Il y a 60 ans, Divonne se voyait dotée d’un lac de plaisance
Né de l’esprit du peintre Jean Debaud, le projet apparaissait complètement fou.
Mais la création de cette étendue d’eau allait révolutionner l’attractivité de la ville thermale.
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can.Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead.Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.
Life is inherently uncertain, and if you have difficulty dealing with that, you will have difficulty dealing with life.
Tolerating and even delighting in uncertainty doesn’t merely help us to accept life’s unpredictability; it also readies us to learn and adapt. Each day, the brain uses honed mental models about how the world works, which are used to process a shifting environment. When we meet something unexpected, a neural “prediction error” signals a mismatch between what we assumed would occur and what our senses tell us. Yet our uneasy sense of not knowing triggers a host of beneficial neural changes, including heightened attention, bolstered working memory and sensitivity to new information. The brain is preparing to update our knowledge of the world. Uncertainty offers the opportunity for life to go in different directions, and that is exciting.
This is why being open to uncertainty is critical for mental well-being.
to study something is to enter into a relation with that thing, to form correlations that allow us to represent, simplify and predict how that thing, that process, will unfold.
to understand is to identify with the thing understood, to construct a parallel between something in the structure of our synapses and the structure of the object in which we are interested. knowledge is a correlation between two parts of nature. understanding is a more abstract but also a more intimate commonality between our minds and phenomena.
this interweaving of correlations — between the endless richness of our individual and collective memory, and the fabulous richness of the structure of reality — is itself an indirect product of the equilibration of things in time.
Any time two entities interact, they entangle. It doesn’t matter if they are photons (bits of light), atoms (bits of matter), or bigger things made of atoms like dust motes, microscopes, cats or people. The entanglement persists no matter how far these entities separate, as long as they don’t subsequently interact with anything else – an almost impossibly tall order for a cat or a person, which is why we don’t notice the effect.
But the motions of subatomic particles are dominated by entanglement. It starts when they interact; in doing so, they lose their separate existence. No matter how far they move apart, if one is tweaked, measured, observed, the other seems to instantly respond, even if the whole world lies between them. And no one knows how.
僕が Carlo Rovelli に近づくことは、永遠にない。そんな心配はしないでいい。君がブラックホールの手前の宇宙にいて、僕がホワイトホールの先の宇宙にいるなんていうことが起こらないように、僕は Carlo Rovelli に導かれたりはしない。君をこちら側に置いてあちら側にいくなんていうことは、考えたくもない。
Spring comes quickly: overnight
the plum tree blossoms,
the warm air fills with bird calls.
In the plowed dirt, someone has drawn a picture of
the sun
with rays coming out all around
but because the background is dirt, the sun is black.
There is no signature.
Alas, very soon everything will disappear:
the bird calls, the delicate blossoms. In the end,
even the earth itself will follow the artist’s name into
oblivion.
Nevertheless, the artist intends
a mood of celebration.
How beautiful the blossoms are — emblems of the
resilience of life.
The birds approach eagerly.
Furthermore, in the early Cold War, the United States turned from firebombing Japan to fortifying it against the spread of Communism in Asia. That meant halting the prosecutions of lower-ranked war criminals, and even the parole and rehabilitation of Class A war crimes suspects. Perhaps the most important of these was Nobusuke Kishi, a senior official in Japanese-run Manchuria who later served in Tojo’s cabinet at the time of Pearl Harbor, and who after the war was jailed by the Americans for more than three years as a Class A suspect. After being released without being tried in December 1948, he went on to become Japan’s foreign minister and then prime minister in 1957. He reviled the Tokyo trial as victors’ justice and argued that Japan had been forced to fight in self-defense.
Kishi’s resentments were passed on to his devoted grandson, Shinzo Abe, who grew up to become Japan’s longest-serving prime minister, serving in 2006-2007 and again in 2012-2020. As prime minister, Abe sought to deny official Japanese responsibility for the wartime sexual coercion of Korean women. He told a committee of the national legislature, the Diet, that the verdict was a conviction by the judgment of the victors. On a trip to India, he visited the family of Pal, the dissenting Indian judge. It has taken decades for Kishi and Abe’s views of wartime history to reach the Japanese mainstream, but they are firmly ensconced there now.
