A project that has never received any response: ANTIBABEL

A project that never received any echo: ANTIBABEL

October 11, 2004

**updated on October 15, 2004 ** ---

April 2005 : **I took a look at this page: it has been viewed twelve thousand times. **

It was a project and, I believe, a great idea. I thought, in the troubled situation we are currently in, one of the urgent things to do would have been to equip people with a means of communication between them, beyond the barrier created by their languages. I remain convinced that a team of motivated people could have, in a few years, come up with a tool that could, for example, be connected to a communication software like MSN Messenger (a work done by the Israelis, bought at a high price by the richest man in the world: Bill Gates).

I had given a first direction, intended to show that one could create a sort of entirely ideographic meta-language, "translatable". The example was that of messages delivered in airports, in the style:

*- Due to bad weather conditions, flight AF 254 is suspended. Passengers are requested to present themselves at terminal C with their ticket and passport. An attendant will take care of them and direct them to a hotel in the city where they will stay until their transportation to the city of &&& becomes possible. *

Such a message could be entirely coded in ideograms, with fixed images and animations, which could be displayed on a large panel in all airports around the world, which would not prevent the same message from being displayed at the bottom in "usual languages". At the limit, this project could have been commercially viable. Those who would have developed it and to whom I would have willingly given all rights could have sold it to airline companies, or to a consortium of companies, or granted a license to airports. These messages are limited in number.

Only one reader claimed to have formed a "team" and done something. I had personally committed to quickly making the drawings and animated gifs that constituted the "bricks" of this completely ideographic language. All of this dragged on for six months. I waited in vain, nothing came. It was supposed to be finished at the end of January, then at the end of February. Today, it's not even mentioned anymore. I think it's another project that is "dead", definitively.

On the other hand, I received numerous comments, advice or even questions from readers who asked me:

• *But how are you going to develop your project? How do you plan to manage such and such a problem? *

Simple observation.

We can close this chapter (you can read the rest if you like. Personally, I have lost interest in this issue due to the lack of response) with a humorous note, but showing that a relatively sophisticated message, a sentence with a subject, a verb and a direct object, imagined by a Russian, could turn out to be directly understandable by ... hundreds of millions of people. See for yourself:

**Indeed, when everything is ruined, when efforts have proven futile, one can always say "better to laugh about it". **

But, for me, it's a bit of a sad laugh. ---

The general idea

Be realistic, consider the impossible

Ten years ago I had imagined the concept ANTIBABEL. It was well before I opened this site. Six years ago, when I created this one, I installed a page describing the idea. People read it, but few reacted. Some wrote to me: Is an Internet site designed to make people react?

Yes, this one is.

By creating it, I discovered, like you, things I had not imagined the extent of. Indeed, for twenty years I had known the capacity of the human mind to invent weapons of destruction, occasional or mass. I even wrote a book on the subject: "The Children of the Devil". What has the devil to do with it? It's simply the code name of the army, in scientific circles. Since the publication of this book, in 1995, by Albin Michel (it had been written ten years earlier and "lived" another ten to twenty years before that), things have not changed much. Year after year I have installed files on my site, informing my readers of the sauce they may one day be seasoned with. Would you like to be neutralized by a Taser, or manipulated remotely by modulated microwave brushes, anesthetized, put to sleep, numbed? Would you prefer to be cooked like chickens by mini-bombs, "bucky balls", etc....

Tiring.

You remember Martin Luther King, and his famous speech:

I had a dream I had a dream

Today I want to dream. Don't you?

Our planet is the site of a phenomenon called "Life". This has shaped its own habitat, modified the initial atmosphere, resulting from volcanic emissions. It could settle, expand. Phenomenologically speaking, Life tends to become more complex and to expand its relational field. It sometimes creates strange vehicles, like insects, which appeared at the same time as flowering plants, to carry plant seeds further. Other seeds are configured in a way to resist the gastric juices of birds that swallow them and can thus be transported even further. The genetic message has thus spread everywhere life could settle. Animals had a rudimentary technology. Volatiles, like our chickens, swallow pebbles to crush their food. Some birds use twigs to fish insects from tree holes, to which they cling recklessly. There are crabs that stick various objects they find on their way onto their shell, with a mucus they secrete, to camouflage themselves. The list is fairy-tale, infinite.

But suddenly appears a strange animal, a biped, which develops these "technological attributes" far beyond anything any animal had done before. Ten thousand years later, it has forged hundreds of thousands of strange objects, all-purpose. Some allow it to transform its food before swallowing it. This is called cooking. Others protect it from the cold, the sun. Others carry it to all corners of the Earth. Others allow it to communicate using electromagnetic waves. Thanks to these, it can transport visual, auditory sensory impressions to the other side of the world. The Earth has become a tiny garden where people can communicate from distant parts of the globe. I received a message this morning from a woman who had read the text where I asked people who had been moved by the death of my friend Jacques Benveniste to send a letter to the address of the laboratory he had created. She replied that she would have liked to do so but that, from where she lived, the mail did not pass.

She was writing from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

She could not write, nor receive a Western radio or television, but Internet, yes.

Ulaanbaatar! .......

Yes, that's where we are. Words, emotions can cross tens of thousands of kilometers, instantly. Before the various national powers, who are doing their best, cut these immaterial threads that connect us, we form an immense, planetary network.

But why? Telecommunications are just one facet of technology, which is just an extension of the living, of the "natural". Technology, which animals had millions of years before us, is just a new expression of the phenomenon of life. Incidentally, it has connected us all together.

But why technology?

Let's reverse the question: what can we do with technology and cannot do with the biological? Search......

Keep in mind this phenomenology of Life: to expand its relational field, to become more complex. It is simply a fact, observable, undeniable. Why is it so? Our purpose is not to answer this question. Let the philosophers take care of it. Let's simply extrapolate the idea. Today, the Earth, we have circled it. Logically, we still have to go further. Towards the solar system? A bit limited. I am one of those who believe that interstellar travel will one day be possible, and not by enclosing entire populations in huge cylinders, as O'Neil, to send them, at a peaceful subluminal speed, to spread in all corners of the galaxy, on one-way trips, without even having the possibility to send a postcard to friends. I believe that interstellar travel will one day be possible by taking a "twin universe" where the speed of light is higher, while respecting the principle "you cannot go faster than light in the universe sheet you are moving in".

If one day these travels become reality, only technology would have made them possible. Going further, I would even say that ... this was its function. Indeed, no bird, however large its wings, could cross light years.

But the technological attribute presents risks. Its development is rapid, infinitely faster than that of biological structures. Micropressors develop faster than neural connections. It is with the stacking of our successive brains, structured like a Russian doll in our skull, that we manage our dangerous technological attributes. There is reptilian, primitive mammalian in each of us.

Dangerous.

Therefore, this animal called "man" had to be endowed with an additional, regulating attribute. Something that would allow to control this development, this new form of evolution "technological", otherwise "hyper-teleology" (teleos, goal and hyper, beyond). A "transcendence of purpose". It was necessary to have an attribute that would allow man to consider the consequences of his actions. This is not intelligence, which is only the ability to reprogram oneself, to "create code" to become more efficient in pursuit of a goal, whatever it may be.

The regulating attribute is called moral consciousness.

Not to be confused with the simple consciousness of existence. But in fact, there is no clear boundary. Let's say that the level of moral consciousness of man, compared to that of the animal, is in the ratio of their technological developments. Man is equipped to become aware of his responsibilities, which are now planetary in scale. Sakharov expressed this very well in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in the passage where he writes:

Thousands of years ago, human tribes suffered great privations in their struggle for existence.

It was then important, not only to wield a club, but to have the ability to think intelligently, to take into account the knowledge and experience accumulated by the tribe and to develop links that would establish the basis for cooperation with other tribes.

Today, the human race must face an analogous challenge. Several civilizations could exist in the infinite space, among which societies that could be wiser and more 'performant' than ours.

I support the cosmological hypothesis according to which the development of the universe repeats an infinite number of times on the 'next' or 'previous' pages of the book of the universe.'

Nevertheless, we must not minimize our sacred efforts in this world, where, like weak lights in the darkness, we have emerged for an instant from the darkness of unconsciousness into material existence. We must respect the demands of reason and create a life worthy of ourselves and of the goals we barely perceive.

