Happy New Reading Year!

Today, a friend of mine wrote in his Facebook status that one of his resolutions for 2010 was to "read a book." I have not determined yet, although I intend to clarify this, whether this was a facetious comment, or whether he meant that his work and life have been so hectic in 2009 that he could not find the time to read a book. I think it may well be the latter, unfortunately. As someone said, it's better to be a pessimist because you're rarely disappointed.

His post led me to two thoughts. One is that I have read more books in 2009 than probably in several preceding years. The second one is that my Kindle has helped me read more.

On the first point, those who know that I retired in May 2009 will of course understand how suddenly the necessary time materialized to enable me to read more. I'm no longer filling personnel appraisals that no one will care about, or redoing slides three times because the boss at level N+1 is afraid that the current version isn't right (and is too long) for level N+2, etc. You can't create time, but when circumstances permit, you can stop wasting it.

My retirement present was a Kindle 2, with which I rapidly discovered, stingy as I am, that there was great value to be obtained because Amazon has many classics, not longer copyrighted, available for download for free. Just a few days ago, I found out that this also now extends to French classics in the original language, although I have not taken advantage of this yet. Actually, I would also like to find some Spanish or German texts, so that I can improve (for the former) or try to recover (for the latter) my knowledge of these languages.

So here's my May-December reading list:

• Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
  
• Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
  
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Return of Sherlock Holmes, ibid., because one can never read too many good short stories
  
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (what a delight!)
  
• The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (they don't make people like this any more)
• Travels in the United States by William Priest (not as good as Alexis de Tocqueville, but still interesting)
  
• The Legends of King Arthur (the version by Sir James Knowles)
• The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (I have only read a small portion of this text, which does not contain the drawings, and is very heavily annotated, making it a rather more scholarly exercise than I was intending
• A Tramp Abroad, Vol. 1, by Mark Twain
  

Currently, I am reading Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift. Yes, it is about very small people and very big people and very weird people, but it is also a very smart, and very daring for the time, criticism of the politics and mores of Europe. The first focus of these imaginary travels to Lilliput and Brobdingnag and other fantasy lands is to convey the idea that everything is relative. As if that wasn't provocative enough, Swift then proceeds to let his foreign characters express incredulity and shock at what Gulliver tells them of the common practices of Europeans. For example, explaining the concept of war to the Houyhnhnms, who don't know it, he writes, "Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, as those occasioned by difference in opinion, especially if it be in things indifferent." Which is eerily reminiscent of Wallace Sayre's saying, which I have been fond of repeating to professors I know, at least when no weapon other than their repartee is available, that “The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low.” Except that Swift was being more daring by attributing this behavior to people who did have the power to do harm to him. And he wasn't putting his potential defenders on his side by adding, a few pages later, that "there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid." No modern lawyer joke really approaches this level of sarcasm, and the following pages just get worse, of if your prefer, better.

I have also downloaded, and intend to read next:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• The Prince by Machiavelli
• The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells (which I only read in French translation several decades ago)

I have downloaded samples, for later purchase, of:

• 30 novels (!) by Jules Verne, in French, in a single file. I'll have to pace myself. I do own an illustrated print edition of Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, so I can skip the electronic version of that one, but I never read most of the other books.
• The Spell, by Alan Hollinghurst. I am very fond of his other two books The Swimming Pool Library and The Line of Beauty, which I read just a few years ago in print.
• In the same vein is At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill, which I know from the sample will be hard to read because of the Irish dialect, which is faithfully reproduced, and also because of the emotions that will swell until the fatal climax of the book (yes, I've read the synopsis).

I'm not sure there is a conclusion to this chronicle of my reading progress in 2009 and plans for 2010, but here are two observations. First, e-book readers, which some understandably decry for the loss of the special feel and smell of paper books, can actually help you read more, simply because of their convenience. I can carry a large number of books at one time, switch from one to another, keep my place in each book, look up a rare word in the Oxford dictionary on the fly, all within a small box about as long and wide, and half as thick, as a regular book. Secondly, there is a lot of literature out there that can be had for free (only on an e-book reader), and it is often the best literature ever written. As for modern books, they do cost some money, but much less that a hardcover book, often less than even a paperback, and they download in about thirty seconds. So even though I still like to browse in bookstores, this is at least an additional option to get back in touch with the power of words, expertly manipulated by the best writers in the world, dead or alive.