Let us journey into the heart of a black hole. We slip beyond its horizon and tumble down this crack in the universe. As we plunge, we see geometry fold. Time and space pull and stretch. And finally, at the black hole’s core, space and time dissolve, and a white hole is born.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Einstein’s relativity is that your time is not my time. The flow of time is relative. It can change. In particular it depends how fast observers (i.e., us) move in relation to each other or how close we are to massive bodies (like a black hole). So, to an outside observer, someone falling towards a black hole seems to have their clocks slow down until they stop entirely at the event horizon’s edge. How this works? How the flow of time is both personal and relative?
If we approach the horizon and go beyond it, our watches do not slow and nothing strange happens to the space around us, just as nothing peculiar happens to a ship when it crosses the line of the horizon and disappears from our view.
More money has been lost because of four words than at the point of a gun. Those words are “This time is different.”
What is certainly clear is that again and again, countries, banks, individuals, and firms take on excessive debt in good times without enough awareness of the risks that will follow when the inevitable recession hits.
The lesson of history, then, is that even as institutions and policy makers improve, there will always be a temptation to stretch the limits. Just as an individual can go bankrupt no matter how rich she starts out, a financial system can collapse under the pressure of greed, politics, and profits no matter how well regulated it seems to be.
Compassion is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capacity to enter into places of pain, to “weep with those who weep,” according to the Apostle Paul, who was central both to the early conception of Christianity and to the idea of its underpinning in compassion.
In the Gospels, we repeatedly read of the compassion of Jesus for those suffering physically and emotionally, for those “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
During times of sorrow and times of tears, when it feels like we’re “being broken on the wheels of living,”, there is great comfort in believing God empathizes with our suffering, having entered into suffering himself. But we also need his emissaries. We need people who see us and know us, who enter our stories. Through their compassion and love, we feel, I feel — even if only partly — God’s compassion and love. That doesn’t eliminate the storms from within or without. But it makes greater room for joy in the journey.
In April of 2022, I was notified of a new Ebola outbreak in the D.R.C., in a city of a million on the Congo River. A 31-year-old man who had experienced a week of mounting fever arrived at a clinic and died soon after. Now, though, the medical officer on duty had received enough training to recognize possible signs of Ebola. The medical team had the gear on hand to protect themselves as well as the right lab equipment. They made the diagnosis and alerted the national public health authorities that very afternoon.
Within 48 hours, they had people on site identifying contacts, and newly developed vaccines were shipped for the exposed. The result: Just five people died. The disease never spread beyond the local community.
A response that once took years and hundreds of millions of dollars now took mere days at a tiny fraction of the cost. This is what antifragility looks like.
How long would it take a running faucet to fill the inverted dome of the Capitol? What is the total length of all the pickles consumed in the US in one year? What are the relative merits of internal-combustion and electric cars, of coal and nuclear energy? The problems are marvelously diverse, yet the skills to solve them are the same.
**
The conversion efficiency (the ratio of animal feed to animal weight) varies from two for chickens and fish through four for pork to seven for beef.
Artificial intelligence (AI)-supported systems have transformative applications in the humanitarian sector but they also pose unique risks for human rights, even when used with the best intentions. Drawing from research and expert consultations conducted across the globe in recent years, this paper identifies key points of consensus on how humanitarian practitioners can ensure that AI augments – rather than undermines – human interests while being rights-respecting. Specifically, these consultations emphasized the necessity of an anchoring framework based on international human rights law as an essential baseline for ensuring that human interests are embedded in AI systems. Ethics, in addition, can play a complementary role in filling gaps and elevating standards above the minimum requirements of international human rights law.
The innovation introduced by Dunant was to keep humanitarian activities separate from the vicissitudes of the battlefield by granting the protection of a neutral status, recognized by both sides, to all those who care for the wounded.
This concept represented a departure from standard practice. Until then the organization of care had been entrusted to national medical services, and the application of the term “neutral” to the latter initially met with strong reservations.
