Conferences are Soooooo Much Better in Person. Zoom and Hybrid are a Different Event.

La Maison de la Chimie, Paris

At the beginning of June, I went to a Science and Diplomacy conference hosted by La Maison de la Chimie, Paris. I have written about the conference and some of the people I met there. 

In addition to listening to some fascinating presentations, the conference itself was like a demonstration of what is lost when conferences are on line or hybrid.  I may sound like a kid talking about his favorite parts of school, but it is really true that, for me, the best parts of the two-day conference were the lunches, the dinner, the coffee breaks, and the hallway.  

I really liked hearing Matthew Adamson talk about uranium mining as part of his presentation on Cold War weapons and resources.  During the break after his talk, we spoke about how resource maps influence industry, and how maps affect military strategy.

During lunch the next day, Adamson and I talked about his career path from grad student in Indiana and Paris, then professor in Budapest. Across from me was Fintan Hoey, a professor of history at Franklin University Switzerland. He is from Ireland, studies the modern of Japan particularly during the Cold War.  His best stories were about working in the Italian-speaking part of Switzerland and learning the language of his region. 

I turned to my right at the same lunch and talked to Maritza Gomez about her presentation on an attempt by equatorial countries to claim their sovereign territory extended into space, at least as far as the orbits of geosynchronous satellites. She told me about her life in California, then studying in Germany and continuing her studies in Mexico.

Another hallway conversation was with John Krige. He spoke as part of the public panel on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the effects of Europe stopping all collaboration with Russian scientists just four days after the Russia started the war. Krige's presentation was clear and stark that the war will cause pain across Europe and the world. 

At the conference dinner I sat across from Nestor Herran, a professor of the history of science at The Sorbonne in Paris. We talked about his research in Cold War nuclear technology in Britain and elsewhere.  I told him I was a Cold War airman on a crew that did live-fire static test of Minuteman missiles and later a tank commander on the East-West German border, so had two different "ground-level" perspectives on the Cold War and the nuclear threat.  

After a while, Nestor said, "I am 50 years old and this is the first time I have had a long conversation with a career soldier."  We talked about how much the military is separate from the larger culture in countries with voluntary service and who serves in the military.  I could tell him I had not met a lot of historians of science in uniform.  

Apparently, I am very good at dinner because one of the conference organizers, Charlotte Abney Saloman, invited me to join her and her mom, who was visiting Paris, for dinner the evening the conference ended. 

I'm sure I will have to use Zoom in the future for book groups or other events where meeting in person is not possible.  But this conference showed me why people get together for conferences.  Zoom has no hallways, coffee breaks, or shared meals. 

                  

When a Plan (or a Bone) Breaks, My Mind is Alive with 'What's Next?"

Yesterday, I checked in for a flight from Paris to Rome, started my train trip to the airport, and got a message saying the flight was cancelled. "No further information is available at this time."  

I got off the train at the next stop and mapped a trip to Gare de Lyon the station where trains leave Paris toward the Alps and Italy.  I checked several possibilities, then made reservations for what I hope is the most reliable option.  

It's not that I want my plans to fall apart, but when it happens, I feel and odd kind of joy.  Once plans are made, travel is passive. Sit on the plane or train until the destination.  But when plans fall apart, I can go into action.  My mind races with possibilities.  I look at weather, news reports, and feel exhilarated when a new plan comes together.   In this case, staying in Paris would get me to Turin, Italy, by noon, and Rome by 8pm.  I got a cheap hotel near the train station and left Paris at 6:46am.  

Part of my happiness when I redo broken plans is experience. I have done this a lot, so I know what to expect. But I still have to deal with the situation as it is. It's like broken bones in that way. Each broken bone hurts like Hell, but by the 40th broken bone, I knew how the recovery would go and was excited about the surgery--it makes the healing process faster.  

Part of it is also something I looked for in all of my kids and in soldiers I was in charge of: How would they respond to injury? Two of my kids got angry when they got hurt. They wanted to get back in the game or the race.  The other four wanted to heal up and re-evaluate.  

I am now on a train to Turin. I got an email from Air France this morning offering me a different flight. It was a connecting flight through Luxembourg. With all the flight cancellations, that option would give me two more chances to have a flight not take off, and possibly be in Luxembourg looking for a way to get to Rome through Switzerland.  

Laundromats Have Tourists Again!

