Friday, February 16 2024

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Saturday, October 14 2023

A Collapsology Draft

Not just to indulge in a gloomy dramatic view of the future, but to look in the eyes at some highly probable categories of events, to mitigate them, adapt to them, and to what will follow.

Continue reading...

Friday, August 4 2023

Compo : Le Détroit du Solo

Composition for the 250th episode of the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Démarrage directe en arpèges de corde 6/8 , puis gros theme de cor qui.. reprend l'hymne de la Nocta de l’épisode 150, 6 ans plus tot, avec tous les changements de rythmique, d'harmonie et de mélodie nécessaires. Interlude au basson et pizz, retour au theme plus calme avec piccolo en avant. Et on entre doucement dans le solo de la flute, qui glisse et glide pour se contorsionner en ralentissant... et enfin retour a la confiance, au tempo, et au remplumage pour un final caracolant. Presque 3 minutes, ca passe encore, tant que la structure y est..

Sunday, September 4 2022

Compo : Au Cœur des Volcans

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Petit tambourin, timbale en rythmique asymétrique, tambours épars, un cor lances une mélodie… triangle, djembé, accord de cor qui s’effondrent en demi ton.. le cor reprend a l’octave au-dessus, intrigant.. Silence. et woush c’est une tornade de couleurs entre la harpe, les glocken, la flute, l’harmonie exotique, fruitée et éclatante, /! et wash, ça repart.. Pour continuer sur la rythmique initiale, le cor aiguë, l’accord qui s’effondre avec mystère, puis le cor grave, puis la rythmique simple.. et fin. /roll Une structure en pyramide comme une montagne, avec un petit feu d’artifice au milieu...

Sunday, July 3 2022

Compos : Nos Premières Vacances

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Un arpège de lydien en mouvement, une flûte et glocken pour un thème simple sur ce tissu. Passage central avec les cordes reprenant le début du thème, un basson a la réponse, l'harmonie bouge enfin, évolue, touche romantique, et puis une tension de gravite ponctuée par la timbale, résolue toute en douceur (sur 2 accords qui sont ceux du morceau Shooner sous les Feuilles de Hugues, que j'ai en tête depuis 2016 :) ) Retour sur le tissus initial, la harpe s'ajoute, et c'est le basson qui reprend le thème, crescendo sur la fin du thème, coupure, et accord final. Harmonie un peu statique, a part la partie centrale, plutôt dans une option de souvenir heureux des vacances. Le développement est un peu trop sérieux, académique, voire pompeux pour un sujet aussi doux et léger.

Sunday, June 5 2022

Compo : La Pierre de Rosette

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Ligne de corde grave, puis une mélodie de cordes solo façon moyen orient (avec touches indiennes !) Des cordes plus hautes accompagnée de cors donnent une réponse plus harmonique, en péplum arabe et Puis c'est un espèce de dialogue de robots entre des clochettes (gamelan balinais) et un santoor. Un long arpège se construit, un beat infâme apparaît.. et se confirme, c'est un beat techno bien cheap qui accompagne le gamelan, puis les cordes de retours avec les mêmes elements. Séquence beat sec, puis arpège au santoor, et conclusion sur les accords épiques. De l’Égypte oui (en ratissant large jusqu'en Iran et inde..) mais pour Vangelis, de la techno, vraiment ?

Tuesday, May 17 2022

Hylian language : Complete Legend Translated

Hylian becomes more real! After an extensive re-harmonisation of the script and a full development of the prefixes, I have finally translated all the legend of Zelda 5, Ocarina of Time.

Open the article to see the 7 pages!

Continue reading...

Saturday, April 9 2022

Compo : Une Chance Pour La Paix

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Une marche bien classique sur 3 temps, avec des sons de cordes un peu frottants, et un harpe low fi. Montée harmonique tragique assez académique, conclusion de phrase avec des éléments plus épiques modernes sur le final apaisé. Passage central plus léger et animé entre le hautbois et la flûte, et des harmonies plus riches. Retour massif sur le thème initial, assez royal, peut être trop lourd avec la timbale. Comme dit Florent y'a une inspiration presque religieuse au début. Une paix reçue après des souvenirs éprouvants.

Sunday, February 13 2022

Compo : Bataille de Fourmis

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Rather a sketchy draft, the introduction drags a bit, and then the action riffs take from the indian kamavardani mode (again!).

Coups de taiko, cordes d'ambiance sur harmonies douces et légèrement tendues, claves d'intrigue, les cordes traînent et se tendent.. tension grave, et boum lancement de motif riff au violoncelle, mi-blues mi-exotique, repris en full spiccato avec timbale, une mélodie d'un couple basson flûte, puis pour pizz (enfin!) triangles avec mélodie basson hautbois. Et la, passage vers une section centrale d’arpèges pizz mélancoliques (euh, mais c'est la guerre mon capitaine.. osef, c'est joli.), mélodie basson, puis remplumage a coup de spic et trompette. Retour énergique sur le riff spiccato et cor, montée avec pizz, jusqu’à.. la conventionnelle explosion de gong...

