Frog Musings

An Evening at the Opera

2011-11-06T01:15:00.001-05:00

Well, this wasn't the Met or la Scala, but the Austin Lyric Opera. I went to their production of The Magic Flute (one of only three operas they will give this season, the other two being Lucia di Lammermoor and Turandot) at the Long Center in Austin, expecting to be entertained, if not awed by the quality of the performances, and I was pleasantly surprised. This seemed to me to be a solid production, although perhaps one that was more faithful to the playfulness that this work often displays that to the profound philosophical ideas and the actual drama that play in parallel with the facetiousness.

Most of the singers were quite good. An advantage of a younger troupe, without major stars, is that it's nice to have a Pamina (Hanan Alattar) who doesn't look like she should be singing a Walkyrie instead, and a Tamino (Arthur Espiritu) whom said Pamina can credibly fall in love with.

I realize that The Magic Flute is partially a moral tale, and partially a comedy, and so one may take oneself too seriously by critiquing some absence of gravitas at the right moments, but that's what I felt was missing most.

Sarastro was sung by James Moellenhoff, who according to the program hails from Germany and therefore had a very clear diction of the German words, although all the singers did very well with their pronunciation. He was perhaps the most compelling singer, with a forceful bass and an imposing stage presence, aided by the props and the costumes appropriate for his regal character. By contrast, the Queen of the Night (Juliet Petrus) was a little thin-voiced. She was not the looming and ominous presence you expect, and her hair and makeup didn't help -- more commedia dell'arte than it should have been. The opera only gives her two real chances to shine, and her first aria was not convincing. Der Hölle Rache was good, but still did not reach the piercing vengeful screams that the situation calls for. Her third appearance is very brief (the failed attack on the temple) and the staging made this scene appear rushed, giving her no chance to make a last impression.

Papageno was very well done... perhaps more compelling as the comic character than Tamino was as the chivalrous hero, an impression consistent with my earlier comment about lack of gravitas. Another instance of this came after Pamina's suicide attempt. The three spirits have just told her that she will see Tamino again, and that he loves her, and he is going to face death during his initiation rites in order to conquer her. At that point, Pamina and the three spirits act on stage as if she had only heard the first part of the sentence. They sing and dance and jostle each other, Pamina seems positively giddy when you would expect a more complex mix of hope and fear for the well-being of her beloved.

The decor was very sparse -- a series of connected platforms and a set of vertical moving panels bathed in a vague pastel lighting. This was alright for most of the opera, but fell through toward the end. After you have seen at least once how Bergman simulated the walks through fire and water in his superb cinematic rendition (1975), anything that doesn't trick your senses into imagining these elements is disappointing. Here, the gestures made by the priests in their robes to simulate fire or water, and the lack of depth of the stage didn't even imply that the protagonists were being tested in any way. Surely some light or screen effects could have helped save these scenes. Similarly, the Queen's attack and defeat gave no sense of drama.

The supertitles had multiple problems. On the positive side, you can see them even from the first row of the Michael and Susan Dell Hall. Of course you have to look way up, but you can read them. I've heard that this is not the case everywhere. But the timing was off at a couple of incongruous moments. At the end of Pamina's despair aria, the title switched prematurely to the first sentence of the following scene between Tamino and the priests, so it read "O Isis and Osiris, what joy!" while Pamina was still singing of her broken heart. At another point, the titles were too late. And during Papageno's count to his own (half-hearted) suicide attempt, the famous "zwei... zwei und halb... zwei und drei Viertel... drei" was not translated at all. The oddest supertitle moment came earlier, just after Papageno has subdued Monostatos and his slaves thanks to his magical glockenspiel. I still can't decide if the double entendre was intentional or accidental, but some in the audience did chuckle when they read above the stage: "If all men had such bells..."

Speaking about translation, the opera was sung in German but the dialogs were spoken in English. I'm sure this was helpful to the audience, and it wasn't dramatically jarring (except during the first spoken scene, between Papageno and Tamino, when it surprised and distracted me for a while), but I think I still would have preferred everything to be in German.

In spite of the relative length I gave to the negatives, this was a thoroughly enjoyable performance -- several very solid singers, good staging, a good musical performance, and a great sense of timing in the more comic moments. The fact that the ALO seemed more competent, in this work, during the lighthearted moments than the serious ones will be tested during the other two operas of their season, where comic relief isn't exactly called for.

Stanford Engineering Hero Lecture: Don Knuth

2011-05-14T01:33:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, Stanford Prof. emeritus Don Knuth gave one of the "lectures" in the series devoted by Stanford to their "Engineering Heroes." Jim Plummer, Dean of the School of Engineering, rattled off the names of the eight initial Engineering Heroes so quickly that I had to find them later here. They are William Durand, a pioneer in aerodynamics; Fred Terman, who is credited with fostering the emergence of Silicon Valley; Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard; Charles Litton, one of their associates and vacuum tube developer; Ray Dolby, whom we all associate with noise reduction in sound reproduction; Vint Cerf, one of the "fathers of the Internet"; and Don Knuth.

Like Cerf, Knuth was one of my professors at Stanford, and I am deeply indebted to his teaching. He is as close to a Renaissance man as you can get these days: a mathematician and computer scientist who pioneered the analysis of algorithm performance, but also invented many key algorithms for data manipulation; an accomplished player of multiple musical instruments, especially the organ; the developer of the T_EX typesetting language (a derivative, L_AT_EX, is still used today to typeset mathematical texts, including on Wikipedia and Blogger); the author of the famous series of textbooks called "The Art of Computer Programming," which he has promised finishing soon... since Vol. 3 appeared in 1973; and someone who, in the middle of all that, took time off his scientific pursuits to study religious texts.

Knuth used to devote the last lecture of his courses at Stanford to fielding questions from his students. True to form, he decided that his "Engineering Hero lecture" would not be a talk, but a Q&A session. He fielded questions from the packed auditorium on campus, as well as from the Internet audience who were following the event in real time. Dan Boneh, a cryptography expert who teaches at Stanford, was the moderator.

Below are my notes, providing a potentially biased summary of the session. I took the time to research links so that the reader can understand what mathematical or computational problems are mentioned in Knuth's answers. It should be noted that Knuth is often facetious, and will not bother giving a serious or complete answer to a question if he can get away by making a quip about it. He also tends to get off on a tangent frequently, and doesn't always return to the point. You can almost imagine the thoughts colliding in his head faster than he can express them -- nothing much has changed in this respect since I sat in his CS155 course, "Analysis of Algorithms," in 1973.

Q: If you wanted to give an interesting open problem of mathematics or computer science to a smart new student, what would it be?

A: One of the biggest open problems, of course, is P vs. NP. But really, this question is like asking a parent which of their children they love most. (Knuth searched for a specific problem in his own book, fumbled a bit, and gave up).

Q: In the 1790s, the French tried to introduce a decimal time system. How would a computer scientist design a time system?

A: Well, a decimal system could be very convenient, for example you could have birthdays more often.

Q: A lof of computer science students today don't know who you are. Do you think that's really bad?

A: I find it tragic when people don't know who Martin Gardner, who died about a year ago, was. He did a lot to illustrate mathematics in a really interesting way. For me, the important thing is not that they remember me, but that they remember the things I put in my books, and don't reinvent the same things over again.

Q: You developed T_EX when computers were slow and user interfaces were not WYSIWYG. How would you do things differently today?

A: Actually, I wanted to design something that could capture texts in an archival format, something that would endure through technology changes. So I was never interested in changing it to track the evolution of technologies.

Q: I learned Pascal, then C, C++, and Java. After 25 years, I still think it is hard to write software, debug it, etc. Why, and do you think we'll finally some day overcome this?

A: I put a lot of ideas about this in my book "Literate Programming." I think the key is to write programs so that they can be easily understood by humans. But there is no silver bullet. Some techniques will make things better, but programming will still be hard.

Q: What is your opinion of quantum computing? If it ends up working, will it change the notion we have of algorithms?

A: Quite possibly. Quantum computers make some things we consider very hard today much easier. So if this works, I might be able to finish my books much faster.

Q: Your Web site has Frequently Asked Questions, but also Infrequently Asked Questions. Do you know why those questions are infrequently asked?

A: I am not an activist, but I think people should be talking more about some important issues like those. And my points must not have been made strongly enough, because I didn't get any hate mail.
[Note: I think that it may simply be that this page is hidden away and has not been mentioned enough. I just discovered it myself as a result of this question.]

Q: Can you talk about some mistakes you've made?

A: I once wrote a paper about the mistakes I made in T_EX, and there were over 1000. One of them is that I based T_EX on binary units internally, but decimal units externally (in what the user can see). The rounding error that results when someone specifies, for example, a space of 0.1 points, can cause some anomalies to happen.

Q: If you were starting as a Ph.D. student today, what area would you go into?

A: I'd probably be most attracted by computer graphics, because I like to use my left and my right brains at the same time.

Q: Do you think we will ever create real artificial intelligence?

A: I am not sure, and if it happens, we may not know it. But regardless of the result, aiming for that goal has been one of the most fruitful generators of ideas and of useful computer science problems.

Q: What are the biggest bottlenecks against improving the quality of life?

A: The eighth and latest volume of my collected papers ("Selected Papers on Fun and Games") is the "dessert issue" -- things I couldn't think of leaving out. I mention this because quality of life is about building a bridge to the other side of the river so we can cross it and go have fun on the other side. But I really don't enjoy the kind of ranking we tend to do, like "what is the most this, what's the best that?"

Q: What is your general approach about solving a tough problem?

A: One of the biggest problems I solved, with several other people, was the "giant component problem" in graph theory. When you randomly connect vertices in a set, the largest connected subgraphs stay small for a while, and then there's this sort of big bang explosion of the size of the largest component. We had to invent a way to look at the time steps in this process differently so we could see what was happening in slow motion, so to speak.
I tend to train my brain to understand the domain of the problem by taking baby steps during the first weeks.

Q: What do you think about open-access (freely downloadable) texts and journals vs. traditional commercial publications?

A: I like to do control quality myself on my work, but I'm also now thinking of doing e-books. I'm in favor of open-access journals because I don't like it when commercial publishers make money from the free work of the authors and reviewers.

Q: Do you prefer analyzing a problem or solving it?

A: If I can solve it, I certainly feel an adrenaline rush when I succeed. But I can sometimes find the journey more interesting than the destination.

Q: A long time ago, you had said that computer science did not have enough hard scientific results to really qualify as a science. Are we there yet?

A: Yes, we must have passed that point 25 years ago. What happened is someone told me that a science needed to have 500 theorems or more to really be a science. I replied "or 500 interesting algorithms." We've had that many for a while now.

Q: When you write your programs, what language do you use?"

I use CWEB. I write about 5 programs a week, mostly pretty small ones, and that's what I use.

Busy Week-End: "The Magic Flute" and "Ann"

2011-05-08T23:51:00.000-05:00

In a rare coincidence, I had found some time ago two attractive performing arts events on this week-end's Austin calendar, and I decided to attend both.

"The Magic Flute" is a ballet by Stephen Mills, based on a compressed version of Mozart's opera. In fact, the score was written specifically for this piece, cutting the length in half and incorporating some of the sung parts into the orchestral suite. This was rather well done — the Queen of the Night's famous airs, for instance, were "sung" rather well by a trumpet.

I wish I could be as positive about the staging and the choreography. Mr. Mills, who spoke with the audience after the performance, said he was inspired to use shadows projected on a backdrop by something he saw at the Biennale in Venice a few years ago. The idea is okay... but leaves you to imagine what he could have done, for example, if Tamino and the dragon had danced their fight, instead of the lame shadow dragon we saw instead. Or if the water and the fire, through which Tamino and Pamina have to pass as their final induction rites, had been dancers in appropriately colored costumes, evoking flames and waves. There were tons of creative ideas that were just reduced to nothing through the limited and repetitive gimmick of this screen projection.

During his interaction with the audience, which he kept disappointingly short, Mr. Mills said that he "wanted to depart from the Egyptian and Masonic settings imagined by Mozart." I didn't think he got away from it at all, and indeed how could he? The story itself, even without any representation of a temple, implies a search for truth and purification, and a set of rites of passage, that clearly represent the Masonic traditions more than those of a traditional church. This is reinforced by the costumes chosen for Sarastro and his priests. As for the Egyptian references, they are, in most productions of the Flute, already limited to the minimum demanded by the libretto ("O Isis und Osiris," etc.) and since this production is voiceless, there wasn't much else to avoid.

But in fact my main criticism of the piece was that the costumes were overdone and did not serve the dancers or the work itself well. Schikaneder's libretto says that Papageno is dressed in the plumage of birds. That's fine for an opera, where the key artistic exploits are going to be first and foremost the singing, and then the music and the acting. In fact, a "busy" costume like Papageno's will be very good if the singer, instead of being a thin young man, is a bit older and corpulent. But this is dance. We're supposed to be fascinated by the movement of human bodies (none of which is going to be old or fat), not by the movement of layers of feathers!

In fact, I was reminded of Trey McIntyre's Peter Pan, created in 2004 for the Houston Ballet, in which I had also found that there was too much emphasis on complicated costumes. Note to choreographers: we are in the 21st century, and your predecessors started showing off the human body, with the minimum amount of costume needed to create visual harmony (and pass whatever decency standard seems currently applicable). There are lots of ways to suggest that Papageno is a birdcatcher, Tamino a prince (and the dragon a dragon, if there had been a tangible one) without covering them in things that hide their movements.

When Mr. Mills explained how the ballet came about, it was clear that he had spent months identifying and working with the people who could create the backdrop shadow effects, and he only started on the ballet five weeks before the first performance. This speaks a lot to the skills of the dancers, but unfortunately it doesn't say much about the choreographer, and I'm afraid it showed in the results. It was entertaining, it felt like a good family evening that would amuse the kids a lot, the orchestra and the score did an excellent job of reminding the people who know the work of all its superb musical moments... but this work seriously needs to be redone by someone in the tradition of the great choreographers of the last decades... a Stephen Morris, for example, or a Paul Taylor.

The next evening, I went to see "Ann," subtitled "An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards," a monologue written and played by Holland Taylor, a mostly TV and screen actress (Two and a Half Men, The Truman Show, etc.). At two and a half hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission, this one-woman show is quite a tour de force. Taylor has the accent, the mannerisms, and renders the often acerbic humor of the Governor. She had access to a lot of friends and colleagues of her subject, which gave her tons of materials to work with in order to tell the life, the challenges, the victories, and ultimately the gracious defeats (to two versions of hell: George W. Bush, and cancer) that marked her remarkable life.

The play was actually performed in several other Texas locations before hitting Austin for five sold-out performances in the last few days. It will be heading north later this year — it runs for three weeks in Chicago from Nov. 13 to Dec. 4. If it happens to be playing near you — and I assume that it will be back in Texas some time next year, unless if moves to Broadway or off-Broadway and stays there — don't miss it!

Humor and Dance in the Capital

2011-03-26T19:39:00.000-05:00

Washington, D.C., is well-known as a place where important people dance around issues, and sometimes unintentionally provide humor, but this post is about real dance and subtle humor, as seen in a performance of the Paul Taylor Dance Company at the Kennedy Center on Thursday.

All three pieces on tap that night were relatively recent productions (2009-2010) of the prolific choreographer himself. Brief Encounters, the first piece, was notable from the start by its fluidity of movement. The minimalist, stark black costumes (tight-fitting briefs for both sexes, plus bras for the women) and the often bright lighting combined to emphasize the movement and the individual bodies. Some of the frequent visual jokes in Mr. Taylor’s oeuvre were already noticeable, as well as some of the sexual ambiguity he often introduces.

Three Dubious Memories went one step further (so to speak) in that direction. In it, a love triangle is seen in turn from the perspective of each of the three participants. In each of the first three “memories” in question, a couple is lovingly minding its own business when a jealous third intrudes. A fight ensues. The contrast between the three recollections creates humor in itself: the Man in Blue remembers finding the Woman in Red and the Man in Green together, whereupon he beats up Green, and takes Red away. Laughter ensues when the second scene unfolds, and one realizes that Green remembers that he found Blue and Red together, beat up Blue, and took the girl. The third permutation brings an uncommon symmetry, as Red comes up on the two men frolicking together, goes from shock to anger, slaps them both and stomps away. The rest of the company forms a sort of Greek chorus that punctuates the storytelling. I can’t tell if it was the explicit allusion to a same-sex relationship that scared away the two ladies seated next to me, but they didn’t return after the second intermission.

The final piece, Also Playing, was a joyous romp made up of 15 short vaudeville acts danced with a faked incompetence that was sometimes reminiscent of the Trockadero Ballet. Of course, pretending to dance badly takes great mastery, even if the audience may have been laughing too hard most of the time to notice.

2011-02-20T20:04:00.000-06:00

Stanford Leading Matters (the end): Lecture on Stem Cells

Please read the Preamble of the previous post to understand the context of this article. As always, I encourage comments and responses. Remember that you can find and listen to the actual lecture on Stanford on iTunes.

"Stem Cells and the Promise of New Cancer Therapies" by Dr. Henry Weissman

A stem cell has a unique property, which is that when it divides, one of the two resulting cells is also a stem cell. Dr. Weissman took pains, at this point and several times later in his lecture, to debunk the myth that a stem cell can produce any tissue. He said that there are several types of stem cells (blood-forming, bone-forming, muscle-forming, etc.) and that they are not interchangeable at all.

Blood-forming stem cells can be obtained in three ways:

from the bone marrow
from "mobilized blood": you can give someone a drug that flushes stem cells into the bloodstream for just a few hours; during that time you can collect as many stem cells as you would normally get from as many as 100 bone marrow taps.
from umbilical cord blood — but again, people who propose "cures" derived from this source for all sorts of ailments are charlatans.

California has a law (Prop. 71, adopted in 2005) that allows a university to perform clinical trials of treatments that a company might not want to fund. This is what the Stem Cell Research Center at Stanford does.

The speaker described the potential to help fight blood-related and brain-related diseases with stem cells. However, there is a complex interaction between graft rejection mechanisms and stem-cell transplants. You need to circumvent the rejection mechanism to successfully implant foreign stem cells into a person.