 

Amy, Lee, Jane and John

American tourists are back in laundromats in Europe

Five years ago, I started making trips across Europe and Israel with just a backpack. Carrying just a few pieces of clothing has many advantages, but it also meant weekly trips to laundromats.  I like doing laundry, but the laundromats turned out to be much more fun than I expected. 

Other tourists from all over the world use laundromats in big cities so I met some very interesting people while resupplying myself with clean clothes.  But COVID changed laundromats just as it changed so many other things.  This current trip I am on is my fifth trip to Europe since July of last year.  

Until last week, I did not see any tourists in laundromats from France to Poland. At the beginning of this trip, I washed clothes in Rome in an empty laundromat.  But last Thursday, I went to a laundromat near the Pantheon and met three sisters traveling together in France. Actually, there are four sisters, one was off doing something else.  

Amy, Lee and Jane are currently living in Chicago, DC and Detroit.  We talked for a while about where they had already been--the Louvre, Versailles, and many other Paris destinations. The next day they were going on a tour of the Normandy coast.  They have another week in Paris then back to America.  

A few minutes before the laundry was dry, Jane's husband John joined us.  He saw my armor tattoo. He had an uncle who was a tank commander in World War II.  

Next week I am staying in a monastic guest house which has its own washer-dryer so I won't need a laundromat.  

In the same laundromat in which I met Amy, Lee and Jane, I met a couple from Australia and a bike racer from California. That was in 2017. The story is here.   

My favorite laundromat story was from 2019 in Jerusalem. That is here. 

Matthew Adamson on Academic Career Paths and the Interplay of Maps and Reality

 

At a conference on the history of science and diplomacy in Paris, Matthew Adamson talked about the history of uranium exploration and mining in the nuclear age. He had a mercator map of the world with all known uranium deposits as part his presentation.  

At a break, we had a chance to talk about the interplay between resource maps and the people who use them.  As the maps become more detailed and more reliable, they exert influence on those who use them.  When I worked for a global chemical company, the map of actual and potential raw material became a big part of business growth meetings.  Each potential source of uranium can be a source of peaceful power or weapons.  Adamson's map has business, regulatory and threat dimensions. 

At lunch we talked about he came to be Director of Academic and Student Affairs at McDaniel College's campus in Budapest, Hungary, as well as External Researcher at the University of Veterinary Medicine in Budapest advising on the history and institutional context of use of radioisotopes.

Adamson studied French and French literature at James Madison University, graduating in 1996, then began a PhD program at Indiana University in the history and philosophy of science and technology. He completed the program in 2005. But in 2001 he had moved to France as part of his doctoral studies and met his future wife, who was from Budapest.  

She got a job in Budapest in 2005. Matthew followed and found a post at an McDaniel College Budapest and has been there ever since.  

I hope to see Matthew at a future conference, or possibly if my future travels take me through Budapest. 

The conference was organized by the Science History Institute at La Maison de la Chimie.

Where Does Politics End? On Earth? How Far Into Space?

Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, 

a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico

At the conference on science diplomacy since World War II, one fascinating presentation was on a group of equatorial countries who in 1976 decided to claim the territory directly above their countries in space. These countries in South America, Africa and Asia were among the many non-aligned states who did not take the side of either the western democracies or the communist world.  

Pointing to a mercator map with the countries proposing the pact highlighted, Gloria Maritza Gomez Revuelta, a PhD candidate at El Colegio de Mexico, said the United States and Russia were both launching satellites into geosynchronous orbits for communication and surveillance.  The satellites travelled in space at the same speed as the earth's orbit so they remained in position until they fell from orbit.  As this band of space filled with satellites, the countries with land underneath the satellites wanted to control the space above their land.

The pact never became reality. In the discussion after the talk, several people discussed the issue of what a country can claim as sovereign territory. Where does space begin? At the limits of the atmosphere? Higher?  Gomez Revuelta said Hannah Arendt said politics is part of life on earth. 

Arendt opens her book The Human Condition by saying it was an event “second in importance to no other.”  Sputnik meant that human beings had taken a real step toward actualizing a long-wished-for goal: to escape the earth. In Arendt’s telling of the story, earth alienation is part and parcel of the all-too-human dream of freeing ourselves from our humanity. Sputnik’s launch thus signified not simply the lowering of humanity’s stature, but humanity's destruction of humanity itself. (from the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College)

The discussion continued raising serious issues, and also the issue of how far into space could an equatorial country claim territory? The solar system? The Milky Way?  The entire universe? 

