Philippe Rose
One day I'll have my office on the Moon!
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Monday, 26 January 2004

In memoriam


in memoriamGermaine Madeleine Dupuis Montel, 1927-2004†

To the love she had for all those around her and beyond, I love her...

A l'amour qu'elle avait pour ceux autour d'elle et plus loin, je l'aime...

Ihre Liebe hatte keine Grenzen, ich liebe sie...

Я лублю тиба, бабушку...

[26 January]



Sunday, 25 January 2004

Mars: Spirit and Opportunity!


opportunity (12k image)Second successful landing for JPL with the rover Opportunity! And NASA seems to have found a way to recover Spirit's functionality, they have upgraded the rover's condition from critical to serious, saying that getting the rover moving again should be three weeks away. This is a good day!

[25 January]



Saturday, 24 January 2004

Я лублю Россию


Swiss supermarket on a typical SaturdayEver seen a Russian supermarket? First, behold, a supermarket in St. Gallen on a typical Saturday afternoon. This is what should be the bread section, with lots of nice loaves for hungry customers. It's traditional to buy a tresse to eat for breakfast on Sunday morning. For this poor lady (and for myself), we had be feast on the last crumbs kindly left over under the shelves!

A complete opposition to the clean, modern and well-supplied supermarkets and food markets I have visited or heard about from friends visiting for professional purposes...

   On Ladoga Lake - in wild company

[24 January]



Friday, 23 January 2004

High flies the ISS


I caught a sight of the International Space Station flying above St. Gallen at 5.46pm. Standing outdoors by -5°C temperature and on top of the university campus I had a clear view over the low South-East trajectory of this 4-minute-long sighting. I had my digital camera ready and tried to see Commander Michael Foale and Flight Engineer Alexander Kaleri waving out the window - but didn't.

St. Gallen at 5.46pm with the ISS flying aboveISS flying above, shot by my shaky hand

On a related news, the rover Spirit sent 20min of data back to Earth earlier today responding to command instructions and controllers at NASA will be trying again later. No good news yet, but better than yesterday. Pete Thiesinger, Mars rover project manager, said: "I expect we will get functionality back from this rover. The chances that it will be perfect again are not good. But the chances that will not regain functionality are low, too."

And NASA is also busy preparing the Sunday 5:05am GMT Mars landing of Opportunity. It will be an even more challenging landing than for Spirit. The Martian atmosphere is much thinner at the Opportunity landing site than it is where Spirit landed, and a recent dust storm in the region thinned it even further. The conditions mean that Opportunity's parachute will have a harder time slowing the craft as it prepares to land. To compensate, the craft will deploy its parachute much sooner before touchdown. Wayne Lee, the engineer in charge of Opportunity's entry, descent and landing, said: "This will be challenging because it's the highest-altitude landing that NASA has ever attempted."

[23 January]



Thursday, 22 January 2004

'Extremely serious anomaly'


Rover SpiritAccording to BBC News, "Nasa's Mars rover Spirit has stopped sending useful data to Earth from the Red Planet and mission scientists are unable to send it commands.

Nasa says the problem could either be due to a major power fault, software corruption or memory corruption.

Scientists has tried several times to communicate with the rover but has received either very little or no data."

Teresa HeinzBesides this unsettling news that caught me off guard - and could put Bush in an awkard position should worst come to worst, I discovered today an interesting personality in the name of Teresa Heinz, the wife of the late founder of Heinz food products (read article in Elle). I have been following the US election campaign train for some time now (some friends know my thoughts on General Wesley Clark) and for the first time, I read something actually colourful. Teresa Heinz Kelly remarried (after her husband's death in a plane accident) to Senator John Kelly, candidate for the presidential job. She would probably be the most interesting and influencial First Lady in a long time and would make reading the morning papers a lot more interesting than right now!

[22 January]



Wednesday, 21 January 2004

Davos: playground for the military top brass


mafalda (5k image)Tonight, a panel composed of a military colonel, a cantonal police chief and two members of parliament (left and right) debated the issue of whether it was the Swiss military's job to provide security at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The discussion was organised by the club of officers at uni and the public comprised many militia officers studying here. The debate took some time to warm up but became rapidly emotional and even personal. The discussion polarised itself with the right-wing majority arguing against the lone left-wing member of parliament (who happened to be one of the rare women in the crowd). But in my opinion, she argued better, was more objective and her thoughts were the most provoking.

