mandarine

The sequel of the ten things I like. The first five were:

• The letter k
• Kant (philosophy)
• Kindergarten (rural public schools)
• Kilimandjaro (global warming)
• KDE (Linux)

Here are entries 6-10:

• Kindness. My mother once told us her kids that what best defined our father was kindness. I cannot exclude that I have cultivated kindness as a Freudian way to seduce my mother. I do not know that that has worked, but it did with my wife. I aways try to be kind first, and think later. I am hardly ever angry. My speciality with children is to act angry before I am angry, so that I never get carried away. People tell me it is not sound never to be angry. Maybe I am a raging psychopath underneath; then you are fortunate I do not live in your street.
• Kodak (as in photography). I long thought I was a heartless rational geek. Taking up photography when I was 15 taught me otherwise. I still have to occasionally fight the image people have of me. Just because I cannot help thinking of supercooling phenomena or refraction indices when I see a tiny twig in its coating of crystal-clear ice does not mean I do not find it beautiful.
• Kilometers (as in bicycle). I would not ride for a sport, but I will not drive to commute unless I am forced to. If I can keep the current riding pattern, I will have ridden five thousand kilometers in 2007.
• Ka-band (as in telecommunication satellites). Telecommunication, telephone, and the internet are the true marvel of the late XXth century. Shut down your radio, your TV, your phone, your DSL connection, remove your mailbox, and you will know how life was like only a century ago. Every news was second-hand rumor, manipulation was everywhere. The only good side was that you never had to learn about faraway disasters you could not do anything about. Well, nobody forces me to watch the news.

• Kourou. I spent two months at the Guyana Space Center as a student in 1993 and I keep a vivid memory of the rainforest, the launch site, the deep lashing vibrations of a 450-ton rocket lifting off at night above the jungle and rushing for the night sky through the ghosts of late-afternoon thunderstorms. A few tens of miles away, in the Guyana National Park, there are Wayana indians living the same way they have been for the past 8,000 years. I like the contrast between a seemingly almighty nature and a niche of high technology, a place where modernity keeps to a narrow territory in the savannah between the mangrove and the forest, a place where there are tarantulas near the light switch of the tennis court. Maybe I try to recreate this contrast now, when I have to wield an axe to chop my heating fuel, when near the old woodstove is the broadband connexion I use for keeping in touch with dear faraway e-friends.

Read on

19.99 non-commecial things
The happiest person in the world
Mellow moments
Boasting some: what I know best

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