Mathematics and Computation

I have a whole list of things I want to do over the holidays, but I finally managed to put together something that had been bugging me for a while, which is an "illustration and defense" of recursive programming, at least as long as it is done intelligently by considering the mathematical properties of the problem being solved.

The issue itself is not new, nor is my solution to its traditional example, the Fibonacci series. But I have attempted to create a clear, end-to-end explanation of the whole issue and its resolution, which I did not find elsewhere.

To do this, I experimented (as far as I am concerned, at least) with the knol format. Knols are Google's answer to Wikipedia -- a collection of elements of knowledge that are published by specific authors, and kept under their guardianship, rather than being a collective article where the individual contributions tend to get lost, and a team of editors may need to police the contributions.

I am not taking sides in the knol-vs.-Wikipedia debate here, let alone in the higher level discussion about "wisdom of experts" vs. "wisdom of crowds." Enough ink has been used on this, including by myself in a past Cutter Consortium e-update entitled "Control vs. Collaboration: Web 2.0 Meets Knowledge Management." But I wanted to see what it was like to author a knol, and I am rather impressed with the functionality of the application. In terms of ease of use, it's not unlike Blogger, as a matter of fact, but the knol editor offers additional functionality, such as an equation editor, which I really needed for this particular paper.

Which leads me to the second thing I had to practice, namely LaTeX, the mathematical typesetting language derived from my Stanford mentor Don Knuth's TeX language. I've used LaTeX several times in my life, most recently to compose equations in Schlumberger's internal Wikipedia. The equation editor for knols uses LaTeX too, so I had to relearn some features in order to display the equations I needed for my article.

And finally, I really wanted to program the various algorithms and run them, both to measure the time they took to execute in order to illustrate my points about performance, and also for the sheer fun of programming. I suppose that the use of "fun" and "programming" in the same sentence makes me a certifiable geek after all. So I quickly taught myself Python, which is not very hard when you have used several other languages, and installed a Python interpreter on my laptop. While I have only scratched the surface of what Python can do (I have not used its most complex data structures, or its object-oriented features) I am rather impressed by the elegance of the language. The almost austere syntax (no semicolons everywhere, no braces all over like in C, no "begin/end" pairs like in Pascal) seems to actually decrease the chances of making errors: even though I wrote extremely small programs for the Fibonacci calculations, each of them was correct on the first try, which was unbelievable given that I had not programmed, even as an amateur, in over 20 years.

Another reason I like Python is that it implements an idea that Bertrand Meyer and I had when we wrote our French textbook on programming methods over 30 years ago. In the book, we used an invented algorithm description language, which was a sort of Algol or Pascal in which we indicated blocks of code through indentation. To clarify the levels of indentation, we drew vertical lines to the left of each indented block of code instead of using keywords like "begin ... end" or curly braces (my friend Tahar tells me that when he was learning computer science in Algiers, just a few years ago, his professor used our textbook and was very adamant about the use of these vertical lines in students' homework). So it was refreshingly familiar to me to discover that Python also uses indentation meaningfully, to convey the structure of the program, thus getting rid of other forms of block delimiters.

So, knol + LaTeX + Python = the finished product, which I just published tonight, and which you can find here. Let me know what you think, if you are so inclined.

Religious Tolerance on the Runway

Dear American Airlines,

I would like to commend the flight attendant who announced "Welcome to Los Angeles and Happy Holidays" when our full plane, flight 427 from Austin, landed at LAX tonight. It's nice that a professional service person in the U.S. recognizes that we live in a multi-cultural, multi-confessional society.

And to the loud lady in seat 6B, accompanying a girls soccer team, apart from the fact that you should definitely find a better hairdresser or stop pretending you're blonde, because yours is a color not found in nature, listen up: I heard your nasty comment about "Happy Holidays" vs. "Merry Christmas." I also heard that, when your companion in 6A asked you what you had said, you didn't have the guts to explain yourself, but just muttered "oh, nothing." Look, you cowardly bigot: last time I read the Constitution, the First Amendment included the so-called anti-establishment clause. In other words, your religion doesn't legally have standing above others, or above the absence thereof. This plane probably contained Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians (or people like you who pretend to be Christians), and at least one atheist (that would be the guy in 6F, me). The American Airlines flight attendant welcome respected them all by wishing "happy holidays." Your ignorant comment did not.