The discussion continued at lunch about Hannah Arendt and space and the Cold War and world politics today.                                

Science Diplomacy Conference in Paris at La Maison de la Chimie

 

Maison de la Chimie, Paris

On June 13 and 14, I attended a conference on science and diplomacy in Paris at the Maison de la Chimie.  The two-day conference had been organized long before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.  The title of the conference:

Diplomatic Studies of Science: The Interplay of Science, Technology, and International Affairs after the Second World War

Most of the conference was the unchanged from its planned format in 2020, but the public panel on the first evening was about how governments and international scientific organizations in most of the world acted within 48 hours to exclude Russian researchers from international collaboration.  

The six panelists had a variety of views about what could be done and could not be done now that Russia invaded a neighbor.  One of the panelists, Joachim Hornegger, a university president in Germany, can help Ukrainian students at his school, but not Russian students. He said many of the Russian students say they are against the war and do not want to return to Russia, but by law he cannot provide any assistance.

John Krige, a professor emeritus at Georgia Institute of Technology and author of ten books on science diplomacy, said Russia was completely in the wrong to invade Ukraine and even the issue of collaborating with individual scientists who say they are against the war is difficult: support for Putin among Russians in science and technology increased after Putin seized Crimea and invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014.  Other Russians in science and technology emigrated after the seizure of Crimea.

The conference was part of an annual series since 1998 by the Science History Institute of Philadelphia called the Gordon Cain Conference.  I worked at the Institute from 2002-2015 so I attended several of the Cain conferences. Some of them were among the best history of science presentations I have ever heard. I am going to write separately about a few of these conferences. I will also write more about other participants I met and talks I heard at this year's conference.

In two weeks I hope to be in Warsaw, Poland, volunteering at the main train station to help feed the hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  Since March I have been volunteering with #RazomforUkraine in New Jersey making combat first aid kits for the Ukrainian Army.  Going to this conference and hearing how sanctions affect research and policy around the world gave me another dimension of how the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing suffering everywhere. 

Ukrainian in Paris Talks About Her Family

 

I walked around a corner onto Boulevard St. Germain and saw a sign saying that the little park behind the fence had been part of a refugee for Ukrainians since 1937.  The official name is Square Tarass Chevtchenko (see below) it is also called "L'angle" or "the corner." 

The sign on fence (above) says

The corner of Blvd. Saint-Germain and and rue des Saints-Peres is known by its proximite to the Greco-Catholic Ukrainian cathedral and Tarass Chevtchenko Square has become since the second half of the 20th Century a place of important ,meetings in the immigration of Ukrainians to France. Dispossessed of the rights, their identities, their land by foreign powers, the Ukrainians emigrated to France in dozens of thousands where their work has created and incontestable heritage of their social, cultural, economic and political history.

Inside the park, I talked to a woman with her son waiting to go into the Church next door.  She told me that she had moved to France more than a decade ago with her son. She was from Bucha. Two months ago she was able to get her mother to Paris, but her father is still in Bucha.  She is hoping to get her father out of Ukraine. I am not using her name because she wants to remain anonymous for the safety of her father.

Statue of Tarass Chevtchenko

Entrance of the Cathedral

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Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (Ukrainian: Тарас Григорович Шевченко; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861), also known as Kobzar Taras, or simply Kobzar (a kobzar is a bard in Ukrainian culture), was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist and ethnographer. His literary heritage is regarded to be the foundation of modern Ukrainian literature and, to a large extent, the modern Ukrainian language though it is different from the language of his poems. Shevchenko is also known for his many masterpieces as a painter and an illustrator.

He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts. Though he had never been the member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in 1847 Shevchenko was politically convicted for explicitly promoting the independence of Ukraine, writing poems in the Ukrainian language, and ridiculing members of the Russian Imperial House. Contrary to the members of the society who did not understand that their activity led to the idea of the independent Ukraine, according to the secret police, he was the champion of independence.

Back to LeMans: another look at a the greatest endurance race course

Part of my visit to France in February was a long walk around the race course at Circuit de Sarthe where the 24-hour race at LeMans is held.  I took more pictures in the museum.  

I first visited in November 2019. I had planned to walk the course, but there was a 24-hour race in its final hours when I arrived in the afternoon, so I watched the race. This time I walked along that paths near the course and looked at the track from different vantage points. 