Moving to the importance of this research for cancer, Weissman said that when a chemotherapy drug kills ordinary tumor cells but not the tumor stem cells (TSCs), the cancer will regenerate. Leukemia cells carry a CD47 protein that serves as a "don't eat me" signal to macrophages that would otherwise eliminate them. Therefore, antibodies targeted at CD47 seem promising, but so far experiments have only been conducted in the form of xenografts from humans to mice. In those experiments, the antibodies have arrested the development of the cancer cells transplanted into the mice.

In conclusion, Dr. Weissman pointed out that this research has a lot of implications because of the passionate opinions for or against the use of fetal stem cells. He did not shy from the controversy.

An audience member asked about potential solutions that could come from transplants from mice to humans. Dr. Weissman said that unfortunately, mice have about 150 viruses they live with, but which could potentially cause leukemia in humans. There are current efforts to raise virus-free pigs, because their hearts are about the same size as human hearts, so they would be suitable for transplants.

In answer to another question, the speaker said that his research center is performing clinical trials in the UK because patients are covered by a single national health insurance system. In the U.S., he would have to negotiate about the coverage with a number of private insurance companies, and after some of them deny coverage, the remaining sample population for the trials would be small.

Feel free to comment on these last three posts — either about the subject matter or about the usefulness of these notes.

Stanford Leading Matters, continued: Lecture on Innovation

2011-02-20T18:54:00.001-06:00

Please read the Preamble of the previous post to understand the context of this article. As always, I encourage comments and responses. Remember that you can find and listen to the actual lecture on Stanford on iTunes.

"Harnessing Collective Wisdom" by Hayagreeva Rao, Professor of Organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

"Darwin's ideas of variations and selection apply to how the C-suite handles innovation."

Key questions about innovation in an enterprise: how do we encourage ideas without creating clutter? And how do we select some ideas, therefore kill some of them, without discouraging people from continuing to submit?

A study by McKinsey found that the way many companies measure innovation is flawed. Metrics and measures and useless without a good system of idea generation, which requires creative people and a positive climate, which in turn is created by good leadership.

In most companies, when you ask people what hinders innovation, you get two very different answers depending whom you ask:

people at the top think that there aren't enough ideas generated by people below
people in the trenches say that it is the top echelons of the company that act as a bottleneck

There needs to be a climate of confidence, trust and fun, enabling people to share their ideas and to try new things.

A good predictor of an organization's ability to innovate is how it handles failure. You have to:

reward people for trying hard enough that they will fail a certain percentage of the time;
make sure that failures are recognized quickly and that projects are stopped when they have failed, freeing resources to pursue others.

Peter Kim, head of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., used to tell people: "if you kill a project, I will give you stock options." At another company, the CEO frequently visits employees and hands them a business card, the back of which looks like a Monopoly "Get out of jail" card. Then he says: "Try something new! If it fails, give your boss this card, and I promise you won't get in trouble." At Amazon, Jeff Bezos gives a monthly award to an employee who did, without asking for permission, something that improved customer satisfaction.

Rite Solutions, a Rhode Island company, has created an internal stock market for ideas, called "Mutual Fun" (a pun on "mutual fund"). This virtual stock market trades cost reduction ideas ("savings bonds"), mildly aggressive ideas ("Bow Jones") and far-out innovations ("SPAZDAQ"). Once this market determines what are the most popular ideas, actual funds are allocated to them. Ideas are never killed by a corporate review board -- they are by the community when the corresponding shares don't sell. This approach also circumvents a common flaw of management review processes: senior managers tend to mostly empathize with people who are a lot like them.

At the end of his talk, Rao was asked about Open Innovation. He said that one size doesn't fit all. "You may not use the same incentives or the same rules with different actors."

Stanford Lecture on Energy

2011-02-20T17:58:00.000-06:00

Preamble

In the last six months, I attended two instances of a series of events entitled "Stanford Leading Matters." This is a touring half-day conference that is going through 28 cities, mostly in the U.S. but with some foreign locations too. The purpose is to re-acquaint university alumni with the challenges that Stanford University is addressing. Of course, as a by-product of this goodwill, the university hopes to successfully appeal to their generosity and raise more money for the "Stanford Challenge," a $10 billion fundraiser.

Leading Matters was a rather stellar production, complete with making the meeting hall look like a scale model of the university's inner quad — sandstone arches and all. At every stop, Stanford University President John Hennessy spoke of the university's vision, which is no less than helping solve the world's toughest challenges; incredibly gifted and involved students provided their views in a panel moderated by Hennessy; professors gave lectures on important issues in today's world; and very good food could be sampled.

The 28th and last stop on this tour will be in Portland, Ore., at the end of May 2011. Because I was at a conference in Boston the week immediately preceding the Leading Matters event there, in late September 2010, I added a day to my trip and went. There were about 550 Stanford alumni, spouses and sometimes their college-bound children in attendance. Then, when Leading Matters stopped in Houston a month ago in January, I went again — in part because the faculty lectures and the student panel involved different people each time, therefore it wasn't a complete repetition.

What I am proposing to do in three successive blog posts is to give a summary of the lectures I personally attended (they can all be found and downloaded for free at "Stanford on iTunes" but some readers will appreciate a more personal touch).

Fixing the Energy System — Why Is It So Hard?" by Prof. James Sweeney

Sweeney is the Director of the Precourt Energy Efficiency Center at Stanford, thus named because it was founded thanks to a $30 million donation by Jay Precourt.

He stated that there are three drivers for a public energy policy:

Global climate change
National security
Economics

Concerning the first one, the world releases about 30 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year. To address CO₂ emissions, we should focus on three things:

"decarbonizing" the generation of electricity
reducing the use of oil in transportation
improving how we use electricity

"Energy efficiency" means the economically efficient improvement of energy use — i.e., something that we can be willing to do not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it will save money.

The possible improvements in the production or use of energy fall into several categories, in terms of their feasibility:

those for which technology advances are needed
those for which the technology exists but is currently too expensive
those that require new regulations
those against which there are no obstacles, other than our behavioral inertia

Why are some of the energy cost reduction opportunities not being pursued? Sweeney gave several examples:

Owners or rental property have no incentive to make improvements, for example in insulation: they cost money, but do not allow them to charge more in rent.
Consumers are not receiving enough information to understand their electricity usage; for example, a cable TV decoder/DVR box uses 45W when it is on, and almost the same when it is off.

The Google Power Meter is a free energy monitoring tool for households. It checks your pattern of electricity consumption, and reports the results a day later. However, apart from the fact that either your utility company must be part of the program (and only a few companies are), or you must install a monitoring device otherwise, Sweeney said that this tool "requires too much analysis by people, and feedback should be more immediate" if we are to obtain real changes in consumer behavior.

Electric utility companies, of course, do not have incentives to reduce consumption. Usually it is the opposite (although he should have mentioned that an increase in peak consumption may cost a utility more than they can recover, because they may need to bring online their most inefficient plants, the one they would otherwise keep shut off, in order to meet the demand). Instead, we should find ways to decouple volume from profit, which California has done through regulation and financial incentives.

For businesses, there should be software packages for energy use management, just like there is to manage and optimize other company resources (people, equipment, etc.). "What you don't measure, you can't manage."

After the speaker ended his talk, someone in the audience, who worked at the Department of Energy for ten years, suggested that there is a rift between blue (Democrat-leaning) and red (Republican-leaning) states: people in red states are opposed to energy management measures because these sound anti-business. Sweeney replied that he did not see this issue as a clear-cut Democrat-vs.-Republican attitude, but he also admitted that as a Republican he could be biased about it.

Men and Near-Men of the Year

2010-12-19T22:20:00.000-06:00

Wow... nothing posted since May 27. It would seem that my life got super-exciting since then and took me away from the keyboard. In fact, all that happened was that I was quite busy with consulting work from August to early November, and that we got a puppy in July. Other that that, it's the usual reason: procrastination. And perhaps a lack of something really exciting or infuriating to write about.

I received the TIME Magazine "Person of the Year" edition (and yes, I wrote "Men" in this post's title because I'm only going to talk about men here) and I was thinking of the meaning of some of the choices.

I've already heard the Luddites say that it was preposterous to bestow such a high honor on Mark Zuckerberg, but I think the point is that regardless of his actual personal qualities or limitations (disclosure: I have not seen The Social Network) the phenomenon that he and his company created is of great importance. I consult and write professionally about the importance of social media in the enterprise, and about the fact that companies that try to create an internal social network fail to realize that their employees want to be connected to a mix of colleagues and non-colleagues. Since Facebook and LinkedIn are the primary places that meet this need, they will not become faithful to an internal-only site. My latest paper on this, "If You Build It, They Won't Come" will be published by the Cutter Consortium after the turn of the year.

Now don't take me wrong: I'm interested in this enough that next time I walk by Antonio's Nut House, which is a couple of blocks from where I lived in Palo Alto in 1985-88 and 1993-2000, I may drop in to see if Mr. Zuckerberg is there (he may have to change his unofficial headquarters now that TIME has disclosed this habit), because I would absolutely not mind an autograph. It would be a change from my usual ballet dancers and violinists... OK, violinist. But Facebook (and LinkedIn) are now much bigger phenomena than any boy genius, and will probably not depend on their respective founders to continue (the usual counter-example to this is Stevc Jobs, of course).

The Chilean miners, los trenta y tres, almost made it. Some of them were truly heroic, others were well inspired to follow their leaders' advice. They are important not so much as 33 individual men, but because it showed how a country and the victims could take charge of a rescue operation that some thought was doomed from the start. The "Heckuva job, Brownie" exclamation was a gross sign of incompetence at all levels in the U.S. in 2005. Next time there is a Katrina-like catastrophe in this country, I hope we ask some of these miners, and perhaps the President of Chile and his cabinet, to come here and coordinate the rescue, since they know a thing or two about actually succeeding at a rescue.

And now, the man whose near-designation may be controversial, but who deserves some discussion: Julian Assange. Once again, here is a person who seems to have some deep flaws, and who is alleged to be a repeat sex offender; but regardless of his personality, he is the visible face of a movement to expose diplomatic secrets. I am quite perturbed, frankly, by the attitude of governments and banks toward the Wikileaks organization and even toward Assange himself. First, it has not been proven that Wikileaks participants procured any information illegally. The people who gave them the information may have violated their terms of employment by various governments, so go after them if you have legal standing, but don't blame the messenger.

Secondly, I find the diplomatic niceties tiresome. We all know that foreign dignitaries, be it Karzai, Merkel, or Sarkozy, are not angels. I find it refreshing to hear about the incompetence of the first, the imperiousness of the second, and the vanity of the third. Instead of suing someone for revealing this, the U.S. diplomats should say "oops" and move on, and the big shots who have been described in unflattering terms should look at what they can do to govern more competently or more humbly.

Thirdly, and the TIME article on Assange points it clearly, the financial institutions clearly acquiesced to apply punitive measures to Wikileaks as soon as Ms. Clinton's organization cleared its powerful throat. Paypal suspended processing payments because of "illegal activity" even though it is an allegation that has not been proven. Visa and Mastercard stopped too, even though they still let the Ku Klux Klan have accounts with them. And a Swiss bank has frozen Mr. Assange's account because he is not a permanent resident of Switzerland -- a rule they constantly overlook in other cases. This is just spineless capitulation and, until and unless an actual illegal action has been proven, a sad day for freedom of speech.

Even the fact that he was arrested in London just after the outcry from the U.S. government seems rather suspicious. I can imagine the debates at Scotland Yard: "if we arrest him now, we'll be called lackeys of the U.S. If we don't arrest him, we may be derelict in our duty. Oh, what to do, what to do? Here's an idea: let's arrest him and then free him up on bail. Let's see how this plays out."

So this Person of the Year issue is more interesting than the usual crop. I was especially glad that the designation didn't go to some Tea Party politician, because I doubt that we will remember them much in a few years, and it would have been another U.S.-centric story. Instead, in all the cases I mentioned (Zuckerberg, the miners, and Assange) we have people whose actions have inspired or disturbed the entire world, and who evoke in us some fundamental values that are not only American: connectedness, the love of life, and the right to know what our governments would like to hide.

Another Houston Ballet evening

2010-05-27T23:02:00.001-05:00

Woohoo, I got another autographed program cover. Ian Casady (at left) danced the role of Pecos Bill in Pecos by Stanton Welch, and I got him to sign the program bearing his photograph in that role. I say "role" because the piece was more theatrical than anything else, an impression Ian agreed with.

That piece closed a program that started with Ballo della Regina by Balanchine, which pleased one of my companions, since she learned classical ballet for eight years, but was too old-fashioned for me. And as fun as Pecos Bill was, I far preferred the middle part of the program, Sandpaper Ballet, a very abstract piece by Mark Morris, set to Leroy Anderson's music, including such whimsical pieces as Sleigh Ride, the Typewriter, and others.

A Volcano and a Goat

2010-05-22T11:46:00.000-05:00

I flew to Paris almost two weeks ago. My plane left Houston five and a half hours late, and arrived in Paris seven hours late. The cause of course, was the Eyjafjallajökull volcano, whose name I can't resist writing since I can spell it without looking it up anymore.

Yesterday morning, I took a train from Paris to Poitiers, where I changed to another train from Poitiers to Angoulême, in order to have lunch with an ex-colleague of mine. The second train, which was coming from Brussels, arrived five minutes late in Poitiers, but then stopped for 20 minutes in the middle of nowhere and arrived in Angoulême 27 minutes late. No, there wasn't an ash cloud along the track: the train ahead of us had hit a goat that was standing on the tracks. Goat against TGV: no contest here. Still, it's probably a good thing that the trains on that section go at about 125 mph (200 kph), not their usual 185 mph (300 kph).

When I was told about the reason for the train delay, I found it rather funny that while a mighty volcano can cause thousands of flights to be canceled and 200,000 passengers to be stranded for days, a humble goat, in the wrong place at the wrong time, can create a smaller commotion, delaying over 1,000 people (between the two trains, assuming it didn't cause an even worse ripple effect) by half an hour.

Newsworthiness or Prejudice?

2010-03-31T15:36:00.000-05:00

I posted a first version of this article last week in French. After the situation evolved, and considering my international readers (yes, all two of you), here is an updated version in English.

When I received the e-mail notifying me of the publication of the newsletter of the French Consulate in Houston, Le Trait d'Union (the title means "The Hyphen," but the French phrase evokes the sense of "connection" better than the English word, and therefore implies that it is a means to connect the local French community), I was surprised that one of its articles was entitled Portrait of Annise Parker, First Homosexual Woman in the Houston City Hall.

Upon reading the content, it was clear that while it stated her history, competence, and summed up her campaign, the newly elected mayor's sexual orientation was indeed a key aspect for the author. The article was certainly positive in its tone, but I tended to dismiss this as rather insignificant, because how else was an official publication of a foreign government going to talk about the mayor of its host city anyway? But the tabloid title rubbed me the wrong way.

I then discovered that the newsletter contained no link to respond to the editor, which made me feel like the Consulate only cared about one-way communication, a very "regal" French way of doing things (the French actually use the word régalien to refer to things that authorities do in a way that is reminiscent of the omnipotent kings).

So I composed my very critical (surprise!) response to the Consulate as an open letter, which I posted here and was reflected in my Facebook status. A local French friend saw this, and sent me the contact information for the Consulate's press service, to which I sent the same message in an e-mail. I very quickly got an e-mail back from an official, containing a personal response from the Consul General, Mr. Grandjouan, and I had a nice phone discussion with the gentleman who had relayed the response.

The gist of the reply was that many publications has focused on the new mayor's orientation; that she was very open about being a lesbian; and that it was important to mention this because people tend to have a false image of all Texans as very conservative people. Therefore, the argument went, the article was trying to point out how positive and progressive her election was.

While I acknowledge that there was probably no actual prejudice at work here, and I appreciate the communication effort and the personal attention the Consul gave to my criticism, I still think that the focus on "first gay woman in City Hall" in the title was inappropriate. It would have been fine to talk in the article about the "conservatism" issue. For example, the writer could have written that Ms. Parker has long served the local community as an openly gay woman, that her sexual orientation was not an issue in the campaign (until a last-minute desperate maneuver by her opponent), and that her victory demonstrates that Houstonians are not as socially conservative as people tend to depict Texans in general. This would have been fine in the body of the piece — but you can't claim that something is a non-issue... then try to grab the reader's attention by making it an issue worthy of the headline.

It is also a little ironic that a French publication refers to the sexuality of the Houston mayor in a headline in 2010, given that in 2001 Paris elected a mayor whose homosexuality was public knowledge since 1998. It almost sounded like the author of the article on Ms. Parker had not heard of Mr. Delanoë.

More generally, this reminded me of the general debate about invisibility vs. recognition in the LGBT community. Some people might point out that we are in general trying to be recognized for our presence, contributions, and need of equality. But equality precisely implies that our sexual orientation should not be newsworthy — it is its still-rampant denial that should be.

Of course, what is and should be much more important to the French representatives in Houston, and was completely omitted from the article, is this: in the current climate of a still lingering recession, what will the new mayor do to control its impact on her city? And incidentally, how can the strong French community in Houston, including all the French who work in the Oil & Gas industry, be involved in a mutually beneficial manner in the economic workings of this city?

Apollo, Hush, and Fancy Free

2010-03-19T23:01:00.001-05:00

After a bit of a dry spell, I went to the Houston Ballet tonight and saw three good pieces. And since the season's Playbill has Connor Walsh on the cover, about whom I wrote before ("Arts and Politics, part II" on February 23, 2008, and "Icing on the Cake" on November 7 of the same year), I came back with a little prize besides having seen a great performance:

All three pieces had the common quality of combining great choreographers with great musicians. Apollo is by George Balanchine, on music by Stravinsky. However, composed in 1928, this is both relatively early Stravinsky and very early Balanchine. Interestingly, this means the score is more classical — not sense-jarring and almost cacophonous like the Rite of Spring — while the choreography is more modern than what Balanchine became known for later, even though it is based on Greek mythology. At least I was positively surprised.