You should be a role model to the teenage girls you accompanied. Instead, you're a disgrace to your own country's Founding Fathers.

There.

Now I Know Why...

No, I haven't discovered why the world exists, or why people have been waging war through times immemorial. What I have discovered (and this is tongue-in-cheek, because I certainly don't believe in this sort of predisposition stuff) is why I have always been fascinated by... telephone area codes.

November 10, 1951, which is the day I was born, was also the day when the mayor of Englewood, New Jersey, sat down in front of cameras and officials from AT&T and made the first user-dialed long distance area code in the U.S. (and I presume in the world) by dialing the 10 digits, starting with area code 415, for the mayor's office in Alameda, California.

Area codes had been designed in 1947, but for the first six years they were only used by long-distance operators to route the calls on behalf of the customers. This removed the need to connect to several intermediate operators (as many as 5) in order to build the entire route for the call. Instead, they could directly reach the recipient's local operator through numbers prefixed with one of 86 three-digit area codes.

The original area codes all had the pattern [2-9][0-1][1-9] for reasons that are best explained in the Wikipedia article on area codes. In recent years, after running out of area codes, the middle digit was allowed to be other than 0 or 1. But weird people like me had memorized quite a number of the old area codes: if you told me "212, 213, 214, 215" I might answer "New York, Los Angeles, Dallas, Philadelphia." To this day, this serves me as a mnemonic aid to remember my hotel room when I travel (without looking at the little envelope containing the plastic key): since most rooms in the U.S. have a three-digit number, and there are not often more than 20 rooms on a floor in a medium-size hotel, room numbers often match one of the old area codes. So if I am in room 404, I remember that I'm in the "Atlanta room," etc. It works very well (but again, I did say that I am weird).

Why did I finally discover this weird coincidence about my birthdate? I received a submission for a technical paper from someone whose phone number is in area code 416, and because this is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., I immediately suspected that this might be a Canadian area code (the original North America Numbering Plan, or NANP, covered the U.S. and Canada). I checked it, and found that it is indeed an area code for Toronto. But the Google search also returned the Wikipedia page, and the two-line summary in the results page showed the date of November 10, 1951, which caught my eye.

Nice coincidence!

Happy Birthday, They Said...

So I have been silent on this wavelength for almost six months -- May 16 to November 10. While there is no contract between you and me about the frequency of the "frog musings" publication, I want to explain a few things.

The day before my last post, I had retired from my company after 26 years of (often hard) work for them. I needed some time to adapt to this radical change, but I never got a chance: three days after that last post, my husband started drinking again, after more than eleven years of sobriety, following a slow decline started in late 2008 and brought on by increasing pain from fibromyalgia.

The end of May and early June were a succession of shocks related to all this. He went to a treatment center in Atlanta, only to leave against medical advice within days. He went to another place -- and left. And on June 21, while drunk, he attempted suicide (and threatened to hurt me at one point) until I literally came to the point of subduing him physically with one hand while calling the police with the other hand to get him taken into protective custody.

Fast-forward to yesterday, November 10, glossing over a number of episodes of relapse, aborted treatments, various horrible scenes, etc., which largely account for my silence... and finally he checked himself, very reluctantly, into a world-renowned clinic in Houston that treats severe depression, including when associated with substance abuse.

It turns out that yesterday was also my birthday. Spending part of your birthday getting your partner into a medical facility isn't a great plan. But it was also, given the previous six months, the best present I could get from him -- even if he was essentially kicking and screaming all the way.

While I was waiting during his intake processing, I caught bits and pieces of a meeting the current patients were having, in which they took turns saying what was their "high for the day." It's a classical way to get people to focus on the positive instead of the negative. I completely failed to apply this to me then, but now I can see the point, and I can say this:

• So far, 44 people have wished me a happy birthday through Facebook, text messages, and phone calls (thanks, Sean and Jeffrey!). How lucky can one be?
• I was invited to go to the trivia game at a downtown pub with a group of people I know. They knew it was my birthday, they thought (incorrectly) I would have better things to do, I didn't, I showed up, and one of them (thanks, Sean No. 2!) bought my drinks and food. You guys are so freaking great!

