french wikipedia

I expect you are already familiar and may already be a regular user of the wikipedia website.

However I want to write in praise of this great site and how I am starting to use it in a new way.. recently I have started regular use of the french version http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accueil 

What has surprised me is the quality of the writing. Despite the limitations of my french, unlike many other french language websites, I can read french wikipedia and understand/learn interesting new ideas in a foreign language!!

Why? In brief because of the style of writing is always clear, concise and without any slang or colloquialisms.. absolute great for me.

For example, following a recent radio program about the 1960s model Nico, I was able to learn more about Nico, The Velvet Underground and David Warhol all in French :)

The diversity and range of articles is phenomial, not just the mainstream and popular but more obscure articles e.g. one of my old math professors Marcus Du Sautoy:

Marcus du Sautoy, né en 1965, est professeur de mathématiques à l'université d'Oxford.

Il est également l'animateur d'une émission de la BBC Four et publie des articles dans le Times, le Guardian et le Daily Telegraph.

Il est amateur de musique, en particulier de piano et de trombone, qu'il lie aux mathématiques. Il a en effet publié en 2003 La Symphonie des nombres premiers (The Music of the primes) qui détaille l'histoire des mathématiques dans le domaine des nombres premiers, principalement l'hypothèse de Riemann.

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Favourite Films: One Hour Photo

Robin Williams playing a simple delusional lonely man. In many ways this film is too sad to watch. Excruciatingly embarassing but fascinating at the same time.
The main character is a nice man at heart, but so lonely he latches onto a family he absolutely no connection with, beyond that he develops their photos at the local mall. A relatively low skilled job he probably mastered in a few months.

What makes this film work so well is:
1) The insight it gives into how a basically good man, can become so delusional and lonely. Later under duress he is driven to a terrible mistake.
2) The film is beautifully shot, the sad character is always in stark light, which hardens the poverty of his existence. While the "ideal family" with a fantastic home and all things beautiful are shot in rich colours ...
3) A good sound track - atmospheric and perfectly fitting the mood of the film
4) There is a clever plot twist

Self-righteous Brits? Sweet, I totally agree...

One of my bug bears is the endemic self-righteous nature of our tabloid press.

There are many great things in British culture, but we are as a nation becoming increasingly aggressive and abusive. There are many other problems: poor diet, cheap booze, drugs ... This is all very sad and the tabloids seem to be in denial, adopting a classic chav "aggressive defensive" posture. Rather than talk about real issues, they focus on celebrity, sports, and banging on about British superiority plus beating the Germans over half a century ago?

I was lamenting this point about "endemic self-righteous of the Brits" on the way back home, when an attractive young women (late twenties), with an Eastern European accent passed and called out laughing "sweet, I totally agree!"

Pero theatre trip

A Saturday with my mother and two nieces (10 and 8 years old)

The lunch went down well, for the main course:

1) a base of couscous and soya (no tumeric: Sophia has a phobia of all things spicy) with some veg (grean beans) and prunes

2) fried turkey breasts adding cashew nuts at the end (so as to soak up some of the juices)

3) pour into baking dish the "base" (couscous, soya, veg, prunes) and then add on top the turkey and cashews

4) bake/grill for 5 - 10 minutes

serve with pesto and/or sweet chilly sauce. Possible variations:

1) add pumpkin or sunflower seeds at the baking stage?

2) add walnuts or brazil nuts stage

3) spinach <-- delicious but not so good for children who like blander flavour

4) tuna or salmon stakes instead of turkey

The theatre was great, a stylish puppet theatre with operatic themes. The younger couple (washing girl & baker) were attractive, dance in a puppet like movement and sung nicely. They were slightly coquetish: very theatrical displays of legs and playful taps :) The pretty washer girl with curly brown hair had very rouge, which looked grat on her pale complexion. The baker looked slim, athletic and neat altogether a simple but vaguely handsome young man.

The older couple (the sun and the moon) were the music and song which drove the theatre. She had a very powerful, saprano voice, I expect she was an ex-opera singer. They played a wide range of instruments: keyboard, percussion, sax, ...

The whole arrangement had a rather traditioning Victorian style, there is little in this show which would have looked obviuosly out of place 100 years ago? Not so clearly visible there were: amplifers, spot lights, synthizer

For supper (with Mum & Nadjib), I did a nice salad: bed of spinach leaves, cherry tomatos, roasted figs (it is the season), asparagus, olives, feta cheese (cows milk?), rapeseed oil and balsamic vinegar.

Dinner with friends: Dawits, Stephanie, Emmanuelle and Nadjib

Aperitif: Champagne cocktails (dry pinot noir plus a few drops of sweet creme cassis)
Starter: Red and Green salad (peppers, cumcumber, tomatos, olives, asparagus)
Main: Coucous and turkey baked (plus sweet potatos, sunflowers, greens, farmhouse vegs, rapeseed oil, cranberries ...)
Wine: Chilean Red (muy bueno Cabernet Sauvigon)
Desert: Desert wine (nice Sauterne/Montbazillac) and chocolates

Halloween - the battered boyfriend!

Nadjib and me went straight from work in Brighton to a Halloween fancy dress party in London, only minus the fancy dress.

Still a bit of make up and I could play the "battered boyfriend" ;-)

A cool party with Nadjib's old colleagues

Financial Crisis? How bad are things? "J'ai tort" Alan Greenspan

Following on from my blog entry last weekend, Nadjib has sent me another link to a credit crunch story. This time the article is in French, from the liberal paper "Liberation".

The article is a report of Alan Greenspan confession:

"J'ai fait une erreur en comptant sur l'intérêt privé des organisations, principalement des banquiers, pour protéger leurs actionnaires."

i.e. we can not blindly trust in free markets. Emphasizing the point he stresses that the markets (and himself) are in a state of shock:

"Ceux d'entre nous qui comptaient sur l'intérêt des établissements de crédit pour protéger les actionnaires (en particulier moi-même) sont dans un état de choc et d'incrédulité".

"La crise a pris une dimension beaucoup plus grande que ce que j'avais imaginé".

Also he doesn't know just how bad are:

"J'ai trouvé une faille dans l'idéologie capitaliste. Je ne sais pas à quel point elle est significative ou durable, mais cela m'a plongé dans un grand désarroi."

He continue to blame those who blindly followed the false god of free markets and deregulation (personally I am angry at Thatcher and Bush and their followers who for years have been so consending to anyone who has questioned the wisdom of complete deruglation):

"La raison pour laquelle j'ai été choqué, c'est que l'idéologie du libre marché a fonctionné pendant 40 ans, et même exceptionnellement bien".

I was really interested that he is particularly concerned about Credit Default Swaps:

"J'ai eu en partie tort en n'essayant pas de réguler le marché des Credit Default Swaps"

I blogged about this last week:

In brief a huge market for insuring against corporate bonds defaulting, in fact the CDS market ($50 trillion) has become much bigger than the actual corporate bond market ($5 trillion). Worse still these products, originally insurance tools have become highly leveraged, speculative products. If this market was to partially collapse (one big financial institution collapsing bring down another?) would it leave a financial black hole? Or have I mis-understood?

The article finishes with Alan Greenspan comment that risk managment model and market have collapsed:

"Le modèle de gestion des risques tenait depuis des décennies. Mais l'ensemble de cet édifice intellectuel s'est effondré l'été dernier."

Given ths CDS (risk managment) market is $50 trillion dollars that sounds very bad.