Hush is by Christopher Bruce, who also choreographed Swang Song, the piece danced by Mr. Walsh that I commented on in my post two years ago. The dancing, while inventive, did not strike me as particularly extraordinary, but the accompaniment by Bobby McFerrin and Yo-Yo Ma, with McFerrin's amazing ability to make his voice sounds like various sorts of musical instruments, added an extra dimension.

Fancy Free is a fascinating piece, not only because of its inherent qualities, but because it was premiered in 1944, and one might have almost found it sacrilegious to feature sailors on leave while WW II was still going on. But the other interesting aspect is that while it is a very traditional "boys chase girls" story, the guys try to win the girls by demonstrating their not-very-macho footsteps, there are gestures that hint at the traditional semi-funny, semi-homophobic jokes that guys can make about each other... and then both the music and the dance were composed by two of the biggest closet queens in New York's so-very-gay artistic world, Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein!

I got my autograph in the Wortham Center's Green Room after the performance, and had time to chat a little with Mr. Walsh. I complimented him on giving a very complex dimension to his character in Fancy Free: especially during the duo dance with one of the girls, his sailor had at times the cocksure attitude you would expect of a slightly drunk sailor on leave in New York; at times, the hesitancy and shyness of a corn-fed boy who doesn't know what to do in a new world; and finally, a big grin on his face that says "I can't believe what's happening to me!" He said, in different words, that there was indeed a conscious attempt to layer several personality aspects onto the character, and he seemed genuinely pleased to be told that it had come across successfully.

Unholy Mix

2010-03-13T23:33:00.000-06:00

A few months ago, I joined a LinkedIn group of small business owners in the "Houston Bay Area" — which means the area between Houston and Galveston, including places like Pearland, Clearlake, and the rest of the area around NASA's Johnson Space Center. I'm not based in that specific suburbia, but it's only a 25-mile drive from my Houston location to NASA, which depending on the time of the day can take between 30 minutes and infinity. As a fledgling independent consultant with existing connections in Houston, I figured the networking could be useful.

The group leader soon started organizing in-person meetings at a Mexican cantina near NASA. After missing the first opportunities, I went to a happy hour in January. My initial impressions were cautiously favorable: while many people were in unrelated fields (construction, real estate, insurance) there were a few members doing IT work. They were not directly competing with me, so there seemed to be good cross-selling opportunities. There were also contract personnel agencies, and while they typically deal with clerical and accounting positions, I thought they might occasionally need to find a part-time IT expert for a client, which I could do for a few days, even if it was "filler work" at a lower rate than usual. Business cards were exchanged, and I went to a second time for a luncheon meeting in February. I volunteered to give a not-too-geeky talk about IT trends at the March 11 lunch, a proposal which was accepted with very positive feedback.

About a week before my talk, as I was putting the finishing touches to my presentation, I got e-mails telling me that a couple of new posts had been added to the group's discussion board. I went to the site, and discovered a message from a pastor, asking the rest of us something about how we would answer God if he met us at the "pearly gates" and asked us some question I have now forgotten. The second post, by the group's manager, Mary Sullivan, was to re-emphasize the pastor's message and tell us to re-read it and think about it. And then there was a third message, by another member who said that yes, he had re-read the question, and would still be able to answer God in the affirmative.

At that point, I wrote a polite but a bit "challenging" message, saying that while I respected everyone's beliefs, this discussion had nothing to do with the purpose of the group, and that it should be taken offline. I remarked that I was aware that some Christians tend to assume, in this very religious country, that everyone else is one too, and that it is okay to mix religion and work. However, I pursued, this is not okay because people from other religions, or with no religion at all, would feel discriminated against, and at any rate this was the "Houston Bay Area LinkedIn Group," not the "Houston Bay Area Christian LinkedIn Group."

At this point, Mary Sullivan replied that she wasn't going to change the direction of the group (which she did not restate, which was convenient since she would have been hard pressed to find any mention of a religious focus or assumption in the group's mission statement). She stated that my remarks indicated that I was intolerant of Christians. She informed me that she had asked the pastor who has posted the initial note to open the next meetings with a prayer; and that, since she did not want me to feel "uncomfortable" at that point, she had already secured an alternate speaker to replace me on March 11.

I sent a quick reply, where I remained polite but pointed out her hypocrisy (she had cancelled my talk, so who was being intolerant of whom?) and immediately thereafter I left the LinkedIn group, as it seemed the most appropriate course of action to avoid further confrontation and move on to more productive things.

As far as I am concerned, the incident is closed. I actually hope their group falters because I think it is a disservice to its members to have hijacked it for a hidden religious agenda. It was dishonest to create the group and invite people in the first place without clearing stating the assumption that members were Christians who wanted to discuss their business in the context of their faith (or vice versa). It may seem mean-spirited to wish them failure, but my point is that the sooner the group makes itself irrelevant, which may or may not happen given that this is Texas after all, another group can be formed to fill the void — one that will be unrelated to the practice of any specific religion and will serve its stated business networking purposes directly and honestly. If such a group gets formed at some point, I am certainly interested in joining it.

Oh, and my slides on "IT Trends" are ready, and will remain current for a little while!

I have an amazing friend

2010-03-10T16:59:00.000-06:00

Well, okay, before you all explode in recriminations, I have lots of amazing friends.

But today I want to talk about one of them specifically. We are both on the board of Stanford Pride, and he is a third-year medical student at Columbia University in New York. His name is Bryan McColgan.

Bryan finds the time, even on days when he spent many hours in the pediatrics department or in the emergency room, to share his life as a medical student, and the important things he is learning, with anyone who cares. He does this on Twitter (his feed) a few times each day, and he also has a video log on Blogspot (here).

I'm almost addicted to his tweets, because they make me realize how complicated medicine is, how intimately connected it is to our society and civilization (e.g., his posts about how parents who look up symptoms on the Internet bring their children to the emergency room convinced that they have an extra rare serious disease, or the way overweight teenagers are victimized by their peers instead of getting encouragement), but also because on a personal basis I am discovering that Bryan is an exceptional individual.

He spent several months in Zimbabwe a couple of years ago, and has developed a deep appreciation and compassion for the plight of people who suffer from bad health care, malnutrition, and a criminally negligent, incompetent and/or corrupt government. And he so much wants to help, that I'm sure he'd go back to Africa in a heartbeat when he finishes his studies... except for the slight problem that he will be at least a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt from the cost of his medical studies. When you watch his videos and read his tweets, you really feel the goodness of this guy coming at you through the screen, and the next minute you're laughing when he tells you how cool it is when urologists blast kidney stones with lasers as if they were zapping aliens in a video game!

Anyway, instead of me continuing, you just need to do yourself a favor and read his tweets or watch his video clips. I guarantee you'll learn something, and one of them will be how immensely talented and generous some people can be.

Speechful People

2010-02-11T19:20:00.000-06:00

I went to see Tim Miller perform his monologue "Lay of the Land" at the Vortex Theatre in Austin on January 29. After the performance, I bought him a glass of red wine, to make sure he would recognize me, since that was my excuse to introduce myself last time he had performed here, and was a prelude to a faithful-if-distant Facebook acquaintance with him.

Tim was of course surrounded by admirers, but he kept introducing me to them as "my friend Claude" so that gave me an excuse to hang around for a while. Two of the people who were talking to him, Melissa and Kile ("legally it's Kyle, but in life I spell it Kile, it's my one act of rebellion," he told a judge at the tournament I will talk about later), are part of the UT Speech program, which is not in the Drama department as one might suspect, but in the Communications department. Kile talked about work done with high-school students, for which Tim's monologues were one of the sources, which I found fascinating given how much "in your face" Tim's work can be.

So I asked Kile and Melissa more about the UT Speech program, because I really had no idea what this whole subculture is (since then, I've mentioned this to a couple of people, who both said "oh yes, I used to do this when I was in college"). They said that there is a whole schedule of contests between colleges in different cities, and that in the fall in particular, they are at some event in Houston almost every week-end. They advised me to look at the program's Web site. I then e-mailed the team's director, Randy Cox, to ask if there was a schedule of upcoming events. He said the season was essentially over, but that there was a contest at Texas A&M during the week-end of February 6-7. Since I was planning to drive from Austin to Houston on the 7^th anyway, I decided to make a detour through College Station and see what this was all about.

I ended up attending two of the finals, and was fascinated by this world that was unknown to me until then. The one thing I still do not understand is why these speech tournaments take place in basement rooms and are not made into public events, which might attract donations and at least publicity.

Imagine a bunch of college kids (mostly young men, although there were a few women, and there was some good diversity in terms of ethnic origins), wearing suits and ties, carrying small vinyl binders the size of a book. This makes the men at least look like preachers! The little black book contains the script or story from which they perform, although they have almost totally memorized their texts, so they only refer to the book on rare occasions to jog their memory, or use its opening and closing for dramatic effect. At least this is what they do during the "prose" events, which are basically readings of short texts (composed from key passages of longer works) with some interpretive acting thrown in, and the "duo interpretation" events, in which a couple, usually a mixed-gender one, blends multiple texts into a story they act together.

I often listen to Public Radio International's Selected Shorts while driving between Austin and Houston. During this captivating program, great actors read short stories on stage. The college speech contest was better in several ways: first, I could see the students in front of me, a few feet away; second, they put a lot more passion and dramatization in their reading that is done in a program like Selected Shorts; and third, this was as good as going to a performance at a playhouse... but free.

The typical way these interpretive readings are done follows a specific routine: the performer (or performers, in the case of the Duo event) read a first paragraph of the story, setting the stage and whetting the viewer's appetite. Then they close their book rather ostentatiously, implying that they are now departing from the text, and give a short introduction to the work and its meaning; they conclude that part by stating the title and author. Then they re-open their book (mostly for effect, to indicate that they are going back to the text) and resume where they left off after the interest-provoking opening.

There are other types of events -- one is about persuasive speaking (convincing the listener of a point), another about talking about a subject with minimal preparation, another about giving an entertaining after-dinner talk.

I took some notes about the six stories that were competing in the Prose finals. Today, I used those notes to research the authors and titles of the works (I found four out of six -- thank you Google) because I hate to mention works of art without attribution. I hope these terse notes will give an idea of the depth and variety of the contestants' sources. A common point is that these are texts that carry a lot of emotional weight, a lot of passion, and this allows the performer to express himself of herself very strongly -- again, contrasting with a "normal" reading.

Nathan: in Brian de Leeuw's novel "In This Way I Was Saved," a boy develops a complicated, controlling, and ultimately insane relationship with another boy, and several years later, in college, kills his friend rather than losing control over him.

Brendan: in Joe Meno's "The Boy Detective Fails," Billy tries to make sense of his sister's suicide, the one case he is not able to solve, but ends up in psychiatric care, unable to cope with the reality.

Kyle/Kile: a man literally gives up his right arm for his girlfriend -- a metaphor about commitment, sacrifice and resentment. Creepy but very effectively performed.

Amanda: in Laura van den Berg's story "Where We Must Be," Jane, a failed actress and mother of Jimmy who will soon die from a lethal disease, takes (and then loses) a job impersonating Bigfoot at a local amusement part, providing a comical counterpoint to a poignant story.

Colin: Richard McCann's essay "The Resurrectionist" explores the complicated feelings someone has toward the donor of the liver he received as a transplant.

Jeremy: after his mother dies, a man sorts the contents of her attic and finds nude photos of her that his father had (unsuccessfully) submitted to Playboy Magazine for their centerfold.

Most of the duo interpretation texts had something to do with exposing prejudices, racial or ethnic. This again gave the students an opportunity to do some great acting around the texts they had chosen. The audience often laughed... and then paused when the next sentences in the text made us realize that perhaps we had laughed at something that should have made us upset, or laughed because of a preconceived idea we had about people from a certain background.

Overall, this was eye-opening... and a good incentive to find out more such events in the future and attend them.

The Planets

2010-01-25T19:52:00.000-06:00

Saturday is named after Saturn, the greek Chronos, the god of time. That's the day (two days ago) when I went to see the performance of Gustav Holst's The Planets at the Houston Symphony, which promised a movie montage of high-definition pictures from space telescopes, projected above the orchestra, to illustrate the subject matter.

For a while, I didn't think I was going to make it. After consulting with my newly-moved-to-Houston friends David and Brenda to gauge their interest, I called to get three tickets, expecting that it would be fairly easy as usual, and was told that there were only single obstructed-view tickets left for all three remaining performances. So we gave up on the idea of going together on Sunday, but by Saturday evening I resolved to try my old Boston trick. I dusted off my cardboard sign that reads "Looking to Buy ONE Ticket," the one that got me into multiple performances at the ICA on the waterfront there, and went to Jones Hall.

I should have known it was my lucky day when I managed to parallel-park in a space between two cars that was, I swear (I measured it) 4" (10 cm) longer than my car. Of course, strictly speaking, that's pretty impossible. But not to an ex-Paris driver, and not considering the elasticity of car bumpers and of tires: you can (gently) touch the car behind, push a little, then move forward, touch the car ahead, push a little... and pretty soon you're in. Still, you have to get exactly the right angle, and the planets must have been with me.

The very nice usher at Jones Hall told me, within a minute of my taking position in front of the entrance, that there was no way she could let me stand there with my sign. But she said not to worry, she was sure she could do something for me. And sure enough, ten minutes later, she had secured a ticket that someone turned in because someone in their party couldn't come, and she gave it to me! So not only did I get a seat, but it was free. And I even had time left to munch on the tiny overpriced cheese-and-fruit plate sold by the Jones Hall concessionaire. The seat was at the rightmost end of an orchestra row, and the view was in fact slightly obstructed by the underside of the boxes, but barely -- just a little sliver missing at the top of the projection screen, and an excellent view of the stage.

The concert started with the Scherzo fantastique by Stravinsky, whom I tolerate reasonably well. It was followed by Timbres, espace, mouvement (la nuit étoilée) by Dutilleux, and that was much harder for me. But the Holst suite made it up. It was only the second time I heard the entire suite (classical radio stations usually just play the most famous movement, the fourth one, Jupiter - Bringer of Jollity), the first time also being live. I was wondering whether the projection of the film would add to or detract from the musical experience, and I am satisfied that it was an excellent addition. Duncan Copp's movie, using NASA footage from various interplanetary probes as well as CGI, is visually stunning. That is also got the Symphony to give several sold-out performances is very comforting, given how difficult it usually is for classical orchestras to balance their budget and to attract a younger-than-70 audience.

And my car didn't have any more scratches when I retrieved it than it had before — it just took another dozen or so back-and-forth maneuvers to extract it from its parking spot.

Addiction: Conflict Between Brain Circuits

2010-01-22T21:15:00.000-06:00

This was the title of a lecture given today at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) in Galveston. I heard about on National Public Radio a few weeks ago, made a note to visit the Web site, registered and drove down from Houston to Galveston today to attend. In case you don't know why I have such a keen interest in the science of addiction, my November 10, 2009 post will explain it.

Dr. Nora Volkow, the speaker is the Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), which is part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Quoting from her biography:

"Dr. Volkow's work has been instrumental in demonstrating that drug addiction is a disease of the human brain. As a research psychiatrist and scientist, Dr. Volkow pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the toxic effects of drugs and their addictive properties. Her studies have documented changes in the dopamine system affecting the actions of frontal brain regions involved with motivation, drive, and pleasure and the decline of brain dopamine function with age."

Of course, I couldn't resist taking some notes. This is just a sampling of all the interesting things that were said.

After someone takes either food or amphetamines, you can see the same increase if dopamine in the nucleus accumbens. But drugs don't have the same satiating effects as food.
Experiments can be conducted on humans using methylphenidate, which mimics the effects of cocaine. It also blocks the re-uptake of dopamine, causing the receptors to be flooded with the stuff. The "high" effect can be reported by the subject, and happens only if the substance is administered intravenously; if it is taken orally, it gets into the brain much more slowly and you see no effect at all, even allowing for a much longer period of time. So the dynamic aspect of drug administration is key.
Different drugs have different clearance rates, and the "high" seems related to the rate of change of dopamine concentration, not to the absolute level. So if the level of dopamine goes up rapidly, then decays very slowly, the "high" does not persist, but starts dropping quickly as soon as the dopamine level has reached its maximum.
Her imaging techniques allow her to study the effects of drugs on separate brain functions located in different places: the executive function (decision-making); inhibitory control (which allows a non-alcoholic to decide not to have one more drink, but is evidently damaged in the alcoholic); motivation and drive; memory and learning.
Tests on animals who have been trained to push a lever to self-administer a drug have shown that causing the overexpression of dopamine D2 receptors causes the rats to lower their usage. As the substance injected to cause this overexpression wears off, over a period of 10 days or so, drug self-administration progressively returns to its previous level.
Changes in dopamine receptors in the striatum correlate with changes in glucose metabolism in specific other parts of the brain, such as the orbital frontal cortex, which are also the effects observed in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Another similarity between OCD and addiction is that when the reinforcement ceases (e.g., a lab rat is no longer given food when he is pressing the lever he had associated with this reward, or an addict no longer gets pleasure from his drug), he/it is still compulsively practicing the behavior.
In the non-addicted brain, the ability to control actions is decreased by disruptions, such as anger, that affect the prefrontal cortex. That's why, when you just heard that your flight is canceled, you're more likely to go ahead and have that chocolate chip cookie that you had resisted earlier.

Happy New Reading Year!

2009-12-31T23:32:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-20T22:21:00.000-06:00

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

2009-12-07T00:17:00.000-06:00

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...

2009-11-26T15:14:00.000-06:00

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...

2009-11-11T01:23:00.001-06:00

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

2009-05-16T23:35:00.000-05:00

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:

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.
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.
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

2009-03-12T22:46:00.001-05:00

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.

Great Men Theory

2008-11-07T23:43:00.001-06:00

A couple of weeks ago, TIME Magazine mentioned a survey on who was the greatest Russian leader. Of course, this was a survey run in Russia. You couldn't run such a survey in the U.S., where most people wouldn't be able to locate Russia on an unlabeled map of the world, let alone name one of their past leaders.

