Sites which interested us
Nous avons cessé de nourrir cette page d'archives vers 2009. (Si les liens ne s'ouvrent pas dans le cadre, allez à archive_main.html)
- Rafi Haladjian et microsoft : des vues pénétrantes, hilarantes et très bien écrites sur la communication contemporaine. Voir aussi :
- How to write, think and learn better by Michael A. Covington
- Maxims for teachers
- A history of education and childhood a source on the history of education and of childhood. See also
- Libdex: a worldwide index of Libraries on the Net
- Brief History of the Internet
- Benjamin Graham, le père spirituel de Warren Buffett :
- The Nominalists / Realists dispute. It is not possible to create new science without being familiar with the issues debated in this controversy:
- Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy
- New Advent encyclopedia
- Ancient Greek mathematicians could not discover Calculus
and could not compute the area under a curve because they were Realists (to whom an area could not be thought of as another curve). It took the
freedom of abstraction of the Nominalists of the late Middle-Ages to invent these tools. Then they were developped in the XVIIth century.
- Renaissance is built on the strong foundations of the late Middle-Ages' new ideas.
- A few powerful minds of the Middle-Ages, arguably more powerful than those of the Renaissance:
- Alcuin
of York (735-804) leading scholar at the court of Carolus
Magnus.
- Al-Farabi
(870-950) regarded, for centuries, as the Second Teacher in philosophy
after Aristotle.
- Gerbert
d'Aurillac (c945-1004) introduced arabic
numerals in the West. Became pope Sylvestre II in 999.
- Avicenne (980-1037)
also named Abu
‘Ali al-Husayn b. ‘Abd Allah Ibn Sina.
Great persian physician.
- Abelard
(1079-1142) pre-eminent philosopher and theologian of the XIIth century.
- Averroes
(1126-1198) also named Abu'l-Walid Ibn Rushd. A towering figure in the
history of Arab-Islamic thought. Contributed to the rediscovery of
Aristotle.
- Maimonides
(1135-1204) major jewish thinker of the late Middle-Ages. Thomas
Aquinas borrowed ideas from Maimonides.
- Albertus Magnus
(c1206-1280) called "Doctor Universalis", in recognition of his
extraordinary genius and extensive knowledge. Advocated for the
peaceful coexistence of science and religion.
- Roger Bacon
(1214-94) surnamed "Doctor Mirabilis". Placed considerable emphasis on
empiricism, and has been presented as one of the earliest advocates of
the modern scientific method.
- Thomas Aquinas
(1225-1274) a Dominican friar. Had views on God.
- William of Ockham
(c1285-1349) a Franciscan friar. One of the leading Nominalists.
Recommended to minimize hypotheses to explain new phenomena (Ockham's
razor).
- Oresme (c1320-1382) un
génie mathématique du XIVe siècle.
- Luca
Pacioli (c1445-1517) wrote the first manual on double entry
accounting. Well, this one belongs to the Renaissance.
- chesscorner.com
Un site, appartenant à Aletia Corporation qui, parmi d'autres choses, permet de visualiser en interactif des parties d'échec célèbres de maîtres. Ici j'ai sélectionné directement le lien vers Alekhine. (Utilisez la barre d'espace pour voir le coup suivant) .
- Food for thought
- Un document sur la
dangerosité des OGM :
- Le monde selon Monsanto (faire un clic droit et "ouvrir dans une nouvelle fenêtre")
- Pendant des années, les fabricants de cigarettes ont dépensé des dizaines de millions de dollars pour tenter de discréditer ceux qui montraient que le tabac était cancérigène.
- Depuis le 1er février 2007, en France, fumer est interdit dans tous les lieux publics.
- Le film ci-dessus montre le début de la même histoire concernant les OGM.
- Combien de temps faudra-t-il attendre avant que le public soit informé honnêtement des travaux, des incertitudes et des risques liés aux aliments issus de plantes génétiquement modifiées ?