Saturday, January 22 2022

Reprise familiale : Gluecklich Zusammen

Le neveu de 2 ans qui se met à la batterie avec une étonnante régularité, le frère qui évoque un vieux tube anglo saxon, le papa qui sort la guitare, y'avait plus qu'à ! ( et tant qu'à faire, sortir aussi une traduction en allemand !)


Cliquez sur l'image pour écouter, c'est juste un petit montage rapide einh! )

Sunday, January 16 2022

Compo : Eternity Express

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Orchestral and brightly joyful, a bit static as I lacked time to develop twist and turns.. I'm getting into the bad habit of composing by loops :p

Friday, December 17 2021

Privacy Tutorial for Android phone v8

Most apps are free, but they drain from you precious data.
Is that free? No.
This data allow them to know you and predict your behavior, consumer and voter trends. And once you're partly transparent to them it's easy to be manipulated. Hundreds of thousands voters got targeted and influenced in the Brexit and Trump votes during the Cambridge-Analytica Facebook scandal. Google is even more powerful.

The most sensitive App Permissions are :

  • Body Sensors : that data tell how much you move, and insurance companies are ready to pay much money to do their due-diligence before accepting covering you.
  • Microphone : apps running on background are actively listening to recognize keywords, like "Ok Google" or other commands. Of course knowing what we talk about is also precious to profile us further. The component "Alphonso Automated" is an in-famous one.
  • Camera : If you haven't covered your selfie camera with a sticker, then it can easily eye-track where on the screen you're looking and how you react to each visual content. That's an powerful psychological assessment method to finely profile your reactions.
  • Location : Knowing where you go, when, how fast, and roughly who you meet (cross checked with conversation content if you allow the microphone), that too is very sensitive.

Click on the image to enlarge

Sunday, November 14 2021

Compo : La Dernière Blague Du Joker

Composition for the Nocta music contest, episode 231 :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Orgues en tuyaux frottants, sonorités fatales, évolutions plaintives et pleines de regret, arrivant sur une reprise de la marche funèbre de Chopin. Tout s’arrête.. ou pas, c'est un orgue de barbarie titubant qui se lève, danse en ivresse colorée, et monte en.. barbarie, grandes orgues grotesques, noires, maléfiques et éclatantes. Le feu se consument, et les cendres retombent sur l'orgue doux et fatal du début, mot de la fin.

Friday, November 5 2021

New keyword: Guy Fawkes

It has become increasingly obvious that the articles of this blog are identified across many fields, and it's not unusual to see over 5 tags for a single article! I believe this is a semantic issue, about finding the right vocabulary. It is sometimes necessary to create a new word to concisely capture a novel specific idea.

Here is propose "GuyFawkes" as keyword tag for my articles related to: "Defense of liberties, privacy, democratic civil society and access to knowledge, against oppressive states and corporations". It is not fully in line with the ideas of the Anonymous, Chanology, Pirate, or Occupy movements by definition, but shares similarities.

For me, November 5th is a cheerful celebration of anarchism and critical thinking, a warning sent to all abusive authorities, both public and private (GAFAM and Party)

Guido "Guy" Fawkes was an English catholic activist who belonged to the failed gunpowder plot aiming at bombing the British parliament on 5 November 1605. His figure, and particularly the above mask designed for the 2006 movie V For Vendetta has gained universal symbolic value, which doesn't have any religious connotation anymore.

Saturday, May 15 2021

Block trackers from the GAFAM with Privacy Badger plugin

After a long fight against Facebook's last full scale monitoring, Off-Facebook Activity, during which I've run trial and error tests, I've found and validated a very powerful plugin for PC and Phones : Privacy Badger. It can effectively block the countless trackers that Google and Facebook, among others, are sticking at us.

Off-Facebook Activity is Facebook feature since 2019 that shows you all the data shared about you with Facebook. It includes purchase you made, apps you use, sites you visits (among which petition, bank, news articles and other sensitive visits), on your PC and phone alike. It claims to do it to give you.. (guess what?)... more relevant content and ads.

Here is where to automatically check on your own FB account what Facebook knows about you : www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/activity_list

For me the list was so long and shockingly detailed that it drove me mad. I logged every change of that list on daily basis and ran tests, to understand how it could spy on my so pervasively. The only method that could cut off that spying was this plugin. I suppose the other plugin called "Ghostery" is equally effective.

Friday, June 5 2020

Learning Patterns on Duolingo

This is a graph I made using Gephi to show the number of Duolingo users learning which language from which. Colours represent language families.


