mandarine

This mosaic is on the wall next to my bathtub. This time of the year, while floating idly in warm water, I can contemplate the rising sun bringing extra orangeness to the hues. And I am proud. Because I know we made that mosaic. We made it with leftovers from the terracotta tiles once the bathroom floor and bathtub wall had been tiled. It took us two days to complete, deciding on the design, cutting the little dice, sticking them on a fiberglass netting with tile cement, fitting the net on the wall while filling the joints with lime mortar.

The net result is that it cost us two days of fun work (the materials were virtually free) for an endless supply of pride (and compliments when visitors happen to spot it on their way to the bathroom). I do not count the capital gain because I cannot imagine that I will ever sell this house.

This mosaic is already three years old, and to me it has become a symbol of my house and of my life : hard work, lazyness, and pride.

Although on the economic front, ’slowdown’ sounds inappropriately shy to describe what is soon becoming a great depression, it is the right word on the blogging front. I have long hesitated to write about it here, probably because I still have not made up my mind about how personal I want this blog to be. But I figure I owe that much to all my blogging friends who seldom fail to mention a word or two about what is happening in their lives, especially when it keeps them away from the keyboard.

It’s not blog burnout, it’s not boredom or weariness. I simply have been busy.

• Busy at work because I have been working on two tenders, three patents, and a spacecraft dynamics course for internal training which is turning into a testament



• Busy in the garden and the kitchen because you may have a no-work garden for pretty much of the growing season, the tomatoes still won’t pick themselves (you can read about the garden there)



• Busy at home because I am stepping in to replace my terminally pregnant wife with her computer home help business (logo by yours truly below) in my spare time and days off



• Busy in the house because we still have to build a bedroom for kid #1 so that he can leave his bedroom staircase landing to kid #2 when kid #2 leaves our bedroom (that would be before next summer)
• And busy mentally because there maybe new opportunities job-wise (but shhush..)

This slowdown will probably last another fortnight, but after the birth I will be on leave for at least a month, leaving enough time to resume the weekly posting rhythm.

Summary

People need three things: land to grow food, energy to make stuff, and information to interact. In the old model, it was easier to pack people together so they could make stuff and interact more efficiently, and move food and energy around. But now that the information and energy can be everywhere, we had better live where food grows. [more]

By command of Her Royal Highness, I hereby answer a series of personal questions which make the blogging world a futile and friendly place.

Where I was ten years ago.

I think ten years ago was when I got my first doubts about my job. I had been working for two years then, in what is probably the finest job in the world for an engineer who likes hardcore technique: future spacecraft projects with the leading European space systems manufacturer. There’s nothing like achieving a childhood dream too early to kill glamour for good. The job was extremely interesting, but essentially abstract. One of the inventions I made back then did make it into a live spacecraft design, which is due to fly in 2010. That’s a five percent chance of seeing a concrete outcome for my work after twelve years. The job was (and still is) great fun, but essentially aimless. I have lost all illusions about space conquest (and will probably write soon why). There is no democratic debate on how the space subsidies should be spent either. I spend taxpayer’s money for things taxpayers have no clue about. Sometimes I feel like a Monsanto scientist doing fun stuff just because it can be done and it’s fun to do; and that which can be sold makes it to the market.

For the past two or three years I have been wanting to find some other job, one that would be more useful to mankind, but now I have decided to keep my fun (and mildly harmless) job, and save the world on my free time, like most superpeople do.

Five fatty snacks

1. Home-made nutella (which some would call Gianduja; it’s hazelnut butter with sugar and chocolate), by the spoonful
2. Roquefort cheese. My boy’s nanny is raising ewes, whose milk is used to make Roquefort. Each year, she gets discount cheese from the ‘caves’. We have six pounds of the treasure cheese hoarded in our freezer, bought for the price of burger-grade cheddar.
3. Saucisson. You’d probably call it dry sausage.
4. Foie gras. (We do it ourselves with our neighbour’s ducks, but not before November)
5. Tomates confites. Half-tomatoes that are slowly baked in the oven with olive oil, garlic and pesto.

Five other fatty snacks (no dietary duality in my world)

1. Tapenade. A paste made with olives.
2. Caviar d’aubergines. A paste made with eggplant and olive oil.
3. Ail confit. Garlic slowly cooked in duck fat.
4. Fresh cheese with herbs. Chives especially.
5. Onion jam.