Andrei Sakharov

Moral consciousness is an attribute that is supposed to allow man not to self-destruct with the dangerous technological tool he has in his hand at the end of his evolution and whose purpose is to allow the living process to continue, always with the same fixed idea: to expand the relational field, the next step being to establish contact with other life-bearing systems, located tens or hundreds of light-years from the star where it resides. It is very close to discovering the techniques related to interstellar travel and this state leads to a discreet surveillance by neighbors who have already crossed this threshold and wonder if this new member of the club will behave properly. Logically, exchanges will take place, enriching. In what form? We don't know. One day, vehicles built on Earth will take off towards distant systems. At that moment, will man be the passenger of these or ... just a driver of a sort of cosmic carriage.

A nice program. But something is wrong with us. Technology has developed well, but there was an accident. A planet of the solar system collided with the Earth while it was already well formed, with cooled magma, calm. Normally, life and technology could have developed there, as elsewhere, on a single continent, devoid of relief; inhabited by a single human ethnicity, speaking a single language. The absence of natural barriers would have meant that this people, modulo some inevitable historical turbulence, would have been endowed with a minimum of political, social, ecological stability. Of course, this Earth would have been culturally, biologically and ethnically less rich, but more stable. You know the principle of Sa Forderie, in the Best of All Worlds:

Identity equals stability

Common sense, the home, the ability to reason about effects and causes would have settled with luck before the heavy technological tools appeared, which would have allowed them to be directed towards the true goal and not to continue foolishly waging war. But we were not lucky. A wandering star hit us, giving rise to the passage to the Moon as an ejection. All this kinetic energy had to be eliminated. It warmed our magma. The single primitive continent, flat as a hand, fragmented, giving rise to plate tectonics, mountain ranges, creating natural barriers, isolating ethnic groups from each other. And here we are today, on the eve of building our interstellar caravels, very occupied with resolving ethnic conflicts that are several centuries old, sometimes even several millennia. It turns out that power has fallen into the hands of the most foolish among us, like offensive grenades that would have ended up in the hands of eight-year-old children.

Humans also have a character that puts them in the greatest danger of disappearing. In their great majority, they have a resigned, lazy nature. It is their history that has transformed them into sheep. They only dream of entrusting their fate to leaders, political or religious. To make things worse: they do not all speak the same language, always because of this damned plate tectonics, the cause of our richness, but also of all our evils. So, even when they are animated by the best intentions in the world, they do not understand each other. Misunderstandings ravage our planet. Fear of the other, whom we do not know, reigns supreme.

As it stands, honestly, I don't know if we will be able to get out of this. What could we do, which would give us a slight chance of not ending up so badly?

What you may have discovered, by reading pages of this site, is that lies corrode the planet more than ever. I say it, I repeat it:

Learn to think for yourselves, otherwise others will do it for you

The corollary is also to exchange with others, to go towards others, to learn to know them, directly, without intermediaries, without politicians, without elected officials, without spokespersons, without journalists going "to collect information", since today it is technically possible, thanks to the Internet, to software of "chat", discussion like "MSN Messenger". But for this, you have to speak the same language. This is what is missing. Automatic translation software has made progress, but remain inadequate compared to needs. It is strictly impossible to throw a text equivalent to a newspaper article into a translation software without risking catastrophic misunderstandings, harmful. Yet, for decades, many people have tried to improve these tools.

I say: there is a solution, which I have simply outlined in the ANTIBABEL file. This project name does not please us, by the way. If this were to come to life, it would be the result of a global collaboration. But in Mongolia, they do not know what the Tower of Babel is. We then looked for a project name that could find an echo in all languages and one of us suggested:

The Language of the Heart

Do not be afraid of words. If we manage to get out of this damned planet, it is because the hearts of men will have taken over, will have expressed themselves. This "heart" is also this planetary consciousness that dictates the obvious: if we do not play the mutual aid, the solidarity, the unconditional brotherhood, we are lost. Any man on Earth knows very well what we are talking about when we put these words together. There must be a flow. There must be a wall that separates men, this wall of languages, so that they can speak from heart to heart. What they will say to each other: that is their problem. We are only technicians. Can we create, in urgency, this human telephone that allows all men of the Earth to communicate, directly, without intermediaries, in a reliable way. In your opinion, this project is vital, priority.

But how to succeed where so many others have failed?

By taking the problem differently and using the immense resources that today's techniques offer us.

In the matter of automatic translation, what is problematic is the version, not the theme

Taking the problem differently: When we speak or write, we proceed in two steps. We first develop ideas, feelings, wishes, questions, whatever, then we formulate them, each in their language. The mistake of linguists has been to think that one could "feed a computer" by providing it with ... sentences and that it could then manage to understand them, analyze their meaning, then transcode them into another language.

When you think about it, languages are fabulous communication tools, as soon as you go beyond the simplest sentences. If I write:

Je m'aperçois que .....

it is simply absurd. An automatic translation system is an immense machine charged with translating absurd forms into other absurd forms. How to be surprised that it always misses something, that thoughts, messages emerge distorted, even reversed. Translate: impossible mission.

I think that when you don't laugh a little from time to time, you can't do something really serious. I suggest you take a break.

Having done that, by which end to start? I don't remember who said that when you undertake something, you immediately have against you:

• Those who do the same thing

• Those who do the opposite

• Those who do nothing.

I know that as soon as I wanted to draw people's attention again to this ANTIBABEL idea, I immediately attracted comments like:

• But, how will you do with Chinese, Korean?
• Do you know that there are very important grammatical differences between different languages? - How will you translate poetic nuances? - And for Basque?

One must know what goal one is pursuing. For the moment, automatic translation software envisages the translation of any speech, on any topic. I think that one should go from simple to complex, retrace the entire history of languages from the beginning and be inspired by it. The goal is to transmit messages carrying meaning, information. For poetry, the elegance of style, we will see later (in any case, a reliable translation software, even if it respects the meaning of messages, could introduce a certain connotation ... surreal, a poetry specific to the computer, unexpected, unpredictable). When a man writes, what does he care most about? What would be his reaction if we told him "if you accept to play the game we propose, your speech will be immediately translatable into 25 languages".

In such a project, nothing prevents us from limiting ourselves to a finite number of languages from the same trunk, where thought forms overlap sufficiently.

To communicate is to exchange signs, in all possible forms. These signs can be fixed images, with or without colors, or animations, or sound sequences, or all at once. In the construction of languages, we see that man, often, started from a representation that was a simple drawing. If you think about the news I asked you to read, you can go back to the Chinese ideograms mentioned. The skin is represented by "a skin drying on poles". But when you speak, you can evoke millions of possible objects. Take two dictionaries, linked to two different languages, for example Czech and Portuguese. What do they have in common?

The images, the plates that illustrate them

I open my Larousse dictionary. On one of the pages I find the drawing of a cetacean called a narwhal. All I can claim is that there is a high chance that this image, this representation of this animal is present in dictionaries in practically all the usual languages of the world. In English, this animal is called unicorn whale (a whale with a single horn).

Creating a translation machine would consist of building a very large database with the maximum number of possible objects, represented by fixed images. What must be fixed in the head is the immense capacity of contemporary computers. And what must be kept in mind is that this capacity will only grow. Central memory, computing speed, display finesse, capacity of external memories.

I have experienced microcomputing at its very beginning, when a hard drive of 2 megabytes (equivalent to 20 5-inch floppies!) was as big as a suitcase. I worked on micros running at 2 megahertz, displaying images in "high resolution" composed on a matrix of 180 by 140 points, I think. With three different colors! Images more refined, created at the cost of hours of calculation, expensive, represented 2 megabytes (the "screen pages" of an Apple II represented 8 kilobytes). These images, which seemed very sophisticated to us, could be displayed on screens that were not accessible to the average person and these display systems were controlled by special memories, of high capacity or "rasters". I remember the first computer-generated images shown on television, where one saw "wireframe" images (without hidden parts removed) showing a dishwasher spinning on the screen. I remember the first image of a hand, "mobile", where one saw the fingers bending, a sequence that made the viewers swoon with admiration. I remember these expensive images where one could discern a grid through a glass. I remember my first "spark" printer, which burned a sheet of metal paper from a 10 cm wide roll, creating characters point by point according to a matrix of 6 by 8 or something like that. For today's young people, these tools are inconceivable, comparable to abacuses.