English of course stands out as a hub. Duolingo users can learn any language from English, except Catalan and Guarani (from indigenous around Paraguay) which are learned from Spanish. Asymmetric drains are seen towards French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Italian to some extent. The network rather follows geographic proximity, with the notable exception of the Arabic>Swedish stream, accounting for the great effort of migrants to integrate Swedish society.


(click on the graph for a bigger picture with explanations)
Data review on June 2021 didn't show much change.

This is an example of semi-structured graph based on a data matrix. The interesting aspect of it is that the shape of the graph emerges from its inner structure, by optimizing the proximity and arrangement of the nodes linked together. Like letting the data spontaneously express itself and grow into a particular pattern.

(Shared here on Facebook Duolingo group)

Monday, February 3 2020

Bible lexicon: Strong Concordance with whole KJV in spreasheet

Here is my worksheet about biblical lexicon, a clean compilation of various treasures i've found: Strong concordance lists for Hebrew and Greek with translation counts for KJV and NASV, along with the complete KJV with Strong numbers. All in all, this allows word counts through the use of excel functions. Enjoy!


(Click on the picture to open the XLS worksheet)

Thursday, September 26 2019

Etymology - Esperanta Vortorigino kaj Komprenebleco

Esperanto:

Mi kunhavas chi tie kelkajn datumojn pri la vortorigino de Esperanto. Mi surbazis de la laboro de Andras Rajki el jaro 2006. Li studis grupon de 4000 vortoj kaj serchis la similajn vortojn el la latina, franca, itala, germana, jidisha, nederlanda, angla, rusa, pola kaj lituana lingvoj. Tiuj lingvoj estas konsideritaj tiel "lingvoj de Zamenhofo" char estas la lingvoj kiuj Zamehof pli-malpli kapablis kaj vershajne uzis por krei la internacian lingvon.

Andreas Rajki studas per sia vortprovizo la kompreneblecon inter tiuj lingvoj. Lia samecaj kondichoj estas iom striktaj (priskribitaj chi tie) Ekzemple li jughas ke "perfekta" ne sufiche similas "perfetta", "distanco" ne sufiche al "distanza" aw "distantia", "historio" al "istoria", kaj "havi la "haben", aw "trinki" al "drink". Do oni povus rekalkuli pli grandajn porcentojn de interkomprenebleco se inkluzus tiajn prununcajn variajhojn.

En tiu bilda rezumo ni povas vidi kaj la granda plejparto de Esperanta vortorigino estas la franca kaj latina. Preskaw 80% devenas de la romanaj lingvoj. Sed plej interesa estas ke tiu vortaro tamen tre bone kompreneblas de la parolantoj el la germanaj aw slavaj lingvoj.

English:

I'm sharing here some information about Esperanto etymology. The work is based on data published by Andra Rajki in 2006. He studied a set of 4000 words for which he looked for similar words from Latin, French, Italian, German, Yidish, Dutch, English, Russian, Polish and Lithuanian. Thos languages are considered "Zamehof languages" since Zamenhof knew them and probably used them to create the International Languages.

Andras Rajki studied the mutual intelligibility between these languages. His similarity conditions are somewhat strict (details here) He decided that "perfekta" wasn't similar enought to "perfetta", "distanco" neither to "distanza" or "distantia", "historio" to "istoria", and "havi to "haben", or "trinki" to "drink". We could then recalculate larger percentages of intelligibility if we'd include those variations of pronunciation.

In the picture we can see that the vast majority of Esperanto vocabulary comes from Latin and French. Nearly 80% come from Romance languages. However it is even more interesting to see that this lexicon is still well intelligible to speakers of Germanic or Slavic languages.

Discussion ici en Français sur l'Atelier

Tuesday, September 10 2019

Hylian language : Legend verses 1 and 2

Here is a new translation, taking piecemeal the famous legend from Zelda 5 "Ocarina of Time".

This short text is full of interesting paradoxes. It puts together the ideas of beginning and what was before. The concept of origin is rendered by SMR (from Somaria, creation or start), and that of antecedence by the preposition KR, derived from KKR (from Kokiri, youth or morning roost). That antecedence is part of a cycle imitating the sun and four cardinal points: Est-South-West-North, NotYet-Already-Still-NoMore, Before-Inside-After-Outside. These two contradicting time models, the linear and the cyclical, are closely knit together like a primal bomb ready to expand.

Time is rendered by BRN (from Labrynna, the oracle of Time), with its abstract sense. The concrete one would be "moment".

Finally, "the chaos that was Hyrule" is paradoxical since Hyrule, the cosmos, basically means harmony. Hence "chaos" is constructed as "un-hyrulish". A cosmos yet very un-cosmic, a formless nothing yet to become something.

(Also posted on the ZeldaUniverse forum)

Thursday, May 16 2019

A Phrasebook of Vietnamese Walls

Here is a compilation of pictures and notes, about Vietnamese walls and inscriptions. Posters, ads, mysterious glyphs and undecipherable symbols. My notebook of Indiana Jones in Vietnam!