Some day I would like to see the race at night--headlights blazing in the dark at more than 200 mph on the longest stretch of the Mulsanne.  Here is the post on that visit.

I was in Paris in November 2019 during the premiere of the movie "LeMans 66" which was called "Ford vs. Ferrari" in American.

Below are more pictures from Museum of the 24 Hours of LeMans.

Other posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

Maison Fournaise, My Favorite Restaurant in Paris is a Victim of COVID

 

Last month when I visited Paris, I took the suburban train to Chatou to visit a restaurant that had closed in March of 2020 and never reopened.  That restaurant is Maison Fournaise. It is located on an island in the Seine northwest of Paris on a narrow island called Ile des impressionistes. There is a small impressionist art museum on the island that is still open, but Maison Fournaise closed after being in business from 1857 to 1906 as a restaurant and boat rental business, then reopened in 1990 closing again in 2020.

In its first life, Maison Fournaise drinking spot for artists who would become some of the most famous French impressionists. Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "The Boating Party" on the porch at Maison Fournaise.  The scene became the business card and symbol of the restaurant.  

Inside the restaurant are several sketches on the walls, carefully covered in lucite.  The sketches were caricatures done by Henri Matisse.  The owner told me that Matisse drank too much and was in love with one of the bar maids. He would come to the bar, flirt with the bar maid, and drink too much.  When he drank more than he could pay for, he paid his bar tab with sketches of prominent customers.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted "The Boating Party" 

on the porch at Maison Fournaise. 

I first learned about the restaurant in the late 1990s from a colleague, Alain Mathurin, who showed me several restaurants where I could host business meetings and even impress French guests. Twice I rented the same porch for a business meeting. At each event one of the French guests said they had lived in Paris all their lives and never heard of Maison Fournaise.

When I visited recently the porch that was the scene of "The Boating Party" was stripped of furniture. Some volunteers are preserving the building and hoping the restaurant has a third life. 

Even on a cold, gray day in February, the area is lovely.  The next island to the south, around the bend of the Seine, is the setting for one of Guy de Maupassant's sad love stories.  

On a summer evening with a late sunset, on the porch, watching barges and pleasure boats slip silently past, there could hardly be a better place in the world for dinner.  I hope the restaurant somehow returns. It is a victim of COVID and a loss mourned by many, including me. 

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

The Museum of the Great War, Somme, France

At the end of my trip to Europe last month, I visited the Museum of the Great War in Somme.  The museum is in a castle near the site of the one of the most horrible battles in World War One.  

The museum displays the things each soldier carried in the armies in the battle: clothes, mess gear, ammo, weapons, cleaning supplies and much more are displayed lying flat in areas recessed into the floor.  The displays have some of the feeling of graves.  

 As a soldier, I had the same kind of equipment I had to lay out for inspection. All the soldiers in the unit lay out their gear in a very specific pattern to make it easier for the their leaders to inspect the equipment. Anything missing is glaring when forty soldiers all lay out their equipment.  

Here are some of the displays from the Great War Museum:

German soldier

French officer uniforms

German uniform items

Machine guns

Machine guns

Medical equipment

Nurse uniform

American Soldier

Just a few miles away was the Red Baron Memorial on the side of a country road.

Waterloo: A Visit to the Museum and Battlefield

 

On a cold, clear, windy afternoon earlier this month I visited the museum and battlefield of Waterloo, Belgium: the scene of the final defeat of the Napoleon and his army in 1815.

When I visit the scenes of great battles, I try to imagine myself as the 20-year-old I was when I first made sergeant, leading a squad of men in the face of thousands of enemy soldiers. Chances of me reaching my 21st birthday look very dim in those moments.

The fields of Waterloo are open, flat and a horrible place to be a soldier.  At Gettysburg, I knew I wanted to be in the United States Army. To be in the rebel army, especially in Pickett's Charge, was to have run uphill into artillery behind stone walls.  

At Waterloo, everyone was on rolling open ground, the difference was timing and maneuver. The French were out-flanked, out-maneuvered and finally defeated.  Napoleon Bonaparte was neither the first nor the last general defeated in part by his own arrogance. 

The museum is beautiful and is all underground:

There is a delightful collection of contemporary propaganda:

A huge diorama places all of the armies on the field.  A fixed model can only capture a moment, not the complex maneuvering that led to Napoleon's defeat, but it is nice to be able to look at the model then go out and scan the field.

And in the gift shop, there is a Napoleonic War chess set and the t-shirt I came home with: