Cirque de Navacelles

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I actually learned about this in the geology class I took at Ohlone College back in 1983 – a river meanders and then the meander cuts itself off. In this case there is a medieval village down below. It’s so far off the beaten track in south France that I think it would take anyone 3 hours to get here. And it is a damn scary drive: I spent over an hour driving on narrow switchback roads high in the French mountains – so narrow, if you’d run into another car, someone would have to back up nearly a kilometer!

Hohenstadt Elephant

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For reasons I don’t understand – and neither does ChatGPT – you’ll find a surprising number of pictures or statues of elephants in the Schwabian region of southern Germany. ChatGPT speculated that a large number of Schwabians participated in the Crusades, where they most likely encountered many elephants – so that’s the reason.

La Couvertoirade – A templar village in South France – Part 1

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Continuing the series, here is a snap of La Couvertoirade, a village in Southern France that dates back to the 1200’s.  The templars were a group of fighters first started in 1119 in Jerusalem, during the Crusades. After around 1300 the templars fell (well, they did not really fall, like falling on the ground – they “fell” in the sense of all getting slaughtered by King Philipp IV of France, for corruption and having too much power) – and a somewhat older group (a religious order called the Knights Hospitaller) took over the city. Believe it or not, it was not until the 1980’s that people got smart – and in this case “smart” means “let’s make the village pretty so we can sell souvenirs to hoards of tourists!”

Bolards: an elegant defense for more noble times

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OK, it is always a bad idea to paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, but during my recent trip to Marseille I thought for a bit how some things never change. In the middle ages, villages and cities used stone walls to protect the people inside against invaders — and, by the way, to more effectively and efficiently kill those who would try to invade. And today, bolards are used to protect the people inside against terrorists. Maybe we can define “progress” in this sense, because today we build infrastructure to keep the terrorists out, not to kill them.

As an IT guy, I am wondering if we could call this a design pattern?

Here is a barricade I spotted guarding the pedestrian area of the Vieux-Port in Marseille:

And here is a nice snap of the Barricade Man opening it, so a water spray truck can drive inside and spray water everywhere. The French really don’t feel comfortable unless the streets are sprayed with water on a regular basis.

Reactors on the Rhone

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These are nuclear reactors that comprise the Cruas Nuclear Power Plant in the Savoie region of France – but what you can’t see is that they are sitting on the Rhone river, near Montélimar. According to WikiPedia they produce 3’600 MW of electricity and account for 5% of France’s electricity demand.

Let’s assume two large wind generators could crank out around 36 MW – this means we’d need 2×100 = 200 wind generators to equal the output of these 4 reactors!

By the way, so as not to be confused, the big “hyperbolic cooling towers” you see are just for cooling the water. The reactors themselves are the tiny cylindrical objects you see on the far left, with the small domed roofs.