Using an Amazon Kindle in Beijing
Dear Amazon helpdesk I am writing to confirm, as I have done before, that downloading English books to a Kindle from amazon.com (as opposed to amazon.cn, I assume) takes forever in China.…
Je suis Charlie. OK, mais qui suis-je, au juste?
Il y a d’une part, des terroristes, et de l’autre, des récupérateurs. Pour les terroristes, Mélenchon a raison: leur combat n’est pas religieux, est politique. La cible du combat à…
La France remporte enfin Waterloo? La saga continue!
Sous la pression de son voisin français, la Belgique – au lieu de crier à l’ingérence – a retiré un projet de pièce de deux Euros commémorant la bataille de…
NSA 62nd anniversary
The National Security Agency (NSA) was established at the beginning of November 1952 (on the 4th of November, to be precise) . Join me in congratulating them on the occasion…
A practical joke by MicroSoft?
I was very surprised, yesterday afternoon, when my brand-new HP Zbook running Windows 7 crashed after I inserted my good old Huawei broadband wireless USB stick. The crash took the…
Un bien bon canular à base d’anus de porc et de calmar
Thomas vient de me faire parvenir un lien avec une information de première: on vendrait du calmar surgelé qui contient… des anus de porc. C’est sur le site de la…
Climate change: vehemence Vs competence
This text by Didier Nordon appeared in February 2011 in Pour la science, the French edition of Scientific American (N.400, Bloc-notes, page 5). Related posts: How difficult it is to…
Eurobabel
This post is about the use of languages in the European Commision (EC) and the European Union (EU). There are at present twenty-two languages, which are designated in the EC…
Xenophobia: who’s immune?
The extreme right, xenophobia and nationalism are gaining ground in many countries in Europe. Sometimes (Belgium), the situation borders on the ridiculous, but no-one dies! In Norway, after a bomb…
Exegesis of a scary and – therefore – often quoted passage from the second book of AR4 (II AR4, 9.4.4)
Updated 20111007 This post explains how a vague and unsubstantiated statement in a non-peer reviewed “report” about climate change and agriculture in Maghreb countries made its way via a poor…
How difficult it is to be a climatologist…
Just before COP-15 took place in Copenhagen in December 2009, unknow people broke into the computers of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and stole…
Le droit d’ignorance, version soft
[Cet article a été écrit dans le sillage d’un cours que j’ai donné en 2009 à l’université de L., et dont je suis revenu catastrophé par l’ignorance et le manque…