- La crise du système de santé américain (traduit de The Economist, 26 janvier 2006). Lire aussi
- Qu'est-ce que le Web 2 ? un article par O'Reilly
- A good and complete RSS
tutorial by wizard-creek. Voir aussi :
- Simple counterintuitive systems : Most systems display counterintuitive behavior. We want to correct a variable y by acting, in a way shown by common sense, on a variable x, and we get things worse instead of better. Why ? Because the links between x and y are different from what intutition or common sense suggest.
For instance, in order to reduce mortality from smoking (the variable y) an obvious idea is to reduce the quantity of tar (the variable x) in cigarettes. But this is based on the assumption that people want a stable number of cigarettes per day. If, as it turns out, they want a stable quantity of tar per day, they will smoke more cigarettes per day. And if in cigarettes there are other bad products for health, the quantity of which, per cigarette, has not changed, then the impact of reducing x is not to decrease y but to increase it !
Systems display two types of counterintuitive behavior :
- evolution in the wrong direction toward a new stable static state,
- strange dynamic evolution, sometimes simple oscillations (like cars wavelike stops and gos on freeways at certain regimes of flow), sometimes more complex dynamic behavior.
It is time political leaders learn the basics of systems, because they constantly take decisions which turn out to be counterproductive (example : the French government 's fight against unemployment). And the dire state of the economy in France, which will lead to increasingly frequent chronic strikes in the next ten years, before some major social upheaval takes place, is, for a large part, the result of such wrong headed decisions.
- Bachelier and his times: very interesting interview of Bernard Bru by Murad Taqqu, of Boston
University, on the life and works of Louis Bachelier (1870-1946).
- Nonlinear Science:
- Hyperhistory a useful site, designed by
Andreas Nothiger, to position quickly a historical event in its world and time context. Many maps. See also :
- Histoire de la monnaie en France:
- Clio, la muse de l'histoire
Le site de Jean Savaton, membre du ring consacré à l'histoire, présentant les civilisations anciennes, de sumer aux grecs (importantes iconographie et bibliographie). Voir aussi :
- Un site sur l'Histoire de France avec une iconographie

- Sainte-Radegonde : une princesse de Thuringe, reine mérovingienne, devenue sainte. Sa vie contient tous les éléments d'un magnifique drame : la guerre des Francs en Thuringe, Radegonde trophée de guerre, éduquée près de Soissons, épouse de Clotaire, devoirs de reine et exigences de la piété, meurtre de son frère par son mari, séparation d'avec le violent Clotaire, fondation de Sainte-Croix, persuasion de Clotaire de l'aider, vie édifiante sous la direction de Ste Agnès l'une de ses suivantes.
- Augustin
Thierry
- Jeanne d'Arc de Dreyer
- A Short History of the World, the synthesis of the history of the World, published by H.G. Wells in 1922, put on the Net by www.bartleby.com of Steve van Leeuwen. See also
- Can market crashes be forecasted ? Some observations on market irrationality and likely crash.
-
Myopie monétaire : critique roborative de l'action tant admirée d'Alan Greenspan (traduit de The Economist, 12 janvier 2005). Lire aussi
- Too easy money (by Eric Le Boucher, Le Monde, 28-29 January, 2007)
-
L'étonnant redressement de l'Argentine : description du redressement non orthodoxe, mais pas dénué de fragilités pour l'avenir, de l'Argentine (traduit du Guardian, 10 janvier 2006).
- Economic articles from Le Monde :
- There are three types of money : standard fiduciary money (in various currencies), marketable tangible assets, private promises. The U.S. use mostly promises to pay for their excess imports. This will lead to a world financial crisis that will happen sooner or later in the next few years, because the value of their promises (approaching 10 000 billions of dollars) will collapse. As a forewarning, the price of gold - even though it is useless - is rising.
- Global Imbalances - An assessment,
by Raghuram G. Rajan, economic counsellor at the IMF
- Recommended reading : "The
power of gold, the history of an obssession", by Peter L. Bernstein,
to understand the deep economic and monetary forces that shaped our
world, and are still at work. See also :
- Le mathématicien physicien : Jean-Marie
Souriau. Voir aussi :
- video
(taper "Souriau" dans la fenêtre de recherche)
-
2000 ans d'histoire l'émission de Patrice Gélinet sur France Inter.
