Notes de Voyage

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.

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...

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 ?

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.

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! )

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

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.

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)

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

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

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?

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..)

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.

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.