We are still in an era where reality has entered the machine. The human eye does not have infinite resolution power. I believe that if you present on a screen an image of 2000 by 3000 points, that is, composed of six megapixels, the human eye is no longer able to distinguish them. The slightest laser printer outputs 600 points per inch. An inch is 25 millimeters. So each point represents half a tenth of a millimeter. What human eye is capable of seeing something like that? The "staircase" effect has disappeared.

Thus, all the "usual" objects can easily enter the machine and these images then become common to all languages.

A language is not composed only of objects. It also contains verbs. Many, in a given set of languages, can find a gestural or image-based translation. Tell yourself that for you to express yourself, you have the right to everything you can imagine, as an image, animations, sounds. That makes things. A real "Meccano".

In fact, try to put yourself in the shoes of a deaf-mute illiterate. Try to think like Harpo, the character from the Marx Brothers. There are gestures, otherwise universal, at least common to a large number of cultures, to say I, him, we, together, go, towards, here, yes, no, ....

Beyond that, one can play the concept of signifier-signified, dear to Jacques Lacan. In the sentence:

An man is a man

The word man refers first to the adult male belonging to the human species and the second refers to its "traditional" attributes.

How to go from the signifier to the signified? With a "determinative" ideogram. Let the men agree. We have finally created road signs that have been adopted in a respectable number of countries. It is enough to imagine a way of presenting a linguistic object in a particular color, in a way that the reader is encouraged to consider not the object itself but what it signifies, provided that this signifier is the same in the N languages or cultures considered.

Take, for example, the "no entry" sign. On one hand it is a red circle with a horizontal white bar. On the other hand, this means "direction prohibited". One can agree, by extension, to say that this image means "prohibited" by extension.

With that in mind, what to do with peoples who have neither roads nor road signs? Take the image of the illiterate deaf-mute. There will always be an image, a gesture, an animation that makes you understood.

Does this mean that you will have to express yourself through gestures? That would be extremely cumbersome. That is not what I mean. The important thing is that the computer "understands" what you wanted to say.

What I want to evoke in this text is that we are far from having begun to exploit the immense "linguistic resources" offered by the computer in its multimedia aspect. I don't have a miracle solution to present. It is a huge project that would require the collaboration of linguists, computer scientists, people who speak several languages.

I want to highlight another aspect. Our young people today are born with "a screen in front of their eyes and a keyboard or a mouse under their fingers". Spontaneously, computer users have created and used "emoticons", still very primitive. The HTML language does not impose the presence of these visual or auditory signs on a user, but allows them to appear at will, simply by moving the mouse pointer over a word, a sentence, in a given area of the page. Iconographic translations or animations can then appear at will. What can be conjectured is that a large number of "propositions", in the logical sense of the term, of messages can be coded in a "non-linguistic" way. The essential thing is to eliminate all ambiguity. The idea is that reliability takes precedence over elegance, the essential being to produce messages translatable into N given languages.

Introduce the concept of translatability

A linguist could object that sentences are not independent of each other, that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, that the context plays a big role. Indeed. All this remains very primitive, but I am convinced that individuals could become familiar with such systems. It is not about creating a new language, like Esperanto. It is about introducing, inside the computer, a multimedia coding system that allows the validation of a message entry. Using this meta-language, the computer signals to the user that it has understood, for example, the meaning of a word. The big problem with languages is that the same word can correspond to many different meanings. In French, the word pas can have the following meanings. Let's cite the Larousse.

pas : [noun]
Movement that a man, an animal, makes by placing one foot in front of the other. A trace of a foot on the ground. A way of walking. The movement that a dancer performs with his feet. A fragment of a ballet performed by one or more dancers. The slowest pace of a horse. The length of a step. A narrow and difficult passage. A strait. A threshold. The distance that separates two consecutive turns of a helix or two consecutive threads of a screw.

*Associated with another word: * Large steps: quickly. Step by step: slowly. Step by step: silently. To pace back and forth: to go and come back. To make a mistake: to slip while walking. Figuratively: to make a mistake. To take the first steps: to make advances. To take the step: to finally decide. To walk with giant steps: to make rapid progress. Bad step: dangerous place. Figuratively: difficult situation. To put someone in line: to bring someone to reason. Accelerated step... No weapon... Cadenced step... No charge... No running... No bolt, no gear... No repeated... No road... No shooting (...) ... No lost... From this step: immediately. Step by step: slowly. As an adverb: is used to express a negation.

All this for three miserable little letters of an alphabet.

In the ANTIBABEL file, it was suggested that as soon as a user started entering a sentence, he should assemble it by specifying its grammatical structure. Then drop-down menus would offer a precise meaning for each word, to be validated (this would mean, in the example mentioned earlier, that the computer would enter pas1 or pas2, pas3, etc.). One could also imagine that with a "right-click", the computer, for each word, would present a juxtaposition of thumbnails, possibly animated or sound (when the mouse cursor is over it). Just as one can compose a "semion", a semantic element, with several words, one could compose thumbnails within a single "cartouche". The computer could, in turn, produce a "resultant" thumbnail, a combination of the two. Inverse approach, for "someone who does not understand", a thumbnail could be decomposed into several thumbnails presented in a cartouche. All this leads us to an extraordinary semantic decomposition capability.

It is very clear what is emerging behind all this:

Allowing illiterates to express themselves

One thing is certain: there is the same percentage of geniuses and fools among people who can read and write and among those who cannot. They could then compose their message in an ideogrammatic way, using thumbnails and a cartouche system, linked together by "verbs", "conjunctions", represented also as ideograms or animations. Once the sentence is formed, the illiterate person could check that the message was correctly entered by listening to it, synthesized in sound.

In fact, this consists of having a person perform, from the very beginning of their message, all the work that we try without success to assign to a computer by submitting a sentence already formed. It must analyze it, discover its grammatical structure, apply a large number of rules specific to each language (in French, a "type poor" is not a "poor type"). It must associate words, discover conceptual structures.

All this seems feasible to me. It seems to be an area of investigation that deserves attention. We are certainly not aware of the number of icons we already manipulate in our text processors, in our software. In the past weeks I was at a friend's house. I admit that I rarely read user manuals, especially that of my mobile phone. I had vaguely heard a friend talking about a kind of "instinctive typing" a year ago, a concept to which I had nothing understood at the time, and, I admit, had not paid much attention. It was only when my friend Jacques, an IT specialist, explained it to me.

• You see, on your mobile phone, you only have twelve keys. Some have a sequence of letters: ABC DEF GHI JKL MNO PQRS TUV WXY
• Yes, and to make an R, I press twice on the PQRS key.
• Imagine you want to compose the word IMAGE, which is made up of five letters. You just have to press the five keys that contain these letters and your mobile phone will display the most probable word that matches these letters.
• Oh really?
• Try...

I press the keys, one after another, and I get:

I IN HOC IMAG IMAGE

All this would make a ten-year-old child laugh, who is already juggling with all this. But imagine that thirty years ago you presented a typewriter with twelve keys to a typist, speaking the same language, explaining at the same time that when she types a short word and the meaning does not suit her, she can make other words appear by "pumping" on another key, which is provided for this purpose.

We can imagine that an input involving icons, thumbnails, animations, and sounds could lead to even more sophisticated juggling. All this recalls the story of the gorilla Koko, who had been taught the sign language of the deaf. Knowing the signs for "necklace" and "finger", he saw the researcher woman who took care of him. When he saw her with a ring, he formed "necklace" and "finger". Yes, a ring is a "finger necklace".

In iconographic research, one can imagine trees in which people (the illiterate) could move quickly. In drawing or image processing software, the magnifying glass means "enlarge". But it can also mean "detail". The "lasso" allows you to select a subset in an image. In the representation of a human body, an illiterate person could display a human body, then focus on a detail, a hand. An iconographic representation, possibly animated, or even a simple color, would illustrate the concept of "defined" or "undefined". This approach could thus lead to:

The index finger, the finger, the fingers, etc....

Intuitively, I would say that a message creation software, working this way, would not be more complicated than a utility like Photoshop. It's all a matter of motivation. It is obvious that a graphic designer juggles with Photoshop, which is his work tool. The simple amateur only uses a tiny part of the possibilities of this real "factory".

If it turned out that a message creation software could really allow effective and rich communication with people speaking other languages than the speaker's, the motivation could follow. It would be essential that this structure be open and that the software could constantly be enriched by new contributions. These multilingual speech creation techniques could be the subject of teaching. Essential point: this technique would not impose any language as "dominant" (as English tends to become).

