Further to Geneva, some photos

On offer at the Red Cross museum, which is an alright museum, but their mazelike layout is a bit effective. At the beginning they have a section about protecting life, with extracts from various ancient cultural-religious texts purporting to support the idea of humanity in warfare. However, at least in the case of the extracts from Sun Tzu and the Hadith, they say 'treat prisoners well, as they will then be more effective slave labour.' This lays the basis for humanitarian law...

Over at the museum of human perfection, they had pretty things to entice the eye.

Even Geneva has panelaky

Public art by the Palace of the Nations

Heaven's Gate

They take their food seriously (it seems, though I didn't eat particularly well).
They even fly-post invitations to cutlery events:

from the cote du rhone

It's all over, and I am back in Pressburg. We stumbled across a horse race this afternoon. Ilona bet on Senita, who came first. My Kragulec came fourth. In no particular order:

Geneva has a big fountain in its lake, which has been running for a hundred something years and which is a very pleasant feature. Like many lovely things, it started life as a mistake.

Attending a technical UN conference was predictably an experience which broadened my mind. Maybe not in ways I would have expected - by far the most attractive aspect was the jolly academic cameraderie of the demographic experts, which maybe bodes well since I will study Demography and Health in the autumn. The subtitle of the Generations and Gender Programme conference was "Towards Policies Based on Better Knowledge", but there was a lot on knowledge and not so much on policy. Their potential to come across as a navel-gazing group with no values was tempered by the impassioned call during the closing session from the very impressive John Hobcraft for the scientific community to remember their role as providing a basis for valuable social policy making; given the large-scale disinterest of the policy community, they could be forgiven for treating the event as a chance merely to talk among themselves, but thankfully this closing comment and that from the UNECE's director or general secretary, following that from the UNFPA representative, suggested that the estrangement of the policy and data aspects of the conference might be addressed in the design of future events.

My presentation went okay. The previous midnight, at home, it went better, but no matter. I learned a great deal in the process (this has to happen in a real forum because I failed to get involved in a debating group at university - word to anyone in the position not to make that mistake), not least that I may fluster myself by trying to respond to the chair's joke in his introduction. But maybe a bit of humour is worth a bit of fluster. In all, the attempt to get policy makers to include young people in developing policy which targets them fell a little foul of the aforementioned lack of interest from the national delegates (although the woman from the Council of Europe was sincerely interested and had some good ideas). Which means if anything happens in the continuing saga of UNFPA's youth policy review, it will probably be led from the international technical support side rather than the national

All the above is academic though, as I am embarking someday soon on a new life as a particle physicist - the proper tour of CERN wasn't even available, but the standing exhibition was enough. The joys of maths and the immensity of scale (large and small), the beauty of the precision of the engineering, the sound of cow-bells clanging in the field opposite Site B. And the distance (measured, of course, in light years) from the frustrations of trying to make social policy. So yes, any day now...

Any suggestions welcome as to how a prospective country director for Amnesty International could propose to spend 4000 euros on a one-year project. It seems rather a little to me...

Photos soon.

At the CERN bus stop

Uncompromisingly stood up; headache moved in to stay.


"Are you a particle physicist?"
"Yes."

And so on - all woes forgotten, headache marginalised for a while, he was even interested in youth policy. The only thing missing was the Higgs boson.

And later, lost on my way in the dark to my host's home, I got a ride in a 2CV. What a way for things to work out.

This was quite amusing, if disappointing in answering its question at 2:58 and in this post and comments.

I was also delighted to remember about Jen's (sadly radical) blog,
which is not so frequently updated but well worth a read, especially if you are too attached to all that gender rubbish you were socialised into.

Hello chickens. I've been a bit absent recently, but here is a little hello. I should currently be teaching in Pov. Bys, but yesterday being a public holiday, there was nobody to pick me up, so instead I am making good use of mild grammatical mistakes to make this interview look more authentic.

Absence has been mostly due to my upcoming presentation at this conference. I am quite excited, not least by going to the Palace des Nations, built for the League of Nations. (No spurious conclusions need be drawn, thanks.) But also nervous - first real presentation ever, of the UNFPA youth policy review process which took me all over Europe last year. But seven minutes is quite a comfy time, and I have a couple of supportive colleagues. Needless to say, I'll be sitting at the 'experts' table.

Apart from ours, the rest of the presentations are from Generations and Gender Project researchers, presenting research from that project. Ours is a 'policy statement' by UNFPA, whatever that means - I think the ultimate purpose is to tell the government people that they don't have to wait for the results of longitudinal studies in order to start responding to their worries.

So if anyone fancies a glass of Swiss milk lemonade next wekk, I'll be around.

This is the report everyone's talking about*
* in Turkey

Good luck to Evan Harris and crew. How's it looking? Question: would it be a good compromise to accept a reduction to 22 weeks of the on-demand limit in return for making abortion properly available on demand and get rid of the doctor-permission nonsense? Early abortion is after all the best way of reducing late...

That's all. That and the observation that in/prior to homo sapiens hardwiring phase, surely individual volition against the group interests was punished by natural selection? From where do we get this imaginative love of freedom?

Two messages from yesterday's bike ride

Ondrejský cintorín

Stromp Gyurláné's grave is whiter than the rest, and newer-looking, perhaps for having spent less time alive, and thus being newer-looking, him- or herself, than the other being laid to rest.

Died the same year as did all hopes that the Great War would be an aberration, as did Laura Marcis-Oehring, eighteen years after her husband - which sounds unfair, and is, but not as you might expect; he first cried when Cardigan fought Nicolas the first, she only when Alexander the second had expired.

They both lost to Bertá, who in a faultless show of gratitude sniffed puberty, understood and left. Once unhearable, better unseen: she got the third-place inscription, despite winning.