Welcome

If you arrived here by chance, you deserve a word or two of explanations. This is the blog of a real-world person. Like all real world people I am sometimes Serious and sometimes Not so serious, and sometimes too I just let my mind wander and speculate on various subjects.

serious articles on climatology, global agriculture and food security

Serious

Serious side covers mainly climatology, global agriculture and food security

vaguely philosophical articles

Vaguely philosophical

Issues that puzzle me for various reasons, basically dealt with Seriously

Not so serious articles

Not so serious

Not so serious side is mostly made of subjectivity and a fair dose of derision

Eifel wddings

Eifel

A geographic study of weddings in the Eifel: who married whom in the Eifel, and where.

life in Bonina

Bonina

A small place in the deep Piedmont in north-western Italy

Latest posts

Tout doit disparaître! (6/7/2025) Posted in: Not so serious Je continue à lire cet excellent livre de Dorian Lynskey Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (Tout doit disparaître : Les histoires que nous racontons sur la fin du monde). Lynskey est un journaliste et écrivain britannique et ce livre témoigne d’une culture étourdissante. Je suis au chapitre […]
Insect’ Hotel (6/4/2025) Posted in: Bonina Un hôtel à insectes au Piémont.
Geochemistry of honey (5/28/2025) Posted in: Serious The abundances of chemical elements in honey generally reflect their abundance in the earth''s crust. Bees, however, exercise some control on the chemistry of honey, with Aluminium Al and Silicon Si being virtually excluded. It seems that bees accumulate silver (Ag) and the halogens, especially iodine, which is 1000 times more abundant than in the crust.
Les abeilles, leur miel et ce qu’on trouve dedans (5/23/2025) Posted in: Serious Le billet examine les résidus toxiques de métaux lourds et de pesticides dans le miel. The post is about toxic residues in honey, especially heavy metals and pesticides.
My cognitive decline revisited (4/20/2025) Posted in: Not so serious About one and a half years ago, I published a post in which I wondered if a relatively long time series (3 complete years) of scores achieved in Classic Words solo (“CWs”, i.e. electronic Scrabble) could be used to assess my intellectual performance and intellectual decline associated with ageing (I am 75 now). Conclusions were […]
Carbonade flamande (1/31/2025) Posted in: Not so serious … avec un petit hommage à la mémoire de mon ami Maurizio J’ai cuisiné ce matin de la carbonade à la bière, la recette simple standard de chez nous, je crois: – fristouiller les morceaux de viande– enlever la viande fristouillée de la casserole, et y fristouiller des oignons– ajouter la viande aux oignons– ajouter […]
Märchen, contes & Fairy Tales (1/8/2025) Posted in: Not so serious Français: Ces contes proviennent du projet Gutenberg, où on en trouvera de nombreux autres ainsi, d’ailleurs que des audiobooks complets et plus de livres qu’on ne peut en lire en une vie. Et si vous en voulez d’autres, le Net a tout ce qu’il faut. Deutsch: Diese Geschichten stammen aus dem Gutenberg-Projekt, in dem viele […]
Find subliminal and quasi-subliminal images in a film (11/19/2024) Posted in: Serious A 90 minutes film is composed of about 135000 individual frames at a standard frame rate of 25 per second (fps). Searching for a specific frame (say, a subliminal or quasi-subliminal frame hidden at a random time in the film) is virtually impossible. We present a simplified and automated way of locating such hidden frames.
Nous sommes une espèce pusillanime et suicidaire (11/15/2024) Posted in: Vaguely philosophical Les négociations climatiques volées par l'industrie pétrolière vont nous mener à notre perte. Nous mourrons donc à petit feu. Et tout le monde s'en fiche, et les émissions de gaz à effet de serre continuent à augmenter. Triste monde!
More about pesticides in the European Union (10/26/2024) Posted in: Serious There are many methods to assess environmental impacts of pesticides. We compare a composite index based on national statistics with a published spatially explicit pesticide pollution risk at the global scale.