A bit of a walk

I wouldn't want you to think from yesterday's post that I spent my whole, precious, day off riding the tram back and forth. No, no. Just one go-round, that's all. The other thing I did was take a walk in the hills to the west of town to photograph a certain tree there.

There's this one rather nicely shaped tree that's off on it's own on a hillside, standing about a hundred feet from a bunch of a dozen other trees that make a little tableau of their own. It's like the guru tree and the others are the followers. Anyway. I go up there every few weeks and take way too many pictures of them all. I figure in a few months I'll make an album with nothing but these trees, a sort of woody biography.

31 stops.

This is just in case you don’t ever get to ride the tram around Clermont yourself. Read this and you won’t have to.

11:07 La Pardieu Gare. Southern end of the line (or the eastern end, depending on if you think of the tram line as a north-south thing or an east-west thing. Your choice.) in an area of businesses and light industry. Departure in 3 minutes. Departure after that in 10 for those of you who are not quite ready for all the excitement of the adventure. One other person gets on, and sits near the middle of the tram.

11:11 Lycée Lafayette. Three women with their shopping from the nearby grocery centre, two with wheely carts, one with just sacks. I used to snigger at the wheely things, but now I have one myself. Useful for stocking up on cat litter. Or if you need to carry home more than one case of wine. Nobody from the Lycée gets on here, but later they will flood the train.

11:13 Fontaine du Bac, between a cluster of cheap apartment blocks and a football field. Two more women board. A fat old man watches the empty playground from a bench in the unexpected sun.

11:15 Margeride. Another handful of riders board, having left their cars at the park&ride lot. Nothing else is here except a connection to the number 13 bus. We’re filling up.

11:16 Campus, where a handful of college students wait. This is my stop when I’m done with classes in the fall.

They’re whacking down all the old pampas grass along the railway today. A shame to cut down the golden fronds that catch the light so well, but they’ll grow back soon enough. As a bonus now we can see all the trash that’s accumulated on the ground over the year. It isn’t all that much, really.

11:18 Cezeaux Pellez. The other campus stop, right next to the physics and math buildings. Another handful of people get on, and finally some get off.

11:19 La Chaux. The railway passes under a bridge here, and the sides of the cut lined with concrete are covered with graffiti. A real canvas for the spray-can set, though not many of them seem to have much talent. Near the train station is where the real artists tag. The other interesting thing about La Chaux is the section of track that is also a residential road. There isn’t room to have a tramway and a road, so cars and tram take turns. Parking must be an adventure sometimes.

11:21 Léon Blum. If when I get off the bus on the way to work, there’s not more than 3 minutes to wait, I’ll wait for the tram. Otherwise just walk. Unless it’s raining.

11:22 Saint Jacques Loucheur, the closest stop to work. Not much else to say.

11:24 CHU Gabriel Montpied. The most popular stop that isn’t right downtown, there’s a park&ride lot, and of course the University Hospital Centre.

11:26 Saint Jacques Dolet. Another stop in the shadow of subsidized housing towers, some of the older ones in town. From here we leave the St Jacques plateau, down the viaduc and into the bowl of the city. In the middle of the long bridge the tram always slows to a walking pace, then speeds up again. Who knows why. Just for that one section. There’s a nice sharp turn at the bottom, but we’re allowed to gather speed again for that.

11:28 Université. The other campus, or part of it. Law and the humanities here. A crowd gets on, laden with notebooks and computers.

11:29 Maison de la Culture. The stop is right in front of the old bus station, still boarded up but not torn down after several years. What, 7? More? Still a few seats left on the tram, but most of the new riders stand in the aisles.

11:31 Lagarlaye, at the foot of the dental school, the last bit still open of the old old complex formerly comprising the main city hospital. The rest is all boarded up and barb-wired. They can’t tear down the historic old buildings, but it would cost millions to make them usable. So there it all remains.

11:33 Jaude, the main square with its shops and restaurants and theaters and bus connections. The most popular stop on the tramway. We’re at the edge of the historic center of Clermont and its pedestrian district, so we snake slowly to the next stop, sharing the path with bikes and pedestrians.

11:34 Gaillard. More shops and eats. There’s a new tapas place just around a corner here I’ve been meaning to try. Maybe on the way back.

11:35 Hotel de Ville, with its terraced park and Renaissance period fountain (am I the only one to find it ridiculous and rather hideous? I don’t care if it’s authentic) and statue of local boy Blaise Pascal, bird shit on his buckled shoe.

11:37 Delille Montlosier. We’ve made a big C around the hill that is the center of Clermont, and have passed through most of the points of the compass.

11:38 Les Carmes. Stop for the Michelin Tires headquarters. Any Michelin people getting on or off? Nope. Nobody gets on or off. This stop is the reason why the tram does not go to either the train station or the new public hospital, like any normally-planned public transportation system would. It’s already a big squiggle, but it would be a ridiculous squiggle to hit those other places and this one.

11:40 Première Mai. The French love to name things for dates. I should remember that tomorrow is the first Saturday of the month, and that means the monthly flea market will be held at the big parking lot here in the morning. Treasure!

11:41 Stade Marcel Michelin. Rugby! Also going on here tomorrow, though I have a date to play bridge instead. The tram gets so packed on game days you can’t get on (or off, sometimes)

11:42 Gravière. Kind of a nowhere stop. I guess no stop between the stadium and the townlet of Montferrand would have been a pretty long gap.

11:44 Montferrand La Fontaine. This used to be a separate city, and still retains its ancient center, a beautiful place to walk for admirers of architecture and history.

11:46 Musée d’Art Roger Quilliot. Not much of an art collection, but it’s all we’ve got.

11:47 Les Pistes. Michelin’s factories are close by, with the strange-looking enclosed ramps for testing tires. Steam rises from the complex, but it seems half of the huge walled grounds and buildings are no longer in use.

Stop for a convoy of trucks heading to the Bank of France’s money-printing facility on the west side of town.

11:50 Lycée Ambrose Brugière. Nobody around. Must not be lunchtime yet.

11:51 Les Vignes. Get off here to go to the indie movie theater the Rio. *cough* *gag* The guy who just got on isn’t technically smoking, but he reeks so badly it makes me ill.

11:53 Collège Albert Camus. Here it’s lunchtime, and we’re flooded with junior high-schoolers (“college” is grades 7-9 or so in France; lycée is high school).

11:55 Hauts de Chanturge. Another huge subsidized housing project. Most of the kids who just got on now get off. Why didn’t they just walk?

11:56 Croix de Neyrat, more of the same.

11:57 Champratel. End of the line. Everybody off.

Stir crazy

I haven't been travelling in ages. I really must go. Someplace, anyplace! Friday has been reserved as an off day. What can be done with one day? One day in the in-between season, with no snow, no green anywhere. Find out Saturday!

Here we go!

I've got a list of more than 300 families to go over at work, verifying that the nomenclature of the mutation is correct, and that all the right tests were done. We're combing through the archives, updating, and making sure there aren't any mistakes hiding.

The plan is to divvy up the work and go through, say, 30 dossiers at each meeting. Today was the first such meeting, with an hour and a half to get started. Perhaps we won't do all 30, of course.

How many did we get done?

Zero.

How many did we look at and decide what other data to gather before considering the case done?

Three.

How long will it take me to dredge up the data from the archives and go over it all again?

Er, how long is it until the next meeting?

The Quantum Physics of Horses in Cancer Treatment

A woman called the lab today wanting to establish a major collaboration between my institute and, well, I’m not sure who. She said her name quickly at the beginning and neither she nor I are native french speakers.

She dived into some spiel about cancer patients and horses and quantum physics. I should obviously be interested. I do work in a cancer research institute, after all, don’t I? Well, horses get cancer, and they’ve treated them, and their high frequency helps them get better. If I’m a cancer researcher, I should know all about this latest research. So we could apply that to patients. We could put the patients, when they’re not in the hospital, with the horses, and the low frequency of the patients which is keeping them sick, could be corrected by the horses and make them better.

Er, come again? Frequency? What frequency?

The energy frequency.

Ah, what energy frequency?

It’s quantum physics! You do have a notion about quantum physics, don’t you?

Indeed, I do have some idea of what quantum physics is about, and that’s precisely why I’d like a more coherent explanation here.

The horses have high frequency. They have good energy. Cancer patients have low frequency, bad energy.

Okaay...

The horses can transfer their energy to the patients and slow their cancer. It’s the immune system. Energy boosts the immune system. It’s quantum physics!

Like, duh!

Could you send me some references there, so I could study the issue before responding?

No, of course not. This has never been done. That’s why I’m calling, to start this project.

In another conversation, I may have been interested in hearing some details about how the caller imagined this research. It is well established that a robust immune system helps fight cancer, and many things can boost the immune system. Most notably (and neglectedly), well-being is good for immune function, so whatever we can do for patients’ well-being, whether it be sending them to the local thermal spa (in an actual ongoing research project), to having a hairdresser at the hospital, to keeping their social networks intact, we’re in favor of it.

But the way the caller browbeat me with her magic words, brandishing Quantum Physics! as if that made everything very scientific and I was quite dull not to grasp the obvious, the way she evoked real science (immune function) through the voodoo of “energy transfer” and “frequencies”, made me run.

Drop the smoke and mirrors and we can have a real discussion.