- Commanding Heights: site presenting the economic history of all major countries, and much more. See
also :
- Complex systems and Keynes approach. See also :
- www.riskglossary.com a nice site on investment and risk. See also:
- Quelques ressources en Economie
- Watch online PBS video production "The Elegant Universe",
based on Brian Greene's book, presenting the current explanation of
what the Universe is made of and how it works. See also :
- A presentation of
M-theory,
from Wikipedia
- Planets,
as bodies turning around the Sun, were postulated only five centuries
ago. Now we have pictures taken from the surface of Titan
- Atoms,
as fine constituents of matter, were seriously postulated only two
centuries ago (Dalton),
to explain the surprisingly simple chemical combinations observed by
Lavoisier. The atomic theory was strongly criticized for a whole
century before full acceptance.
- Quanta
of energy were postulated only in 1900.
- The particule
form and behavior of atoms, and their constituents, was abandoned
in the late twenties.
- To explain some of the
current riddles posed by observations, we now introduce
strings
and branes. If the usefulness of these explanations is confirmed, for
instance by unexpected predictions and the creation of new tools for
our everyday life, they will become as "real" as the preceding concepts.
- XXIst century science: a refreshing site from the University of Oregon. Also:
- It is time to abandon the idea that the wave function represents a probability density, and that there is a fundamental uncertainty principle in the joint measurement of position and momentum of a particle. Such "particles" stem from a naive realist view of the world.
- It is like steadfastly wanting to know, or at least to be allowed to think about, the exact abscissa and ordinate of a small malleable surface.
- Old books at the BNF
- Mathematics made simple
- Resources in economics:
- Sur
la trace du boson de Higgs ? Voir aussi :
- Chinese, notations and mathematics :
- Chinese, unlike western languages, doesn't use a notation of sounds to note words and concepts: there is no way to know how to pronouce this 马 until we are told so, and it is difficult to recognize that this is the picture of a horse. It is not pronounced "horse" nor "cheval" in Chinese, it is pronounce "ma". It is not the notation of a sound either. For instance 骑 (which contains the horse character in its left part) is pronounced "tchi" (noted in Chinese pinyin "qi" :-) )
- Learning Chinese helps
distinguish between concepts and their notations, and the rules to
interpret the notations.
- This is useful too in doing
mathematics.
- In mathematics there is a
common mistake which is to mix up notations and concepts, and as a
result to be lead to do meaningless operations. The following erroneous
proof of Cayley-Hamilton theorem is a classical example : the theorem
states that a matrix A put into the polynomial in x obtained with det(A
- xI) yields the zero matrix. The erroneous proof goes like
this : put A instead of x in the det notation, we get det(0), and this
is zero. It is erroneous because det(M) is only a notation for
operations on the components of M (and the result is a number), not on
M itself.
- Jacques Bouveresse: a philosopher we appreciate, who knows what does thinking mean and entail. See also:
- Henri Bergson : a bright mind that unfortunately did not go anywhere, essentially because he did not think important to check his conceptions with experience. (On "laughter" : he ignored all that was known on aggressiveness. On "time" : he did not understand the new profoundly interesting ideas of his time.)
- Gaston Bachelard : a luminous philosopher and poet. Exposed his theory of the three minds : magic, scholar, interrogative and conceptual, in "La formation de l'esprit scientifique".
- Un site de jeux mathématiques interactifs. See also:
- A view of mathematics a very clear and interesting survey by Alain Connes.
- Blois
- A
brief history of calculus Calculus is one of the
great achievements of human
thought.
Its history illustrates the slow progression from Realist thinking to
Nominalist thinking and the tremendous power of the latter approach to
solve problems.
