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.
Latest posts
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 un […]
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. 
Pesticide use in the European Union: the good, the bad and the ugly listed (10/23/2024) Posted in: Serious 350000 tonnes of pesticides are used annually by European farmers. The largest pesticide consumption intensity occurs in 6 countries including Cyprus, Portugal and Finland, as well as 3 countries that are among the main agricultural exporters in Europe: France, Italy and Spain. Other major exporters are doing much better, including Germany, Poland and Bulgaria. The absolute champion, when considering pesticide use relative to total agricultural output is Romania, followed by Croatia, Slovakia, Greece and Sweden. 
Anoxic utrification of Laurustine (Viburnum tinus L.) leaves (9/5/2024) Posted in: Serious Under anoxic conditions decaying Laurustine leaves (Viburnum tinus) can spontaneously inflate, i.e. fill with gas and some water, and become buoyant.
Sterput (9/4/2024) Posted in: Not so serious 1 C’est quoi, un sterput? Un sterput (on prononce le t final) c’est, dans une grande partie de la Belgique francophone, un dispositif à garde d’eau destiné principalement à recueillir les eaux de ruissèlement ou de nettoyage des sols. Ça s’appelle par ailleurs avaloir chez Wikipédia, dont est extraite la phase en italiques ci-dessus. Je […]
Piccolo resoconto di una piccola incursione di Popillia japonica a Camagna Monferrato, Regione Bonina (8/18/2024) Posted in: Bonina Infestazione di coleottero giapponese (Popillia japonica) nel 2024 a Camagna Monferrato, Piemonte. A small case study of a “domestic” Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) infestation in NW Italy (8/15/2024) Posted in: Serious Popillia, the Japanese beetle, has arrived in north-west Italy about 10 years ago, and it has been constantly spreading... creating havoc in agriculture and private gardens