Claude Lelouch On Driving Alone

Posted on September 10, 2012 by laura

A few weeks ago on the way to Valloire, I heard an interview with author and filmmaker Claude Lelouch on the radio. He talked about how he experiences driving. Unfortunately, Autoroute Info doesn’t seem to provide access to all their short features in podcast form, and it didn’t occur to me to record it with my iPhone at the time, so beyond a few notes I typed in Evernote a little while after the interview, I don’t remember exactly what he said.

There’s something special about being in a car. The view through the windshield commands attention, the unfolding scenery playing in front of the passengers like images on a big screen. Lelouch pointed out another unique aspect of being in a car: it is one of the few places you can be alone and with others at the same time.

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Something Must Change

Posted on September 1, 2012 by laura

Today is the first day of September. As is customary, summer seems to have ended in a rainstorm last week. It’s hard to believe that just two weeks ago late afternoon temperatures were in the upper 30s Celsius (over 95º F). Most kids here will be starting back to school on Monday.

August was vacation month here in Europe. I took just one week and then went straight back to work. Ironically, I didn’t have more free time during vacation than I normally do, but I did make some decisions.

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Rebelote

Posted on August 17, 2012 by laura

I had a chance to return to Provence last weekend and spent an afternoon in the Toulourenc Valley in and around Brantes and Savoillans. Since summer is drawing to a close, I thought I’d post a few photos that capture the late-summer feeling of that sunny afternoon.

I probably won’t get a chance to go back again until the start of the harvest.

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Selfishness Isn’t A Winning Strategy

Posted on August 16, 2012 by laura

I hoped I would have some time to read (and write!) during vacation, but it didn’t happen. However I was able to catch up on some of the articles I’d saved with Instapaper. One I particularly enjoyed was from the slow web, by which I mean it was an article with long-term relevance that required more time to read and digest than a bite-sized blog post,

Edge master class 2011: The Science of Human Nature. The Evolution Of Cooperation

This article is from 2011, and I don’t remember how it got into my Instapaper. It’s the kind of article that makes me wish I were back in school. Martin Nowak is a mathematical biologist, and the article is a transcript of a talk describing his research into how cooperation can emerge through the process of evolution and natural selection.

The topic is well-known to any student of evolution, a subject that interested me greatly when I took a series of classes on the history of science as electives while completing my Bachelor Degree. The importance of this subject derives from the apparent contradiction between cooperation and evolution: in an evolutionary process in which natural selection favors survival of the fittest, cooperation among individuals should not emerge. To understand why this might be so requires first understanding what is meant by cooperation: one individual’s fitness is diminished by cooperating with a second individual whose fitness is improved. If natural selection favors survival of the fittest, then individuals tending to help others at their own expense will be less fit and the expressed trait (collaboration) will disappear.

Obviously, it makes a big difference whether natural selection operates on individuals, on groups or on populations. Nowak discusses this and I won’t elaborate on that point here. Of course, cooperation does occur so there must be some way to explain how it could evolve. He goes on to discuss several possible mechanisms that would favor collaboration and cites a lovely passage from Darwin, which I will reproduce here,

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Posted in Awesome, Science, Society | 16 Comments

Vacation: Photos From Provence

Posted on August 15, 2012 by laura

My vacation pictures seemed to generated some interest, and since I have a few unpublished ones I really like, I thought I’d do another post. They also give me the opportunity to follow up on some interesting comments from Corinne and Rich, both of whom alluded to the changes in vacationing since the seventies in their comments on Notes From Vacation: Nîmes.

I wasn’t around to see European vacation patterns in the seventies, but the typical vacation Corinne described corresponds quite well to my observations in Provence over the last few years. I can’t attest to the length of their stay, but judging by the provenance of license plates on the roads, vacationers from all over France, Belgium and The Netherlands, many in campers or towing caravans, make up a large percentage of visitors to Provence at this time of year.

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Posted in Culture, France | 2 Comments

Why The Hate For The Apple Genius Ads?

Posted on August 8, 2012 by laura

Returning from vacation, I found my Twitter stream and blog feeds overrun with criticisms of the Genius ads unveiled by Apple during the Olympics. I got around to watching all three of them on Monday. I should’ve dashed off the post I wanted to do right away. I didn’t, and now as I finally sit down to write it, CNET informs me that Apple seems to have pulled the campaign in response to the negative reaction: Apple Pulls Its Boy Genius Ads.

I’m not going to let that stop me.

I’m not a marketing expert either, but that hasn’t stopped anyone else, so I don’t see why I should let it stop me either.

So here goes,

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Posted in Advertising, Apple | 5 Comments

Notes From Vacation: Nîmes

Posted on August 7, 2012 by laura

From Castillon du Gard, it was a short drive to Uzès and then down the D 979 to Nîmes. Unfortunately there weren’t many places to stop and take in the view through the Gorges of the Gardon. At least there wasn’t much traffic.

I hadn’t expected to wind up in Nîmes but spent a few hours of the afternoon in some of the city’s beautiful parks. Sometimes the best days are the ones that aren’t planned. Les Jardins de la Fontaine was one of the first public gardens, created in the 18th century by military engineer Jacques-Philippe Mareschal and architect Pierre Dardailhon by order of Louis XV. The park extends over 15 hectares and has a number of different garden spaces, including a three-level waterfall and a lily pond. I should have taken more pictures.

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Notes From Vacation: Castillon du Gard

Posted on August 5, 2012 by laura

Castillon du Gard is a small French village near Uzès in Provence. Somewhat off the main tourist route, it’s a nice place to take a lazy summer walk through the narrow medieval streets, staying on the shady side out of the crushing heat.

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Will Evernote Help Readers Connect eBooks?

Posted on July 18, 2012 by laura

On Monday I wrote about an interview of Evernote CEO Phil Libin in which he told Ingrid Lunden from TechCrunch that Evernote has “specific plans” to develop solutions for readers of eBooks, Evernote Planning New Features For eBook Readers.

After I wrote that post, I realized that I had received the Evernote monthly newsletter by email on the same day. In it, I read that Evernote has added a “related notes” feature to the Chrome Web Clipper, a pop-up window that appears when you clip a web page with Evernote. The window displays two tabs: one shows related notes while the other displays all the items that have been clipped from the same Internet domain. A screenshot from the announcement illustrates quite nicely how this should work. I don’t use Chrome so I haven’t tried it.

I knew that Evernote provided a web page clipper, but I hadn’t looked closely at it because I thought it only worked as a browser plugin and wouldn’t be useful for me since I do most of my reading on mobile devices. I decided to take a closer look, and I realized that in addition to Chrome, Evernote has plugins for Firefox and Safari, as well as solutions for Internet Explorer and a bookmarklet. I installed the javascript as a Bookmark in Safari on my iPhone today and was able to clip web pages relatively easily. Here’s a snap of a clipped Evernote page as it appears on my MacBook.

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Posted in Digital Books, eBooks, Technology | 2 Comments

Evernote Planning New Features For eBook Readers

Posted on July 16, 2012 by laura

In an interview with Ingrid Lunden of TechCrunch in London last month, CEO Phil Libin Discussed Evernote’s future plans. His comments focused on two areas: the “quantified self” (personal memories or life data) and eBooks:

Evernote Wants To Be The Automatic, Trusted Place To Store Your Life [Interview]

Evernote is already in the business of saving personal notes, so the quantified self doesn’t seem like a big announcement. I was more interested in his descriptions of saving (and sharing) personal memories and in the connection he made to eBooks:

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Posted in eBooks, Reading | 1 Comment