Reading the results, which are immaterial to my point, I tried to classify those leaders in my head. I came up with this: there are the feckless ones, the sinister ones, the dour managers, and the transformers. Arguably, the latter category included the Great Catherine, who brought Russia in contact with Europe and pulled it away from its Central Asia roots; Lenin, who upset the old order and ushered in the great and ultimately failed laboratory experiment of Communism; and Gorbachev, who closed that parenthesis. Note that I am not saying that their transformations were good or entirely successful: I am just saying that they were enormous, in some way "inspired," changes of direction. Whether Putin is just one of the "dour managers" à la Krushchev, or ranks among the sinister ones (Ivan the Terrible, Stalin) is yet to be seen, although it would be a stretch to compare his behavior to the degree of malevolence of those two.

After I had finished thinking of Russian leaders, I realized that it is a lot easier to start with another country, assuming one knows something about its history, than with one's own. For example, most French people learn about Napoleon in school in a very biased way. While he created a set of institutions and legal principles that endure to a large extent today, he arguably had a disastrous impact on all of Europe, not just France, through fifteen years of incessant wars. And to start with, he was basically a dictator who seized power in a coup, ostensibly because the previous governments were so dysfunctional that only a "providential man" with full powers could save the day. Which brings to mind the debate on whether Pétain, 140 years later, was a sinister or a feckless leader, a conscious ally of the fascists or a half-senile grandfather who was abused and manipulated by his ministers.

My model is too simple in many cases, for sure. If you look at U.S. leaders, what was Nixon? At home, he was sinister, but overseas, he was practically a transformer, considering that he ended the war in Vietnam and dealt constructively with China. For Bush No. 1 and Bush No. 2, the verdict of history will probably be one of double fecklessness, the second case being worse than the first because of the presence of some sinister puppetmasters named Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice. Now we shall see if Obama is a transformer. If his presidency is anything like the speech he gave the night of his election, there is a good chance of that.

A Perfect New England Day

2008-11-07T23:31:00.000-06:00

So many things have happened in the past six days, including the real beginning of the end of the Bush presidency, and the slap in the face we got in California with the success of the discriminatory Prop. 8, that I was in danger of glossing over what was a perfect day in Boston, last Saturday.

It was warm in the morning, I had breakfast at Crema Café in Harvard Square, then chatted with my other half for a long time, mostly about the election, while sitting on a brick ledge at the corner of Brattle and Eliot Streets. Being able to sit outside on Nov. 1 in Boston is a hit-or-miss proposition. It can still be Indian Summer, or it can be winter. Actually, two days earlier, it had been 36°F (2°C) in the morning. And now it was in the mid-sixties (18°C).

I went to the Symphony box office to buy a ticket for that night, then I walked over to my old haunt, Aquitaine on Tremont St., for brunch. I got the best table in the house — in the corner, in the back, facing the whole restaurant — and a very good server named Rebecca. And they had not run out of the pressed duck sandwich, my favorite brunch dish there.

After brunch, I walked through the Public Garden and the Boston Common to get on the T at Park Street. There were musicians everywhere, including an accordionist, a jazz duo that was rather incongruously made up of a young Asian couple, with the girl playing the trumpet and the guy playing the bass, and a lone saxophonist playing a little farther down.

I Don't Get Richard Strauss

2008-11-07T23:16:00.000-06:00

I went to the Boston Symphony last Saturday, Nov. 1. The first part of the program was Brahms' Violin Concerto, the second one was Richard Strauss' Symphonia domestica. I don't "get" Richard Strauss, except perhaps the famous and soaring Also sprach Zarathustra. I probably would nickname this piece the Cacophonia domestica, and that does not even take into account the gross narcissism of the whole thing, which is supposed to describe an entire day of the life of the Strauss family. If you want to describe "A Day in the Life..." of anything in music, give me the Pastoral Symphony anyday.

The program notes were very smartly written. About the Brahms concerto, they did not just focus on that piece, but contrasted it with the other great violin concertos (the Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Bruch — I have no idea why it omitted the Tchaikovsy). Some of the criticism made by others in the past, and reported in these notes, was rather shocking. For example, von Bülow said that other concertos were written for the violin, but Brahms had written his against it. And the reviewer contemptuously dismissed the Mendelssohn as an easy and gentle piece. I can't say anything about the ease aspect, but I have always found that concerto to be very moving, starting from the first bar (one of the earliest entrances of the solo instrument in the repertoire, I'm sure).

Rendez-Vous 2010

2008-11-07T23:09:00.000-06:00

After the success of California Proposition 8 on the ballot three days ago, which writes into the Constitution of California that same-sex couples are not allowed to marry, my friends and I seem to have been shellshocked for a couple of days — even though the polls had actually predicted that we would lose this fight.

We're finally emerging from this catatonic state, and some of us have been exchanging messages. I wrote this today to other Board members of Stanford Pride, and I don't think I could paraphrase it better again, so I'll just quote myself here (I know it sounds arrogant the way I just said it):

"We need to lick our wounds a bit, but I think that this accident teaches us a lesson: we need to be proactive, and not wake up a month before the election, suddenly realizing that the polls are against us, and do a rearguard fight in the last couple of weeks to come back.

This being said, we can all be immensely proud that we did come back from a 10% deficit in the polls a month ago, to only 4% (and perhaps less once all the ballots are counted) in the end. This is still a tremendous improvement over the 22% spread from elections on this topic years ago.

History is on our side. In 2010, there will be about 3% of the voters who are currently between 16 and 18 years of age. While they are not all on our side, I think it is clear that young people are much more liberal on social issues, and much more used to studying and living side by side with "out" LGBT people whom they wouldn't think of hurting on the basis of their sexuality. Conversely, 3% of last Tuesday's voters, out of the older age range, will have passed away, and while I don't wish anyone dead, this is how the electoral base shifts over time even if you don't convince anyone else to change their vote.

I really believe that if we organize better, and maintain the effort throughout the period from now to the next election, we can reverse this unfortunate vote. And if not in 2010, then surely in 2012 (but 2010 must be our immediate goal).

I also welcome the idea that Stanford Pride should play a bigger role. I wonder if we can meet with our counterparts at Berkeley, UCLA, etc… the larger universities in the state. I also notice that one of the first Facebook groups about "repealing Prop. 8 in 2010" was created by UC Davis students. An intercollegiate consortium could be very effective in terms of its outreach. Everyone in the state must be at most 2-3 degrees apart from an LGBT alums from one of these colleges. Well… perhaps not in the boondocks, but the people in the boonies are not really a very useful target audience for us. The primary audience are the people who are educated and intelligent enough to change their vote once we explain to them what's really at stake and that some of the things they were told are lies."

I don't yet know if we will succeed in our resolution to be activists about this. Two years is a long time to maintain a level of engagement such as that which may be required here. But we must try.

Icing on the Cake

2008-11-07T22:52:00.000-06:00

I'm just back from seeing Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal at the Wortham Center, home of the Houston Ballet. Interesting program with two resolutely contemporary pieces, Toot and Noces, the latter on the eponymous music by Stravinsky.

I enjoyed the program, but the icing on the cake was the chance encounter with Connor Walsh during intermission. Mr. Walsh is a principal dancer with the Houston Ballet, with whom I had a very interesting conversation after a very moving performance — see my "Art and Politics" entry dated February 23rd. While I was buying a snack at intermission tonight, I saw a man rush through the line to order a pasta dish and sit down with it at a table. I thought I recognized him and chose a table that gave me a chance to observe... and got convinced that it must be him. Dancers can of course be hard to recognize in their street clothes, without makeup, and in his case with the beginning of a beard. He was obviously totally wolfing down his food to make it before the end of intermission, so I didn't interrupt then, but I kept staring and got worried that he'd be offended, although I would assume that he get stared at a lot!

Finally, he shoved the last bite into his mouth, it was high time to go back to our seats, but I went over and asked him if he was Connor Walsh. He was very gracious, we chatted for a second, mostly so I could remind him of the performance of Swan Song I had liked so much, and off we went our separate ways. I felt a bit like a groupie. Artists in general humble me, and people like him who personify the union of art, beauty and grace (I know this is multiply redundant to some extent) are exceptional. When I shake their hands, I wish that some of those gifts would rub off a little on me.

The End of "Hamlet"

2008-10-20T21:48:00.000-05:00

At the end of "Hamlet," everyone dies. It would be a literal bloodbath if some of the deaths weren't by way of poison instead of the sword.

I thought of the Bard's most famous play a lot in the past month, as I have literally been assaulted by news of people's deaths. Almost always people who were to young to die -- not that there is ever a good age, but you know what I mean. Some whom I didn't know, some whom I knew well, and every degree in between. Too many. The kind of events that makes you alternate between sadness and a sense of revolt: "f!@#, s$%^, why is this going on?"

My self-centered view of this started on Sep. 23, as I was talking to a colleague at the cafeteria of our offices in Clamart, outside Paris. He told me that a man whom I had casually known as a colleague for 30 years had died the week before, after a sudden relapse of a cancer he had fought off several years earlier. And then, as I was absorbing this, he asked me if I knew about another ex-colleague, who had left a few years back, was apparently working from home in the countryside, and had died of another long illness six months ago. I had not seen this man in many years, contrary to the first one, but this means that I could vividly remember him as his young self -- not only that, but I can even still hear his distinctive, constantly ironic tone of voice!

The next morning, as I walked into another one of our office locations, this one in Montrouge, I was greeted by two colleagues. We said hello and then, almost immediately, the woman went on: "Have you heard about M...?" When sentences start like that, you know what's coming. M..., a woman ex-colleague who was 58, had had a sudden heart attack (uncommon for a woman at that age), remained in the hospital for a while, and then died. So by now, that was three people whose passing away I was learning about in two days.

Back in Houston the following week, someone who actually used to work for M... was visiting for a training course, and invited me to have dinner. That was a nice chance to reconnect, as I hadn't seen him in two or three years. The last time was in a really ugly traffic jam at the end of the M4 coming into London, when I dropped him at an intersection where he could get on the Tube and I could turn around and go back to the airport (where I still missed my flight). We weren't in a panicked rush this time, and we ate a leisurely dinner at Churrasco's, an Argentinian steakhouse (the one near the Beltway, not the one near Montrose, for your locals). And then D... said, "oh, and by the way, did you know A...?" I did. Last time I had seen A..., in 2003, he had driven up from Houston to Austin, where I lived then, to discuss a project we were both working on. We spent the afternoon working together, then I took him to the Oasis to have a drink and watch the sunset over Lake Travis. When he left to drive back to Houston, we hugged and said "okay, let's make sure we see each other soon again." But A... left the company, and I had no chance to really remain in touch. And then D... dropped the bombshell: A..., who I think D... said was 35 years old, had accidentally killed himself just recently.

Six days later, on October 8, the "care page" maintained by my friend C... for his wife since she started her fight against inflammatory breast cancer four years ago took an ominous turn. There had been bad incidents before, and she had always come through. This time, after fighting infection and respiratory failure for days on end, she had just "crashed." The day went by, and early the next morning there was an urgent update: I opened it reluctantly -- she had passed away in the evening, at the age of 37. I will be going to a memorial service this week-end...

15 days, 5 deaths -- ranging from a dear friend to estranged colleagues. The last one was of course the one that affected me the most, but in some way the other deaths compounded the sense that something unusual had happened and that mortality wasn't just a concept.

Finally (for now), last week, while I was in Orlando at a conference, I got an email from one of the Stanford alumni with whom I work on alumni matters: a car carrying three business school alumni, aged 23, 24 and 29, had fallen off the road on the Pacific Coast Highway as they were on their way to a reunion in Big Sur. All three were killed. I didn't know them -- only one was listed among the members of the group I help manage, and I had never met him. Apart from the obviously tragic aspect of this event, this coming after the other five deaths seemed to continue a dramatic and improbable series.

People die all the time, of course. But in our age it's not often, absent wars or epidemics at home, that you hear about the deaths of 8 people, with whom you have some sort of connection, within a three-week period. Our ancestors had a sense of fatality about this -- all it took was an exceptionally harsh winter for people to fall like dominoes. But that was over 200 years ago.

I'm coming up on six days without hearing about another death. It would sound callous to say "I hope this series has come to an end" because it would seem to place my own mental comfort over the tragedy of these deaths and the anguish of those who have lost loved ones. All I can do is reflect on our fragile status, and cherish even more all the friends I still have among the living.

Bristol Palin's College Applications

2008-10-04T18:46:00.000-05:00

Do you know why Bristol Palin is not planning to apply to the University of Southern California (USC)?

Because the campus newspaper is called the Daily Trojan.

(Yes, I made this up myself, and I am proud of it...)

How People End Up Believing in the Irrational

2008-09-05T22:30:00.000-05:00

I'm glad I have my head screwed reasonably well on my shoulders, because otherwise I might have become tonight one of these people who are spooked into believing the irrational.

Uncharacteristically, I had my laptop on my dining table, doing miscellaneous stuff while waiting for dinner to be ready. My friend Mark, from the northern latitudes (he doesn't really like to be identified much more precisely than this), comes in on LiveMessenger, as he does almost every night, with some variant of "sup buddy?" I told him I was ready to eat dinner, he replied that he and his partner were too, and I wrote "cool". Then he wrote this sentence, which I reproduce verbatim because it is important for the rest of our story:
ya got a nice bottle of wine

Now, there are two ways to understand this sentence: "yes, we've got a nice bottle of wine!" or "have you got a nice bottle of wine?" because, at least on such an informal medium, "ya" can pass equally, I think, for an abbreviation of "yes" or of "you," and who cares about precisely placing commas in instant messages?

I understood the sentence the second way, which didn't seem far-fetched since, after all, I did have a bottle of wine -- which a friend offered me a few days ago -- and I looked at the label and typed:
Malbec 2006 from Argentina
,,, and what came back was:
um how'd you know
I'm scared

At first, it didn't make any sense, and it took me a little while to figure out what had happened: they had the same wine in front of them, and Mark, who had not meant to ask me what I was drinking, but just to tell me that they were having some wine with their dinner, thought I had guessed what they were drinking!

I was silent for a while, first because it took me a while to figure out what the heck had just happened, and then after that because I was playing games with him, letting him spin his brain around this little mystery. He "nudged" me (in LiveMessenger, a "nudge" is a command that makes the message window shake while your computer buzzes, as if you were given a shock) because he really couldn't take it -- not knowing how I had guessed correctly. At that point, I must admit that I embellished in a somewhat underhanded way: I didn't explain that I had misunderstood his statement, instead I said that I was just using the wine I was drinking as a wild-ass guess for the one they were having -- a half-truth at best.

End of the anecdote. What does one make of it? Well first, Malbec is now very much en vogue right now, so it's not too surprising that they would also be drinking it. Perhaps no less than one chance in 10? Secondly, there are not that many vintages in active circulation in supermarkets, I would guess mostly three: 2005, 2006 and 2007. So that leaves us with one chance in 30, if I oversimplify. So it's not so far-fetched that we would accidentally be drinking the same wine from the same year (for the record, these were at least not the same vintner or brand: mine was Domaine Jean Bousquet, from Tupungato Valley, Mendoza; theirs was Trivento Amado Sur, a blend with some syrah and bonarda, a grape I had never heard about).

But my point is this: if you take the average person with no knowledge of probabilities, and somewhat influenceable into finding a supernatural explanation more convincing than a statistical one, that person could be very easily convinced at this point that I am some sort of medium with clairvoyant powers. We know that people talk about "the laws of series" when three plane crashes happen the same week in unrelated contexts; or that many amateur gamblers believe that if the roulette has come out on black four times in a row, it is more likely than the next throw will come up red; etc. So surely, my wild but successful guess would have been interpreted by many of these people as a sign that a higher power was at work. The same people, of course, do not notice when plane crashes do not occur, or are very equally spaced, which is just as improbable as three in the same week; or when the roulette goes "black, red, black, red" which has the same probability as four times black in a row.

If I wanted to take the time, and antagonize some of my friends, I could be convinced to drift into how this kind of superstition is probably the source of most religions. But it's getting late and this is the kind of theory I need to explain when I have not had a glass of... Malbec 2006 from Argentina.

An Oversimplified Model of Recent World History

2008-08-25T12:21:00.001-05:00

I just read some news item that said that tourists who went to Beijing for the Olympics were "dazzled and daunted" by the event, and that this was an unprecedented exercise in increasing the maturity of a country in such a short time span. Last night, the NBC commentators marveled during their retransmission of the closing ceremonies (bits of pageantry shown during the infrequent gaps left between commercials and the incessant replays of the achievements of almost only U.S. athletes) that Beijing had spent about $40 billion and mobilized up to one million volunteers for the games, and that one was unlikely to see an effort of this size any time soon, "or perhaps ever."

The description of the advances made in Beijing for these games may well be true. But what the media, and U.S. media in particular, do not seem to grasp, is that we're talking about the durable emergence of China as a pre-eminent economic, political and social power, not about a temporary flash of brilliance. And for that matter, I can look in my crystal ball and tell you exactly when the Olympics will cost more and mobilize more people than the 2008 games did: this will happen the next time the games are hosted by China, and I am pretty sure that this will happen again some time in the next 30 years (OK, make that 32), because China is in the front seat for good now.

So here's my oversimplified geo-politico-historical model: the 18th century was French (the Enlightenment, French spoken in the palaces of Europe, the Revolution, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen). The 19th century was British (Waterloo, Queen Victoria, the building of the Empire, international maritime commerce). The 20th century was American (the U.S. conclusively intervenes in two world conflicts, rules the economy, develops the atom bomb, puts a man on the moon, and ends up as the sole superpower in the last decade of the century). And the 21st century will belong to China: 1.3 billion people, a 9% annual growth rate in GDP, the world's largest manufacturer and soon the world's largest consumer.

Americans still think that they are God's chosen people: this hubris will only delay the inevitable realization of China's preeminence. The U.S. still has the best universities in the world... but students are increasingly dropping scientific subjects in order to choose careers in Finance, Business, and the law. Can you build an economy solely on that basis? No, you can't. The modern world isn't just virtual: someone needs to grow our food, make our clothes, build our homes and our cars. Increasingly, all these things come from elsewhere. And that elsewhere more and more takes the form of this little label that reads "Made in China." OK, food is a little different, because the cost and duration of transportation already make it expensive and/or inconvenient, and will make it increasingly so, to import foods from afar (we still cherish our Chilean strawberries in winter, but for how long?). Crude oil at $120/bbl is actually increasing the interest in local/regional food production. But will it cause a resurgence of manufacturing in the U.S. (and other Western countries)? Only when the cycle completes and our countries' economies sag so low that we will be the "new poor," and our ill-educated work forces, aided by a dollar worth 50 euro-cents or less, will make it cheaper for an American consumer to buy goods made in Mississippi than made in China (you can name the equivalent "bottom of the barrel" regions in your own countries).