We believe that something can come out of all this. We can consider two goals. Instant translation in a "chat", which would be equivalent to equipping a software like MSN Messenger with an automatic translation system that would allow several people to dialogue, each speaking a different language. The other idea is the possibility of designing documents, articles, and even books, which "exist" immediately, by the way they were created, in N languages.

There is certainly a lot of money to be made. Let's say that this software or this set of software could be compared, for languages, to what image creation and synthesis software have become.

What will happen now? I don't know. It is possible that your talented and imaginative people will be tempted by the adventure. It is "a project without a master", without nationality. MSN Messenger was born in the hands of four students from Tel-Aviv. Hearing it, these four boys would no longer have future problems. What I hope is that beyond this project, people from different countries, cultures, and beliefs can speak to each other without intermediaries. This page is a seed I sow. I am, I remain an incurable utopian, because I know that reality is hidden in utopia. The rest is just a dangerous illusion.

It will either take or it won't.

The world is getting worse and worse. I think that such a project could have major importance in a world that is becoming one of all dangers, all confusion. I don't know if we will be heard. People, my friend Ledoux told me, have their own little problems. Many have serious enough problems not to be able to get their head out of the furrow where they lie. Rafarin "decentralizes" at will. Decentralization sounds like dismantling, dismembering. I don't know who invented this word. Segala, this "son of an ad", maybe?

I admit I hadn't thought of that. I imagined that one day Polish engineers and technicians would come to live in France, accepting salaries much lower than ours. I didn't think that companies would be exported outright, leaving our employees on the sidelines. Twenty years ago, fools or liars talked about a leisure civilization that would become a civilization of unemployment. Some said, "In France, there will remain the services." Others speculated that workers, practicing "telework", could calmly stay at home instead of being brainwashed in public transport. But today, even the services themselves are being decentralized at will. When you call a service, you are surprised to get someone who speaks French with a slight accent. The explanation is simple: she is in Romania and works for a quarter of a French salary, for equivalent work. Europe was certainly inevitable, but this is what it is becoming, at a crazy speed. A friend told me he heard a French boss say, "We will continue to decentralize until French workers accept to work with the same salaries as the Poles." As companies, in France, there will only remain the fools, the unrealistic ones, who wanted to build in their own country and will face rapid bankruptcy, due to not having designed the work tool with Turkish workers, Romanian secretaries, and Polish transporters. These people will be crushed by these social contributions that will support millions of people heading towards a leisure civilization, that is, towards unemployment.

Sometimes young people ask me what kind of job they could orient themselves towards. I would tend to answer them: choose something that cannot be decentralized. Plumbing, for example. I think I would have been a plumber.

What shocks me the most is the rapid decline of our media, which are nothing but machines for anesthetizing, lying, and hiding, in a surreal world where Alfred Jarry had predicted the emergence of machines for brainwashing.

Do you know how to kill a daisy? Simple: you pull off its petals one by one. Each time, the other petals don't notice. Do you know how to boil a frog? Simple. You put it in a pot filled with water and increase the temperature by one degree every day, so slowly that the frog doesn't notice. When approaching the boiling point, the frog is no longer able to react. It is inert, half-dead. Our world is full of daisies being stripped and frogs being cooked. In a newsstand, I saw a magazine called "Yachts". One must believe that there are people who buy it. On the cover, a beautiful ship, immaculately white, twenty meters long. One must believe that there is a class of people who buy this kind of toy. A toy for a decentralized billionaire, no doubt. Money has long since lost its borders. To oppose decentralization? Impossible. If we try to prevent work from escaping, the capital will flee. Simple as two and two times four.

Violence also exports. Soon, it will be everywhere. This, too, people do not realize. Its seeds are in place in all corners of the planet. This violence is the Great Outlet. Periodically, people get a good chunk of it. It's called wars. It relieves, it drives commerce and advances science. The problem is that this time the ceiling may fall on our heads. The sky will be rolled up like a book and the stars will fall. The rivers will carry blood, the waters will be poisoned.

Am I dramatizing? Think. Compare the war of 14-18 to that of 39-45. In 1917, you could calmly have tea five kilometers "from the lines". After that, it became more problematic. Today, jet streams transport poisoned pollens to all corners of the planet, microparticles from the combustion of the heads of "depleted uranium" shells. Scientists are playing with fire, but I read that 74% of the French are in favor of the development of GMO techniques in nature "provided that this is done under government control, in good safety conditions". The green light from Mr. Bidochon is given. Soon, they will shoot at these hysterics who come to tear the plants.

Are you reading these lines? Maybe this site won't exist for much longer. The LEN law, passed in popular indifference and general media silence, will make its disappearance possible, from one day to the next. And you will say, "Hey, it's strange, when I call this site, it doesn't work anymore." A month ago, I asked my readers to send me a stamped envelope with their name and address so that I could contact them by post when that moment comes. I put the received envelopes in a box. While my site is visited daily by 1,800 people, I counted forty-two yesterday.

You know that there are "web newspapers"; like that of the Voltaire network. These people do what they can to alert public opinion. It would be good if there were more of these web newspapers and that they were also translatable into many languages, constituting an antidote to the poison that has become this "fourth power". But according to the news that reach me, the power is doing its best to stifle this emerging freedom. The legal arsenal allows it. These press organs are deprived of all the classic advantages of the profession. This one benefits from a 2.5% VAT. They receive 19%. And everything is like that. These newspapers operate with eleven times higher charges than those of classic presses. The people they employ do not benefit from the status of journalists. Did you know, little warm frogs? No.

People are waiting for Superman to save them. For years, Superman, alias Christopher Reeves, lived in a small car, paralyzed after a horse fall. I learned yesterday that he had died, like that. Yes, if you wait for Superman, it's over, it's too late. He went to the afterlife with his wheelchair.

What to do, in this panorama of all despair? We don't know. Maybe make people talk to each other, thanks to this software project. It could loosen this net of lies that slowly, inevitably, suffocates us, leading us to the most stupid, the most absurd future. We live on a beautiful, rich planet. We are an imaginative terrestrial people. Our scientists have clever solutions in their heads. We are swimming in oceans of renewable energy. If we could convert all the energy that is dispersed as military forces into bread and medicine, we would have enough to feed and heal ten times the people of this planet. But paranoia spreads and the fathers Ubu of the Earth brandish their crooked teeth and their financial sticks.

Utopia or death, said Dumont.

Utopia is the heart. It is the only force of life that remains, against the forces of death that are rising. Speak, quickly, otherwise you are lost. The deadline is less than ten years, know it.

Back to this project, totally, wonderfully, fundamentally utopian, although it is totally realistic and requires no other investment than brainpower. Maybe young people will hear all this, at a time when their parents already have tele-circuit in their ears. Let's be clear from the start. It's about working, contributing a brick to the building, not talking endlessly. Bandar-logs of all kinds, please abstain. As Patrick said, forums are full of people who have time to kill and fill this place with their chatter. We were talking about it yesterday. It is not necessary to be a linguist or a top-level computer scientist to contribute something valuable. Take, for example, this story of a twelve-key mobile phone keyboard. It is a very simple, brilliant idea, but from the programming side it is not very complicated. Starting from the raw idea, it would not take more than a day of work to build a demonstration prototype. At the stage we are at, this is what we need to build: tinker with prototypes, focused on limited topics, targeted areas. I don't know how MSN works, but it's not very complicated. Clever, yes. Complicated, no. I imagine that we could very well couple a utility like MSN with a mini-simultaneous translation tool, which may not go very far, but would allow to throw a fantastic bridge over arid lands and oceans. A "space bridge" as my visionary Russian friend Goldwin said twenty-five years ago.

First of all, people need to understand what they can gain from such a project. Can you imagine suddenly having a tool like MSN Messenger, coupled with an automatic translation system, with constraints on how to enter messages? We will start by simulating this. I will ask Patrick to tinker with it. We need to form a "supporters' club" for the project, a multilingual club. We will ask people to provide their name and surname, age, city of residence, country, profession. Then we will ask them to provide a photo of themselves (or a group of people) in a certain format, with a maximum weight. Adding to the photo: the handwritten signatures, plus a line of text showing "what it looks like when you write in this language." A sample of voice, a simple sentence. If possible, a musical sample.