Much more was involved, however, than organizing a system for medical care, for Dunant advocated that assistance, determined solely by the suffering of those in need, be given without discrimination. This meant refraining from judging their previous actions and, if necessary, showing the same concern for both tormentors and victims.
The credit for this pioneering concept indisputably goes to Dunant. In the grim wars of the nineteenth century, exacerbated by the growing resources available to the armies of Europe, it was a bold venture.
With no religious motivation, political philosophy or ideology to lend it support, expounded, moreover, by a single man and later by a small committee of five outstanding citizens of Geneva, Dunant’s idea came up against the crushing weight of age-old traditions and the temptation for observers to step out of their assigned role and denounce the appalling scenes they witnessed in terms of good and evil.
Even when the generous nature of Dunant’s proposals was taken into account, objections were rife.
Given all of Goodreads’s issues, it might seem easy enough to encourage writers and readers simply to flock to another forum. Sites like The Storygraph and Italic Type have sprung up as promising alternatives, but they’re still far from reaching a critical mass of users. As a book critic and publishing professional, I’ve spent much of my career trying to encourage rousing conversations about the literary arts in whatever venues I could find, digital or analog. Maybe that’s why I’m still committed to the idea that Goodreads, or a place like it, must exist. As the usefulness of other social platforms deteriorates, this one is worth trying to save. If the saga of Goodreads has proved anything, it’s that there are millions of readers who care about books and want to discuss them online. They — we — deserve better.
The reality is that we are all just one accident or illness away from severe pain. Rejecting and punishing the afflicted doesn’t change this fact, nor does it help treat addiction.
Under the five-year trial – first announced in April 2022 – some asylum seekers arriving in the UK would be sent to Rwanda for processing.
On arrival, they could be granted refugee status and allowed to stay. If not, they could apply to settle there on other grounds, or seek asylum in another “safe third country”.
The government said that “anyone entering the UK illegally” after 1 January 2022 could be sent there, with no limit on numbers.
But, so far, no asylum seeker has actually been sent.
NGOs criticize EU migration pact, predicting more death and suffering as a result
Various NGOs have reacted with skepticism to the EU’s new migration deal, with some saying it will cost more lives at sea. The UN, however, welcomed it as a step in the right direction.
Anyone who has no right to stay must leave Germany again. We must be able to enforce this principle; otherwise we will harm our community.
In order for us to be this country, we also need clear rules and laws. This means that those who do not have the right to remain must leave the country again — quickly and reliably.
This is a prerequisite for migration to be accepted in society.
Stopping overseas care workers from bringing dependants and requiring social care firms in England who wish to sponsor care worker visas to be providing services regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).
Increasing the minimum earnings threshold for Skilled Worker visas from £26,200 to £38,700 and raise the individual occupation ‘going rate’ thresholds in line with the median full-time wage for equivalent jobs in 2023.
Those coming on the Health and Social Care Visa route will be exempt from the £38,700 salary threshold applied to skilled workers, so that we can continue to bring the healthcare workers that our care sector and NHS need. We are also exempting education workers on national pay-scale occupations.
Reform the Shortage Occupation List into an Immigration Salary List (ISL), ending the 20% going rate salary discount for shortage occupations – commissioning the Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) to review the composition of the list in line with the increased salary thresholds.
Raise the minimum income requirement for family visas. Our intention remains to bring this in line with the new minimum general salary threshold for Skilled Workers, £38,700. This will ensure people only bring dependants to the UK they can support financially and will apply to all British and settled sponsors under the five-year partner route.
We will raise the minimum income for family visas incrementally, in stages, to give predictability to families.
In Spring 2024 we will raise the threshold to £29,000, that is the 25th percentile of earnings for jobs at the skill level of RQF3[1], moving to the 40th percentile (currently £34,500) and finally the 50th percentile (currently £38,700 and the level at which the General Skilled Worker threshold is set).
There will no longer be a separate child element to the minimum income requirement, to ensure that British nationals are not treated less favourably than migrants who are required to meet the General Skilled Worker threshold as a flat rate, regardless of any children being sponsored.
We will also ask the MAC to review the Graduate route.