So yes, it was a crummy birthday, but it was also a good day. It had all the elements for me to complain about things, or to decide that when handed lemons, I could make a lemonade. And in some modest way, I did.

Who knows what will happen next? I have no clue and I have suffered too much to be naively optimistic, but regardless, I am grateful for my friends' presence and support. I'll keep everyone posted. I hope it doesn't take another six months.

Turning a (Big) Page

These are the notes I had prepared for my retirement party on May 14. In the end, because the room configuration and noise didn't seem to lend themselves to a formal speech, I left the printed copy in my pocket and gave a somewhat less formal version of it, still touching on almost all the same points.

Hello.

It’s a pleasure to see so many friends and colleagues here tonight – actually, some friends who became colleagues, many colleagues who became friends, and even some colleagues who remained friends after working for me, working with me, or tolerating my working for them for so long.

It is rumored that we have a Travel Ban right now. Well, I can tell you, based on the number of people who bailed out from this event in the last week, saying that they had to be at the other end of the world tonight, that either we don’t really have a travel ban… or they didn’t like me as much as I thought.

I really want to thank Susan Rosenbaum for putting together this event for me tonight. What would we do without Susan? Well, for one thing, the people in Sugar Land within a 100-foot, no, make that 100-meter, radius of her laughter would be more productive. But she’s been wonderful to work with, and for, and I can’t say enough good things about having the privilege to have her as my last manager in Schlumberger.

A lot of people seemed shocked when I announced that I was going to be leaving. Some of that was the courtesy of pretending that they believed that I am younger than passport states I am. So to set the record straight, I am 57, I am only 8 months short of the famous 85 pension points, and I was already thinking of taking early retirement in a couple of years.

And then I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and the fortune cookie read: “A golden handshake is better than a kick in the butt with a steel-toed boot.” I took that home and thought about it. And then Personnel called. Actually, I just made up the whole Chinese dinner thing. But the idea is still pretty much the same.

After these pleasantries, I do want to say a few things that maybe, just maybe, you’ll take home and think about.

I’ve had an interesting career in Schlumberger. One of the most interesting aspects is that I only wrote two resignation letters in my life. This shows that I must have a high tolerance for pain, but other than that, wait for the twist on that story. The first resignation letter was in 1977, I had worked for Sema for 2½ years as a slav… er, as a software contractor. I resigned to join Schlumberger in Clamart, to write what was, in fact, our very first interpretation program based on the concept of inversion. Yep, 1977.

But in 1987, while I was a research lab manager at Fairchild in Palo Alto, I was “sold with the furniture” to National Semiconductor when we decided that we didn’t know how to run a semiconductor company after all.

So in 1993, after 6 years at National, I resigned for the second and last time in my life… to join Schlumberger again – in this case, the Automatic Test Equipment division in San Jose.

So in fact, I only resigned twice… and both times it was to join Schlumberger. I can tell you that when I have had a chance to tell this to students during recruiting trips (yes, there was a time when we recruited), it impressed the heck out of them, although I was never sure whether it gave them a high opinion of Schlumberger or a low opinion of me.

Well, I’ve learned a few things over those “ten plus sixteen” years of work for Schlumberger. To illustrate them, I will tell you of three “big” things I am proud of having done. But I want to start by telling you about two things I’ve clearly failed at, in part because it’s better to start with the failures and finish with the successes.

First, IT and software are not given the regard they should have given their criticality to Schlumberger’s business. We’ve had that discussion on and on and on… but it hasn’t converged to where I think it should have. And now, we don’t even have a CIO anymore, and our new VP of IT doesn’t report to the CEO. I’m an IT Advisor, so this is in part my failure. It doesn’t help to consider that many other companies are in the same situation. It is still not what Schlumberger should be doing, but I can’t say “Schlumberger” like it’s a third-person pronoun, and “they” did it (well, on Saturday I will have earned the right to say “they” but not tonight). I have been part of IT in Schlumberger, and the improvement in the standing of IT that we had with Saad Bargach and then Sophie Zurquiyah has been reversed, and I regret that.