The two questions that remain in my mind, because I believe the above scenario to be almost ineluctable, are: what accidents can happen in the meantime to delay or modify it? and what happens after that? Is this is a one-way street, or will the "decline of the American empire" and of other Western countries result in some sort of compensating pendulum swing, where China will find itself, by the dawn of the 22nd century, in a similar situation that the U.S. is finding itself now, unable to prolong its fading grandeur, and sobered-up countries with significant natural resources (the US, Brazil, Nigeria, Canada, etc.) will restore a different balance?

It will help China extend its domination if the Chinese government at the time does not repeat the errors of the most recent U.S. politicians, which caused the sudden and profound moral bankruptcy of this country on the international scene. Assuming that China grows out of the current climate of quasi-dictatorship and human rights violations, let's fast forward. If anything similar to the U.S. 2000-2008 political catastrophe happens in China in 50 or a hundred years, will the Chinese people have the political education, the will, and the ability to change things before it damages their country's standing in a similar way to what Bush & Co. have just done to the U.S.? Of course, today, it is clear that they probably wouldn't be able to. But as the country continues its rapid progress, a time will come when they will probably have that power. So the last question is whether the Chinese people in a few decades will have the knowledge needed to make the right decisions (as opposed to, say, Americans who can't locate Iraq on a globe, or still believe that there were WMDs in Iraq because Fox "News" tells them so). The future of the world may well depend on this more than on anything else.

Friends, Friends Everywhere! -- take 2

2008-07-11T21:50:00.000-05:00

My blogging was paralyzed for almost three weeks, not because I had too few things to mention, but because there were too many. Every time I thought of writing, then either I was having dinner with someone, or I was looking forward to the next dinner and thinking, "I'll wait another day, then there will be more to write about."

I had two trips almost back to back: the Stanford Pride Board held its annual face-to-face meeting (the rest are teleconferences) at Stanford on June 21-22, and I added some personal visits, so I was gone June 19-24. Then I had a business trip to Paris on June 29-July 8. So at the risk of sounding like a vapid star's journal for People magazine, here's what happened (there is a moral to all this, at the end, if you can wait that long):

Thursday, June 21: arrived in the Bay Area, and had dinner with my colleague and friend Julien L. (there will be another Julien later) at Bambino's in the City. What do you mean, "which city?" We talked about social networking, among other things -- a common passion of ours. We're lucky that something we're passionate about is part of our jobs.
Friday, June 20: I had lunch with B. at Café Brioche in Palo Alto. He is one of my "friends" from Facebook, with whom I originally connected because he was one of the first people to accept my invitation to join the Stanford Pride group after I created it. I've always been intrigued by his whimsical status messages, and I often ask him what they mean. I guess one thing leads to another, and we had decided to meet in person. I'll summarize by saying that I hope I can remove the quote marks around "friends" in the future, because the discussion confirmed that he is a really nice and thoughtful guy worth knowing.
Friday evening, June 20: Dinner at "Home" in the City with a subset of the Stanford Pride Board. Nice, but I arrived last, and was at the end of a very long table that did not make conversations very easy.
Saturday, June 21: First day of the Stanford Pride Board meeting. We recently elected 13 new Board members, 12 of whom (I think) were present. What energy and diversity in this group! What's funny is that some of them tend to act like my longevity on this Board is something amazing, and then I'm chuckling and thinking, "how would I want to leave something that puts me in touch with such great people?" And still it's hard work: we met from 8 a.m. to 6:30 p.m., then we had dinner together from about 7 until 9.
Sunday morning, June 22: end of the Stanford Pride meeting. I now have an Assistant Treasurer. Woo-hoo! And he is actually eager to pitch in, and seems very easy to work with. This is going to test my proverbial deficiency in delegation capabilities, but I'm working on it.
Sunday afternoon, June 22: I don't know anyone else than my friend Carol with whom I can spend 9 hours solid, doing very little, both of us talking effortlessly about any number of things of varied importance, never worrying how to occupy the time or restart the conversation, never feeling like I should be on my guard or have to prove anything. At the end, we're always just surprised that so much time has passed and that it felt so good. This is just amazing. Totally drama-less, and boy, do we need this from time to time, both she and I! We always comment on this to each other, too: this is our little "mutual admiration society" topic.
Monday afternoon, June 23: I visited with S. and N., who are back from their trip to India, Thailand, New Zealand, and Australia, at the Emeryville Marina, where they currently camp on their sailboat. It's probably unrealistic to expect that they would make plans to settle down for any period of time, but this is taking an especially interesting turn with their idea to trade their current boat for a larger and much more comfortable one and live on it. That could make for some interesting visits. I'm not sure I'd want to live that way, but I'll sure come and visit!
Monday evening, June 23: B. (that's B no. 2, not B. from June 20) and I had dinner at Maverick, in the Mission. Very nice restaurant, tiny but friendly. The price was what could be expected for a small nice restaurant in San Francisco, about $60 per head with wine. B. is from Stanford, is a geek (the smart kind, not just the well educated kind, that's a huge difference), is a skier (infinitely better than me), which is how I know him after two successive winter ski week-ends, is super-nice, and 100% unpretentious (otherwise, I would obviously never had had a chance to have dinner with him). And we had a chance to talk about our favorite acrobat... an inside joke that said acrobat, and a couple other people, will understand.
Sunday evening, June 29: After sleeping all afternoon to recover from the flight to Paris, I decided to go to Josselin for crêpes, and took the subway to the Vavin station. I hesitated in the station: I could get out on Boulevard du Montparnasse facing west, and then turn left to walk up the rue du Montparnasse, or I could, slightly less obviously, take the opposite steps going east, turn the corner, go up rue Delambre to the Edgar-Quinet crossroads, and then walk down rue du Montparnasse. For some reason, the latter option appealed to me in spite of its lesser logic (drumroll, please). This staircase leads right in front of the terrace at the Dôme. I had probably taken five steps on the sidewalk when I heard my name, pronounced with a slight tone of interrogation. Here was, having coffee with a friend at said terrace, my ex-colleague, friend, and "comrade" (alumnus from the same engineering school) Jean-Christophe, whom I had probably not seen in ten or fifteen years! To make things even more eerie, I had just e-mailed him two days earlier announcing my trip and asking if he had time to meet. This is the kind of encounter that makes you say "I am not superstitious, but..." The evening did end with crêpes, but the three of us together instead of by myself, and at the Saint-Malo because Josselin was packed.
Monday evening, June 30: Here's where Julien No. 2 comes into play. And he is also the third Facebook friend I met for the first time in this saga. Same Engineering school (many, many years apart) and he had missed a dinner of the gay alum club last time I was in Paris. He had given me a not unreasonably reserved "oh well, yes, why not?" answer when I had proposed to have dinner during this trip. I'm not sure what he thinks now, but I had a nice time, conversation seemed to flow easily over a great many topics, etc. I took him to l'Amazonial, which may be a little cliché for gays in Paris, but the place is good enough that it has become much more mixed over the years ("gay is the new black," some people say), plus it was the perfect weather to sit outside. Is there such a thing as making too many friends? Is it like the stock market, where when you issue more shares, it dilutes their value? I hope not, because I'd prefer not to stop given the quality of the people I meet.
Tuesday, July 1, lunch time: Ben managed to make time (well, 20 minutes late, but he did manage) to have lunch with me. He is one of the most demonstratively affectionate straight men I know. That's a compliment, by the way.
Wednesday, July 2: Went to dinner at my friends' P. and A. near Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Their boys make me think of the Olympic motto "citius, altius, fortius," except that in their case it would have to be something like "smarter, more mature, and more handsome" each year. P. was in engineering school with me, same year, but we really had no contact then. Our friendship developed later. We have fairly different political opinions, but we've always been able to have reasonable conversations, as intelligent people arguably should, Daumier's sketches notwithstanding. Their American friend L. also came, and the five of us talked about a lot of things, including American and French politics, switching constantly between French and English. That was easy for P., A.,L. and me, but I was pleased to see the boys follow us easily in this flexible exchange.
Thursday, July 3: Back to Saint-Germain for the official business dinner of the week, at Le Petit Zinc. Charming Art Nouveau décor, especially the wrought-iron-and-glass canopy above the entrance, reminiscent of the original métro stations around 1900. But it wasn't the dinner that leaves me the best memory, it is the after-dinner drinks just down the street, in a jazz café with the Three Musketeers of IT innovation (yes, I know, that makes me d'Artagnan -- this was calculated): Julien no.1, David, and Laurent. I'm not sure we talked much about work, but it doesn't matter.
Friday afternoon, July 4: This was the fourth and last instance, in just two weeks, of meeting a heretofore unmet Facebook "friend." This time, B. (no. 3) went to both Stanford and Polytechnique, and I had just recently noticed that he was in both schools' gay alum clubs. Having contacted him about this coincidence, I found out that he was travelling to Paris the same week I was. So we had coffee in the gardens of the Palais Royal, the original plan of meeting at the Café Marly having been thwarted by the heat and the café's attitude, relegating the non-diners to outside tables that are directly on the stone courtyard, under the sun, and that none of the arrogant waiters ever bother to visit.
Friday afternoon, July 4, two hours later (this looks like a title screen from "Law & Order," doesn't it? Boom-boom!): soft drinks with A., an ex-colleague and perhaps new friend. We gave each other a kiss when we met, and shook hands when we parted -- I hope this doesn't mean anything other than the fact that we weren't keeping track of our protocol. He looks like he's floating on a little cloud because of a very positive turn in his private life. It's nice to see happy people.
Saturday and Sunday, July 5-6: I had been so sad to tell J.-N. two weeks earlier that I might not be able to go to his wedding ceremony, and then when this business trip got scheduled, I was so happy to be reverse myself. And it was a really, really nice event. Three things will remain in my memory: the fabulously embroidered dress that his wife changed into in the middle of the reception; the rare sense of complicity and mutual love between the groom and his younger brother; and the fact that without anyone saying anything special, at some point, I just started crying with happiness realizing that the year-old kid I had bounced on my knee once when visiting his parents had just finally won three years of battles with consular and religious authorities to marry the love of his life, against all "reasonable" advice, and end their forced separation by winning the right to have her at his side permanently.
Sunday, July 6: I messed up my return to Paris a bit -- I should have dropped the car at the entrance to the city, or even in Saint-Denis, and taken the subway in order to be on time to meet Jorge. But I insisted on driving all the way, so I arrived over an hour late. This limited our visit, but it was still nice to catch up, even briefly, before he left for a business trip to East Africa.
Monday, July 7: I hadn't seen M. and R. for several years, and was a bit ashamed when M. told me, not too long ago, "ah, I see in your blog that you've been in Paris several times, how come we never hear from you?" Whoops. So instead of making excuses, I made time, which is better. We had dinner at the Pub Renault on the Champs-Elysées (classy... but somewhat logical since M. works for Renault). Another evening of good conversation aided by decent wine.

So here we are, and although it took me two hours to write this, I feel like I have just paid tribute to all the people who made my life so full during the past three weeks. I realize that apart from a few people looking for what I am saying about them, no one in their right mind will have read the whole thing. That's fine -- it served me well to write it, finding words that would hopefully be seen as positive by the people who will recognize themselves, and that at the same time are absolutely sincere, because I would rather shut up that make false compliments, as those who deal with me must know beyond doubt.

It sounds like after this, I need to take it easy for a little while. Fred, don't worry: I told you we'd have dinner this week, and I'll be ready to treat you like a friend too. For some reason, I'm not actually getting tired of having good times with good people...

A Moment of Screaming, Please

2008-05-26T19:13:00.001-05:00

As I started my almost weekly drive from Austin to Houston this afternoon, the classical radio station (KMFA) was finishing Dvorak's Symphony No. 9, From the New World. After that, the announcer came on and said that on the occasion of Memorial Day, the station would join its listeners in a minute of silence to honor the servicemen and -women who had died. Silence dutifully followed.

I don't know about you, but while I am tremendously saddened by the lost of those young lives, and I am as ready as the next person to honor their memory, the last thing that comes to mind as a reaction to the current war, which has so far cost more than 4,000 such lives, is silence. In fact, what I want to do when I think of that war is scream. I want to scream to Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powell and Rumsfeld (wherever the last two are now hiding in deserved disgrace): I know you didn't fire the bullets or arm the IEDs that killed these people, but you manufactured the conflict in which they were killed. You are thus complicit in their deaths. And the memory of these poor people is not well served by silence, it is better served by an outcry -- hopefully an outcry that will continue until November 4, Election Day, so that you are not succeeded by more of the same.

On the same drive a week earlier, I heard a reading from the book "War Wounds: a Father and Son Return to Vietnam" by Tom Bissell. One quote struck me, so I sent a text message to my own email address in order to remember to look it up, and I now have it as one of my email signatures, ready to be used for the right audience:
"War, when necessary, is unspeakable. When unnecessary, it is unforgivable."

Love the Sorcerer, and the Witch Mezzo

2008-05-17T19:10:00.000-05:00

I went to the Houston Symphony on Thursday evening, for a concert that had a Spanish theme throughout: De Falla's El Amor Brujo (which was translated in the program as "Love the Magician," although I think that "Love the Sorcerer" better conveys the ambiguous and sometimes malevolent tone of the piece); Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez; De Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain; and Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol. Altogether a long and rich concert, one that I would still recommend to people who read this early enough to be able to catch the Sunday matinee performance (tomorrow).

The only sour note (so to speak) came from the first piece, strictly because of the singer. I know that photos in programs are always dated, but this was so extreme that it makes Elizabeth II look positively age-sincere on UK stamps. I'm talking about someone looking 30 in the program, and being 60 in reality. She did look like a witch, which is actually quite appropriate for this piece, but was clearly not intentional. Her voice did not carry well (and I was in the middle of the fourth row). She sings opera, and that's perhaps why she kept taking dramatic poses and making exaggerated faces to convey the emotions of the gypsy girl, but it just looked absolutely ridiculous when just standing by herself in front of an orchestra. And her red-and-black gown must have been badly tailored at home (or else she needs to get a refund), because the left strap kept falling off. Believe me, any "wardrobe malfunction" would not have been very pretty to witness in her case!

While this was a shame, the next piece obliterated this bad experience quite nicely. The solo guitarist, Eliot Fisk, was amazing... and the audience recognized this so well that he played two encores: a transcription for the guitar of Paganini's Caprice n° 24, and a piece by Francisco Tárrega (it might have been Recuerdos de la Alhambra, but I'm not sure).

After the intermission (I told you it was a long concert) Shai Wosner was the pianist in De Falla's Noches en los jardines de España, which I found a little long and discursive, less packed with tense emotion as the rest of that composer's œuvre. And finally, as befits this sometimes very loud and brassy orchestra, Rimsky-Korsakov provided the sonorous (some would say "noisy") finale.

Friends, Friends Everywhere! (and Restaurants, Too)

2008-04-20T22:04:00.000-05:00

Okay, it’s a corny title, perhaps not more than usual; but it was indeed raining friends in Paris last week.

As my overseas trips go, this was one of the shortest ones. I arrived at midday on Monday, and left around the same time on Saturday. Had I not been in Europe three weeks earlier already, I would have been the first to find this uncivilized.

These 120 hours included four fairly long and intense days of work, but I managed to cram quite a social agenda within that time, and I even got a decent amount of sleep, in an unpretentious but nice hotel room very close to the Eiffel Tower, at the bargain rate for Paris of 105 euros a night.

Monday was my recuperation day after the overnight flight, and I just went to a brasserie to eat by myself. On Tuesday, I had plans to meet Jean-Noël. When he called me around 7 p.m. from a town north of Paris where he had been for the day, we settled on 9:15 p.m. at a Tibetan restaurant in Montmartre, Gang Seng, to which he had previously introduced me. He ended up arriving at almost 10, but we still managed to spend a great two hours catching up on each other’s life and work.

On Wednesday, I had plans to meet my ex-colleague Emmanuel, whom I hadn’t seen in probably five years. He selected Yamamoto, a Japanese restaurant tucked away in a side street near the Opéra (note to tourists: for a real Parisian, there is only one Opéra in Paris), in an area where I found out that there are now dozens of them (Japanese restaurants, not operas). The amazing thing about meeting him after all this time is that he is still exactly the same: a permanent smile on his face, the nicest guy in the world, GQ-handsome, totally hyperactive, and not looking a day older than five years ago. And we fell back into the same friendly and easy banter we were used to when we went out to dinner in Islington then, as if we had seen each other a week earlier. It just warmed my heart that there are people like that, not just in the world in general, but in my world.

Thursday was an unplanned, but equally successful evening. I was actually not sure whether I was going to want to see anyone, because my project for the week still required work. I was getting nervous that there might still be too many holes in the resulting "white paper" by Friday afternoon, when it was due. But by 7 p.m.-ish, I was also getting tired of the day. I had told another ex-colleague that I was in Paris and had hoped for a last-minute call from him, but nothing had come. I was reasonably content with the idea of eating late by myself at Josselin in Montparnasse, but on a hunch I called Mohamed (see my prior "You Write Too Much" post). It turned out that he was expecting his friend Isabel, a medical student from Colombia whom I had seen a couple of times at parties in Boston last year (she was part of a group gravitating around our contingent of summer interns from France). She was due to return that evening from seeing one of those ex-interns, Ben, in Poitiers, and therefore was coming back on the TGV... at Montparnasse station! So we immediately made plans to meet at Josselin at 9:45, and had a wonderful time. This being Isabel’s first time in Paris, it was a great opportunity to give her one of the experiences that are not particularly mentioned in tourist guidebooks. Mo was crazy as usual (he doesn’t speak Spanish, but he did recognize "loco" when I was making fun of him talking to Isabel). Giorgio recognized me and couldn't let us go without buying us after-dinner drinks, so Isabel got to taste her first Calvados. They took me back to my hotel just before midnight, so I told them to turn the corner by the Ecole Militaire after dropping me off, so they would have a chance to see the tower’s sparkling light show at the top of the hour.

