DIY Urbanism

Living in a big city can be really asphyxiating, especially if you lived in the countryside before you came in town. Coming from a little village near Annecy, some days are tough when I’m in Grenoble. So I began to think about little things that could help me appreciate this city. My wish for talking about DIY urbanism was strengthened by the last class we had at University, when we watched the short film « Do-It-Yourself Urban Design » by Gordon C.C. Douglas, City & Community Video Abstract. Then, I made my own researches to find some really cool projects around the world. I found three of them which are really brilliant, and I decided to share them with you.

The first project is an idea of the great Studio Roosegaarde, based in Netherland. It is a bicycle path inspired by the work of Van Gogh : on the road, they encrusted little stones that recharged by themselves during the day, with the power of the sun, and then that glitters at night. They use fluorescente mosaics to make this bicycle road a little more pleasant to ride on, and the result is splendid !

The second project is also about light, because it’s a way that allows to create energy, and especially light. The idea is named Pavegen System : it is about small green squares also incrusted in the floor that produced green energy when you walk on them. I think that it is a great idea to create green energy, and it is also really playful ! They managed to make this system in airport, school, streets… And it’s really great to find that those little but really interesting ideas exist.

The last project is more for a personal scale than for an entire city, but I wanted to share it with you because it is an attractive idea for the ones who lives in city and think they can’t have a garden even if they have a house. The idea is called Garden Pool : as the title, it is as simple as a garden, in a pool ! It is Dennis McClung, a designer, that had this great idea. He thought of an entire garden with chickens, vegetables, water with fishes, etc. under a hothouse and designed by the pool itself.

I found others great ideas, and I participated to some of them, like Incredible Edible plans and their shared gardens in Annecy. I really think that the most important thing in the development of a great city is to do small steps in every neighborhood, and then, the city itself will develop automatically, but with and by the poeple that live in it.

Ressources ;

- « Do-It-Yourself Urban Design » City & Community Video Abstract :

http://vimeo.com/83090975

- « Van Gogh bike path » Studio Roosegaarde :

https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/van-gogh-path/

-  Pavegen System :

http://pavegen.com/projects

- Garden Pool :

http://gardenpool.org/

"How brave of your body to keep breathing when all you can think about is not."

Eating is one the most vital thing that a human being has to do. But when your brain is telling you that food is an enemy, it’s where everything gets complicated.

In 2012, GQ magazine published an article written by Nathaniel Penn about male anorexia. I found this article on the website of the magazine, and it really surprised me: five pages full of narration, stories and explanations. And a way of describing the devastation of having an eating disorder and the pain that feel men who are suffering from this illness. Nathaniel narrates the stories of four men, Blake, John, Will and Steven stories that really moved me because you can understand how they are struggling against everything: their mind, others’ opinion, institutions, media…

But first, let me explain things in a medical way: anorexia is a self-induced starvation, accompanied by a morbid fear of food and fatness and the suppression of the production of sex-hormones of the body. Essentially, the brain feels full when his stomach is empty, and it sees a fat person in the mirror. Basically, someone who has anorexia is in a constant panic, and can suffers from isolation, anxiety or depression too. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate than other mental illness, with 24 millions of people who are suffering in the US, and approximately 4% of them are dying from suicide or medical complication. From the ones that survived, the majority will have long term consequences like heart problems, stomach/muscles complications, etc. 

In America, there are 20% of people suffering from anorexia who are men. But the big difference between men and women is that contrary to women, men doesn’t seek for help… It might even be possible that three-quarters of them are suffering in silence. It is sure that the media and the way they show us “body perfections” are not helping… And the stigmatization of two gender types are really influencing people, even men. Being a men and suffering from anorexia is even harder, because it is consider as a white women disease… And when they managed to look for help, to overtake what society and others will think of them, they faced a huge gap that they don’t think they can cross: there are just 25 on 58 centers specialized about eating disorders that allowed men. Those centers are sex-specifics and most of them haven’t the material to help boys, and not girls.

I know that this article is quite short, and really general. But I really think that most of people don’t even know that men can suffer from this illness too. The most important thing to understand is that it can touch everybody, with all ages and all genders. The second thing to understand is to be able to recognize the first symptoms of this illness to be capable of getting help. Because the thing is that you can’t do this all alone, on your own. It’s a battle that you have to do by yourself and for yourself, of course, but has any illnesses, you need help, and supports, and love, and patience. And then, you can kick the ass to these f*ckin illness. So talk, tell about this because it’s the only way to accept that, and to go through without fear. FIGHT STIGMA.

Ressource :

“Male Anorexia: 20% of Anorexics are men” GQ (2012) Nathaniel PENN:

http://www.gq.com/news-politics/big-issues/201209/male-anorexia-gq-september-2012

Through time and space.