Secondly, I went to Paal Kibsgaard in December 2006 and explained to him that diversity cannot be sliced and diced, and we needed to look at the way the company treated all the employees who might face unequal treatment – not just on the basis of race and gender, on which we had a significant track record, but also on the basis of sexual orientation. Paal was interested and receptive, I opened his eyes to a number of issues, and he asked Jim Andrews, the Diversity Manager, to work with me on this aspect. The discussion took a while to start, then proceeded at a rather glacial pace. A few changes were made, in particular with respect to health care benefits for same-sex partners in the U.S., and with respect to relocation of domestic partners, whether straight or gay. But several other aspects have seen no progress. Two years later, Jim changed jobs and I had to restart the whole process with Mike Skibicki, who had very little background on these issues… and as you know, a few months later, we don’t have a Diversity Manager any more. I’m pretty sure I could have tried harder to convince the right people, and it upsets me that companies like Shell rate near the top of the Human Right Campaign’s scale of how companies treat their LGBT employees, and Schlumberger rates near the bottom.

I’ve told you about those two failures because I’m still a little naïve, and I think that some of you in this room can pick up the baton and carry on, especially with respect to an issue like the role of IT in Schlumberger.

And also, regarding the second story, because I want to impress on you that we’re not just technical or managerial beings, we’re also social and emotional beings, and it’s OK to bring that aspect to the workplace in order to improve the workplace. It took me a very long time to make up my mind that I could ask for a meeting with the VP of Human Resources, rainbow-colored slides in hand (I’m not kidding you), look him in the eye and say, “I’ve asked for your time because as a Schlumberger employee and a gay man, there is something I need to discuss with you about how Schlumberger handles, or rather does not handle, the issues we face.” But when I did, and notwithstanding the ensuing inertia, there was no problem per se with my doing so. So you shouldn’t abandon any important part of who you are when you walk into the office.

Now, I’ll tell you about the three successes I think are most significant over these 26 years.

First, in 1983, after I had formed the “Information Systems” research lab for Measurement & Systems in Montrouge, I plotted with two other rather undisciplined guys, Arnold Smith at Drilling and Production Services, based in Cambridge, England, and Claude Barbe, who ran the computer center for Wireline in Clamart, to connect our fledgling networks together and make a larger, interconnected, Schlumberger-wide network. There is a long story about the sneaky ways we did this, involving a dusted-off PDP-11/34 (think of a 100 kHz processor and you’ll get the picture – your microwave oven probably has a faster CPU) that ran a non-routing version of DECnet, which we connected to both the Wireline network and the non-Wireline one in order to overcome the security objections raised by Wireline. But I’ll fast-forward to the point when management got scared. Not about security, but about the cost of this thing we were building. So “they” took it over – there is another long story about this, for another evening – and as a result SINet was born, a professionally managed and planned company-wide utility.

The second story is that in mid-2000, after attracting me to Houston to start an IT Innovation Lab (which ended up not being funded), Xavier Flinois, who ran Omnes, the networking joint venture with Cable & Wireless, told me “there is this thing called Eureka, you must run the IT community.” My first reaction was, “what is Eureka?” and my second one was, “you’re not named to this position, you have to be elected.” Well, by September 2003, when I finally decided not to run again, we had built up that community from 650 members to 4,500. And of course it was a collective effort with Laurent Etur, Mohammed Rupawalla, Christophe Causer, Catherine Mifsud, all the other SIG leaders, and support from Henry Edmundson, Anh Kuhn de Chizelle, Gordon Shudofsky, and Susan in her role as Global Métier Manager.

The third story brings us to the end of 2006, when some vague discussions about Web 2.0 suddenly gelled into the concept of SPEEDIA. Here, the co-inventors are Sally Boyd, Fred Hugand, Louis-Pierre Guillaume, and the one who then really made it happen was Laurent Butré. As you know, two years later, we have 20,000 articles including 1,900 abbreviations, and 3,300 people have contributed at one point or another by adding or editing at least one article.