« Victoire idéologique » pour Marine Le Pen, un texte « qui respecte nos valeurs » selon Elisabeth Borne… Le projet de loi de réforme de l’immigration adopté par le Parlement dans la soirée mardi 19 décembre a fait couler beaucoup d’encre et a été la source de nombreux débats, jusqu’au sein de la majorité.
Son entraîneur, Will Still, confirme : « Ito, c’est Ito, il est dans son monde, fidèle à lui-même, s’amuse-t-il. Mais on lui permet d’être lui-même. Ce n’est pas le plus grand fan des entraînements et le jour de la reprise, il doit courir moins que les gardiens ! Mais au fur et à mesure de la semaine, il prépare son match à sa façon qui est différente de tous les autres. »
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike―either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself.
Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action.
Economic history states that money replaced a bartering system, yet there isn’t any evidence to support this axiom. Anthropologist Graeber presents a stunning reversal of this conventional wisdom. For more than 5000 years, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods. Since the beginning of the agrarian empires, humans have been divided into debtors and creditors. Through time, virtual credit money was replaced by gold and the system as a whole went into decline. This fascinating history is told for the first time.
I’ve always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I’m not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect.
I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.
I’ve never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.
Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.
We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It’s our own concept—our own selves—that we love.
My past is everything I failed to be.
Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.
Credo in Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, Creatorem caeli et terrae,
et in Iesum Christum, Filium Eius unicum, Dominum nostrum, qui conceptus est de Spiritu Sancto, natus ex Maria Virgine, passus sub Pontio Pilato, crucifixus, mortuus, et sepultus, descendit ad inferos, tertia die resurrexit a mortuis, ascendit ad caelos, sedet ad dexteram Patris omnipotentis, inde venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos.
Credo in Spiritum Sanctum, sanctam Ecclesiam catholicam, sanctorum communionem, remissionem peccatorum, carnis resurrectionem, vitam aeternam.
Amen.
I have spent 25 years in the field of corporate sustainability, trying to figure out how business might become a meaningful part of the climate solution. Over time, I came to understand that the ethic being applied — the idea that free markets can solve societal problems and that even a monstrosity like climate change can be fixed without regulation — was a ruse that I had bought into, realizing that fraud only late in the game.
This year, Earth’s average temperature bumped, briefly but ominously, to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial average. Climate scientists have been telling us that 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming is the threshold we should not exceed, but at this point, more and more experts are saying it is all but inevitable.
Happiness is finding another world to live in, a world where you can forget all this poverty and tyranny. Happiness is holding someone in your arms and knowing you hold the whole world.
Philosophers, politicians and populations have long wrestled with all the thorny trade-offs between different goals. Short-term instant gratification?Long-term happiness?Avoidance of extinction?Individual liberties?Collective good?Bounds on inequality?Equal opportunity?Degree of governance?Free speech?Safety from harmful speech?Allowable degree of manipulation?Tolerance of diversity?Permissible recklessness?Rights versus responsibilities?
There’s no universal consensus on such goals, let alone on even more triggering issues like gun rights, reproductive rights or geopolitical conflicts.
In fact, the OpenAI saga amply demonstrates how impossible it is to align goals among even a tiny handful of OpenAI leaders. How on earth can A.I. be aligned with all of humanity’s goals?
Le président Macron et le rabbin Haïm Korsia dans la salle des
fêtes de l’Elysée, 7 décembre 2023
« L’Élysée, ce n’est pas l’endroit où allumer une bougie. J’ai été surpris. Je me demande pourquoi Macron l’a fait, ce n’est pas son rôle »
— Yonathan Arfi
Condoning the continuation of fightingwhile claiming to care about the lives and safety of people in Gaza is self-contradictory. Condoning the continuation of fightingwhile advocating for the prevention of the spillover effects of the conflict is self-deceiving. Condoning the continuation of fightingwhile making references to the protection of women and children and human rights is hypocritical. All these once again show us what double standards are.
Expressed in terms of purchasing power parity, the combined GDP of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will exceed €40,000 billion by 2022, compared with just €30,000 billion for the G7 countries (United States, Canada, Japan, Germany, France, United Kingdom and Italy), and €120,000 billion on a global scale (an average of just over €1,000 per month for the world’s 8 billion people). Differences in average national income per capita remain considerable, of course: almost €3,000 per month in the G7, less than €1,000 per month in the BRICS and less than €200 per month in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the latest data from the World Inequality Lab.
