Switzerland Samba

I went to Brazil last Saturday night. An hour driving from Geneva.

The place is called Montreux and there's a jazz festival over there every year since 1967. Well it's actually more than jazz. This year the organizers had the great idea to schedule "Carnaval do Brasil", a looong evening dedicated to brazilian music. I was going there a bit sceptical: a brazilian night organized in Auditorium Stravinsky (sic) somewhere in the Canton de Vaud. Hmmmm. Doesn't look like that exciting. It definitely was. While I was expecting a quiet auditorium filled with a very polite audience comfortably seated on red velvet chairs (see which ones?), it actually was a huge dancing place (no seats!) filled with hundreds of brazilians partying all over the place. You could have spotted from time to time an inhibated european-like spectator enjoying as much the music as the crazy atmosphere.

The music was indeed really good too. I really liked the songs of Alceu Valença which sometimes reminded me some french songs (in the music and the format). It was then followed by Beth Carvalho who was amazing. She sang many Samba classics (some of which I even knew from before!) which, as I later discovered, were "her" classics written in the 70's and the 80's. Of course, everybody (but the europeans, remember) was singing with her. The last (and least) band was playing some mixture of Reggae and Samba music. It was interesting although I liked it a bit less than the previous two concerts (I was also starting to get tired).

Perhaps some of you didn't know there's such a large (and active) Brazilian community around here. I can tell you there is, fortunately. And sometimes, they gather in Montreux, Switzerland.

Nobel collection

My friends Dolores, Markus, and I are making a (totally useless and childish) list of Nobel prize winners, that is the number of Nobel prize winners we've seen so far (a more stringent variant includes the need to shake hands). Anyway, my list increased by one unit yesterday at the cafeteria after I finished my pasta dish, when an old man wanted me to move away so that He could have a seat. Markus was fair enough to tell me this impatient not to say impolite person was Carlo Rubbia, whom I had not seen yet, surprisingly. For non-experts, he got the Nobel in '84 with van der Meer for the discovery of the Hig... nope sorry the Z0/W weak bosons. He's one of the few CERN's Nobel laureates.

My list now includes, in alphabetical order: G.Charpak, C.Cohen-Tannoudji, M.Gell-Mann, R.J.Glauber, T.Haensch, T.D.Lee, B.Mottelson, N.F.Ramsey, C.Rubbia, J.Steinberger, G.'t Hooft, S.Ting, F.Wilczek, and last but certainly not least, C.N.Yang (14 in total, yet I have a doubt concerning Ting). I regret this list is only made of Physics Nobel prize winners, I'd like to see Nobels in other fields as well!

Many more could be added quite "easily" I believe, such as: Glashow, Gross, Perl, Smoot, van der Meer, Weinberg, Wilson, ...

Doug Hofstadter at CERN

The other day Doug Hofstadter ("Godel, Escher, Bach") came to CERN and gave a colloquium on Albert Einstein. I was on vacation last week and missed that talk, shame on me ! Have a look on the CERN website for the video of the conference: video Hofstadter

My very first blog

Hi there,

you're reading my first note on this blog. It ain't a real blog anyway, consider it as a regular (static) homepage. I'll write some notes and put some links from time to time, though.

Enjoy !

(tu aimes bien leo, le nom du blog ? argh j'ai pas pu resister a le creer .....)