When consulting this "data bank," faces or groups of individuals will appear on the screen. By clicking on them and specifying the "output language" (by clicking on a flag), you will see, for example:

My name is Sacha Rublin I live in Petrograd, Russia I am 31 I work in a shoes factory This is a short sentence, following, written by me. This is my voice I join a sample of music of my country.

If you had chosen French, you would have seen:

My name is Sacha Rublin I live in the locality of Petrograd, Russia I am 31 I work in a shoes factory. I join a short sentence, written by me. This is my voice. I join a sample of the music of my country.

A fun exercise: make sure these messages can be displayed in a maximum of different languages. Later, if there are many people, the display of faces or groups can be random.

That's for the supporters. I hope Patrick can have enough memory so that many can appear on this multimedia file. Beyond that, we will need to recruit people capable of contributing constructively to this project, whether because they are programmers, or linguists, or bilingual, or simply because they have ideas, imagination. To prevent the "time-eaters" from rushing in, Patrick will ask those who want to sign up to provide their names and addresses, age, profession. No pseudonyms. This kind of work is not condemnable.

When people send "posts," if their address is not on them, they must indicate

Name, surname Age Profession Education, skills Nationality City Languages spoken: .....

If one day such a software is born, people can say whatever they want. But at the moment, it will be an exclusive forum focused on the design of the tool, without confessions, beliefs, political affiliations, ideologies.

Finally, I would like to tell an amusing anecdote. At the end of the 1970s, I was a sculpture teacher at the École des Beaux-Arts in Aix-en-Provence, at a time when my friend Jacques Boullier, alias Vasselin, was in charge. In my workshop, the students built complex mathematical surfaces with "copper wire". It was there that "the representation of the Boy surface using elliptical meridians" was born. In addition to that, I had created a microcomputer unit at the faculty of letters, which ran like hell. With philosophy students, we built a chess game software. Very quickly, I wanted to create my own computer-aided design software, CAD, and that is how "Pangraphe" was born, which the "old stems of micro" may remember, followed by "Screen". Around an Apple IIe (48 K of memory. 5-inch disks of 120 K) I had gathered a "input tablet" and a drawing table. We were having a lot of fun. Using the tablet, we entered the meridian of an object of revolution, then the machine composed the corresponding "vase" (I didn't forget that I had been a potter). We could assemble objects, create spiral staircases, imaginary cities, temples with their columns, space stations. I quickly mastered all the basic problems of CAD, invented in my corner the system of "virtual edges", the decomposition into convex polyhedra, the management of "obstruction spheres", and all the tricks of hiding parts.

One day I brought all this equipment to the École des Beaux-Arts in Aix, in the large amphitheater. I made a demonstration. Boullier, always very "avant-garde", was delighted. At the end there was a certain silence. Then, from the back of the room, a professor's voice rose.

• You are not going to tell us that the computer will replace the artist!?

I immediately started to pack everything up. Boullier was devastated.

• Jean-Pierre...
• Jacques, I think I'm coming too early again. In ten years, or more, it will be good...

October 13, 2004:

Seeing the reactions of some readers, including those of linguists, I have the impression that I did not make myself clear. A reader talks about metalanguage. It is indeed a key concept. But let's not theorize too much at the beginning. Let's be pragmatic. This thing is made to work, not to make linguistic publications. It was the computer scientists who created the word processing software. If we had asked the academics to look into the issue, we would still be there. Let's say we try to... do without metalanguage, or use a gestural, symbolic metalanguage. The images in a dictionary are not metalanguage. A roller skate is... a roller skate, period. Where possible, we call on the REAL.

A reader proposes the concept of "atom of meaning". It is in line with the project. We could propose the term "semion". These semions refer to objects, verbs, adjectives, all elements of a language. We are practically trying to imagine a "Mendeleev table" of all languages, or at least a set of languages, saying that sentences are structured and behave like molecules.

I attach excerpts from a mail from another reader, a young Frenchman, Romain, who lives in Japan. He writes this (in blue), and my comments are in red.

The classic translation tools work as follows: - Lexical analysis: splitting words, analyzing their structure (plural, singular, gender, conjugation for verbs).

It is the user who does this job, at the very entry of the message. Once the sentence is split into key words and analyzed, we proceed to create a grammatical tree.

Same comment. We therefore get the sentence split and linked via grammatical operators such as: adjective, action, direct object complement, etc...

Then, to go from one grammar to another, we recombine the grammatical tree: for example, "It's a green car." -> "This is a green car."

It is indeed where the machine takes over. But if the grammatical and semantic analysis has been well negotiated at the entry, from the source language, with a question-and-answer game from the machine, then the transcription into the target language should be feasible.

In fact, we have simply applied the English grammar rules that say that a color comes before the word, whereas in French it is after. Once the grammatical tree is transformed, it is enough to retranslate in the other direction...

I conjecture that it is feasible.

Problem: human languages are ambiguous, unlike computer languages. Solution: remove the ambiguity (ah, that sounds silly said like that). Your solution is to remove the ambiguity via the user who will decide the semantic to apply to such or such word... Indeed, we should be able to increase the success rate in translation compared to the purely computer system.

Exactly. That word will have n meanings: word1, word2, word3, etc.... all non-ambiguous. A human being cannot manage that. He uses the context:

A poor type ........ a poor type

The computer will manage: { type3, poor2 }

However, there is one thing to see: entering the complete dictionaries and coding them in a computer way (i.e., relation with other words, entities of the database) is a titanic task. (not impossible but good...)

This software will require a large number of people. The enrichment will happen "on the go".

I don't know why, but I feel that there are places where it won't work. (it's just a feeling, one would have to work on the data structures and simulate the algorithms before actually programming anything)

The idea is: as few algorithms as possible and maybe, at the entry, no algorithms at all.

On the other hand, all comments like: and Chinese, Basque? We see that these are people who haven't thought about the problems.

Exactly...

Anyway, it is clear that: - a lexical analysis module (capable of recognizing a word despite the various transformations applied to it)

No, it's the user who does this work, at the input!!! - a grammatical analysis module.

It's also the user's job, at the entry!!! The whole difference is there.

When the grammatical analysis is done, then we ask the user questions, saying that we propose a default meaning for a ambiguous word: is it correct, yes/no.

No. The user learns to enter his sentence grammatically, structuring it around its verbal core, like a molecule. It is necessary to completely leave the linear view of a sentence.

We could also do lexical analysis on the fly and propose various meanings...

With "drop-down menus", "mental images" in the form of images, animations, sounds.

**
October 15, 2004:**

I don't know if this project will succeed, but the consultation numbers are important. Some ideas emerge from discussions between the different members of the group. If we manage to make this "Language of the Heart" project come to life, there will be several benefits. The first is that the illiterate of the planet could, theoretically at least, find a means of expression. Some say, "but poor people don't have computers." It's true and it's false. A computer is a sophisticated object, but in reality it is incredibly cheap (very little raw material and energy). I remember the relationship between the selling price of an Apple II in 1977: 25,000 F and its "factory price": 800 F. A ratio of thirty! It is therefore theoretically possible to imagine a very wide distribution of equipment throughout the third and even the fourth world. In poor countries, people know that comfort is out of their reach, but not knowledge. It is not necessary to install a computer per person. A single machine per village, operating with solar sensors (low energy consumption) could be a feasible thing. There would also be the possibility of giving the people of the third world the machines we no longer use.

Second point: a computer equipped with the software we are considering would allow illiterates to communicate, to read and ... to write, in their own way. Along the way, they would learn to read and write "by a global method", against their will. This system thus becomes a fantastic system of acculturation and transmission of scientific and technical knowledge, knowledge in the field of health, etc. Will we be able to mobilize a dinosaur like UNESCO in such a project? We would need itinerant ambassadors capable of advocating this cause in such institutions. There is work for everyone.

Third point. Young people will take hold of this teaching tool, which will resemble a video game. When you think about it, to ensure the translatability of messages, making the user immediately provide the machine with the grammatical, lexical, and semantic structure is equivalent to teaching grammar and spelling to young people "against their will". Otherwise, "it doesn't go in". "The Language of the Heart" becomes "a fantastic learning machine", from all sides. I have already used this metalanguage system to create my scientific comic books, the adventures of Anselme Lanturlu, which were published for 25 years and have been translated into eight languages. Images and geometry are an international language. This allowed me to convey a lot (19 subjects covered). In "The Language of the Heart", the comic and its fantastic possibilities will be widely used, despite the collection being abandoned a few months ago by Belin editions.

