has to imagine minuscule specks of matter (protons or nuclei of heavier elements such as iron) racing through space at speeds close to that of light (about 300 000 kilometers per second). At unheard of energy levels. Of the thousands of cosmic rays detected since 2004 at the Pierre-Auger Observatory, abut 80 possessed an energy superior to 40 billion billion electron-volts, exaelectron-volts ( 4 followed by 19 zeros!). " That means that one of these particles possesses the energy sufficient to elevate by one degree Celsius the temperature of one gram of water which contains approximately ten thousand billion billion particles" explains Antoine Letessier-Selvon who proposes a second analogy. In its underground ring of 27kilometers, the future large accelerator being built for CERN (nuclear research), near Geneva, will be capable of producing proton streams with energy at 10^13 electron-volts (1 followed by 13 zeros): a level yet to be achieved on earth. "Consider that, to produce a cosmic ray of 57EeV, one would have to build an accelerator with a circumference of 270 million kilometers, that is to say 7 000 times the size of earth at the equator!"

GALAXIES WITH ACTIVE CENTERS

Where and how did the universe manage to accelerate particles to such energy levels, unattainable at scale on our own planet ? It becomes understandable why this question has troubled scientists for decades. And why 17 countries got together 54 million dollars to launch in 1999 the construction of the Pierre-Auger Observatory.

If cosmic rays of 'low' energy (less than 3 EeV still!) are spread-out through space
pretty much uniformly, the authors of the study have shown, by following their trajectory in earth's atmosphere, that this is not the case for the more energetic among them (more than 57Eev). The latter come from, in effect, relatively close regions of the sky, such as the super galactic incline, where the density of matter is higher and where one finds the most galaxies with active centers. Because of the presence of giant black holes which gobble-up matter in their centers, these galaxies could play the role of cosmic accelerators, but science is yet at a loss to describe the precise mechanisms by which this might be happening.

The weakness of deviations in trajectory (between 3 and 6 degrees) provoked by galactic and extra-galactic magnetic fields also suggests that comic rays are more likely composed of protons than nuclei of heavier elements. The latter, being more electrically charged, should deviate more. There again, it is impossible to conclude with certainty, because those magnetic fields which we know badly might be weaker than we assume and thus have a weaker effect on charged particles.

FOLLOW-UP

AN IMMENSE OBSERVATORY IN THE ARGENTINIAN PAMPAS

Situated near Mendoza, in a desert area, the Pierre-Auger Observatory follows in a non pre-defined manner, extra high-energy cosmic rays.

The Senate

For once I agree with Stéphane Dion: the question is not light but complex. I am referring of course to Senate reform. We are told the writing is on the wall for the Senate and that most Canadians would favour its abolition. It is an expensive institution from another age with no clear output of benefit to the country. Its members are aged and a Senate post is a goody conferred on party faithful. So we should reform and why not abolish... Thus, a complex emotion-laden issue.

I am tempted to think of an analogy with complex numbers in mathematics. Part of the expression is imaginary - it's about what the Senate might do - and one can perform operations without ever leaving the imaginary realm - the very existence of the Senate is a a guard-rail to break-down of various sorts in Parliament. This harbours back to the historical conception of the institution. Without going into the offensive dribble such higher houses have generated from their own members: keeping the Parliamentary Riff-Raff in check, as it were, this division of powers could be functional at a time when the two houses did indeed contain members from different segments of society, in fact represented different interests, the established and the emergent.

The American Constitution, devised on a more egalitarian mind-set of the late 18th century, used the notion of a higher house of more worldly individuals and assigned that house to overlook external affairs and the conduct of war. It effectively circumvented the notion of class to define function.

Someone would have to pay me a great deal of money to say what led to the creation of the Canadian Senate. But on the question of reform, let me say this: Firstly, I fully appreciate the notion that a Parliament - any Parliament - needs a countervailing force, a check, a fall-back. Because things can go wrong, the very mechanical workings of the institution can lead to impasse: essentially what Stéphane Dion argued was happening when he legislated on the clarity question.