So there remained Friday. I had exchanged e-mails with my friend Jorge (the accidental model for Givenchy’s "Irresistible" eau de toilette for men, but this is another story) earlier in the week, and knew that he was coming back from Dubai in the morning, and was leaving for London in the evening to see his girlfriend, who lives there. So it wasn’t entirely clear that between his mad schedule and the demands of my own project, we could find the time to meet for lunch — but Jorge called mid-morning and offered to come to our office so it would take me less time. We only had an hour and a half, but made the most of it. This was another one of these easy, relaxed conversations that can only take place when you're good friends and you're not trying to put up appearances, you don't have anything to prove, you can just be yourself and the talking and the listening just alternate spontaneously.

That may be what was missing from my dinner meeting that same night, in an eastern area of Paris I am a total stranger to, with members of the gay alumni group from Ecole Polytechnique. Only three people came in addition to me, which was disappointing. They were all very nice, although different from my usual crowd in a way I could not really define. I certainly felt like we were strangers observing each other. The conversation revolved a lot around the food and the wine, and was helped by the ebullient personality and familiar behavior of the assistant manager, Camille, quite a character whom the others knew well. When we discussed American politics for a while, especially the Democratic primaries, one of my companions soon remarked, "what a serious topic we’re discussing tonight!" I think he was relieved when the more superficial banter resumed. It was certainly a pleasant evening in good company in an excellent restaurant, but nothing close to the four previous get-togethers of the week. I may certainly have more dinners with that group in the future, and meet more of them, and may get more comfortable with that crowd over time. But for now, it served a really useful purpose: it allowed me to benchmark my relationships and friendships, and appreciate the difference.

Merci Jean-Noël, Emmanuel, Mohamed, and Jorge (in order of appearance). Gracias a tí también, Isabel, although I certainly know you less. I am happy that I just got to see all of you, I love you... and I can't wait to do this again.

Blaming People for Saying the Truth

2008-04-14T16:33:00.000-05:00

The Democrats' race for the presidential nomination continues, and is growing more vicious. One hopes that the Pennsylvania primary will mark the end of this internecine battle, but that was said before — in February and in March, several times, to no avail.

That the standard bearer for the party is chosen through a protracted series of contests that keep them in the limelight for weeks is not a bad thing per se. On the contrary, one might argue that many Republican voters have been disenfranchised by the early consecration of John McCain — and I'd be surprised if many of them felt motivated to vote in the remaining state primaries, given how little meaning they have left.

However, extending the ideological contest between Clinton and Obama would be fine it it served to shed light on their policy proposals, and if it wasn't destructive to the survivor's chances in November. Unfortunately, on both counts, the trend is exactly in the wrong direction.

Witness the latest clash about Obama's remarks to the effect that some people, feeling left out by shrinking federal (non-military) spending and disproportionally hurt by the recession, "cling to their guns and their religion" and their anti-immigrant sentiments to make sense of their lives. Since he said that, both Clinton and the Republicans have attacked him, the media have been all over his case ("elitist" being the milder adjective employed to describe him), and he has himself backpedaled — all in spite of one simple, all too easily ignored factoid: he is right!

The populist mood in the country (and the inability to discuss religion in factual terms) is such that making the statement he did is toxic. Clinton is now wrapping herself in a very ill-fitting cloak for her: someone who is "close to real America" — and by implication, is so unconditionally embracing it that the idea of critiquing how people form their judgments is considered tantamount to treason.

Yet it is true that some of the most vociferous opponents of gun control, the most pious proponents of school prayer or of the dismantling of barriers between church and state, and the most xenophobic (and, let's say it, racist) people in the U.S. are Democrats, not Republicans. Especially in southern states or in poor rural areas. This is not unlike the xenophobic current that existed in the Communist party in France in the 1980s and 1990s, based on the same fear that "they are taking our jobs," which led to this revolving door phenomenon in which people disappeared from the extreme left to reappear on the extreme right and vote for Jean-Marie Le Pen, thus proving that the political continuum is not a straight line, it is a circle!

I was, and I still am, positive about a Clinton presidency because of her ability to tap into a large talent pool of advisers and potential cabinet members. I was, and still remain, concerned that in a tight election, the lingering "race factor" could throw the election to McCain in some southern states if Obama is the candidate. But Clinton's tactical move last week — joining the critics rather than supporting Obama by acknowledging at minimum that his remarks, however undiplomatic, raise a real issue — do not reflect well on her character. If she wins because she cannot have the honesty to support an "inconvenient truth," then there will be some sadness mixed in that victory. But if Obama wins because he retracted what he knows to be correct, then it is equally sad.

Frog Readings

2008-04-07T22:56:00.001-05:00

A quick post, fueled by guilt... I've been on the road for two weeks, and I was sick last week, so while there were interesting goings-on in Paris, Cambridge, Madrid, and Boston, I haven't shared anything. "Sick" for me means that I was maintaining an almost normal work schedule from 8 to 5, then taking the T (I was in Boston) back to the hotel, crawling under the covers with three aspirins, and trying to sweat out the fever so I could restart the same grind the next day. That may be crazy, but the MIT Media Lab visit and discussions were, as usual, superbly motivating.

Then I also had a miserable 15-hour trip (door to door) from Boston to Austin -- but I'm not even really mad at Delta Airlines: it wasn't really their fault, they rerouted me as well as they apparently could, and my bag made it before me. Next time, perhaps I should travel in my bag.

I am reading two books now. They could hardly be more different. "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely is about the ways in which we make economic laws useless because our decisions are not based on rational calculations -- but interestingly, those irrational decisions follow some pretty stable emotional laws, such as the fact that "free" has an irresistible appeal. The author conducted fascinating experiments (on unsuspecting MIT students...) that illustrate his points, and he tells the stories with wit and perspicacy. He's a little less convincing when he makes sweeping generalizations to public policy, but he may be onto something. It's an excellent read anyway.

"The End of the World Book" by Alistair McCartney could be described as the modern, gay man's version of Ambrose Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary." It is presented in the form of short A-to-Z articles that range between facetious, literary, surrealistic, and erotic. If you thought you might guess what word you can find under the letter F, think again... you might be suprised by some of the entries (no, I haven't reached F already, I just couldn't resist getting an early peek). Alistair McCartney is the long-time lover of Tim Miller, the performance artist. I love Tim Miller's work, and I think I've seen each of his shows (well, I can remember at least five). So when he mentioned McCartney's book in his newsletter last week, I ordered it from Amazon. Now the challenge will be to get the autograph. Miller's is easy to get, if you can catch one of his memorable performances -- he is quite happy to chat with the audience after the show. But his BF doesn't travel with him, as far as I know, so this may require some plotting...

Of Jokes, Cartoons, and Freedom of Speech

2008-03-25T15:07:00.000-05:00

The four of us who had dinner on Sunday in Les Halles plunged into a very serious discussion by the time our pizzas arrived. I can't remember how it started (my colleague Nigel would tell me that if I had blogged in real-time from one of the gadgets he loves so much, like an iPhone, I wouldn't have let this memory slip), but we ended up talking about the relative understandings of freedom of speech in different countries and cultures.

One of the first things that was mentioned was how denial of the Holocaust is a crime in France and in some other European countries. I pointed out that while I find the denials both abhorrent and ridiculous, in the U.S. people would have the right to express those opinions — and let the public be the judge.

(I didn't think of Scientology as another example of this. While it is certainly a cult in my opinion, and a harmful one by most accounts, the U.S. protects their expression even to the debatable point of recognizing them as a church, while at the other end of the spectrum Germany, I think, has banned their activity and gone after their financial empire and the way they relieve credulous people of their money).

Back to what we did discuss. I made the point, without actually taking sides, that a tenet of what Americans consider freedom of speech is that it protects even expression with which most reasonable people disagree to the point of finding the ideas objectionable and pernicious. The U.S. constitution still gives the proponents of those ideas the right to express themselves, as long as they do not directly incite illegal action. In that sense, the Bill of Rights follows the position expressed by Voltaire a few decades earlier, when he wrote to someone, "I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write it." And today, the American Civil Liberties Union (of which I am a card-carrying member) also takes that position, although some bloggers have complained about a trend toward a form of "political correctness" among the ACLU's national board, leading it to accept some restrictions on objectionable speech — but I am not sure if those bloggers are correct or are crying wolf on the basis of scant evidence in cases whose complexities should be further scrutinized.

One should note, by the way, that in practice the American principle of protecting objectionable speech unless it directly incites lawless actions is not consistently followed, or at least not without fighting. Professors have been disciplined for expressing objectionable opinions (including Holocaust denial, or the opinion that the state of Israel was illegitimate). Facebook has banned a group called "WP forever" where "WP" stood for "White Power." If you Google "freedom of speech objectionable opinions" you will find multiple examples, as well as many thoughtful discussions of this issue by other bloggers.

Being all computer professionals of one form or another, we touched on the issue of banning the sale of some items, such as nazi memorabilia, on the Intenet, especially on eBay. If this is illegal in France but not in the U.S., and given the difficulty of ascertaining on the Internet where the seller and the buyer actually are, it is not obvious for the intermediary to police these restrictions. As a result, the safe thing for them to do may be to ban such items everywhere, thus arguably denying someone, in a country like the US, the ability to do something that is legal there because of another country's law. And one might argue, in this case, that trading nazi memorabilia is not necessarily a sign of adherence to the ideology (this may be somewhat more credible on the seller's part than on the buyer's...).

When we were discussing whether Holocaust denial should be one of the "objectionable but permitted" expressions in the U.S. sense, one of my new friends mentioned that some of the prohibitions in European countries could "prevent historians from doing their work." I replied that surely, there is a lot of serious work that historians can do without infringing on the restrictions in question. No one is talking about preventing research into how fascism arose, how it was sustained for so many years, etc. One could even study the resurgence of extreme-right groups in various countries without violating the laws against promoting or defending the deniers. So I didn't buy that argument... but the question remained whole.

Another controversy that exposed differences in national attitudes, my friends pointed out, was the issue of the Armenian genocide. This issue has been raised by several countries, including France and the U.S., while the Turkish government seems to essentially prohibit discussing this historic event, and considered the various actions in western parliaments regarding the recognition of that genocide to be meddling in its internal affairs.

Now one could accuse me of steering away from trouble in discussions, and since my companions were all Algerian, I had to say something like, "for a similar situation, look at the controversy about the Danish cartoons." The reaction, while muted and friendly, showed me that "objectionable" is quite relative, and that I still have much to learn. Of course, my acceptance of a cartoon that makes fun of another group's divinity is in part based on my atheism. I can truthfully claim that it wouldn't make any difference to me if it was a cartoon of Jesus, the Buddha, or Mohammad. But my friends thought that while the Iranian or Saudi fatwahs against the catoonist and the publishers were unjustifiable, the negative reaction in the Muslim world was understandable. Of course, based on the earlier discussion, we could all agree that saying that something should be protected free speech doesn't mean that you can't find it objectionable, but I sensed that my friends wouldn't have minded if this particular expression had been judged illegal. And I wouldn't be surprised if one could find something (perhaps along the lines of homophobic opinions) that I would find so abhorrent that my heart would wish it outlawed, while my brain would calculate that it should be protected free speech.

"You Write Too Much!"

2008-03-25T15:00:00.000-05:00

"Claude, you write too much," said Mohamed as we were walking from the RER exit at Les Halles toward the Fountain of the Innocents (which, incidentally, is a rendezvous point for so many people who intend to become guilty of something or another). He was talking about something he had read in this blog.

I wasn't sure how to take it, and our other two companions had a good chuckle over this statement, which made Mo spend the next ten minutes backpedaling furiously. Of course, we didn't cut him any slack. "I meant it in a good way: you write a lot!" he said, having a hard time convincing us, and probably even himself.

Last week, one of my bosses called me and said, "since you write well, I wonder if you could help me with a small task." The small task has since become a big project, but I knew that when I accepted to help her. Now, even if you're only asked to write the report for a working group, the writing doesn't just reflect the thinking — it influences it. If it is written at the very end of the project, it will only influence the thinking of the audience to whom the report is destined; but if it is written iteratively, and the working group members see some of the interim versions before they're completely done, these versions can help frame the priorities they give to different positions. That may not be exactly what Ben Franklin had meant, but there is a definite if subtle "power of the pen"!

Notwithstanding this clear opportunity to have more influence than was perhaps meant to be granted, it was diplomatic to hesitate before telling the boss that I would accept, and since she was referring specifically to another report I had recently issued, I was able to repeat a common but always serviceable and self-deprecating aphorism: "so, no good deed goes unpunished, right?"

She also asked me if this was a "hidden literary talent" of mine. I was actually not amused by that question. The extent of my writing, at least in a professional context, is easily known of anyone who cares to look at my online internal CV (we post them on a company Web site), which includes two books and a number of articles and conference papers. "Hidden" talent"? I could have replied "how about 'clearly known but not by you'?" but I actually like my boss, so I made a much more agreeable repartee and we went on with our business.

Now the interesting thing to me is that when I write, and especially in French, I adopt a much more formal style than I would normally use in speech or in letters to friends and family. And I have found that this respect for stylistic levels (which are more pronounced in French than in English) is very important when it comes to getting the reader to respect the writer. Call it "style over substance" if you wish, but it is a way to command attention.

Truth be told, I am a royal pain when I review other people's writing. But then I give myself the same amount of grief. And some people who have been through the ordeal have actually come back later and asked for more, not because they are masochists, but because they found that they had learned something useful.

I've been asked, "how did you learn to write?" I can't really tell. I think I have simply synthesized everything I've heard and read over the years, from teachers and role models and good writers, and I was perhaps more prone to find it important than the average student. But I can't tell what form of brain wiring it takes to have this inclination. And I should hasten to say that not everyone was appreciative: a French professor in 10th grade annotated a piece of homework, which consisted of writing a sonnet, with something like "some people hide their lack of artistic capability behind linguistic pirouettes." He was right, but it may not have hurt me as much as he thought.

Holding a Hand

2008-03-25T14:56:00.001-05:00

I saw three very pretty and well-attired girls on the métro on Monday (Line 6, Etoile-Nation), and I heard part of their conversation. At one point, they were discussing their preferred brands of nail polish. One of them casually picked up another one's fingers, held them up to look at her friend's nails, then let go of her hand.

This was perfectly natural. No one looking would have found this strange, or indicative of a potential same-sex attraction. But if two young men made a similar "intimate" gesture (let's assume they were not talking about nail polish, but they might compare their earrings, for example, and one would touch the other one's ear lobe to have a closer look), don't you think that people would find it uncommon? I think some people would wince, and many would certainly suspect them of being gay. Even gay people would probably think those two guys were gay, and some of them would be uncomfortable about such a gesture in public, even if they were gay themselves.

I am still a bit puzzled at the double standard. Is there something about our assumptions of how differently men and women interact, that causes us to have such different levels of interpretation and acceptance of similar gestures between the two sexes?

Supertitles

2008-03-15T00:24:00.000-05:00

The Houston Symphony's home, the Jones Auditorium in downtown Houston, has two screens above the stage, far left and far right, that are normally used to project close-ups of the musicians. I don't mind this, because otherwise it is pretty hard to see the woodwind and brass players from an orchestra seat. There are two cameras, apparently placed in front of the first balcony on each side, so they have a "plunging view" that allows you to see much better what's going on behind the strings.

(Actually, depending who is at the controls, you sometimes get something similar to the quality that filmed concerts may reach: that's when the video person cues a camera on a player who's going to have a particular "moment of fame" in the piece being played, and cuts to that camera at the right moment. Of course, for a concert that's filmed and then edited, it's easy to do this after the fact; but here, we're talking "real-time" camera changes, and that would be impossible if you didn't know the music. I'd like to know who does this work.)

Tonight's concert opened with the Four Seasons, for which Vivaldi wrote some cheesy sonnets that he obligingly transcribed on the score itself so you would have no doubt when the birds are signing (or even which birds they are). Well, the Symphony decided that this was important enough to project these words on the screens during the playing of the four concerti. Please don't do that again: it was distracting, and it left nothing to the imagination any more. Yes, since I first heard the Pastorale, I can recognize when the music imitates a thunderstorm, thank you. And if I hadn't been told that the notes played on the cello at some point represent the barking of the shepherd's dog, I might have missed it, but I don't think that it would have marred my enjoyment of the music. At least not more than the occasional false notes by the solo violinist, who wasn't the one announced on the program and might therefore have had too little time to rehearse properly, who knows?

The second part of the concert consisted of Mendelssohn's Fourth Symphony, Italian, and Verdi's Overture to La Forza del Destino. Both excellent in my opinion.

I didn't expect to be disappointed by Vivaldi — but I will always remember a performance I attended in the millennium-old church of Saint Germain des Prés in Paris a few years ago. I was in the third or fourth row, the chairs were hard as usual in those churches, it was cold in there... but it was pure bliss.

Fair Science

2008-03-14T23:58:00.000-05:00

I was a judge at the Science and Engineering Fair of Houston on Friday. Sounds grand, but it's pretty simple, really: you go around with a clipboard, talk to the kids, try to ask some meaningful questions, then you rate their projects according to a bunch of boilerplate questions that don't sound all that different, and where you have to put a mark between 0 and 10, even though you'd be hard-pressed to explain the difference between a 6 or a 7. Then you add up your marks, normalize, combine with the other judges... and then the fun starts: you're discussing why you thought project A was better than B, or the opposite, and you learn from the other judges and come to a consensus. In reality, most of the projects are good, and you end up wishing that you could make everyone win.

I saw twelve computer science projects, all done by senior students individually (for those of you not used to the US school system, this means last-year students, so they would be about 18 years old at this point).

One guy built an FTIR multi-touch interaction table, just like the one some people working for me built in the summer of 2006 at our lab in Boston. "My guys" are about 25, but this kid is 18 and in high school, and did pretty much the same thing. True, he mostly focused on the construction of the device rather than on the computer part... but that's exactly what we had found to be the challenge ourselves.