In general, regarding this project "The Language of the Heart", keep in mind the following guideline:

Be realistic, consider the impossible ---

October 19, 2004: **Techno-dependence? **

Discussions are ongoing about this project. We receive messages from people who have experienced communication abroad when confronted with individuals who do not speak a word of their language, and vice versa (for example, the Kyrgyz). I found a parallel with experiences I myself had when I was a safari guide in Kenya-Tanzania and we met Maasai in a remote area (this was nearly 30 years ago. Things have obviously changed today). These Maasai spoke only the "Maa language", which has nothing to do with the lingua franca, Swahili. At the time, drawing was of great help. But not everyone has this talent.

A reader imagined that a sort of universal ideogrammatic language could emerge. I think this is an impossible dream. Ideographic representations have their limits. There are plenty of them in ... airports, but they translate sentences like "No dogs allowed", "Restrooms are here", "The restaurant is over there", and "Baggage collection is over there". Imagine a message like:

*- Due to bad weather conditions, the flight to Balrutz is canceled. Passengers will be accommodated at the Blamschwiz hotel. A shuttle will pick them up at satellite C, door 12. They will have to present their tickets and their passport at the shuttle entrance. *

All of this in ideograms? Hmmm....

Following a comment from October 20, 2004, things change completely if one imagines that the "pictograms" could be deployed over time in the form of animations, displayed on screens, in loops. This is a path worth exploring, and it is very exciting. I must say that I once managed to pass on fairly complex messages to Maasai, and I used the comic book for that. A village chief, who had invited me to dinner in his hut, offered to exchange his bow, his leather quiver, and his arrows for my ... flashlight. I was extremely embarrassed, especially since we risked a diplomatic incident by refusing. Things got worse because there were no flat batteries in Kenya, only cylindrical ones. The chief must have known that, miles away, an Indian was exchanging different objects for their local production. He also knew, as he later showed, that the battery was an essential accessory for the functioning, and that it could be replaced. We discussed by gestures. I opened the casing, removed the battery. The flashlight turned off. He then showed, after some fumbling, that he could manage to put in a new battery, obtained at the counter. But how could I explain to him that he would then not be able to find a battery with the right shape? I managed to explain all this to him with a series of drawings. They showed the chief using his flashlight. Then it weakened, and he went on foot to the Indian's place to exchange something, a skin, meat, a necklace for a new battery. Then the Indian took out the cylindrical battery, and the Maasai chief realized it was impossible to put this battery into the casing. He returned to the village very angry, thinking that the white man who had exchanged this "bad lamp" for his bow and arrows had tricked him, and he threw the lamp away with a furious gesture, under the mocking gaze of some lions. The drawings came out of hands, were seriously commented on by the people present in the hut, then passed from hut to hut, and then went around the village. The lions mocking the chief created an extraordinary hilarity. I experienced there a great moment of linguistic exchange. Let's add that laughter is an extraordinary means of communication, of course.

For the Maasai, the fact that I could, with a strange stick (my pen), create similar portraits on a sheet of paper, which they examined each time, seemed to be high magic. Especially since the portraits were very similar. It is a people that ignores anthropomorphic or zoomorphic representations and whose art is exclusively at the level of jewelry making (which, at least at the time when I was in the country, were actually very complex coded meanings of their family and clan status). I have been in many places where the locals had never seen someone draw. The success was guaranteed.

I think a team from the "Language of the Heart" program, composed of computer scientists and graphic designers, should explore the possibilities of expression in the form of animated sequences (animated gifs). With a little computer science, it should be possible to create an "animated sequence editor", focused, for example, on a given theme, as an exercise. I think that the different messages that can be seen displayed in an airport, which are limited in number, could serve as the basis for this exercise. I would even say that all of this could constitute a commercial software, if it is effective. An employee should be able to compose sentences with elements like:

• passengers - heading to
• must present themselves urgently at boarding - in front of the door displaying the letter C - with their boarding pass - we remind you that it is forbidden to
• smoke in the toilets - to light a fire in the device (a story I experienced a few years ago in a company like Inch Allah Airlines, which transported passengers and freight in two sectors of old DC3s. In the front, the passengers, in the back, a space left free for freight, which was empty that day. At one point the stewardess had to intervene. Two Bedouins, who were probably traveling by plane for the first time in their lives, had unrolled a mat on this "back area" and simply started preparing tea on a stove!)
• to bring animals on board (I say this because once a Martinican caused a beginning of panic on a 747 on which I was traveling. The use of mobile phones is becoming widespread, at least in technologically developed countries. These devices, increasingly powerful, are becoming real portable computers. It would not pose any problem to attach a translation software to them. The only problem to solve is the entry of messages in "sema-language", through a filter that allows the computer to record the message in its "semantic form", translatable into "a variety of languages". This is the problem we are tackling. Suppose this problem could be negotiated using a mixed system, with elements of language and ideograms. Talking to a person could then be done by connecting two mobile phones, either with a wire or with an infrared link. The output could be on screen, or by voice synthesis, with an earpiece.

Incidentally, note that this message, displayed in an airport in the form of a "scrolling message", with a diode display, in the local language, could also be emitted in the form of "sema-language" via infrared. A passenger sees this message scrolling. He takes out his mobile phone, points his infrared receiver toward the source. The message is recorded in its semio-linguistic form and translated into his language both on the screen and by voice synthesis (especially if this passenger is illiterate).

Would we then become "techno-dependent"? But we have already become so since the advent of technology. The film "Soleil Vert" reminds us that this technology could one day regress significantly. In this classic of science fiction, we see people for whom the mere fact of owning a watch (mechanical) becomes a luxury. The ownership of an individual vehicle becomes an exception that only a minority in power can afford. Even more: in a world that has become extremely coercive, not everyone can move. Pushing things further, I am "techno-dependent" on the pair of glasses I have on my nose. If, suddenly, the glasses disappeared, I would be unable to read any text, given my presbyopia.

There are two types of technologies:

• Those that are great consumers of raw materials and energy
• Those that are not.

Everything based on computing falls into the second category and, beyond that, everything that will come in the future with nanotechnology. Having said that, there is no limit to the sophistication of the object, nor to the range of objects available. Just look at the explosion of the mobile phone market. Intrinsically, they are worth only ... a few euros. There are keys, a battery, and a screen. Plus a transmitter-receiver. The intrinsic value is ... non-existent. It is possible to imagine that systems of this kind could one day exist in billions on the planet. Let's remember that these objects are manufactured by ... robots, like many other objects we use. This communication between individuals will not, one day, require access to the Internet or the possession of a computer. It will be integrated into the technology of mobile phones (just as GPS, the modern version of the compass).

We have seen that mobile phones are now equipped with integrated digital cameras, which are also scanners. There is no difficulty in principle for these scanners to eventually see their resolution increase. This will be interesting for transmitting images with good definition, at a distance, to users with larger screens. But there is another use. I had a neighbor who became blind quite late. This happens to many people. Learning Braille becomes problematic. But this man had a computer (without a screen ...) connected to a scanner. I was able to see that character recognition had made significant progress, allowing our man to read any book, novel or magazine, the text being synthesized vocally, with several voice options. It is already possible to integrate these systems into a mobile phone, equipped with an "electronic eye", the objective of a digital device with which a blind person can read anything, in their language, a restaurant menu, a sign, a street name. Today, the blind have become "techno-dependent". Braille is a terribly heavy tool to handle. Braille-transcribed documents are cumbersome. Today, the rise of computing has broken the isolation of the blind, making them very techno-dependent. My friend could read and write in Braille, but just barely. He no longer used this code except to mark or read the labels of the objects he handled (like audio or video cassettes). A continuation of biological evolution, technology is part of human development, in so far as, not consuming masses of energy, and limiting pollution through miniaturization, it offers aspects with strong positive returns and minimal negative returns. Systems allowing exchanges between individuals separated by the barrier of their languages would have apparently very positive aspects. The whole thing is to solve this message entry problem so that a machine, as a reader remarked, does not translate "I give up" as "I give high".

