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

Serious side covers mainly climatology, global agriculture and food security

Vaguely philosophical

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

not serious articles

Not so serious

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

eifel articles

Eifel

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

Latest posts

About Truth (5/19/2023) Posted in: Vaguely philosophical I am ready to concede that “About Truth” is a very ambitious title1. It is also a difficult concept that in all likelihood and objectivity would exceed my analytical capacity if I wanted to systematically explore all the nuts and bolts2. What I am after, in fact, is the truth of information. The post was […]
TYPOL – Typology of Registry office districts (Standesambezirk) based on scale-independent variables (5/17/2023) Posted in: Eifel TYPOL.1 Purpose A number of environmental and population-related variables have been collected in the ambit of Chapters LUCLIM, VARENV and WEDNUM. They can be used to define a typology of the Registry office districts (Standesamtbezirk). Only “concentrations” were retained, thus excluding variables that depend on the size of the districts (“intensities”, e.g. district areas or […]
SITEMAP – Map of the Eifel Weddings Project (Provisional) (5/12/2023) Posted in: Eifel The list of currently planned chapters is provided by this sitemap. Chapter numbers are difficult to handle as I keep adding, splitting and merging sections. I have therefore eventually opted for chapter Labels and added an internal variable ODT (Ordre de tri, Sorting order) to ensure that on the Eifel “frontpage” the sections are listed […]
Savon et moustiques (5/11/2023) Posted in: Not so serious Je m’en suis pris, récemment, à quelques publications a priori très chic dans des revues très chic dont la motivation ou le “narratif” me semblaient peu honnêtes ou mal informés1. Des publications scientifiques pas complètement honnêtes 1. Il y a eu d’abord un billet sur L’extraordinaire durabilité du béton romain. Les auteurs font semblant de […]
Biorythmes, mémoire (la mienne!) et Classic Words (4/27/2023) Posted in: Not so serious Classic Words enregistre les scores. Je me dis depuis longtemps qu’ un jour je ferai une petite analyse de ces données. Ces scores devraient, d’une façon ou d’ une autre, refléter le niveau de ma forme intellectuelle, par exemple des fluctuations périodiques, ou des tendances à long terme. Malheuresusement, les scores ne sont disponibles – […]
LUCLIM – 1885 Land use and 1961-90 climate (4/26/2023) Posted in: Eifel LUCLIM.1 Population and land use according to the the 1885 census The table below was assembled based on the data contained in the 1885 census of the German empire. All the district offices where the weddings were recorded (Standesamtbezirk) belong to the Government districts (Regierungsbezirk) of Koblenz or Trier. The names of the counties (Kreis) […]
Scrabblemanie (4/24/2023) Posted in: Not so serious Fan de mots fléchés et de jeux de lettres Fan de mots croisés, je pratique presque journellement Classic Words, un magnifique Scrabble pour Android. Ma tablette est un enfant de la COVID-19, un Kindle Fire acheté en février 2020 sur lequel j’ai immédiatement installé Classic Words. C’est, selon moi et quelques autres, le meilleur Scrabble […]
Unknown known unknowns: Rumsfeld Vs Sharon-Rose Khumalo (3/24/2023) Posted in: Not so serious Do you recognise the distinguished gentleman on the left? He was Donald Rumsfeld (1932-2021), Secretary of defence to GW Bush from 2001 to 2006. Like Putin, he’s an invader, but his targets were Afghanistan and Iraq1. As to Sharon-Rose Khumalo, the lady on the right, I discovered her in The guardian a couple of days […]
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/climate-change-and-risk-management-event VARENV – Environmental variables over time (3/23/2023) Posted in: Eifel This chapter on environmental variables provides some background about weather/climate conditions under which the Eifel weddings took place. While it is difficult to determine if other factors than love and tradition played a part, it is logical to assume that politics and weather may, to an unknown extent, have affected the spatial and temporal patterns […]
HIST – A time of moving boundaries and variable weather! (3/18/2023) Posted in: Eifel This chapter attempts to put the locations the spouses originated from in the broader historical context of “Germany” and of “Europe” between 1800 and 1935, as it is clear that most people who married between Hallschlag, Virneburg and Mehring were “Germans” who came from areas that were part of the “Germany” of the time. The […]