- Un peu de géopolitique : Petite histoire récente de l'Afghanistan. Voir aussi :
- L'Histoire de France, par Jean-Joseph Julaud : le livre qui va réconcilier les Français avec l'histoire de leur pays. Voir aussi :
- Les classiques des sciences sociales :
une bibliothèque numérique dirigée par Jean-Marie Tremblay, professeur de sociologie à Chicoutimi, comprenant, en septembre 2004, un millier d'oeuvres de 375 auteurs. Exemple :
- Introduction à l'intégration des fonctions. Voir
aussi :
- La Grande guerre : site crée par les éditions
Anovi, de Eric Labayle, sur la Première Guerre mondiale et l'époque qui l'entoure. Nombreux documents. Biographies.
- efootage.com to find old news clips
- Ditta
- Commanding
Heights a synthetic presentation of the evolution
of world economies during the XXth century. See also :
-
Histoire Géographie et Education civique
un bon site pédagogique de l'académie de Rennes
- Country
studies by the US Library of Congress. See also :
- Worldlingo online translator
- Indo-European roots, for instance Mögen in German and
мог in Russian, guest in English and гость in Russian. Пониматъ, noos and mind ?
- Evolution of human languages
- Caral civilisation: very old little known civilisation outside the Middle-East or China
- Vinca culture and old european script : european scripting before Sumer ?
-
La chronique d'Alain Rey
sur les mots de la langue française, sur France Inter.
- The Khazars: history of a people that linked the East and the West. See also:
- The Thirty
years war the first international conflict of
modern times.
- Russia
in the times of Elizabeth I (16th century) and Louis XIV (17th century)
See also :
- Test
your knowledge of the aftermaths of WWI See also :
- What Gerhard
Schröder could not mention the 6th of June 2004 in
Normandy : if you drive a person nuts and then that person commits a
crime, who is responsible ? This situation is very common in real life.
It feeds the inspiration of writers. It enriches lawyers and judges. It
makes teachers talk about human nature and justice, and pious people
pray.
- Who is
responsible for starting WWI
- What
is a leader : the three types of authority
- conferred by position (that is granted by people "above", and usually there ain't no free lunch : someone given a position serves the interests of the people who granted the position ; this explains for instance the corruption of academic co-optation),
- conferred by superior group-problem solving capacity (that is granted by people "below" ; unfortunately this is not exempt of the possibility of corruption by clientelism),
- obtained by grabbing it.
- Learn JavaScript. See also
- w3schools: the site created by Jan Egil Refnes provides an elementary introduction (but not enough training to be truly operational).
-
Try, for instance, 2^32 + 1 ( = 4294967297 ), like Euler did to check a Fermat hypothesis. And what about
10*(2^32 + 1) + 9 ?
Free JavaScripts provided by The JavaScript Source
- Bayeux tapestry: move along the complete Bayeux tapestry, viewed with quicktime. See also:
- Voiles et autres représentations de la femme dans la société occidentale.
Voir aussi :
- Sur le voile islamique un point de vue.
- Comme toujours quand le débat se prolonge sans fin, c'est qu'on parle de plusieurs sujets à la fois.
- As always when the debate goes on and on with no end, that is because we actually argue on several issues at the same time.
- The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive: the reference in mathematicians biographies. Also contains a history topics index and a famous curves index. See also :
-
Atmosphère
: un modèle d'atmosphère. Voir aussi :
-
Sosmath: a pedagogical site to teach
calculus and other math topics. See also
-
How money systems work: a contribution toward a new understanding of the role and behavior of money. See also:
- Un siècle de télévision

Histoire de la télévision française durant le XXe siècle - où l'on voit qu'elle a toujours été aux mains d'un nombre étonnamment réduit de gens. Les WebTV rendront la télévision aux spectateurs, et leur offriront en plus l'interactivité. Voir aussi :
- A few reference sites in mathematics :
- Games and other softwares by Alexander Bogomolny
- Paradoxes of randomness by Gregory Chaitin.
- Stephen Wolfram a controversial genius, who created the program Mathematica, and went on to claim that the whole world can be explained with a few simple algorithms.