October 28, 2004: **There is a "flouzo-military" version of the "Language of the Heart" project, it is the Taiga software. **

Taiga: Taiga means Automated Processing of Current Geopolitical Information. Taiga was developed by Christian Krumeich, a linguist/informatician of the company Thomson for the needs of the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure. In other words, the French secret services) who wanted to extract information from the databases of the former USSR. Taiga was adapted for technological surveillance and is now sold for 200,000 F per unit. This software is now the property of the company Madicia, owned by the company Questel, itself a subsidiary of France Telecom. Madicia should soon leave France Telecom to join Intelco, a department specialized in economic intelligence of the group Défense Conseil International, itself a department of the Ministry of Defense. In 1995, IBM was forbidden to buy the company Madicia. *The Centre d'Études Supérieures de Défense de Marne-la-Vallée, directed by Admiral Lacoste, former director of the DGSE, participated in the project of development of Taiga. *Taiga works in any language, and is expert in semantics and linguistics. The software was transformed by Pascal Andréi to be able to cover both the geopolitical and the technical intelligence fields. Taiga transforms texts from any language into a pivot language that groups terminologies around semantic fields. Taiga, although very complex to use, is very fast since it processes a billion characters per second. The Military Intelligence Directorate has acquired several dozen Taiga stations at the beginning of 1995.

I took a look. It has nothing to do with what we are aiming for, neither in the goals nor in the technique used. The "Language of the Heart" project could develop if a sufficient number of talented people worked on this task. I don't know if we will find these people. The idea might be to interest someone like Bill Gates in a project coupled with an utility like MSN Messenger. This would improve his image. If I met him, I would say, "Mr. Bill Gates, would you like to be the head of a company that would be said: Microsoft, the company that allowed people to communicate?" Volunteering, humanism, in these times, is rare. It might be safer to bet on something else.

It was not surprising to find "the devil" (the military, in the coded language of researchers) at the center of this new high-tech: automatic translation. All of this makes me uneasy. I have become allergic to the military, to the sound of boots. Those who know my scientific career know, regarding MHD, that I am a walking military secret. In "UFOs and American Secret Weapons" I "smelled the roast" by briefly evoking the techniques used in the hypersonic MHD American using MHD. But as a certain number of essential keys are missing, the European military, skillfully misled by the Americans, and who have abandoned this field for thirty years, will crash against the wall. I know what and how. This will occupy them. With these techniques, one could develop hypersonic transports, infinitely more cost-effective than rockets. But in general, one does not start with civilian applications. Let them go to hell.

This reminds me of nauseating memories. I was having dinner these days with a geneticist who had known Benveniste. A career without too many problems, in the private sector. She was surprised by the problems that some researchers could have had. I told her:

• Do you want an idea with guaranteed problems?
• How so? - The DNA molecules are long. They should therefore react to low frequency stimuli. For example, if they are subjected to pulsed microwaves at very low frequencies, on the order of a few hertz, they prove to be 400 times more receptive to this "effector" than water molecules, which have a dipolar structure. This has been known for thirty years. Even Science et Vie talked about it at that time.
• I didn't know that - With very high frequencies, for example, 3 gigahertz, you can easily penetrate living tissues, including lymphocytes that serve as shelter for the AIDS virus. If one could find a resonance frequency in this virus, very targeted, it might be possible to destroy it in the lymphocyte, acting with very low energy. One could consider similar actions against cancer cells. All structures have weak points. It's just a matter of finding them.
• This resembles Prioré's machine, this thing. - In a way, yes. But Prioré left with all his secrets, after dismantling his famous machine. - When did you become interested in this kind of thing? - Fifteen to twenty years ago. I had a cancer doctor friend named Spitalier, a great guy who unfortunately died quite soon after, from a heart attack. He was interested. At his request, I worked in front of his colleagues. Doctors, when you talk to them about electromagnetic waves, think of something that resembles magic. One of them said to me, "There was a Swede who tried in the past to attack cancer cells with high frequency. It wasn't very conclusive." Indeed, cancer cells are more vascularized. If you put a person with cancer in a microwave oven (and that's exactly what this Swede was doing, with patients in the terminal phase), the first cells that emit are the cancer cells. The trick is to get the person out just before they are cooked. This proved difficult to negotiate. I tried to explain to the doctors that this was not what I was envisioning, but they didn't understand, or didn't want to understand. People don't like someone from the outside coming to play on their turf. - Why did you talk about guaranteed problems? - If you aim for therapies, you put the big pharmaceutical industry in danger. If you could cure people with AIDS by putting them twenty minutes in something that looked like a telephone booth, you can imagine. It is because he was envisioning therapies with electromagnetic effectors, based on his concept of "digital biology" that Benveniste was "killed". I think of this phrase by Rémy Chauvin, referring to research-university habits: "Nothing should be exaggerated. It never goes further than murder." In Jacques's case, I would say that is exactly what happened. He was forced to work under morally and physically unbearable conditions and it eventually killed him. - No one works in this field of pulsed microwaves at low frequencies? - Yes. - Who? - The military. With these techniques, they obtain mutant viruses for biological warfare. When I was trying to interest people in this range of ideas, a guy told me: "You should contact Gilbert P. He is very connected to the military. Right now, two of them are working a lot on the subject of cancer weapons. He gave me a paper from an army research service that had been passed to him and was titled "Evocation of Cancers."

--- ****

December 3, 2004: **A total failure. **

The actions I have tried to carry out through my website are, overall, a complete failure. This project on the "Language of the Heart", which was a good idea, perfectly feasible, was read by more than ten thousand people. The response is practically NIL.

To try to pull this project out of the ditch it was sinking into, I immediately provided a concrete idea, which could even lead to commercial applications. In an airport, it is occasionally necessary to deliver messages to travelers, such as:

*- We inform our courteous customers that due to bad weather conditions, flight 5123 to Belgrade is suspended. Passengers are asked to present themselves at terminal B, door 9, with their boarding pass and their identity documents. They will then be taken by bus to a hotel located in town, where they can benefit from a free telephone connection. We ask them, as much as possible, to carry only the minimum of hand luggage and not to try to retrieve those already placed in the hold. If they are missing personal effects or toiletries, they can ask the hotel staff to provide for this need. *

There is a limited number of messages an airport can issue to travelers. I therefore suggested to catalog them, then to code these different sequences in the form of animated sequences, which I would have realized myself, ensuring the drawing and the animation in "animated gifs". The rest is an interesting programming problem, relatively easy to negotiate.

One would have expected many people to come forward to participate in this project. Unfortunately, it did not happen.

It is clear that the response to these calls launched on my website is very low. Ten thousand people connect and the number of "active" or "reactive" people does not reach that of the fingers of one hand.

If you want to move on, go take a look at the efforts made by the supporters of Esperanto:

http://arrasesperanto.free.fr/prononc.htm

This "Language of the Heart" project will be another project that will be buried. It is not the only one. No modeler has undertaken to build models of Egyptian and Peruvian boats, (7000 readers), remote-controlled, which I had provided the plans for. I had the visit of a young man, whom I invited to my home with his wife and child. I had started to build a model of a Peruvian boat with balsa wood. Quite familiar with naval architecture and owning his own boat and a multi-channel remote control, he offered to finish the work and took what we had already done. Since then, I have not heard from him and my email reminders have gone unanswered. As soon as I have time, I will buy a remote control and balsa wood and resume this, planning to try these models on a pond not far from my home. I think I will make video films of these tests.

The shared computing project in astrophysics quickly turned into organized scientific plundering, to the point that I had to remove from my website the educational elements of astrophysics that I had installed and which had taken me a month of full-time work.

There are other projects that are struggling. It has come to the point that I no longer want to propose any others. For those who can see, this site is full of ideas that need to be developed. I was surprised to see that so few people had ventured to build this pyramid model I had invented, except for a Canadian engineer, Bérubé, and an IT specialist, Patrick Darbon, who created interesting animations. Let's not even mention the lamentable failure of this attempt to publish these works at the BIFAO, the bulletin of the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology.

In general, the "response" is extremely low, on the order of one percent, or in the case of "The Language of the Heart", less than one per thousand, although this response has twice allowed two people to get out of a difficult material situation: namely, me, in 2003, after a heavy defamation conviction and the ufologist Robert Alessandri, also convicted. A reaction coming from the one percent of people with a heart, but how generous.

This weakness of the readers' reaction is evident at all levels. I had asked people to send, symbolically, a letter, or a simple envelope with the words "Goodbye, Jacques" to the laboratory of the courageous Benveniste, who had just died, "killed on the front of research". One percent of the people who visited the page reacted.