Secondly, in an age supposedly of information, Canada could use a serious venue for debate and interest on various questions. Our Senate is gloriously silent, we hear about climate change from Al Gore, it takes an American Senator to go to a gay bar, we pay through the nose for heating oil but we are told the Loonie is strong enough to vacation in Cuba. Should we all move to Cuba? I would like the Senate to perform as a thinking institution. Put them on television, I say.

I wouldn't be surprised if Stéphane Dion changed his mind and got on the abolition band-wagon. Who would be there to question it. A polling-firm called me last night - it was in the middle of my beloved "Two and a Half Men" - and I was a little bemused when a lovely Asiatic woman's voice asked me if I was planning to vote for the Conservatives. I answered I didn't follow politics at all, not altogether true but I was busy. Is this the new voting? I hope not.

Extra-Terrestials

From Le Monde, November 3, 2007
by Michel Alberganti

EXTRA-TERRESTIALS, THAT IMPOSSIBLE CONTACT

The universe carries within itself the hope for life. In the last twelve years, more than two hundred planets have been discovered outside our solar system. Among these, Gliese 581c, found a few months ago and potentially habitable. (Le Monde, April 26). Just in our galaxy - and there are billions - one finds 200 to 300 billion stars, and it is fair to think that a good number of these are, like our sun, surrounded by planets, adds Yves Sillard. Formerly director for CNES (Scientific Studies) and formerly director general for armament, he points out that "the objective for the French satellite Corot launched at the end of 2006, which will be followed, in two years, by the American satellite Kepler, is to identify such planets surrounding the nearer stars in our galaxy". So many new hopes for this scientist, who has not hesitated to recently direct a collective work on unidentified spatial phenomena. Indeed it would be the greatest unlucky if one of these planets did not carry, at the very least, traces of past forms of life...

For exobiologists such as André Brack, such a discovery would mark a decisive step. "The existence of a second instance of the apparition of life would be sufficient to demonstrate that this process is not a unique event" he contends. But what kind of life would it be? More or less evolved than that on earth? Will we be able to recognize it, will we communicate with it?

The creation of the universe goes back to 13,7 billion years ago. Our solar system was born 4,4 billion years ago. "Between these two dates, many planets equivalent to ours could have been the site for the apparition of bacteria capable of evolving towards intelligent systems", the researcher believes. What is more, life on earth did not appear right away, but about a billion years after its formation. The existence of a very advanced civilization, because very much older than ours is thus plausible. " It is not impossible to imagine life appearing on some extra-solar planets ten centuries, even one thousand centuries in advance of what happened on Earth", adds Yves Sillard. There are then two venues to an encounter of the third type. Each nonetheless fraught with a few obstacles.

The first has to do with the process of actively looking for an extra-terrestial intelligence as superior as far. The star other than our sun nearest us being at 4,4 light-years, and that of which Gliese 581c is dependent, 20,5 light-years, a radio message (travelling at a speed near that of light) would need respectively 4,4 and 20,5 years to reach the civilization found there. At best, we could hope for an answer nine years after the question.

These difficulties have not discouraged the promoters of many projects, such as the American program SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestial Intelligence) which waits for extra-terrestial events using the Porto-Rican radio telescope in Arecibo. But with nothing to report for the moment. The dream is of the opening sentences form a short story by Italo Calvino, taken from Cosmicomics(1965) and titled Light-Years: "One evening, I was observing as always the skies with my telescope. Suddenly I noticed there was a sign from a galaxy one hundred light-years away. On it, was written: I SEE YOU..."