If someone asks you if you want to join him to fly through time and space, what would be your answer ? If you had all of time and space, where would you like to go ? In the past or the future ? Or in another world, in another galaxy or even in another dimension (like parallel universes) ?

This is a question that I am asking myself a lot since a few months. Last night I went to watch Interstellar, the new Christoper Nolan’s movie, and it was actually a great experience. I began to watch the TV show Doctor Who six months ago, and I’m still not able to answer those previous questions. What would I do ?

The possibility of travelling through time and space is a human’s dream since a very long time. Lots of films and books have been created by people who are passionate about that subject. Through the years, science have been able to develop theories, and will probably go deeper in those primary questions.

Even if I have seen Interstellar in french, I had watched 2001 : A Space Odyssey in english and I still watch Doctor Who in original version. What I find really interesting is more the link between the characters and the distorsion of time and space than the scientific aspects. In my opinion, knowing the consequences of these quantic effects is essential, but I think that it is more important to know if we, humans, are able to bear all those effects.

I think that the most disturbing thing when you travel through time and space is the dilation of time : in Interstellar at one moment, they have to travel near a gigantic black hole to go on a particular planet, leaving behind them another astronaute. It is said in the film that every hour spent on this planet is equivalent to seven hours for the other astronaute left behind. How can the human brain understand and accept that ? In Doctor Who, the Doctor is always accompanied by a human being. During some episodes, this companion is torn knowing that he is already dead when he travels in the future, and the fact that the earth can die is unbearable. It’s quite understandable : the idea of travelling through time and space is really tempting and exciting, but how would you react by knowing the truth of the future ? How would you stand the temptation to change your past ? Could you be able to stand the loneliness and the silence of being in space ?

In all those films (either Interstellar, 2001 : A Space Odyssey, Doctor Who, etc.) the explorers are really enjoying what they are doing first. But then they gradually tend to be opressed by this huge adventure, and even to suffer from it. In Interstellar, the main character is heartbroken when he watches the recorded videos of 23 years of his son’s life, because he was away just for a few hours. In Doctor Who, it is more the accumulation of little things that makes the companions of the Doctor to leave him. In every case, they are doing a great sacrifice to discover new worlds, a sacrifice that they don’t know before leaving everything behind them.

I really believe, after thinking about this issue for a long time, that it would be great for me to travel through time and space, but knowing the fact that I am ignorant if I could bear those consequences, I would probably choose to do it reasonably.

Ressources :

 « Interstellar » (2014) Christopher Nolan

« Doctor Who » (2005) Russell T Davies and Steven Moffat

« 2001 : A Space Odysey » (1968) Stanley Kubrick

The women of Harry Potter.

What made me want to write about the female characters of Harry Potter are two videos I watched. The first is an interview of J.K. Rowling (« The Women of Harry Potter», Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part.2, 2011) and the second video is the speech that Emma Watson (Hermione Granger) said at the United Nation campaign for the solidarity movement for gender equality HeForShe in 2014.

Speaking about gender equality in the universe of Harry Potter is quite easier in some ways, because at first it is a fictional universe, and also because magic is not single-gender : witches and wizards are equal about the magic that runs through their veins.

Rowling, who is a woman author, created lots of exceptional female characters. All of them are brave, strong, loyal, clever, sometimes very independant, but most important, they are all true to themselves.

Hermione Granger, Ginny Weasley and Luna Lovegood are the most clear representations of those traits of personality.

Hermione is the brightest witch of her age and will never compromise herself and act dumber than she is. She didn’t sacrifice anything about her when she grew up. And without her, Harry and Ron would have never done anything, because she is the brain of the trio.

Ginny is the independant woman that society doesn’t like. She’s strong and sporty, but very clever too.

Luna is also a very strong character, because she really doesn’t care what others think : she’s totally in peace whith who she is and her past and she totally accepts that she is different.

Molly Weasley and Minerva McGonagall are also two strong women. They are powerful mother figures : Molly the « mother of this world » and McGonagall the mother of Hogwarts. They can fight too, they are the « greatest force for good », and they are not just women, or just a mother for Molly. Molly made a choice (to stay at home and taking care of her family) but that doesn’t mean that she’s « just that ». McGonagall is not just a teacher too.

All those women are really strong, and brave, because they lived difficult times : loss of close relations, torture, bully and criticism. And I think that the most important thing that Rowling is trying to give us, is that women have to accept them the way they are, and that they have to always be true to themselves.