People tell me "this is the normal return of mailings". I also hear that "people are overwhelmed with problems". This may be the explanation. But, in fact, it gives a certain impression of uselessness. There is the "spectacle politics". There, I have the impression that information itself becomes a spectacle. I read recently the latest nonsense found by English scientists: "the universe could be completely virtual". The press has picked up this "information". This shows the poverty of current ideas in fundamental science. In passing, I have installed a number of personal scientific works on my website and I had hoped that scientists would react. But in this field, we find the same passivity tinged with indifference.

Paraphrasing these two English buffoons, I would tend to say:

*- We have discovered that the universe could be nothing more than a vast theater, most human beings behaving as passive spectators of a kind of play, which has something of a drama, and no one seems to have the slightest will to change its course. The actors and the outcomes of this spectacle seem not to be the work of one or several particular authors but rather the result of different improvisations, which, according to the unanimous opinion of critics, are completely lacking in coherence. *

We live in the time of all dangers. But this idea is probably so alarming that most readers ignore it. It may be a standard behavior. I remember a scene in the movie "The Day After Tomorrow", which tried to evoke the emergence of a nuclear conflict. A farmer living near missile sites in Minnesota suddenly saw them leaving their silos. A bit familiar with these things, he deduced that the war had been declared and that these shots corresponded to what is called "a response to attack". It is indeed essential for a belligerent who has detected the departure of a mass of missiles aimed in his direction to fire his own salvo of missiles before the enemy shots hit his silos, which would leave him unable to react. The farmer knows he has only a few minutes ahead of him. He hurries to retrieve his family members and take them to a basement shelter he has installed, with large reserves of potable water and food and a way to supply it with air through a filtration system. When he tries to convince his wife to follow him, she is in the children's room and ... making their beds. He insists.

- Hurry up, damn it. We have only a few minutes left! - Leave me, his wife replies, you can see I'm busy .....

It is a very strong image. Our world is about to live through terrible hours, years of burning, and the vast majority of men and women try to abstract themselves from their problems. It is finally maybe a normal reflex. Facing the imminence of his death, many human beings prefer to deny the event. My mother died in two months of liver cancer. While her body was deteriorating rapidly, she preferred, until the very end, to hear the version of the facts served by the doctors and nurses around her. She took her placebos with awareness and made plans concerning a convalescence that was no longer a dream. In her case, there was no other alternative than a quick death. The doctors are not responsible for these lies. They often serve the version that the people are simply capable of receiving. How many are capable of hearing "You are suffering from an incurable disease. In the case of liver cancer, there is nothing to be done and your life expectancy does not exceed two to three months. You will die of exhaustion like someone with a jaundice that never ends. Metastases will appear in an uncontrollable way. Towards the end, you will no longer be able to eat and your body will decompose, emitting even an unpleasant odor, linked to the toxins your body will no longer be able to eliminate. We will try to help you as best we can for the coming weeks. If you have problems to resolve, we advise you to do so without waiting for your mental abilities to be affected, in case a metastasis develops in your brain. We will be able to do nothing else than to limit as much as possible the suffering you will endure. Towards the end, we will increase the morphine doses, which will help you die, but the law prohibits us from doing anything else. Well, if you need anything that is within our capabilities, tell us."

Will our terrestrial society disappear? One can hope not, but the rise of human stupidity seems such that it is becoming increasingly difficult to escape the idea that we might converge, within less than ten years, into a situation where the planetary disorders we know could spread, ending as in 1939 in a real conflagration. All around, the reactions of political or religious leaders are very worrying and seem more to belong to paranoia than anything else. European development projects are laughable. The emerging political leaders are remarkably mediocre. Political programs are absent. Globalization reveals its true face, reminiscent of a sale, politely renamed "offshorings". The capitalist international will make increasingly greater profits, production is about to move towards the ethnic groups least burdened by social charges, therefore towards the most disadvantaged workers. We will witness two phenomena. A powerful lowering of standards for workers and a surge of an infinitesimal minority (new or old rich) towards profits barely imaginable, as they will be based on the accumulation of profits corresponding to markets not national but global. Faced with this evidence, the public remains in a passive reaction, a theme I have developed in "Peeling the Daisy".

I saw a report on a French company that produces gloves and tans leather. It showed the commendable efforts it had made to reduce the pollution (significant) related to its activities. In the background, it mentioned the danger that Chinese competition could pose for such companies. Well, the game is probably already lost. How can one compete with production systems where labor is five to ten times cheaper and where pollution is the last concern of the existing political systems?

Yet, there are solutions. It would be enough for humans to simply manage their different resources, including their "human resources", in a smart way. But it is not going that way. In the USA, a president with very limited intellectual abilities believes himself inspired by God. In the East, a new Tsar dreams of restoring Russia's power, momentarily dislocated. I don't think one can reasonably call him a humanist.

China dreams of a restored greatness. It has a fantastic revenge to take. I would simply like to include a text by Ernest Renan, taken from an issue of the web magazine "Réseau Voltaire":

Renan wrote in 1871 in "La Nécessaire réforme de la France":

• A nation that does not colonize is inevitably doomed to socialism, to the war of the rich against the poor. The conquest of a lower race by a superior race that settles there to govern it is not shocking... Just as conquests between equal races must be blamed, the regeneration of inferior races by superior races is in the providential order of humanity. The common man is almost always among us a disgraced noble; his heavy hand is better suited to handling a sword than a servile tool... pour this devouring activity into countries like China, calling for foreign conquest (...).... Everyone will be in their role. Nature has made a race of workers. It is the Chinese race, of wonderful dexterity, without almost any sense of honor.... Govern them with justice, and they will be satisfied; a race of land workers, it is the Negro, be kind and humane to him and everything will be in order. A race of masters and soldiers, it is the European race.

What is worrying about humans is not their wickedness, but their stupidity. I believe those who read me can consider that many of our planet's leaders have such simplistic ideas in their brains, and the worst is that they might be convinced... that they are right, each in their own logic. But it is true that a man's logic is often that which, above all, serves his own interests.

I had thought it might be useful for people to communicate, urgently. Hence the idea of the "Language of the Heart," which was only a revival of the "Antibabel" project, already ten years old. Will I be able to ignite this fire? For it to take, the powerful must find their interest in it, and without any malice we quickly considered that the only possible artisan of such a task could be someone like Bill Gates, who might see in this project a way to develop a utility like MSN Messenger and to restore the image of Microsoft "the company that would have allowed people to communicate with each other." When faced with such an ocean of indifference, what remains but to try to ride the megalomania of a dangerous visionary? If you wait for academics and intellectuals to react, it is as good as hoping for flowers to spontaneously emerge from a pile of stones.

I heard yesterday, from the mouth of my friend Souriau, a very beautiful sentence:

• Common sense, which others call utopia.....

If we want to look for common sense solutions, we must tell ourselves that they currently have the smell of utopia. René Dumont cried "It's utopia or death!" It was to nameless '68ers that we owe the phrase "Be realistic, consider the impossible..." I am beginning to think more and more that it could be true and that it could be our only lifeline, if it is still possible to save anything. Personally, I will now turn in this direction. This site will remain in place, like a nice Christmas window display. I will continue to feed it as best I can. Scientists will not be long in finding new files on the reversal of the sphere. I also have a large file in preparation on the Algerian War. But I don't expect much from it.

It turns out that there are people who act, at their tiny scale. They are active dreamers, generous, sober. One could qualify them as anarchists in the sense that they have ceased to believe that overly organized systems, those "of Absurdistan," could bring good to men and that ours have reached such levels of incompetence, absurdity and deafness that the only recourse is individual initiatives. Remember these definitions:

Dictatorship is "be quiet!"

Democracy is "go on..."

I will get closer to these people, a tiny flame lost in an ocean of darkness and indifference, which will lead us to join their annual meeting

on June 4th and 5th next, in the Provençal village of Mérindol, for what they have called a

"Fair on energy savings, renewable energy and eco-construction".

In this group there are people who do, who act, who think and who innovate. It still exists.

An exception in the midst of the immense passivity of the surrounding herd. Well, those who want to meet me will find me there.

Utopists of all countries, unite

Number of consultations since October 12, 2004:

../../bons_commande/bon_global.htm

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