Have you noticed? All go with bread. I must be French.

Five things I would do if I was a billionaire

1. Wonder where all that wealth came from
2. Subsidize conversions to organic farming in my region
3. Subsidize research in natural and organic farming all over the world
4. Donate heaps to open-source projects
5. Go back to work

Five jobs I have had

1. Math & physics tutor for rich but mediocre pupils
2. Summer camp leader (volunteer)
3. Metalworking lathe operator in French Guyana (2 month internship)
4. Flight control systems engineer for commercial aircraft future projects
5. Attitude control systems engineer for spacecraft future projects

Three of my habits

1. Going to sleep with the same chapter of the same audiobook on my mp3 player.
2. Commenting blogs in bed instead of reading serious books.
3. Reading blogs at work whenever I need a break. The more pressure there is, the more I read.
4. Driving slower than the elderly.
5. Taking a 30′ nap every other day.

Five places I have lived

1. Paris, France (0->1/2)
2. Trois-Rivières, Québec (1/2->2)
3. Paris, France (2-22)
4. Toulouse, France (22-32)
5. Home, Home (32-Inf)

Now is the time for my farmer self to say good-bye and move to roomier premises. The Mandarine half here will presently revert to literary mutterings, amateur photography, dilettante philosophy and leftist social criticism.

For those interested in my experience (and my errors) as a gardener, you can visit my new website, l’arpent nourricier, which I declare open as of now. If you read French, good for you. If not, you can still look at the pictures

My primary objective is to write about this wager of mine that I’ll be able to farm a garden big enough to feed a family while still working full-time (80% full-time) as an engineer. My secondary objective is much more pretentious: I want to transfer to the French-speaking internet all the experience and resources I can from the very vast corpus of resources and techniques for new, small-scale, organic farming from the English-speaking internet. My ultimate goal (apart from the obvious selfless contribution to the good of that part of humanity which happens to read French and among whom I happen to live) is that there is a chance that like-minded people might get to know me, and offer me to participate in projects involving local, small-scale, organic farming.

The name “l’arpent nourricier” translates to “the nurturing acre”. It is too bad that the term “nourricier” in French only conveys the “food” idea, and not the “care” idea that “nurturing” implies. It would have been an even better name.

PS: do not worry about the theme, I will be changing it as soon as I can.

And while you’re at it, congratulate me about my floor.

[more]

I cannot remember when it started. Maybe the turning point was shortly after I started on my first job eleven years ago, when I explicitly told my wife that although I had one of the most prestigious degrees in France, I would not go for the associated prestigious careers. Instead of using my position to get the highest paychecks, I’d be using it to get the best quality of life possible.

[more]

Four meters. This is how long the surprise cucurbitacea near my potato patch has grown now. It must have sprouted some time in June, but I only started noticing it around the end of August when it started blooming and I could not mistake it for any old weed.

[more]

Fault-tolerant design

Let me take you on a detour through aerospace systems design: when we have to engineer spacecraft that will operate for twenty years in geostationary orbit without any maintenance (imagine your washing machine running 24/7 for 20 years without interruption), or when we have to design aircraft that will fly a billion flight hours without an accident (imagine your computer running for 117,000 years without hanging), we need fault-tolerance and robustness. The way we achieve this robustness is through redundancy and diversity. Whenever a system fails, there is a similar backup system that can take over (redundancy). Sometimes, even the redundant system fails eventually. The most frequent case is because there was a common design flaw in both the nominal and redundant systems. When we want to ensure robustness even against such unforeseeable events (we never know where our design will be flawed, but we always know it can be), we design another backup system that is completely dissimilar from the nominal system (diversity). Generally the backup system design is much less efficient, but much more rugged, therefore it has a lot more tolerance to off-nominal situations. This will allow the pilot to land the aircraft or give ground operators time to reconfigure the spacecraft. The more diversity we build into the system, the more robust the design will be.

Biodiversity theorem

I recently read an interesting analysis in a gardening book: the author was showing that there were always ‘magic’ weeds which showed up after an ecosystem had been upset, so that it always seems to be just the right weeds to improve the soil and make it ever more fertile. [more]