Ressources: 

« The Women of Harry Potter » J.K. Rowling (2011) :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnb-XIZwbY0

Emma Watson at the HeForShe Campaign 2014, Official UN Video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkjW9PZBRfk 

HeForShe :

http://www.heforshe.org/ 

« Character Analysis Hermione Granger in Harry Potter » Humanities360, Holly Robinson (2007) :

http://www.humanities360.com/index.php/character-analysis-hermione-granger-in-harry-potter-2-64456/ 

« Hermione Granger: A Heroine Comes Into Her Own » RH Reality Check, Sarah Seltzer (2010) :

http://rhrealitycheck.org/article/2010/11/26/hermione-grangerheroine-comes/ 

« Ginny Weasley: The Exceptional Woman » Theresa Basile (2011):

http://theresabasile.com/wp/2011/07/25/ginny-weasley-the-exceptional-woman/

« An unabashed love letter to Ginny Weasley » Feministing, Chloé Angyal (2010) :

http://feministing.com/2010/11/22/an-unabashed-love-letter-to-ginny-weasley/

My bucket-list of Grenoble.

It has only been a few months since I live in Grenoble, but as a walk-lover, I went a lot to the city the first weeks to discover my new place. When I was asked to make a list of the things that you have to do in Grenoble, I first thought that it was really dificult, because I came in the capital of the Alpes only two months ago. Basically, I don’t know the city enough to make a list of the five things that you absolutely have to do. So I choose to make a list of the things that I have done and that I really enjoyed, and share those ideas with you.

Take a nap in the Jardin de Ville a sunny afternoon while eating a cookie from Adélaïde Cookies.

I remember this day when I was lying in the grass near the Téléphérique of the Bastille, eating this delicious orange/chocolate cookie. The little jardin is really beautiful, and this cookie shop (16 rue des Clercs) is just marvellous ! You can buy cookies, muffins, brownies and scones, some made with toasted nuts, caramel au beurre salé, three chocolates, nougat, rose, cristallized fruits, hot pepper… This is really the place to have a great goûter.

Go to the Bastille tunnel of the Résistance with a friend, after taking the road in car.

Of course you will go to the Bastille. It is THE thing to do in Grenoble, like the Tour Eiffel in Paris. But it wasn’t the place itself that pleased me. Yes, the vue is really beautiful, and taking the téléphérique was quite funny. But I enjoyed it better the second time I went there, when I took this little and sinuous mountain road where you try not to be lost, and most of all, you hope that nobody will come the other way ! The site by itself is not really interesting. But if you take the little pedestrian road to go to the Tunnel de la Résistance, you will have a great and funny moment, especially if you are scared of spiders and looking for adventures ! This tunnel is quite long, built in the rock, with small lights and lots of cobwebs. So if you want to laugh, don’t hesitate to go there with a mate !

Go to the temporary expositions of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, like the one about spiders.

I think you understood, I’m not really fond of spiders… But when we were searching for an original museum to go to in Grenoble my boyfriend and I, we chose the temporary exposition of the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (1 rue Dolomieu) called Au Fil des Araignées (from April 2014 to March 2015). The museum by itself is not really interesting, especially if you don’t like stuffed animal… But you can be curious to go there to learn about the fauna of the Alpes! The expo about spiders is really fascinating, because it introduced you to those insects that most people fear. You go out from this place full of knowledge!

Those three things are the ones that I really enjoyed, and that made me love Grenoble. It is a city full of surprises compared to its small size. I don’t know the city very much, but the first thing that I advise you to do is simply roaming in the pedestrian streets and maybe you will discover great little shops (like the Acces’soir, 7 rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which sells beads and is soooo cute).

I really think that the better way to discover a city is to walk through its streets, to wander through the shops, and to try lots of things…

The Century of the Brain: How to decipher our brain.

"Science and mountain climbing have a lot of things in common. You first have to find a pick you want to climb, set yourself an “I go”, and when you look at it from the bottom you say “Well, there’s no way. I will never be able to make it up there”. But you can. You need three things. Your first need is a team of skilled, passionate and committed climbers. Then you need to study the roof, and break up the climb into manageable stages, and go through each of them, step by step, making one secure step to the other. The third thing you need is never to lose sight of the summit. You have to endure, you have to have persistence, and continue until you get there.

Well, it’s exactly the same thing in science.”

Rafael YUSTE.

How does our brain work? How am I able to feel love, pain, fear…? How my thoughts and my emotions take life to make me who I am? How can I perceive a flower or recognize Jennifer Aniston and link her to the TV Show F.R.I.E.N.D.S.?

Those questions are the ones that Rafael Yuste and other scientists are trying to answer. Our brain is a gigantic machine, a complex piece of matter that creates feelings, sentiments and thinking. In the end, it creates us: who we are.

Rafael Yuste is a neuroscientist passionate by the brain. In October 2014, the magazine Scientific American published “The New Century of the Brain: Revolutionary tools will reveal how thoughts and emotions arise”, a collaborative article he wrote with George Church, in which they explain how we are ignorant about the brain.

When you watch TV shows, movies or documentaries, you see beautiful pictures of cross-sections of brains, and videos where you can see some parts which are stimulated by the patient’s activity. But when we look deeper, we see that those images are illusions, and Yuste is here to make us remember that we have a long way to go to understand the mechanism of our brain.

