mandarine

The definition of work in our complex economic world is difficult to establish, biased by cultural prejudice and the effects of money. Let us go back to basics with my reductionist model. Imagine a fictitious tribe of prehistoric humans, with little specialization and no currency. Let us try to sort their activities between what was work and what was not:

• Hunting and gathering: work
• Knapping flint tools: work
• Hut building: work
• Ritual dancing: not work
• Cave decorating: not work
• Bathing: not work
• Making love: not work
• Sleeping: not work
• Eating: not work
• Standing guard: work

From the above classification, I could try the following definition: work is any activity that is necessary for survival and that involves unpleasant effort.

It seems fair enough, and yet, even in a very primitive society, I can find activities that fit the definition and yet can hardly be considered work: [more]

My brother used to say: “Don’t do as Americans do. Americans always generalize. Don’t generalize.”

Three weeks ago, our beloved Mandarine gave birth to a litter of kittens. She is now, at age four, the proud mother of seven.

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Apparently, an empty scheduled post went off while I had no access to my site (server mostly down). I am confused. The post will be published next week: it is a meme, which goal is to make a righteous dent to the Mr Nice impression this blog gives about me. Five Fateful Flaws is the title, and from what you’ve just seen, you can imagine forgetfulness is nominated.

Ten years ago, back in early 1997, I would be constantly looking up to the night sky to marvel at the fabulous tails of comet Hale-Bopp. It was pure magic to be able to see such a rare bird with the naked eye.
One day I met a group of friends in Paris at night, and while we where walking to wherever we were to spend the evening, I talked about the comet.
- The comet, what comet? [more]

The XVIIIth century, by allowing free thought, unleashed creativity. People knew they could change things. Obviously, they started by changing those things that were bad. This resulted in unprecedented improvement. This led everybody to believe that change was good. The word progress best conveyed this confusion in meaning between change and good. The end of the XIXth century strongly believed that technology would bring happiness, that science would unveil truth, that industry would remove hunger, that medicine would cure death.

The XXth century, with its unprecented leap forward in scientific and technical prowess did a great job at convincing people that technological progress was steady, accumulative and good.

I want to challenge these three assumptions. [more]

Today, I finished reading all of Emily’s Telecommuter Talk. Ever since I found her blog, I knew I would have to read all of it sooner or later. Here is why: when Emily writes about something, anything at all really, she writes a story. Emily’s blog is not a journal: it is a collection of short stories. You won’t ever find a Telecommuter Talk entry like: ‘Today I hurt my little finger in a door’, no. Instead you will find a small drama about impossible love between doors and fingers, where knobs and hinges are characters with a personality of their own, where creaking door memories meet creaking joints fears. A story strewn with gems of psychology insight, peculiar personal philosophy, or obsessive-compulsive views. A story embroidered on a marvellous fabric woven from skillful language and dyed with colorful wit. I do not know if she’s real of if she’s just a storybook character invented by a skillful writer (maybe Hobs and Dorothy can testify in this respect), but I can tell you the skillful writer has me gripped.
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I am stalled about halfway through ‘Night and Day’. I’ve been painfully trudging along for a month now, and I still have not found anything special to keep me going except the beautiful language and my stubborn pride. To start with, I was under the impression that the first pages had been torn, or that I was reading a second episode before having read the first one. I was missing context for every sentence. This meant I had to store each bit of information, not knowing whether the color of the teacups, the mood of the weather, or the shape of the gas light on the pavement would be of any use for further understanding as the plot and characters slowly gathered more flesh. This requires considerable effort, all the more so because I also need context to help me with vocabulary.

After fifteen chapters, [more]