- Une illustration des mathématiques de la compression jpeg (exemple de filtrage) : images et un
peu de théorie.
- Les chroniques de Frédérick Gersal sur France Info : Ulysse,
Victor Hugo, etc.
- Par 4 chemins : l'index des sujets
traités dans l'émission de Jacques Languirand sur Radio Canada. Ecouter la station :
en direct
- Total Information Awareness
The goal of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program is to revolutionize the ability of the United States to find, treat, and use sensitive information, etc...See also
- Signs: to get, while smiling, a flavor of the future large public profiling
softwares, that will be derived from the Darpa TIAS program. (These will also lead to the next generation of search engines, that will replace Google...)
- www.ncsa.uiuc.edu
- www.aclu.org
- supersnoop’s dream
-
Dossier WIFI
- Courtiers en ligne : comparatif très détaillé des sociétés de courtage par Internet, avec commentaires d'utilisateurs
- jb guinot
un site sur Gustave Flaubert et en particulier sur l'écriture de Madame Bovary, par JB Guinot, qui a aussi créé un
site sur Georges
Perec. Voir encore :
- www.cantabile-subito.de
a site to learn about and listen to opera singers of the past.
- La joueuse de marelle
- Dialogus : un site d'histoire, permettant d'écrire et poser des
questions à des personnages historiques, animé
par
Sinclair Dumontais. Voir aussi
- Wolfram Research
: the Wolfram encyclopedia of sciences. See for instance Dissection, remarkable results on transforming one shape into another.
- L'histoire en ligne : un site d'histoire synthétique et utile par Denis Blondeau, lié à uZine. Nombreuses biographies.
- Planète Terre, un remarquable cours de
géologie et d'histoire de la Terre, par Pierre-André Bourque de l'Université de Laval.
Voir aussi :
- The Mediterranean sea as an explanation. See also :
- La Sylphide
- A primer on Iraq, a good source of background information, at the highschool level, on Iraq, provided by Infoplease. See also :
- Penn State Video Productions : la mise en ligne de conférences données à Penn State University. Visionner par exemple Internet2, un pas de plus vers l'ubiquité.
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. See also :
-
The life of René Girard, best known for his book "Violence and the Sacred".
- Sur un écrivain à succès, Houellebecq
- Valley of the Ancients : The "Eliki" site on ancient civilizations, beliefs and myths. See also :
- Wikipedia a free encyclopedia on the Internet. See also :
-
A course in Literary criticism
by Kate Liu of the Fu Jen Catholic University English department. See also:
- Around the World on a bycicle, and with a pen and a camera. See also
- The Ouighur region and population : at the center of economic, geographic, and cultural conflicting interests (article in French) See also
- Arthur
- Proxomitron: a powerful ad filter, if you ever quit a very interesting page you were reading because you could no longer stand all the flashing ads around the text your eyes and your mind were trying to focus on...
- An interesting chap : Ryszard Kapuscinski, a journalist who travelled the World over with a quick and independant mind. See also
-
The
TIC portal To promote and sustain the
use of TIC in education. See also
- Value-added testing: Information without added-value no longer has any value. Anybody can access it, and make its choice. Media will become more interesting, or at least more opinionated. See also :
- Metro gratuit: a recent new media, already doomed
- Voila: Why this choice? For whom this choice? By whom this choice? Does it contain any added value?
- A paradox : the absence of body signs on the Net makes for a richer, not poorer, communication and it encourages respect (because messages are automatically "profiled")
- A humanistic view of economics : activities and transactions without added-value, i.e. human contribution, will fade
- San Diego zoo's pandas "live". See also :
- For students of the East-West contacts, Chinese cultural studies : "The rise and fall of the great powers", by Paul Kennedy. Other selected references :
- Les sites d'Art et de Culture les plus visités en France. Une intéressante source d'informations sociologiques et prospectives. Voir aussi :
- Artistorama un site pour favoriser les échanges artistiques
- Cyberhumanisme.org De "la matière à penser", même si on peut ne pas être d'accord avec tous les points de vue exposés. Voir aussi
- Le monde merveilleux de Serge Delbono
Un site à l'image de son animateur : riche en ressources informatiques, photographiques et politiques, multiforme, inclassable.