The comments ranged from why the media allowed masked promoters of violence to "express" their "views" on TV when they had no views and weren't even able to express just that, to issues of subsidiarity (the military filling in for the overwhelmed police) or the left, by inciting violence, being responsible for the massive security display in the first place!

I found two items interesting:
- first, that the military top brass was not just fulfilling a political mandate but had a stake in the WEF: being involved in a cool job and talking about it in public is highly rewarding and pleasing (not so much for the poor militia people fearing having to confront unarmed demonstrators)
- and second, the calling to all of us to start questionning what is wrong in the system.

About the second point, ask yourself in which actors (who are themselves part of the problem) do we - all starry-eyed - place our hope of solving globalisation's minor miscarriages. In whose distinct interest are people participating in Davos? Specifically and concretely, who wins what?

The panel
Public preparing its counter-attackLone leftist

[21 January]



Tuesday, 20 January 2004

Rubbish day


rubbish bags

Tomorrow is rubbish day. Here in St. Gallen, rubbish has to be put in specially approved official rubbish bags (the 3 neatly aligned bags cost more than a month's pocket money when I was a kid) and deposited in the street the night before the weekly collection day. If you deposite a bag too early, or too late, or if your bag is too full or torn, it may not be collected. If this should happen, the rubbish police will investigate your bag, open it and try to figure out to whom it belongs to. Then, the police will write to the perpetrator and warn him about rubbish regulations. Should the offence be repeated, the perpetrator will be fined. It's up to law-abiding citizens to figure out how to store the rubbish until it may be lawfully deposited for collection.

(For the curious, is tagging allowed, you may ask? It isn't, but since it appears to be easier to investigate criminal rubbish bags than tags, tags remain while bags go. For those even more curious, this picture was shot in the rare interval of time between lawfully committing the rubbish bags to the street and official collection. It was on this cold, snowy, Tuesday night.)

[20 January]



Monday, 19 January 2004

Welcome to the real world


Ad in Chinese at uniToday was full of funny encounters. It started by meeting a tampax on the floor near my pigeonhole at uni. I wasn't able to take a picture of it, which I now regret.

Then, I saw this ad, written in Chinese, on the bulletin board at uni. I wonder: do we have that many native Chinese students to justify putting an entire ad in Chinese? If they make all this effort to come over here, they are all that much keen to learn everything that they learn German and English in no time! Like this Chinese student I know who came up to me one day and instead of speaking English (like he used to) he suddenly spoke German. He told me he had recently decided to learn it. I told him I was learning for me finals so he said: "Du hast es im Arsch", which roughly translates as, tough luck, in somewhat more liberal terms. I told him he had been learning very well!

Later in the day, I had been thinking about a friend who has some personal challenges at the moment and was wondering how to tell him he could count on me despite my working on my exams all the time but not wanting to bother him for that, when suddently I saw his number flashing on my mobile phone. I quickly picked up, but it was his sister who was ordering me to go to the cinema with her to see Lord of the Rings one more time. She was angry at me for my polite declining, saying I was insensitive to her pleas and merely pretending that my finals require so much commitment. How sensitive of her...

Geneva during the G8 summitAnd this strange funny day is concluding with a radio show asking for call-ins about whether demos are a good thing (the World Economic Forum in Davos opens in 2 days). Some people are calling in saying how our corrupt society is led by evil people and how advertising is a terrible thing, how Switzerland is an imperialist power, etc etc.

My comment:
    Je visitais l'ancienne prison du KGB à Vilnius (Lithuanie) le 22 Novembre dernier, dans laquelle nombre de résistants ont été torturés et exécutés. Ce même jour, les gens manifestaient dans la rue en Géorgie pour demander le départ du président - qui a démissioné. Et sans les manifestations anti-sovétiques en Lithuanie, qui sait combien d'années encore les pays Baltes auraient dû souffrir des persécutions de l'Ex-URSS.

camping du Bout-du-MondeManifester pour la liberté et contre l'oppression peut changer l'histoire, même aujourd'hui. Mais les manifestants du dimanche qui croient que Woodstock n'est toujours pas terminé et campent au Bout-du-Monde en fumant de l'herbe et en proclamant la fin du capitalisme n'ont que ce qu'ils méritent: de la pub et encore de la pub (surtout pour les produits d'épilation).