Click on the picture to open the pdf

Facebook post

Thursday, May 2 2019

Compo : Le Temple de la Lune

Composition for the special 200th episode of the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Approach and gaze at the temple, enter, wander, capture the moon relic, and run away in panic !

Monday, March 25 2019

Compo : Les 4 Elements

Composition for the Nocta music contest :


(Click on the picture to listen)

Epic video game style, ethnic instruments.. Actually one of the elements is missing, but which one? ;)

Tuesday, December 4 2018

Old Persian Text in Miyazaki's "Laputa, the Castle in the Sky"

Hayao Miyazaki's 1986 anime "Castle in the Sky" uses old Persian cuneiform script for the design of Laputa civilization.

The Ghibli museum at Mitaka also features a cube with a text which I have transcribed and tried to analyse...

Continue reading...

Tuesday, May 8 2018

Musical Modes: compiled, analysed and compared

After my first attempt in 2009 to review the modes used in modern jazz, I'm deepening the analysis and including the 72 ragas from southern India.

The diagram shows which of the 12 semitones are used to build the musical scale, with colours indicating their natural consonances or tensions with the starting note.

The excel sheet gives all the data and functions.

Here are the 5 pentatonic modes built without semitone interval:

The pentatonic mode of Re# was used for the melody of this 2011 composition.
The Indian raga KamaVardani was used in the last part of this 2015 composition (Krishna talks!), and in this one (descending little devils..)

Continue reading...

Monday, March 19 2018

Why is Wechat still a clumsy chat?

I've been looking for fair reviews of Wechat, but besides phony can/cannot critics, I found nowhere yet what I'm listing below.

Yes, Wechat is impressive by its payment features, along with great compatibility with other services: food delivery, Didi taxi, shared bike, train ticket, etc. But Wechat is... a chat app. Why is it lagging so much behind its international competitors regarding basic chat features?

  1. No sending confirmation
  2. No reading confirmation
  3. No clear notification of internet unavailability
  4. Late notification of message sending failure (30 seconds to 2 minutes)
  5. No automatic re-sending upon recovery of the internet access.
  6. Impossible to delete or rectify a message after 1 minute. Deleting only removes it from your own log, not the others'!
  7. Worse: Pictures and documents expire after 1 week!
  8. Even worse: Inconsistency of message log when using simultaneously the phone and PC interface: If only one of the 2 is on-line, the messages will only be logged in the on-line machine, and will never by synced into the log of the then off-line machine.
  9. Funny final one: Only 1 bloody ring-tone for 1,000,000,000+ users.

I guess that most of these drawbacks are aiming at reducing internet traffic, but they severely damage the basic chat functionalities.
I'm not trying to get my Chinese visa suspended here, rather I really encourage the above shortcomings to be fixed. Wechat is the hegemonic ubiquitous Chinese chat super-app, therefore no other option. The only way forward is to improve it.

To read further:

Saturday, December 2 2017

Poème coloré "La Corne et le Corail"

En quittant un hôtel à Saïgon dimanche dernier, j'ai vu deux objets qui semblaient contredire l’évolution habituelle de la matière..

Les poèmes que j'aime composer incarnent la concision et la densité du lien. Des formes brèves me permettent une capture rapide à la manière du haïku, mais les relations de musique et de sens exigent un choix scrupuleux des mots. Le sonnet en six pieds me convient souvent, avec de multiples motifs de rimes.
Concernant le lexique, je préfère l'universel. Les noms propres sont généralement exclus car associés à des époques et cultures. Les mots sophistiqués ou rares sont évités. Je cherche à ne garder qu'un langage concis mais accessible.

Monday, September 25 2017

Poème coloré "Conscience"

Cet été un de ces matins vietnamiens, les chats ont déposé au pied de la table deux oisillons agonisant. Les matous n'avaient pas l'air bien émus, peut être simplement ignorant bien et mal.

Friday, September 8 2017

Compo : La Espero

Esperanto was born in the late 19th century, and traditional customs back then was to give it a flag.. and an anthem! During the 100th congress in Lille in 2015, i've noticed with a friend of mine that the music of this anthem is quite military, a coulour in serious contradiction with the peacefulness of the lyrics.

Here is an arrangement with a new melody, slightly similar to the original, but in a form of waltz:


Click on the picture to listen (to the nasty piano-flute duet of mine!)

And here is the music score.

Monday, August 21 2017

Compo : La Complainte du Nounours Abandonné

Last participation to the Nocta contest 3 weeks ago :

Click on the picture to listen

Tuesday, June 6 2017

Hylian language update !

The introduction booklet now includes a selective dictionary, words class for animals and plants, and a comparison with ancient Hieroglyphs !

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