Should one ten try to get there? "For a human being, it is possible in the medium-term future, touching the limits defined by modern physics, to attain speeds one- tenth those of light, some 30 000 kilometers per second", explains Yves Sillard. Hence a 44 year trip to reach the nearest non-solar planet, and two centuries to make it to Gliese 581c. "It is clear these missions will last longer than a human life-span", adds this graduate of our best schools, that the challenge does not seem to daunt. "It will be the descendants of the initial crew members who will reach destination. But it is not at all impossible." On the condition, of course, of really wanting to do it.
The second option appears as an inverse to the trip concern. Extra-terrestials, whose civilization is much advanced compared to ours, could have succeeded in travelling at speeds higher than those of light, or in curbing space-time - the only two means we can imagine, given the present state of our theoretical understandings, to reduce the time involved in space flight. Back in the 1950s, the physicist Enrico Fermi had stated the paradox which follows from this hypothesis: if extra-terrestials can reach us, we should see them. But we don't see them... And the existence of space-ships capable of carrying them remains highly hypothetical.

Not that we lack testimony on the matter. Since the CNRS created in 1977, in spite of scepticism in the science community, the working group on unidentified spatial phenomena (Geipan), there is nocessation in the flow of reports. Jacques Patenet, the current director of Geipan, tells us that 2 600 observation events have been reported in France in the last thirty years, of which 460are unidentified aerospatial phenomena. of these, for 10 to 20 cases, there is " a very strong presumption" for the presence of a material object such as a vessel. this refers to traces on the ground and on vegetation that could herald the presence of an UFO, radars picking up the object, direct observation by pilots of UFOs with intelligent behaviour.

Why then are there no physical trace of these visitors? "Given our current means of analysis, we should be able to certify - or not - the extra-terrestial origins of these phenomena", bemoans André Brack. The sociologist Pierre Lagrange, a specialist in parasciences, is critical of the anthropomorphism that underlies much investigation of UFOs. While we imagine them small, green, more or less monstrous, extra-terrestials, if there are any, might be very different from us...

"The more capable they are of mastering their environment, the more unlike us they are likely to be in culture, scientific achievement, biology and physics" is his view. That would not stop them from taking the initiative and, secure in the knowledge of their superiority, find ways of communicating with us... "We may well be the baboons to some extra-terrestial anthropologist, whose research program we are far from understanding!", suggests the sociologist. do our scientists really want to communicate with bees or ants, or do they merely want to study them?
If we want to, in the future, feel less lonely in the universe, we should no doubt harness on own capacities for observation. And develop them. "On earth, each and every time we have been confronted with another civilization, we have failed to understand them", reminds us Pierre Lagrange, "Yet differences are not that great between us and Australian Aborigines or Amazonian Indians." In this context, he asks whether "we would be capable of seeing and recognizing civilizations stemming from forms of life that could have taken directions utterly different from ours?" That is the nub of the matter.

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The article goes on to cite books from André Brack, Yves Sillard, Pierre Lagrange, Stéphane Allix, François Raulin and Thibaut Canuti.

Fun in the Evening

I have a brand-new absolutely favorite television program which I watch every day. It is "Two and a half Men" which is currently running in my region two episodes in succession starting at seven every night. This is the recipe for addiction. The show has been in production for five years, and lately celebrated its one hundredth episode. The underlying premise of the show - the situation in this situation comedy - has stagnated for that time. This is the greatness of television. One gets to examine a relationship disaster from every conceivable angle and it stays funny the whole time.

Last night's episode about viagra was a real kicker. The middle-aged chiropractor is having an affair with a twenty-two year old who wants to go to his son's birthday party. They keep having sex all the time an arrive late at the party. Only the actress playing the twenty-two year old is about forty and wearing skimpy clothes that belong to an underfed eleven year-old. The chiropractor makes a grand entrance and boasts to everyone present he keeps having sex.

This is great television - candy for the mind - even though the actual episode must last for fifteen to twenty minutes given the long blocks of back-to-back commercials interspersed. I don't mind, I use the time to work on math problems, feed the cat, get a diet drink. Those television writers are artistes and it seems a great pity to let have them break their stride with a nasty strike. This stuff is funny.

Living

The Opening

Is it too late?

Yellow Jeans

Today