- Uzine.net
Un Webzine roboratif et rafraîchissant. Et pour sourire (ou s'indigner, selon votre psychologie) :
-
Télé-réalité Des détails sur le traitement fantaisiste de la réalité à la télévision. Voir aussi
-
La guerre informationnelle Quelques travaux de l'Ecole de Guerre Economique Ege/Eslsca.
- Building a better Web Le meilleur des mondes ?
- Magaziner's report on E-commerce
- Public
Information Research
Un groupe, politiquement orienté à gauche, de
surveillance des activités et prises de position des
élites américaines.
- Celui qui passe
- framasoft.net
Les logiciels libres ; l'esprit du libre.
- Comment ça marche ? (l'informatique)
L'excellent site "CCM vulgarisation informatique" de Jean-François Pillou, qui a obtenu une distinction de Wanadoo, explique tout : Langage, Base de données, Web, Systèmes, etc. CCM anime aussi un forum.
- Walt Howe's Internet Learning Center
Un très bon site, animé par Walter B. Howe, pour connaître et comprendre Internet, son histoire, ses outils, les services qu'il offre. Ce site a des ancêtres, le FAI Delphi Internet Services ainsi qu'une ancienne version, Delphi_navnet, qui donne une intéressante perspective historique sur le Net, et des sites affiliés parmi lesquels le site de forums delphiforums.
-
Dictionnaires
Des dictionnaires de toutes les langues.
- Clicksouris
Le site d'Axelle Desaint pour les enfants,
qui a obtenu un Net d'Or.
- Rue Mongallet
Pour comparer les prix des revendeurs de matériel informatique.
-
Quatuor
Le site de Christian Ricordeau pour comprendre l'histoire de l'art à travers la question "Mais à quoi sert donc une poivrière ?"
- momes.net
Le site pour les enfants animé par Marie Plassard, en ligne depuis
1995.
- www.sytadin.tm.fr
La circulation automobile en temps réel. (Attention à la bonne orthographe de l'adresse URL ; ne pas cliquer sur
http://www.sytadin.com)
- La voile
Un site sur la voile, pour les navigateurs, par Pierre Boucher, qui est aussi artiste peintre
- Convertisseur Euros
Une calculette interactive, offerte par la Banco de Sabadell, qui donne les conversions depuis toutes les monnaies européennes vers l'euro.
-
gratilog.net
Le catalogue des logiciels freeware établi par Sylvie Pierrard. (vous cliquez sur le bouton "Arrêter" de votre navigateur si l'oiseau qui vole vous empêche de vous concentrer).
- sitnema.com
Un site sur le cinéma, créé par Axel Trotignon, référençant 8000 films, 10000 acteurs, 3000 réalisateurs, etc.
- Un site sur l'histoire et les développements récents de la science économique (en anglais).
Tout sur les théories économiques depuis Smith et même avant, jusqu'à maintenant, les idées, les acteurs, les controverses, les polémiques.
- Les ordinateurs et Internet, comment ça marche ?
Une introduction au fonctionnement des ordinateurs et à Internet (pour ceux qui comprennent tout, à condition qu'on leur explique clairement).
Merci à S. Delbono pour l'information.
- Un cours de lecture d'image.
Apprenez à voir, regarder et comprendre une photographie, un tableau ou une image (par Damien Bressy)
- Des liens qui mènent à des textes littéraires classiques, en ligne, dans toutes les langues.
(établie par Bob Peckham)
(this address changes so often, if you get nowhere, please search "Bob Peckham" on the major search engines.)
- Politique et music-hall :
- Partez, M. le Président !,
par Christian Blanc. Lire aussi
- Le CAC 40 depuis 10 ans : expliquer la courbe, puis la prévoir.

- Pour dépasser le débat "libéralisme vs protectionnisme". Lire
aussi :
- France Balance of merchandises

