Tout est dans le titre

It has been a while since I have posted anything in here. So many things happened in the last year that I was busy all time (and I am still…). Among these things, I defended my thesis, published two scientific papers and moved to the exact city I was born in (which occured to be on the other side of the world).

Anyway, moving to San Francisco was a big step that made me realise many things. One of these, I think, deserve to be written here, which is the reason I am back on my blog.

In terms of technologies, California and more especially San Francisco is probably ahead of most of the world. Apple and Google are hosted just a few miles from my own house now and you can easily tell by just the amount of Iphone or Macbook that flourish in people hands. Now I am expecting to see a tsunami of Ipad spreading all over the place in the next months.

A few years ago, I considered myselft as quite a geek person. On average, I was far more aware of these technological issues than most of my contemporaries. I remember the first generation of mp3 players from Archos that started all this in 2000. In only 10 years, the technologie has been so drasticaly improved that we can now have a full computer in the palm of our hand.

Today, I am quite surprise to see that the wave is getting too big for me to be reasonably surfed. The internet is so much intimately connected to our life that it is now difficult to imagine a life without it. The access to communication and knowledge is so easy that we don’t even have to memorize or think in our daily activities. In some regards, the brain is a member that needs its daily sport. Soon we won’ be good at remembering adresses, mails, numbers, birthdays, historical dates or recipes. And so on… The list can be quite extended since everything will be right there stored somewhere for you.

In a few years time, it will probably be difficult to buy a simple map since GPS and Google Maps will be in every hands. As technologies make our life easier and easier, our abilities to memorize and store informations will decrease more and more.

We are currently in the rising phase of this revolution. In human history, every revolution has consequences that follows. Some goods and some bads. Usually the bad side of each is longer to come out because our societies have a great inertia.

Take the mass production revolution intiated by ford for instance. It is only been a decade that we have broadly accepted that our planet cannot handle so much pollution.

Internet revolution started in the 90s and really took over with the millenium. We are clearly at the very beginning of this revolution. Where it will lead us is still very much opened. My worries are that we are blindly surfing this wave and forget that surfing can be dangerous some times. We might hit a rock or a shark we are just not aware of.

Is it possible that, in some extent, Internet could make our like poorer that they were…

I am not sure where we are heading to but we are going to it so fast…

Well, I was kind of interested to know what you think on this specific subject, considering my previous post. It would be cool to know what you think. Please leave comments on this specific subject.

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From France, the American campaign was an interesting story. We all followed the never ending battle between Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama as well as the details on Sarah Palin involvement in the bridge going nowhere. Hilary Clinton was very popular in the french medias, probably due to our last presidential election where Segolene Royal also had quite some chances of being elected. We were surprised to see how much time and effort every single TV channel gave to capture every single American citizen’s attention on a daily basis.

But my main surprise (and worries) concerned the duration of the campaign itself. Barack Obama justified his capacities and experience as a team leader only by the energy he gave to his campaign. The president is elected for 4 years in US. If I am correct, the campaign took possession of the medias during nearly 2 years.

Do you think, american citizens need 2 years to make up their mind about the next president? I don’t think so. My opinion is that the decision is taken in a few days; sometimes just before the actual day of the election. In France, the campaign also tend to be now longer than they were. But even if the medias start talking about it a year or so before the election, the actual campaign really starts 6 months before the election. If you remember that the french president is elected for 5 years, you see that it gives far more time to the president to develop its policy.

Then I though that there must be a reason why it’s so long in US so I asked some of my american friends in Paris about it. And, surprinsly, the only reason they gave me was that it was due to the size of the country. Indeed, 150 years ago, the candidates had to travel all around the country to present their program. That’s exactly why, the debate between Obama and Clinton took so much time. If they wanted, they could have travelled by horse, they had enough time to do so.

Do you think the Ohio needs to know the result in California to choose its own candidate? Again I don’t think so and it does sound weird to us.

So my question is simple. Is the next American president gonna do something about the duration of American campaign for the election of the president?

Travelling in time is the dream of thousands of kids around the world. Hollywood make billions of dollars out of this fascination every decades or so. Donnie darko is a good example among others of what human can create out of those complicated time lines.

Books on time travelling are numerous. Some are based on pure complicated mathematical theory, some others just build a nice story of sons meeting their dad before their own mother met him.

Yet, time travelling is possible. There is place on earth where you can go back and forth in time as easily as taking a taxi. It is called the international day line. If you want to have New Years’s Eve twice, just go in the pacific and here the magic comes!

On the west of the line, it is monday while on the east it is sunday! This is a pure mathematical abnormality we human created 2 centuries ago by choosing England as our time reference.

Why on earth, is there a reference on a sphere?

Now that internet has made our world a single small ball, why not choose a new reference so that time travelling can still be a nice and impossible dream?

Visiblement le programme responsable des pubs cliblés dans Gmail ne se censure pas, la preuve :

Blague à part, cela prouve bien qu’il s’agit d’un programme…

As for jillij-double, here is a new version with comments now with avatars and background color tunable.