Another guy (there were a couple of young women in the group, but only a couple, as usual most of the engineering or computer science projects were presented by male students) had done a simulation of the growth of a colony of cells — inspired by Stephen Wolfram's book that claims that all complex systems in nature can be described accurately by simple computational systems. This was of course reminiscent of Conway's "Game of Life" from a Scientific American article published in 1970, which those of us who learned computer science in the 1970s were all crazy about.

Another young man presented as his science project something he's worked on for two years: a chess-playing program in which he combines several sophisticated algorithms to prune search trees (starting with the α-β procedure I learned 34 years ago...) and got his program to apparently play at grand master level.

And a fourth candidate simulated the flow of traffic through a city grid, including the fact that some drivers are more aggressive than others, comparing what happens when traffic lights are on the same cycle, as opposed to the "green wave" where the lights turn progressively green along some routes, so that in theory traffic can flow uninterrupted once released from a red light. He found that, counter-intuitively, the "green wave" method is usually not effective, unless the timing of the greens is within a very narrow range, and that it is very sensitive to how heavy traffic is: if traffic is heavy, for example, people may be slowed down just enough that they get to the next light just as it is turning red, and this repeats itself, so in fact you hit all red lights instead of all green ones.

Altogether, this was rather impressive. What fascinates me about any sort of poster sessions, science fairs, and the like, is that they ask me to judge, when in fact I feel that I am learning from the students. It's humbling to see so much talent at such an early age.

Some Men

2008-03-13T00:02:00.000-05:00

On Sunday afternoon, I went to see "Some Men," a play by Terrence McNally, at the BCA in Boston. This was a last-minute decision, but I am glad I made it. The play was very well acted, and I found it good, even though the reviews pretty much dismissed it. I'm a bit confused as to why.

The reviews say the play is formulaic — that it uses every cliché in the book about the lives of gay men in the 20th century. Well, unless you've lived at Castro and 18th all your life, I don't really find those things cliché. The play has the "obligatory" scene with the dying AIDS patient in the hospital, whose friends come and visit and say pathetically hopeful and unrealistic statements about his improbable recovery. I'm sorry, but while we may have seen that same scene, in one form or another, in several books and plays and movies ("Longtime Companion" comes to mind), I defy a normal person (by "normal," I mean emotionally competent, not straight, in case there was any doubt) not to feel something move deep inside them when they watch that scene.

The play talks about the meaning of gay marriage, and how many gay people have changed their minds about it — from "who cares?" to "goddammit, yes I should be able to, so I will"; about people who led a happy life even though they weren't "out"; about internalized homophobia; about the dishonesty of the men who were married and fooling with other men on the side, but who felt they had no other choice at the time; about stereotypes and prejudices of all kinds; about the disconnect between young gays and old gays; about the wrong assumption that the younger generation has it easier across the board (ever heard of Laramie, Wyoming?); about what is and isn't courage. These may all be common themes in "gay literature," you could even say that "Some Men" is in a sense a collage of previous work by McNally (such as "Love, Valour, Compassion") and others, like novelist Ethan Mordden. But it's unfair to dismiss any work that makes you think as much as it makes you laugh... and sometimes cry.

La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était

2008-03-12T23:39:00.000-05:00

I was in Boston all last week, interviewing students at MIT and hosting some colleagues who were visiting from Europe, looking at some of our research work as well as that of the MIT Media Lab. The week ended with a deluge on Saturday and a brilliant day on Sunday, lots of things didn't go as planned (a ski trip to New Hampshire and a dinner with a friend both fell apart), yet the week ended well.

This was the longest time (one full week) I had spent in Boston since I left six months ago. I often fear those visits back to places where I lived. I was ambivalent about moving back to Houston in the first place. While that city has matured since I left in 2002, it's still a "wannabe" big city compared to a venerable place of both scientific and cultural excellence like Boston. But more generally, I've always faced an emotional challenge when leaving a city I love, and it seems to be related to the fear that it may be the last time. I remember feeling this in Montréal, in Madrid, in Quito, among others.

And then, some time back, I can't remember exactly when, this feeling went away. Sure, there will be a last time in every city I visited, and some of those last times must have already happened. Simone Signoret, the French actress, titled her memoirs, published in 1976, "La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était." Nostalgia is no longer what it used to be. When I realized on several occasions that I was back in a place that I had mentally said a sad "goodbye" to earlier, and so I was able to push that feeling away and replace it with a more optimistic, or perhaps just fatalistic, "until next time!"

Art and Virtual Friendship

2008-02-28T23:17:00.000-06:00

I thought I'd start with "Art and..." for the heck of it. But it's interesting that three times in a row, a performance made me want to blog.

Tonight's notes for Respighi's orchestration of Rachmaninoff's "Cinq Etudes - Tableaux" said: The seascape portrayed in the central étude is an especially masterly orchestration, employing high woodwind and violin solos to depict the lonely cries of seagulls, cascading string passages for the crashing waves and rich, even-flowing notes in the lower orchestra to suggest the constant rhythm of the ocean depths."

And so my thoughts went to someone I've never met, a "friend" on Facebook, who recently wrote on his "wall" that for him, the ideal person was someone who would know to take him to the ocean, even if he hadn't told him that he loved it. And I daydreamed about meeting him some day, and taking him to eat lunch near the seaside, and then walking on the beach together, just basking in our common love of this feeling of being near this immense power of the sea, feeling good that I was fulfilling one of his desires, and perhaps even that I had surprised him by remembering what he had once written.

So tonight, as I'm back home and the day is seriously winding down, I'm grateful to my yet-unmet friend that he gave me the opportunity to feel better (and I needed that today...), even in my imagination.

Thank you -- you know who you are!

Facebook, College Degrees, Money, and Persuasion

2008-02-25T17:08:00.000-06:00

(I posted this before on an internal blog at Schlumberger, and I just realized that if I removed one or two comments, it could be made public.

There is no moral to this story — I think it's just interesting that Facebook is the object of a college course, that it allowed some students to make money, and that a key issue is how people persuade their friends to install a new application. OK, now please excuse me while I go and reject one more invitation to be a "vampire" or to play "Texas Hold'em Poker.")

On December 12, while I was in California for a meeting of the SOA Consortium, Prof. BJ Fogg hosted the final presentations by the students in his Stanford Computer Science course CS377 entitled "Creating Engaging Facebook Applications."

As the name indicates, the focus was not on the technicalities of using the Facebook "platform" to create an app, but on how you make people (a) come back, (b) invite their friends. In other words, what influences virality? This is consistent with the fact that Fogg is an experimental psychologist by training, not a computer scientist. But regardless, I am fascinated by the topic, given the recent uptake of social networking in professional environments, including Schlumberger, which has about 4,000 employees on Facebook right now.

Prof. Fogg had asked me to be a judge (we happen to indirectly know each other), which gave me an obligation and a chance to look at the apps in more detail than I might otherwise have done.

He gave an introductory talk on "Persuasive Applications and Metrics: the Stanford Experience with Facebook." He said that he came to Stanford in 1993 as a psychologist, and since then he has been looking into how computers involve and persuade users. "Facebook is the #1 persuasive technology of 2007." It demonstrates "mass interpersonal persuasion." Could this principle then be used to entice people to solve larger problems? I noticed that he avoided the question of whether the same phenomenon might be used negatively.

The process followed by sucessul applications goes through these steps:

Acquisition: get an address to which to send an invitation
Activation: the target visits the site and registers
Retention: the user keeps coming back
Referral: the user invites friends to use the same application or site
Revenue: some mechanism is used so that these visits generate money

At each step, you lose some people. The key to success is to maximize the conversion percentage from each stage to the next.

When Fogg announced the course, about 100 students showed up at the first session. After they understood the focus of the course, 73 remained, and they teamed up to create almost 30 apps. Those apps were, altogether, downloaded 10 million times within 10 weeks. 5 of the apps achieved more than one million users each, and were placed in the "Facebook 100" top downloads. 10 applications had more than 100,000 users, and 20 more than 5,000 users. At the end of the course, there were 925,000 daily users of one or more of the applications. Students tended to spend 20 hours per week on this course, even though it is only a 3- or 4-unit course that should occupy much less time.

Some students included a way to monetize their application (probably by placing sponsor ads) and made real money. Rumors has it that one team essentially got enough money to pay for this year's tuition, but this may be exaggerated.

Here are some remarks about the applications that struck me as... being worth remarking on. I'm passing on a lot of applications that are just variants on the "Poke" widget or the "SuperWall" widget in Facebook, which are redundant ways to say hello or send a photo.

PhotoGraph: there are 4.1 billion photos on Facebook, so how can you search for anything? The app builds a collaborative filtering mechanism, where people who browse photos can select which of 3 proposed photos they want to see next. The app captures these links to "thread" the photos together and propose this sequence to others, so that navigation becomes more relevant.

Polls: this allows people to poll their friends about any chosen topic. Usage was modest until they made the polls focused on rating your friends. In the end, this app was installed 61,000 times.

SuperStatus: elevates the posting of status to a sort of "microblogging" by allowing the comments to be longer, and allowing crosstalk.

SocialBuzz: this allows people to use their friends as sources of information and recommendations, but also to enter feedback on a recommendation. As a result, the app keeps a record of how much you trust each source in each area (you may trust someone'a advice about computers, but not about restaurants, or vice versa), and this affects the recommendations you see the next time. This seems very relevant to Knowledge Management in an enterprise, and I talked to the creators of this application after the presentation.

OneVoice: allows people to "video jockey" YouTube videos.

An interesting remark by some students was that "Facebook is the most convenient and respectable way to stay connected with other people." This confirms to me the way Facebook has differentiated itself from MySpace over the last couple of years, with MySpace trending "down-market" while Facebook, true to its Harvard origin, took on a definite "college-educated" flavor.

Art and Politics, part II

2008-02-24T01:16:00.000-06:00

I went to the Houston Ballet on Saturday night. It was a long and rich program. It started with what, in Houston, I call the "obligatory Balanchine piece," Sérénade on music by Tchaikovsky. That's the piece that they have to dance so that the blue-haired ladies and the men with the sterling silver banknote clips don't run away screaming.

(Actually, I'm way too harsh: the Houston Ballet has become much better since Stanton Welch took over as choreographer-in-residence, and the audience is now also much more diverse in terms of age, gender, looks, etc. But I digress...)

The second piece was Swan Song by Christopher Bruce, on a score by Philip Chambon. The third piece was The Core, Welch's rendition of Gershwin's Concerto in F for piano -- a piece set in post-war New York that was boisterous and colorful and funny and had a wonderful decor and costumes, but a little too close to Jerome Robbins' Fancy Free for comfort, especially since the latter is danced to music by Leonard Bernstein, who is certainly Gershwin's heir.

But it is Swan Song I want to talk about. Curtain up: three male dancers -- two dressed in khaki slacks and shirts, clearly a uniform, standing on both sides of the third man, seated on a chair, wearing a red tee shirt and blue jeans. Almost from this first tableau, and certainly after the first moves, you get the point: two torturers and their victim. The scenes of simulated violence alternate with the prisoner's dreams of escape, and with his attempts to placate his enemies by obeying their commands -- in a brilliant metaphor, this is symbolized by the victim repeating his captors' footwork after them.

I found the piece mesmerizing because of the dancers' skill, but hard to watch because of the evocation of brutality and hopelessness. At one point, the torturers pick up their victim by the legs and hold him upside down, clearly mimicking the act of half-drowning him. With the recent discussion of waterboarding of terrorism suspects by the CIA, this was frighteningly relevant. I was also impressed by the fact that the dancer who played the victim actually looked scared when he was sitting in the interrogation chair at the beginning. Now there is always a bit of acting in most dance routines, but perhaps because of how serious the subject was, his acting seemed more compelling than usual.

After the performance, there was a small "meet the performers" opportunity in the Wortham Center's "Green Room." It was actually poorly attended, perhaps because 10 p.m. is bed time for Houstonians. Three of the dancers were conversing with people. I noticed principal dancer Connor Walsh, still wearing his sailor's costume from The Core, but whom I recognized as the "victim" in Swang Song. So I went over and asked him how it felt to dance on this subject, and whether he was totally focusing on his moves or thinking about the theme of the piece at the same time. He told me that actually, the piece is physically brutal to the dancer: he does get thrown around a lot, and said that "it's a long and difficult piece, and as it progresses I feel more and more tired, and I actually hurt from all that's happening. So it is very realistic to me, and the look of exhaustion and pain is really not faked. Right now, I am bruised all over." I mentioned noticing that he really looked scared at the beginning, sitting in the chair between the other two guys, and he said "thanks for mentioning that, but in a sense it's because I really am scared of what is about to happen."

We didn't discuss the relationship with current events -- Mr. Walsh only said something very short about "how this is so important right now." By then, someone was waiting to talk to him, so I got him to sign my program and I went on.

Oh, I forgot to mention that when the ovation had ended after that piece, the man sitting next to me in the theatre had turned to me and said, in a tentative way, "what was that about?" As I was trying to recover my breath after feeling so tense during the piece, I didn't burst out as I might otherwise have done ("what do you mean, you idiot, what was that about?). I just calmly said "torture." And he said "oh." I guess if you can't recognize a metaphor for torture (and believe me, it wasn't that hard to "get it"), you're probably not the kind of person who will think much about what the U.S. is doing to itself when the Attorney General refuses to say what his position on waterboarding would be if it came up to him for a decision on its legality! I just think I know which party the gentleman in seat 29-3 is going to vote for...

Yup, art and politics, once again.

Arts and Politics (or Why I Love Carl Orff, But...)

2008-02-24T00:31:00.000-06:00

I went to the Symphony last night. Well, the Houston Symphony, but it's still the symphony (please don't shoot me for saying that; the symphony is still one of the ways in which Houston is a wannabe big city: it wants to play with the grownups but hasn't quite gotten the hang of it yet).

I was actually pleasantly surprised. The program was awkwardly chosen, in the sense that it consisted of Bernstein's Chichester Psalms, followed by Orff's Carmina Burana. Why put two contemporary choral works in the same program? If you have a limited tolerance for this, then you obviously won't go at all -- as opposed to coming to a mixed concert that contains one piece outside of the mainstream, and therefore getting a chance to stretch your experience a bit. And if you love these pieces, the fact that they are both choral works may result in some sensory overlap, with the second piece obliterating your memory of the first one.

This is definitely what happened to me. I remember loving the Chichester Psalms, which I don't think I had ever heard before. But after Carmina Burana, I don't remember much about them.

Now, the program notes for Orff's piece are completely devoid of the usual biographical sketch. Instead, they totally focus on the work itself: its origin, the history of the manuscript (lost, found, and almost forgotten again), the orchestration. I have heard Carmina Burana in concert several times (including an impressive performance by the San Francisco Symphony, at Davies Hall, with two full choirs combined -- the "O Fortuna" almost blew me out of my seat -- and I don't remember which program was a bit more explicit about Orff's life, but it made the point that Carmina Burana was largely overlooked for many years because Orff had been associated, in somewhat disputed ways, with the Nazis (see the Wikipedia article for more information).

At minimum, Orff "collaborated" with the government by responding to a call for alternate music to the Midsummer Night Dream, to replace the famous version by Felix Mendelssohn, whose music was banned because he was a Jew. Surely, he could have simply abstained from responding to this request without incurring much risk. The omission of this controversy in last night's program bothered me. For one thing, the same program talks about Tchaikovsky in the notes for another concert, and clearly mention his homosexuality, which was long ignored in such publications. So if it's now become all right to acknowledge this aspect of the Russian composer's life, which may or may not have a relationship with his work, then why the silence over Orff's controversial relationship with Hitler's minions?

Then I remembered another instance of controversy over the relationship with art and politics: the cinema industry was active in Paris in 1940-44, during the German occupation. It is claimed that the Germans encouraged it because it served their propaganda purposes (the book "Cinema of Paradox: French Filmmaking under the German Occupation" by Evelyn Ehrlich seems to provide particularly in-depth treatment of the subject).

Is it fair to expect artists to essentially "go on strike," emigrate, change jobs, or otherwise abandon either their environment or their families, or their profession, rather than work under the regime of the moment? Why do we tend to expect this from artists, and not from butchers or postal workers? I think there are two reasons: we assign morality to art, and art has a different ratio of "appearances vs. necessity." What I mean by the second point is that the butcher's work is necessary if people are to eat meat, and that work doesn't really make the regime look good (although in some places and times this point could be debated); the artist's work can be stopped as a form of passive resistance without damaging anyone's immediate well-being (other than the artists') and if the work goes on, the regime can, as was perhaps the case in Paris during WWII, use this as a way to project normalcy: "see those happy Parisians going to the movies, clearly we're not what the evil American propaganda is trying to tell you."

I tend not to provide answers in these pages -- I'm content enough to raise what I think are important questions. In fact, I don't know what to think about this, other than what I wrote above about Orff's options. Similarly, should Marcel Carné have put his camera away and waited until after the war to film his masterpiece Les Enfants du Paradis? The inspiration might have been gone by then. Was he complicit in the Nazi propaganda machine -- or, as has been claimed, did he help shelter resistance fighters by providing them with jobs on the set, knowing that his work enjoyed some level of protection from the authorities?

The work itself was beautiful, the Houston Symphony was actually pretty good at it... I just had this nagging feeling all evening that something needed to be discussed, and that the program author had missed a chance to make people reflect about a moral issue of great importance.

Blanc bonnet, bonnet noir ?

2008-02-08T22:57:00.001-06:00

Excuse me while I blab on in French, but a good friend of mine in Paris asked me to tell him about "Obama and Clinton." I thought that others might be interested, so here's my open letter to my friend.

Mon cher Michel,

Tu me demandes ce que je pense de Barack Obama et d'Hillary Clinton, car depuis la France vous ne comprenez guère ni les enjeux ni les différences entre les deux candidats.

L'enjeu n'est clair que sur un point, qui est de remplacer l'incompétente marionette qui occupe actuellement la Maison Blanche par un président démocrate qui pourra commencer à redresser la barre. Et je dis bien commencer, car contrairement à la légende herculéenne, nettoyer ces écuries d'Augias-là ne se fera pas en un jour.