[19 January]



Wednesday, 14 January 2004

Twin symmetries


Kinder-UniExactly a week ago, I wrote on this blog of my twin disappointments of not having been able to see my favourite prof's lecture in front of 500 kids as part of Kinder-Uni, university for kids. I also wrote about my disappointment of learning of Beagle2's near-certain loss, after the failure to communicate with the probe.

Today, I was allowed a replay of both events, but with a better ending.

First, while I still wasn't allowed in the auditorium to partake of the joy of throwing paper balls around, I watched the performance on screen in an adjacent room. You could still see the paper balls quickly crossing the camera's viewing angle. While I find Kinder-Uni a great idea and encourage such initiatives with no reservation, I believe the lecture itself, while a good effort, was not the imaginative kids-friendly presentation with captivating rhetoric I had expected to hear. Surprisingly dry and dense, I caught myself day-dreaming a couple times during the 45min lecture.

However, the experience for kids is surely going to be a very positive one, if not purely for the lecture. More the chance of experiencing a university environment and being addressed directly about economic issues, a neglected topic for many of them, is bound to have a lasting impact. Cynically, one might call it a sales pitch from the capitalist academia at making future voters and potential students more receptive to the economic worldview.

Aldrin on the MoonThe second event of the day was Bush's speech at NASA. In his words: "Guided by clear objectives, today we set a new course for the American space programme," emphasizing humankind's spirit of discovery and the goal of having a human presence across the solar system, quickly and using existing programmes and personnel. Bush outlined a few key points:

▪ Completing the International Space Station by 2010
▪ Returning the Shuttle to flight asap so as to help finish the ISS
▪ Retiring the Shuttle by 2010
▪ Building a new spacecraft, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, by 2008
▪ Returning to the Moon by 2020, a launching point for missions beyond
▪ (2008 for lunar robotic missions, 2015 manned missions)
▪ Sending humans to Mars and to worlds beyond

Bush: "Human beings are headed into the Cosmos. The crew of Shuttle Columbia did not turn away from the challenge. Neither will we.

While the creation of a committee of private & public sector experts was announced with the objective of reviewiew the above goals (Pete Aldrich, chairman), and while Bush invited nations to join the US in a spirit of cooperation in this journey and not a race, the role of the private sector was not mentioned explicitly. In the article Moon-hopping to Mars in The Economist, these words:

"Ultimately, if NASA is to succeed in human space exploration, it will have to grow its budget substantially, abandon much of its other, valuable work, or ideally find a way of successfully exploiting space commercially. Until now, NASA has been spectacularly unsuccessful in this ambition because it is not designed for this purpose. Any presidential vision ought, then, to include a way of eventually wrestling space activities out of the agency’s clutches and into the hands of the private sector."

[14 January]



Monday, 12 January 2004

War and torture


timcollins (17k image)My attention was caught today by two news reports related to war. First, the resignation of Col. Tim Collins following allegations of mistreating prisoners. Col. Collins's stirring eve-of-battle speech to British troops preparing to fight in Iraq was strongly praised and impressed me greatly.

“The enemy should be in no doubt that we are his Nemesis and that we are bringing about his rightful destruction. There are many regional commanders who have stains on their souls and they are stoking the fires of Hell for Saddam. As they die they will know their deeds have brought them to this place. Show them no pity. But those who do not wish to go on that journey, we will not send. As for the others, I expect you to rock their world.

“We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people, and the only flag that will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country.

“I know men who have taken life needlessly in other conflicts. They live with the mark of Cain upon them. If someone surrenders to you, then remember they have that right in international law, and ensure that one day they go home to their family. The ones who wish to fight, well, we aim to please. If there are casualties of war, then remember, when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly, and mark their graves.

“You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest, for your deeds will follow you down history. Iraq is steeped in history. It is the site of the Garden of Eden, of the Great Flood, and the birth of Abraham. Tread lightly there. You will have to go a long way to find a more decent, generous and upright people than the Iraqis. You will be embarrassed by their hospitality, even though they have nothing… “

“There may be people among us who will not see the end of this campaign. We will put them in their sleeping bags and send them back. There will be no time for sorrow. Let’s leave Iraq a better place for us having been there. Our business now, is north.”


genocide (10k image) The second news item that caught my attention was about the use of sleep deprivation as a form of torture, a practice that appears to be widespread, including by the US and the UK. Discussed is the effectiveness of sleep deprivation in breaking the resistance of prisoners by promising them uninterrupted sleep after days without. In the article, there is a picture of the former KGB prison in Vilnius, Lithuania. The prison is now the Museum of Genocide Victims and until recently had a former inmate as its tour guide. Visitors can walk around the old cells, the warden's office, the isolation rooms, the showers and latrines, a padded cell for torture, rooms where remains are kept "until the people are ready to give proper respect", and finally, in the lowest area of the prison, the execution room. In the execution room, visitors tread on an elevated glass floor with lighting below showing personal items of the killed. A book shows the names of the victims, photographs and personal history.

Genocide Museum, VilniusI stood in those cells, I stayed inside the tiny isolation chamber and I walked on the floor of the execution room. I cannot describe how oppressive the atmosphere is, how overwhelming it is to stand before a close cell containing the bones of the dead, what went through my mind as I sat in the warden's office or in the wet punishment room. Maybe the picture I took, shown here, gives an impression of what I mean. It was a mere 15 years ago that the KGB ceased to use the prison, when the USSR collapsed. Seeing this picture brought back the memories from my 22 November 2003 visit. I don't think I'll ever forget.

[12 January]



Friday, 9 January 2004

Target: Space!


Hail to thee, Heinlein!Today's announcement from the Bush administration of a landmark speech by the President next week presenting his vision for manned spaceflight could not have made me happier.

The vision should include the setting of concrete objectives for a permanent manned presence on the Moon, sending a man on Mars, choosing a new space vehicle to replace the Shuttle and unprecendented tranfers of technology with the Pentagon.

Since I was 8, I had the dream of going to Mars and was looking forward to working on the Moon. Being a business student, I have been joking (not entirely unseriously) with friends about starting my own orbital space hotel company and expressed my wish to have my office on the Moon. Robert A. Heinlein's vision, who helped produce Destination Moon (1950), lives on!

But beyond my idealism and romantic space dreams, what is certainly more interesting to us free thinking Europeans is discussing the motivations behind the Bush administration's broad push of the US space agenda. Coming to my mind are words such as reelection, historical legacy and the fear of waking up with a Chinese, a Russian, an Indian, or, worse of all, a French, picknicking on the Moon.

I am secretly hoping for an insightful article in the Guardian or in The Economist about the remifications and consequences of Bush's agenda in light of the current international security context.

schnitzel (21k image)Besides this nice development, I had a very ordinary day at the library, learning for my exams. This perfectly forgettable day would have gone completely unnoticed in my life (the food being playing a major role in this) had I not had the pleasure of eating with three friends, one of which started a very intense discussion right in the middle of the loud cafeteria.

He had just been speaking on his mobile phone, hung up, and asked point-blank: Do you think God is fair? We debated this question on a variety of aspects, such as:
▪ the seamingly unequal repartition of fairness among people vs. the idea that each person is tested according to God-given, unfathomable criterias and it's up to him/her to individually find meaning in the face of hardship
▪ the definition of God (is God fair ex hypothesi, because he is defined as Fairness?) vs. whether God plays our own cards and leaves us little room for self determination - hence is not fair.

In the end, we nearly forgot to ask why this sudden question. But, luckily, the friend managed to dodge, once again.

[09 January]



Thursday, 8 January 2004

Twin recovery


Twin MullahsJust as I was about to label this day as entirely rotten, I had the great pleasure of dining with my good friend Mr. Mullah and his funny twin brotherl last night. It is entirely fitting that both of them came, since only thus was it possible to counterbalance my twin disappointements.

Mr. Mullah was equally offended by the absence of theatres showing The Last Samurai in original version, so we decided not to be passive victims of St. Gallen's terrible backwardness in things cinema (one of many backwards aspects of this rather isolated town in the Swiss Far East) and drive to Zürich to see it sometime next week. Putting up with such effort to see a Hollywood film isn't symptomatic of a kind of desperation (since I'm sure the film isn't that good anyway). Far more elevated a purpose, it is a deep sense of civility that is motivating us: a film, if seen at all, must been seen in decent conditions. Already Hollywood films not offering much substance, if you spoil the sound and rely only on the pictures, the resulting experience is bitterly drab.

Thus our effort - which reminds me of the story of the stranded British gentleman, waiting for an unlikely rescue on his lost island, putting on a tattered suit once a week for the tea ritual, lest he should forget his humanity.

[08 January]



Wednesday, 7 January 2004

Twin disappointments


Kids at UniAt the very same instant I was denied access to my treat of the day - attending University for Kids, a fun large-audience lecture "Where does money come from" (Woher kommt das Geld, #1 | #2) intended for children - on the ground that I was neither a child nor a member of the press, my cousin sent me an sms from Barcelona informing me about the result of the Beagle2 press conference: probe lost.

My twin disappointments are compounded by the sudden realisation today that the only vaguely interesting movie opening this week, The Last Samurai, plays only dubbed in German here in St. Gallen. The closest theatre showing the original version is in Zürich, over an hour and a half away.

I am now collecting the shattered pieces of today's contigent of excitement (scarce element in these drab times of intense learning for my finals) and deciding whether to resume my learning or find some ersatz fun to spice up my day.

Beagle2 lost and no Uni for Kids, maybe you see some cosmic link between the two?

[07 January]



Monday, 5 January 2004

2003 highlights/lowlights


A few events of my year 2003

 ▪ My younger brother got married in August
 ▪ My grandmother died in May
 ▪ Went to Muse's Geneva gig with my cousin Jon
 ▪ (and bought a female t-shirt by mistake)
 ▪ Went to a Sum41 gig
 ▪ Spent 3 weeks in Russia learning the language
 ▪ Visited India, Central America and the Baltic States
 ▪ Visited Jon in Cambridge in April
 ▪ Drove Lord Marshall, Chairman of BA, at the ISC-Symposium
 ▪ Convinced my parents to get broadband internet at home
 ▪ Bought 2 pairs of shoes (an all-time record in a year)
 ▪ Got 0 driving fines
 ▪ Survived no assassination attempts
 ▪ Started playing Question pour un Champion on the internet
 ▪ Started this blog

[05 January]



Sunday, 4 January 2004

Set sail!


The good thing about simple New Year's Eve celebrations is that there is little chance of messing 'em up. My simple celebration was a success and 2004 has had an excellent start. Snow was falling all over the country and I greatly enjoyed driving my dad's car with worn summer tires on the white motorway (cheap thrill - as long as the car stays on the road).

I am now back in St. Gallen and getting ready for the last sprint of my University career: preparing for and writing my finals. Tomorrow, I'll be getting up early to get back in the work schedule. I'll also be seeing some friends in the Appenzell mountains, which will be neat since I expect there'll be tons of snow.

The weeks ahead will be really crappy for me to keep smiling because they'll require my working 10-12 hours a day. Learning stuff by heart that long is quite painful. I might put a mood-metre on this blog - like the terrorism warning system they have in the US. I guess an "Orange" level would be pretty bad and a "Red" level put me close to dumping all my books in the rubbish bin and taking the first low-cost flight to somewhere crazy.

I've started discovering more about blogs and I really enjoy some teenagers' ones. They show a snapshot of daily reality and remind me of my teen years - days when I'd wanted to disappear off this planet to somewhere like Mars or go on a rampage against all stupid teachers brainwashing brainwash these millions of poor children or create a new form of art by taping toilet paper rolls to my bedroom wall... I feel I've become quite boring: my vision of craziness and rebellion is crossing the road when lights are red (well, in St. Gallen, I'm still the only human being daring to do so, and when I do, everybody stares at me as if I were some extraterrestrial wearing a pink turtle-neck).

I want to wish James (Abscond.org) and Max (Inmyplace.net) the best of luck with whatever it is they're doing, please keep up your sites and, if you read this, I wouldn't mind more pix!

[04 January]





Philippe Rose
Rose.ph is where Philippe Rose blogs. One day I'll have my office on the Moon (in Borneo for now).


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In my ears

♫ Breed 77 ~ The Game

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♫ Rise Against ~ Prayer Of The Refugee

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♫ William Shatner ~ Common People

♫ Wonderland Dementia ~ Hypnosis

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