The human brain in numbers: 
- 3.3 pound mass;
- 85 billions of neurons;
- The same number of non-neuronal cells;
- 10¹⁵  synaptic connexions;
- 20% of the oxygen’s consummation of the body.

A single neuron, all alone, is not intelligent. It’s the first thing that Yuste explains in the “Appendix E” of the Neural Network researches. As you know now, the number of neurons in our brain is gigantic. It was the first thing that surprised me. But more than that, it is what I learned from those articles that impressed me: admittedly, understand a single neuron is really important to understand 85 billions. But most important, it is the connexions between them that it is primordial: how they work together, how they are connected with each other, and how those interactions can create intelligence, feelings or sentiments. We already have succeeded to map the neuronal connexions of a worm (the Caenorhabditis Elegans) which has only 302 neurons…

For sure, we have methods which allow us to map the connexions, but unfortunately not to understand them. The most efficient is the Connectomic method, which permit us to see the directions that take neurons with different colors: red for left to right, green for ahead to behind and blue for above to under.

To be clear about the real gap we still have to cross, I have to explain that we need more than a picture. We need to see the interactions directly, we need to be able to “document the constantly varying electrical signals that product specific cognitive processes”. Therefore, we need new technologies, like nanotechnology which uses the molecular scale, a technique that could be very accurate.

Yuste made a short conference in 2007 that can be found on Youtube, in response to the decision of Obama to increase the research on the brain. From this decision, a project has been created, combining 50 researchers, named the BRAIN Initiative. Their goals are to understand our brain but also to be able in the future to cure mental illness or neuronal diseases like Schizophrenia or Alzheimer.

Rafael Yuste is a professor in biology and neuroscience who works in the Columbia University. He is the co-director of the Kavli Foundation in brain research.

- "Circuit neuroscience: the road ahead" Yuste, Frontiers in Neuroscience (2008)

- "Rafael Yuste: What understanding the brain means to science and medicine” TEDMED :

What is fear ?

« Let me tell you about scared. Your heart is beating so hard I can feel it through your hands. There’s so much blood and oxygen pumping through your brain it’s like rocket fuel. Right now you could run faster and you can fight harder. You can jump higher than ever in your life and you are so alert it’s like you can slow down time. What’s wrong with scared? Scared is a superpower! »

Doctor Who, Listen (2014)

Fear is an emotion. Fear is what is keeping you alive when you feel danger. So basically it is the most normal emotion that you can feel. It is an instinctive emotion that works when your life or your health is in danger. Without this primary instinct, we wouldn’t be here today. Without fear, we cannot go on and move forward.

As anybody has already experienced it once in his life, fear is a body behavior: you feel unsafe, your heart pace is increasing, every muscle of your body is taut, you breathe faster and you feel pins and needles in your skin. All your senses are in alert. You can do anything in your power to save your life. You’re ready to do what it takes to stay alive.

Fear is a chemical message produced by your brain with the information it can find in a certain context with your five senses: what you see, what you hear, what you feel (touch and emotion), and sometimes what you can smell and what you can taste. With all these information, the brain makes a message telling its hormones (adrenaline) by the nervous system to act to “save your life”. Then, your brain has two choices to save you (or, you have two choices to save yourself): run, or fight. Either you can choose to run, to leave or not to deal with what scares you, or you can fight it, find a solution, stay and deal with it.

We all experienced fear at least once in our life. When you’re a child, you don’t already know how to make the difference between what is real and what is the creation of your own imagination. When you grow up, you start to have phobias about spiders, dogs, heights, water, dark, etc. And you begin to think that fear is an inconvenience, a feeling that always keeps you down, that you can’t move forward with it. As adults, we tend to think that fear is for children. That we have to deal with what scares us. And it can be true when your phobias ruin your life. But we forget that it is our survival instinct. Even if sometimes it is hard or annoying, we CAN’T live without fear.

« I know you’re afraid, but being afraid is alright. Because didn’t anybody ever tell you? Fear is a superpower. Fear can make you faster and cleverer and stronger. And one day you’re gonna come back to this barn and on that day you’re going to be very afraid indeed. But that’s okay, because if you’re very wise and very strong fear doesn’t have to make you cruel or cowardly. Fear can make you kind. It doesn’t matter if there’s nothing under the bed or in the dark so long as you know it’s okay to be afraid of it. So listen. If you listen to anything else, listen to this. You’re always gonna be afraid even if you learn to hide it. Fear is like a companion, a constant companion, always there. But that’s okay because fear can bring us together. Fear can bring you home. I’m gonna leave you something just so you’ll always remember. Fear makes companions of us all. »

Doctor Who, Listen (2014)

https://www.quora.com/What-is-fear-1