In a few words, the BRICS present themselves to the world as the planet’s middle class – those who have succeeded, through hard work, in improving their condition, and who have no intention of stopping there.
Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically ; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes.
Quantum mechanics is often said to implicate some form of holism.
Quantum mechanics seems to portray nature as nonseparable. Roughly speaking, this means that quantum mechanics seems to allow two entities to be in separate places, while being in states that cannot be fully specified without reference to each other.
In modern physics the common relational approach should be extended to the concepts of element and set. The relationalization of the concepts of element and set means that in the final analysis the World exists as an indivisible whole, not as a set (of one or another kind of elements). Therefore, we have to describe quantum systems in terms of potentialities and probabilities: since quantum systems cannot be analyzed completely into sets of elements, we can speak only of the potentialities of isolating elements and sets within their structure. On the other hand this quantum property of the world as an indivisible whole accounts for the astonishing logical properties of the structure of the potentialities of quantum systems which it brings forth. This has been confirmed by quantum-correlation experiments (A.Aspect and oth.). These effects have a relational nature, not a physical-causal or material one, and they are brought forth by the changes (resulting from measurement or physical interaction) in the structure of the relations of the mutually complementary sides of reality. One of these sides expresses an actually existing structure of the system as a real (and physically verifiable) but only relatively separable set, and the other expresses the sets of potentialities in it which arise from the astonishing property of finite non-analyzability of the system into elements and sets (i.e. by the quantum property of the world as an indivisible unit).
murphy: You have often said that the progress of science consists in the discovery of a new mystery the moment one thinks that something fundamental has been solved. The quantum theory has opened up this big problem of causation. And I really do not think that the matter can be answered very categorically. Of course it is easy enough to see that those who take up a definite stand and say that there is no such thing as causality are illogical, in the sense that you cannot prove any such statement either by experiment or by appeal to the direct dictates of consciousness and common sense in its defence. But, all the same, it seems to me that the burden is on the determinists at least to indicate the direction in which the old formulation of causality will have to be revised in order to meet the needs of modern science. planck: As to the first point, that about the discovery of new mysteries. This is undoubtedly true. Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve. Music and art are, to an extent, also attempts to solve or at least to express the mystery. But to my mind the more we progress with either the more we are brought into harmony with all nature itself. And that is one of the great services of science to the individual.
Which is prior, the whole or its parts? The monist holds that the whole is prior to its parts, and thus views the cosmos as fundamental, with metaphysical explanation dangling downward from the One. The pluralist holds that the parts are prior to their whole, and thus tends to consider particles fundamental, with metaphysical explanation snaking upward from the many.
There seem to be physical and modal considerations that favor the monistic view. Physically, there is good evidence that the cosmos forms an entangled system and good reason to treat entangled systems as irreducible wholes. Modally, mereology allows for the possibility of atomless gunk, with no ultimate parts for the pluralist to invoke as the ground of being.
Today artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality,” O’Gieblyn writes. “These are old problems, and although they now appear in different guises and go by different names, they persist in conversations about digital technologies much like those dead metaphors that still lurk in the syntax of contemporary speech. All the eternal questions have become engineering problems.
**
Some physicists have suggested that the cosmos is one entangled system, meaning it is not made up of individual systems but is itself an irreducible whole.
**
It was Max Planck, the physicist who struggled more than any other pioneer of quantum theory to accept the loss of a purely objective worldview, who acknowledged that the central problems of physics have always been reflexive. “Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature,” he wrote in 1932. “And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.”
Biodiversity is all the different kinds of life you’ll find in one area—the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and even microorganisms like bacteria that make up our natural world. Each of these species and organisms work together in ecosystems, like an intricate web, to maintain balance and support life. Biodiversity supports everything in nature that we need to survive: food, clean water, medicine, and shelter.
But as humans put increasing pressure on the planet, using and consuming more resources than ever before, we risk upsetting the balance of ecosystems and losing biodiversity.