Feliz Lo que sea - Happy Whatever - Best for 2017!!!

In the traditional way of the Piterbarg-Casagrande's here is the Greetings for the end of 2016 and the Best Wishes for 2017:

And Best Wishes for what still is coming! Y los mejores deseos para lo que se venga! Meilleurs voeux pour ce encore est à venir!

Feliz Año Nuevo!

Happy New Year!

Is-Sena t-Tajba

Gezuar Vitin e Ri

Snorhavor Nor Tari

Soursdey Chhnam Tmei

FELIÇ ANY NOU

Xin Nian Kuai Le

GELUKKIG NIEUWJAAR!

Felican Novan Jaron

Bonne Annee

Prosit Neujahr

L'Shannah Tovah

Naye Varsha Ki Shubhkamanyen

Selamat Tahun Baru

Sal -e- no mobarak

Felice anno nuovo

Akimashite Omedetto Gozaimasu

Godt Nyttar

Nupela yia i go long yu

Manigong Bagong Taon!

Feliz Ano Novo

Subha Aluth Awrudhak Vewa

Gott nytt ar!

Sawadee Pee Mai

Wait! But Why did I say the traditional greetings? It has been a long time since the last one, and it has never been a lasting tradition in the family! However looking forward why not re-starting it, what do you say?

The end of 2015 and star of 2016 went silent, and the year went also silent in this blog.

One picture is worth thousands of words: take a look at the 2016 in review so...

We are still here, here is France, here is Paris. It has been 3 years + and counting. The little one is French, and the cadette has mastered the French and doing pretty good in the equivalent of the Argentinean's secundaria or the american's high school, or sort of.

My French keeps in the original state: horrible... I have to admit it improved however slowly. I can pick up all the words, however not all the meanings. And I could went to the police station, or Prefecture, and process the swap of my Maltese license driver for the French one, and fight some smalls street battles.

The honorary holder of the name of this blog, is mastering French, and in the last years has been through hardened battles against the you do not speak French situation, and manage to navigate the French bureaucracy, school systems, la mairie and put the daughters in tennis classes, gym, athleticism, piano, choir, and wrote extensive reports from Cote d'Ivoire and New Caledonia in the last UN missions in French!

The French system however manages to keep its head high and above the water and yet we couldn't complete some paperwork yet!

The 2016 moved from a 2015 with still plenty of trips abroad in my work, to a more settle one in France and Spain, part of my French improvement. And we did several trips across the French country which is a beautiful place to visit. Normandy, the south and trip to Italy and back through the Alps were part of the accumulating album of pictures from there and here. The Loire is a place that we are knowing the more the better, like Normandy, and we have been visiting all these landmarks that we learnt in history class: D-Day beaches, the castle of Guillaume the Conqueror in Falaise, the tapestry of Bayeuax, and the tombs of Eleanor the Aquitaine, some of the few to name it.

A botched trip to New Caledonia replaced by a hurried visit to our beloved little island of Malta (lately in the World wide news, like always in the 10K years of past european history). Visit to our friends, and known and other places that we didn't visited before (!), and 2 more divers in the family. Emma break through the click of buoyancy, and she can became a great diver, and Eloisa started her first steps as a PADI Seal team.

Another trip to the Canarias to visit a volcanic place, and the underwater for Emma to get her next step as a diver: PADI Advance!

It has been a bumpy last quarter! With a broken hip in Argentina and trips on emergency to the far away South. Everything looks like on track again for a better 2017, but we will not be missing the last months of the 2016...

The world went crazy?

After the Brexit we got Trump... and some other events that got nasty close to our place. For other people not far away is a real nightmare and hell on Earth going on for years already. And everybody things the world's gone mad... Anyone following us knows that the writer here is an optimist. Supported by the massive arguments of Pinker's The Better Angels of our Nature, here the one who subscribes keeps his optimism high. Pinker si not the only one being optimistic about the future and knowing it has been better for several decades and improving.

So, forget some potentially dangerous clowns in charge of the current superpower in command of this blue dot, and remember again Carl Sagan's words:

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994"

And for more, let's take a review about the great things that with amazing ingenuity this particular species, the Homo sapiens, keeps bringing on:

• we put another small robot around Jupiter, July 4th: Juno mission. From the first time Galileo set his telescope on it, and the Voyager's missions, Jupiter is a source of wonder and more and more questions. In 1610 Galileo shook the vision of our position in the Universe, today we want to know more to understand how our Solar System formed, what's beneath its amazing clouds and storms, and learn about its nature and evolution;
• New Horizons and Beyond: October 25th the last bit of data of the Pluto flyby arrived to Earth. What a mission! If you imagined that Pluto was a dark, icy and grey boring dwarf planet, re-imagine!. "Even today, New Horizons captures our imagination, rekindles our curiosity, and reminds us of what’s possible", said NASA’s Director of Planetary Science Jim Green. And this mission is not over: it is moving fast to the Kuiper Belt aimed at the 2014 MU69. Landing in Pluto?
• In January 2016 astronomers announced another empirical test of Einstein's General Relativity theory: Gravitational Waves were found! As if we thought that it was not tested enough!. The detection happened in September 2015, and the ripples caused by the massive collision of 2 black holes. Mr Spock should have been delighted about it!
• it looked like the standard model was gone (here a brief intro to sm), but no, it still holds firmly! Which is kinda of a big news still!
• We think of our consciousness as something precious, our precious, so much that we are always pushing the bar a little higher for any breakthrough on AI. Google translator break through is amazing and it is the culmination of many years of research in one direction. Turing will be proud of it. What better test to it than using Jorge Luis Borges's text Pierre Menard, el autor del Quijote with Google translator now!
• Portugal run on renewables energy for 4 days: yes, we can do it
• Astronomers found the closest to Earth and potentially habitable planet! Wow!
• You know that in these blogs we like crocs, and also this year the biggest fossil of crocodile was found!
• Water in Ceres! Yet you do not think it is cool!? What about this from Phil Plait: "So Ceres is loaded with water. We kinda knew that, to be honest, but now we know it’s all over the place. That’s very interesting indeed; future astronauts need water to survive; besides its obvious use for drinking, the oxygen can be broken off to make air, and it can also be processed to make rocket fuel. Ceres may become a way station (or even an industrial complex) for future humans exploring the solar system"

Until the next entry!