If there are any lessons to derive from this, for me they would be these:

1. You have to challenge the status quo. Our secret network connections between groups were not authorized, but once they became a fait accompli, they caused SINet to be invented. Some of you know some of the naysaying that accompanied the growth of Eureka, or the notion of a collaborative encyclopedia. In each case, there was a crucial moment when we decided to ignore the negativity and forge ahead.
2. Communicating and sharing knowledge has been a constant theme for me. And I hope it is for you too. To know how much energy it is worth expending on a project, always consider the communication and knowledge sharing impact.
3. It’s good to work with people you like, and to like the people you work with. It makes your day easier. So try to get yourself in that position.
   

By the way, in case you were wondering, since you’re here, it means that you all are people I liked to work with!

So finally, what am I going to do now? When Danièle Cuzin retired a few months ago, she proudly explained that she wasn’t looking to doing anything specific in the short term, other than arts and leisure. I’m not as good or sane as she is. My plan is to follow the well-trodden path of becoming a consultant, still in the areas of IT and KM, and trust me, I will keep you posted about what I do.

Thanks for tolerating me for 26 years, 2 months, 13 days… and the last fifteen minutes. Please stay in touch, and right now enjoy yourself.

Soldiers' Mass

I went to the Houston Ballet tonight, and as has often been the case, this is nudging me to post about it. The three pieces were programmed in the right order, going from the more classical ("The Leaves are Fading" by Antony Tudor) to the most contemporary, "Soldiers' Mass" by Jiří Kylián, on music by Bohuslav Martinů. The middle piece, "The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude," choreographed by William Forsythe on Schubert Ninth Symphony, was a nice transition piece, the most recently premiered of all three, yet not as modern as Soldiers' Mass, and in comparison just a nice little academic exercise.

Instead of writing my own review of Soldiers' Mass, though, I found this one written after the first New York City performance by the Nederlands Dans Theater (a year after the premiere in Scheveningen, Netherlands), and it is so good that I can only bow in deference to Anna Kisselgoff (The New York Times, 7 July 1981), and quote:

In some respects, "Soldiers' Mass" might recall Antony Tudor's "Echoing of Trumpets," a great antiwar ballet to another Martinu score, "Fantasies Symphoniques." That ballet, however, was inspired by the German massacre of Czech civilians at Lidice in World War II, an event that also spurred a Martinu work.

Like Antony Tudor, to whom he dedicates another ballet this season, Mr. Kylian is an expressionist and a romantic. He is, like Mr. Tudor, interested in the weighted gesture, the broad, abstracted emotion. He is not a step-oriented choreographer.

In "Soldiers' Mass," known otherwise as the "Field Mass," he is not concerned with civilians but with very human fears and youngsters called to duty, conscripts. His approach is generalized, and in this faceless mass of 12 men, the individual's predicament surges all the more poignantly.

The men, dressed in stylized khaki outfits, are seen in a typical Kylian pose, with their backs to us. Just as typically, they will tend to move in a mass. One of the glories of Kylian choreography at its peak is its choral sweep. And here the actual male chorus in the pit, conducted by David Porcelijn with Bernard Kruysen as the touching baritone soloist, is at one with the dancers onstage.

The images are not all unfamiliar -- men cringe and fall. They die multiple deaths, and their mutual consolation and isolated fears are all clear. When one small figure -- Chris Jensen -- breaks out for a solo, the picture of wasted youth becomes embodied in the very energy he displays and that we know will die out. There are also stereotyped movements, using Martha Graham's floorwork. But there are also sensational theatrical moments. At one point, the dancers sing, as the condemned, along with the chorus. Another time, they rip of their shirts. Mr. Kylian's horizon decor, which disappears and reappears, is just as dramatic. In the end, the cross and the firing squad become one: A ballet that moves the mind and the heart.

She said it all -- the passion, the humanity, the tragedy, the stupidity of war. It was beautiful and moving. I believe that the solo piece mentioned above was the one danced by principal dancer Connor Walsh tonight -- a dancer I have (app)lauded in this blog before (see the entry for 23 February 2008, about Swan Song). And yes, the venerable New York Times spelled "Kylian" and "Martinu" without the diacriticals on the "a" and "u". Shame on them.