Cela ne veut pas dire que les démocrates ont la clé de la porte de sortie en Irak. Personne ne l'a, du moins tant que l'on ne veut pas admettre que ce pays n'est pas viable en tant que tel, que c'est la Yougoslavie du Moyen-Orient et qu'il vaut mieux une partition honorable qu'une guerre civile prolongée, et cela même si un sud chiite se joint, de droit ou de fait, à l'Iran, et si un nord-est kurde attise des velléités séparatistes de leurs frères turcs ou iraniens. Mais je digresse.

Mais même si sur ce terrain tout le monde, de quelque bord qu'il soit, aura les mains plus ou moins liées de la même manière par les conneries de la troika Cheney/Rice/Rumsfeld, d'autres sujets sont toujours traités de manière sensiblement différente par les démocrates et les républicains, et cela se résume au rôle accordé au gouvernement dans la vie publique : les démocrates penchent pour que le gouvernement intervienne pour assurer un certain "contrat social" concernant l'éducation, la santé, etc., alors que les républicains sont en principe pour un gouvernement central réduit... ce qui en pratique les amène à laisser tomber ceux qui auraient le plus besoin d'aide. En revanche, ce même parti cesse totalement d'être minimaliste quand il s'agit d'imposer une uniformité morale et confessionnelle au pays : c'est le parti favorisant un "moment de prière" dans les écoles, le parti proposant un amendement constitutionnel déclarant qu'"un mariage est un lien sacré entre un homme et une femme", etc. Dès qu'il est question de morale chrétienne (essentiellement protestante), les républicains ne sont plus du tout libertaires, et se complaisent assez à venir voir ce que nous faisons dans nos chambres, et cela malgré les frasques de certains de leurs sénateurs dans les toilettes pour hommes des aéroports (cherche "Larry Craig" sur Google ou Wikipedia si tu ne comprends pas l'allusion) !

Bon, mais tu ne m'as pas demandé de dire pourquoi je vais voter démocrate, je pense que tu me faisais assez confiance pour cela. Donc, revenons à nos moutons.

Clinton et Obama représentent tous les deux une rupture significative avec le passé, puisqu'il s'agit d'une femme et d'un noir. Mais Clinton est évidemment marquée comme étant la femme de l'avant-dernier président. Cela a deux implications contradictoires. Pour certains, c'est l'assurance de son expérience supérieure, de son accès aux conseils de son mari (qui est maintenant respecté comme ayant été un très bon président, malgré son utilisation peu orthodoxe du cigare et, pardonne le jeu de mots, de la pipe), de la facilité avec laquelle elle pourra assembler un gouvernement ultra-compétent, etc. Pour d'autres, c'est la promesse d'une alternance Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton qui fait que seules deux familles se seront partagées la charge suprême de 1988 à 2012 ou 2016, ce qui est aux antipodes du changement espéré.

Obama, de ce point de vue, peut presque se targuer de son inexpérience. Et pourtant il essaie un peu maladroitement de répondre à cet aspect critiqué de sa candidature, en disant par exemple qu'il comprend la politique internationale parce qu'il a été à l'école à l'étranger ! C'est un peu faible.

Obama se présente comme plus crédible pour le retrait des troupes d'Irak que Clinton, parce qu'elle avait voté pour donner à Bush le pouvoir de lancer l'opération militaire de 2003. Là, Clinton joue mal : au lieu de dire, "on nous avait menti, et comme beaucoup d'autres j'ai voté pour ces pouvoirs parce que cela aurait été la bonne décision si les informations que nous avions reçues avaient en fait été correctes, et si j'avais su que c'était faux je n'aurais pas voté pareil," elle a voulu éviter le faux pas de Kerry en 2004 ; mais du coup, elle s'est enferrée dans une défense au moins aussi maladroite que lui de ce vote.

Mais il est clair aujourd'hui qu'Obama, tout en s'en défendant, profite du fait qu'il est investi par la communauté noire d'un grand espoir, qui a son importance vu l'histoire du pays : l'espoir de mettre enfin réellement l'ère du racisme et de la ségrégation au placard en élisant un président noir. Et cela, malgré le libéralisme des Clinton à ce sujet (entre autres), c'est un argument imparable dans sa symbolique dans un pays qui n'a pas réussi à se débarrasser complètement de ce spectre depuis la Déclaration d'Emancipation promulguée par Lincoln en 1863.

Conclusion ? Il n'y en a pas encore. Pour moi, les deux candidats sont valables, représentent un espoir et un changement, et seront certainement sensiblement meilleurs que le régime actuel. Il est intéressant que l'électorat démocrate soit aussi partagé qu'il l'est après qu'une trentaine de primaires (sur 50) aient eu lieu. Il est donc possible qu'il faille attendre la convention démocrate cet été pour qu'une décision soit prise. Ce qui exclut complètement un "ticket" Clinton + Obama, car ils se seront trop heurtés d'ici là pour pouvoir travailler ensemble ensuite avec crédibilité.

Reste le problème de l'éligibilité. Ce qui me frappe pour le moment, c'est que les électeurs des primaires semblent plus spontanés que calculateurs : ils votent pour Clinton ou pour Obama (ou, avant qu'il ne se retire, pour Edwards) plus parce qu'ils aiment réellement leur candidat que parce qu'ils pensent que c'est le plus susceptible de gagner contre leur opposant de novembre (qui semble aujourd'hui devoir être l'antique mais crédible John McCain).

Or chacun des deux, Clinton et Obama, entrerait en lice pour novembre avec un lourd handicap. Pour Clinton, le fait d'être une femme n'est peut-être pas très grave -- les hommes susceptibles d'être le plus misogynes voteront probablement républicain de toute manière. Par contre, sa candidature provoquera une levée de boucliers des forces religieuses qui la considèrent comme le diable incarné à cause de ses positions sociales, et elle ne s'est pas fait que des amis, même dans son parti, par son attitude arrogante pendant les premiers mois du mandat de son mari, alors qu'elle essayait de faire passer un programme ambitieux de réforme du système de santé en n'étant investie d'aucun mandat, étant simplement chargée par son mari d'un "groupe de travail" (task force) sur la question. Les blessures d'amour-propre ne sont pas encore toutes refermées...

Quant à Obama, pas besoin de faire un dessin pour comprendre son handicap. Il suffirait d'une petite proportion de démocrates racistes dans certains états pour lui faire perdre ces états, même si les démocrates y sont en majorité, et ce serait assez pour lui faire perdre l'élection. Mais personne ne veut dire à haute voix "ne choisissons pas Obama parce qu'étant noir, il n'est pas éligible". C'est ce que l'on murmure aujourd'hui dans les chaumières, mais personne ne le dit publiquement de peur de se faire accuser d'être soit raciste, soit manipulateur clintonien.

Devant ce dilemme, que j'ai voulu résumer par le titre choisi pour ce blog, "blanc bonnet, bonnet noir", les électeurs démocrates qui votent aux primaires ont une lourde responsabilité : de leur choix (et de tous les impondérables qui peuvent se présenter dans les neuf mois restants) dépend le fait que le changement arrive ou non en novembre.

Affaire à suivre. Ce qui est certain, c'est que la campagne actuelle est plus intéressante qu'on ne le soupçonnait il y a encore quelques mois, quand on parlait d'"Hillary l'incontournable".

Mon cher Michel, j'espère ne pas t'avoir trop ennuyé du haut de mon perchoir électronique, et dis-moi si je t'ai un peu éclairé ou si j'ai semé une confusion encore pire.

Claude

Gender Bender

2008-01-28T14:40:00.001-06:00

I had a nice lunch today with E., an ex-colleague, who incidentally now works for the competition, with whom I had barely stayed in touch since we got organizationally and geographically separated more than four years ago.

She is very active in the "Women in Science and Engineering" community, and it seems to motivate her tremendously to work toward better gender equality in schools and at work. I learned a lot from her today about things I tend to be oblivious to as a male, especially the "pressure to perform badly" in high school, because "cool girls" are not supposed to be smart -- it threatens the boys' self-esteem, apparently.

Toward the end of my discussion with E., we talked about the influence that other countries would have on the future of this situation. Some of the most interesting points that came up, in my opinion, were the following:

The gender issues in school are, at least in part, causing a shortage of scientists and technically oriented people in the U.S., and we are partially making up for this by attracting students from other countries. However, these students are increasingly able to return home to have good careers -- they're no longer automatically staying in the U.S. as they used to.
Some of the countries that are likely contenders to dominate the 21st century, especially China and Russia, have much better gender equality than the U.S., both in academia and in industry. Call it an unexpected lasting benefit of communism! But these people may be able to stay home and do well, especially because their countries are doing a lot of outsourcing for Western countries. So their influence will be positive in terms of the presence of women in science overall, but not specifically in the U.S.
On the other hand, the technical gap is also filled by a lot of students and immigrants from the Middle East (Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Iran, etc.), and this population is overwhelmingly male, because they come from countries where women are even less supposed to go into science and technology than in the U.S. Therefore, this tends to aggravate rather than help our imbalance.
An unexpected bright spot in the world, we agreed, is Latin America. Both E. and I have travelled (although not extensively) in countries like Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, and we met women in significant positions in management, sales, etc. -- of equal or higher rank than men, who appeared to be well adjusted to this mixed environment. It even seemed to me like the professional women in Latin America were able to remain very feminine in their social behavior (they would kiss the men good morning each day at the office) without jeopardizing their professional authority when they were the hierarchical superiors. Did we happen to find the exceptions, or is this a real social/professional phenomenon? I'm curious to hear about other people's experience.

Taken altogether, these remarks point to another troubling point for the U.S. in this century. Losing some access to the intelligence and potential of half the population is a crime, and aside from all the other stupid things that have been done geopolitically in recent years in this country, this is a handicap that may take a very long time to be corrected. If better regard for women in schools and in the workplace contributes to the standing of Russia, China and other countries in the 21st century, then more power to them!

Some people might object that the presence of a woman in the current race to the White House disproves my argument. First, I wasn't talking about politics, but about science and technology. But even considering politics, I don't think Americans realize that marveling about the fact that a woman may become president isn't as good as not marveling about it. Margaret Thatcher (not that I ever agreed with her, but that's another story) was the UK Prime Minister 20 years ago. India had Indira Ghandi. Israel had Golda Meir. Chile has Michelle Bachelet. France had a serious woman candidate for president, Ségolène Royal, in the 2007 election. The U.S. has never had a woman at this level of power, or that close to being chief executive, and government cabinets were overwhelmingly male, or had women in minor positions, until Bill Clinton appointed Madeleine Albright as Secretary of State in, I think, 1996.

So... nice lunch, depressing thoughts, but I'm glad E. made me think about all this.

Non-Phishing Problems

2008-01-26T21:33:00.000-06:00

Stage 1: the Internet is this nice new place where people communicate.

Stage 2: the Internet is this nasty place where people get caught by scammers, spammers, phishers, and other assorted kinds of crooks.

Stage 3: the Internet starts looking like the real world -- there are nice people as well as scam artists, you need to be careful when deciding whom to trust. Helloooo... welcome to the real world!

But that's not the end of the story. Over the last couple of weeks, to my surprise, I discovered...

Stage 4: everyone has become so distrustful that sometimes you get a legitimate message and your first reaction is to dismiss it as a scam, potentially with unpleasant consequences!

Here are the two examples I experienced recently.

The first one has to do with Paypal, the online bank (to simplify its description). I am the Treasurer of a non-profit association, so I maintain a Paypal account for us, so we can more easily accept payments from our members instead of doing everything through checks. About two weeks ago, I get an e-mail that says that I need to provide proof of our non-profit status, otherwise our account might be "limited." Well, you've all gotten all these bank-related phishing scams before, so guess what? I trashed the message. There are a couple of things that seemed legitimate: the message was addressed to me by name, and we do have a Paypal account after all. But the message was signed "Mike, Paypal Compliance Department" -- no last name. And I was asked to send information to a phone number, therefore presumably a fax but it didn't even say so. And that number was in the 402 area code, which I didn't recognize. I know Paypal has offices in San Jose, because a good friend of mine works there, so I would have expected 408, not 402. Anyway, there were enough conflicting signs that I felt very confident that this was a phishing scam.

Last week, just a day before leaving for a ski trip organized by our association (and for which we had asked people to pay us through Paypal, precisely) I got a second message, worded like the first one, except it said that since I had not responded to the first one, our account had had its access "limited," and we needed to provide the requested information to restore full access. My first reaction was, as you may have guessed: "here they go again, been there, done that, go to trash, go directly to trash, do not pass Go." After trashing the message, I thought, "well, it doesn't hurt to check where I am with the account" -- especially since we were expecting a couple of late registrations for the ski trip, and seeing an incoming payment would be a good way to check on that. I log in to Paypal and, you guessed it, our account was "limited" -- we couldn't receive or withdraw money any longer -- because of the lack of verification of our status.

I got rather annoyed and flustered, but I kept my calm as I called Paypal (four times before I could actually get an answer) and discussed this with them. The poor woman who answered the phone really had no clue, and didn't seem like she really cared to escalate my issue with how misleading the message had been. But it was quickly apparent that the only solution was to comply with the request. I was just nervous because they were asking for documentation of our tax-exempt status, and since we are a chapter of an association which is part of a university, I was envisioning all sorts of complications in (a) getting a copy of the university's 503(c) tax status certification by the IRS, and (b) satisfying Paypal that this double indirection still qualified us as non-profit. But in fact, these fears were ill founded: it only took about 48 hours for Paypal to acknowledge my statements, which I sent both by e-mail and by fax, for good measure, and to restore full access to the account.

The lesson from the story is that sometimes a phishing-like message isn't one, and when it's ambiguous enough (you are doing business with that institution, and they call you by your correct name), then you need to investigate. Of course, you need to be careful: in my case, I looked up the Paypal customer service number on the Web, and I called that number.

Example 2 concerns a letter I received this week at home. It was from "U.S. Claims Services," an official-sounding company that said that they were looking for a Claude Baudoin who had once lived, or might still be living, at a certain address in Houston, which did turn out to be my previous Houston address (2000-2002). It also listed the correct last four digits of my social security number. The letter went on to state that they had found that there were leftover funds in a certain amount (not a negligible one -- between one and two thousand dollars) in my name, coming from some insurance company I don't remember having ever dealt with, deposited with the state government, and that they could help me claim that amount if I sent them a check for $75 and some cents.

So, guess what? My first reaction was, "this has to be a scam. If I am gullible enough to send them the money, I'll never hear from them again." I went to their Web site, and it actually looked reasonably professional, well written (contrary to the usual "Nigerian" scams), had an FAQ page, listed registration numbers in California and Florida, had an 800 number, the name of the owner, etc. I then went on Google and searched for them. There were quite a few forums were people had asked the question, "I just got a letter from U.S. Claims Services, do you think it is legit?" Almost invariably, people were answering "be careful, this must be a scam." But what started looking a little strange to me is that no one was actually stating as a fact that it was a scam, they were just asserting that it must be one, clearly based on the same sort of cautionary attitude that I myself had. A number of the answers said "you shouldn't have to pay anyone to recover money that is rightfully yours," and pointed out that the writer's state had a Web site to check on unclaimed tax refunds, etc.

My next step was therefore to Google "texas unclaimed property" (the idea of using the word "property" came from the language used by some people who formulated the type of answer I just described), which led me to the Web site of the Texas State Comptroller. The "unclaimed property" page offered me a very simple search form (last and first name and city) and lo and behold, the search found exactly the same information listed in the letter from U.S. Claims Services: same amount, same year, same insurance company name! And then, it asked me to fill some additional information, including my current address, and obligingly created for me a prefilled PDF claim form, with the instructions on what documentation to attach, and where to send it!

I find the situation quite intriguing in several respects. First, this smelled like a scam, but it wasn't. The existence of this unclaimed money is real. These people are offering to get it for me for a price which is less than half of a percent of the amount I can recover. That's not a scam, that's a business proposition! Secondly, I can actually go ahead and recover the money myself, quite legally, without using them -- the state of Texas has made it super-easy -- but I wouldn't have done it if they hadn't written to me. So while I am very happy not to spend $75, I almost feel funny because I owe them the fact that I am (presumably) going to receive a nice check in the mail in a few weeks. If everyone knew about the state's unclaimed property Web site, then U.S. Claims Services would have zero revenue and would go under. So people like me depend on the fact that some other people will pay that company to do the work for them. And what is the "work" in question, for which they get $75? Well, I assume that all they would have done if I had paid them would be to print the form from the state and send it to me with instructions on what identification and past proof of residence to attach, and where to send all this -- bringing me exactly to the same point I am now. Sounds like a lot of money for just printing and mailing a claim form, doesn't it? On the other hand, it sounds like a pretty small fee for making me discover more than a thousand dollars I was blithely letting the state keep. See, it's not as simple as it seems.

Back to the initial point: twice since the year started, I thought that I was being scammed, and almost hurt myself in the process. Upon further examination, the alerts were legitimate, and careful verification allowed me to get the right outcome. If I hadn't double-checked, my club's Paypal account would have been locked longer, potentially missing contributions or causing other trouble for us, and I would have missed a personal refund for a significant amount.

Now we need to add to "careful, it may be a scam" the reverse concern: "careful, it might not be a scam." Sigh... life on the 'net ain't simple, is it?

What's in a Name?

2008-01-26T21:25:00.001-06:00

I've been "Bayfrog" on several other sites for years... but I can't be on Blogger. That's because I'm not the only one who thought that this would be a cutesy name for a French expatriate living in the San Francisco Bay Area. A certain "Dr. Ni" -- his profile handle -- has already cornered the bayfrog.blogspot.com URL.

It's a sign of the Internet age that the namespace is so densely populated, I guess. And that may be a good thing. Oh well, I'll use my real name -- not that I am usually shy about that anyway. As Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems said a few years ago, "you have no privacy -- get over it!"

When I moved from California to Houston (whether that was a moment of insanity or not will never be known, since we don't have a record of a parallel universe in which I would not have moved, so that we could compare the results of the two options), the "Bayfrog" nickname seemed out of place, but then I moved to Boston a few years later, and stayed over three years. Since Massachusetts is known as the "Bay State," I was like a fish in water again, so to speak. Now I'm back in Houston, but what's in a name? I guess it doesn't matter here anyway.