Everything's Corner

Of spring and autumn - and past revolutions

2011-10-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

This year, the four seasons seem to have brought with them more than just weather changes as they have traditionally done. It looks that the airs of spring and autumn this year have carried a strange scent that has grown in the youth of various countries around the world a sense of frustration against the current world order. It has brought forward a generation that feels that in the future, they will be unable to make a decent living the way we (or better said, up until the generation of the baby-boomers).

That way, this year we have experienced the Arab Spring and the American Autumn. In between, we have also witnessed demonstrations in other places - such as London, Madrid, Santiago and Tel Aviv. Some of them have had political interests - like overthrowing the governments in the pursuit of a new political system, as was the case in Tunisia and Egypt (and the NATO-backed civil war in Libya). Some others, looking to change the social system (like the case of Tel Aviv and Santiago), and some others, advocating for a different economic order (like the protests in New York). Youth protests are the trend of the year.

Despite the fact that every protest has been different, all of them seem to converge at the same point: There is a new, massive, and united generation of people who are discontent, and are not being afraid to show their unhappiness with their living conditions - past and future. Students are graduating from universities and are unable to find enough jobs. For those who do find jobs, the cost of living seems to be too overwhelming to sustain with their paycheques: Rents, mortgages, taxes, groceries, and so on, add up to create a cyclical economic burden that a lot of young people -regardless of their educational level- are barely able to cope with. To that, add the unhappiness of having a small percentage of the population controlling most of the wealth and power in societies. Income gaps are expanding.

Sounds familiar? It should. Historically, the mix of unhappy people - small rich and powerful elites - increasing income gap has led to revolution. Take the case of the French Revolution for instance, where King Louis XVI's absolute-monarchy style, a very select elite of powerful and reach people, and a great majority of unhappy French citizens led to the overthrow of the royalty of France - giving birth to the new French Republic that promised a more fair economic and social system under it's three pillars Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

The only difference between the French Revolution and the current awakenings around the world are the global aspect of the latter. The protests don't seem to demand a change in the system of a single country or region - but it has acquired a global sense that goes according to the current economic trend - globalization.

It is undoubtable that these protests are far from done, and that they definitely are a symptom of a great problem of our times. Perhaps, as the demonstrators believe, the current world order is not effective anymore and has already served its purpose for as long as it was effective, and deeper changes are required in order to foster further progress to our civilization. Perhaps something better lies ahead... a more equal and fair future for everybody. So we hope.

Photo: Reuters / Hurriyet Daily

Nature of Love (The Golden Rule)

2011-09-05T23:25:00.003-07:00

It is said that love is of different types: Love for a partner, love for a parent, love for a child, love for the Universe, love for ourselves. Every kind of love is unique, and all of them are of a different breed that cannot be compared to another kind of love because, at the end of the day, all of them are not the same. Isn't love just love?

The concept of love, as we know it today, is a mere bastardization created and propagated by the media and the entertainment industries. Because of such wrongful promotion and bastardization, the idea of love in the eyes of the most vulnerable minds has become synonimous of the feeling of butterflies in the stomach, sex, and dependence to a partner. Love has been degraded to a purely physical emotion that people crave to satisfy a need.

Of course, this is where the differentiation of types of love comes into play, as for instance, the love for a child is different in that neither sex nor the butterflies in the stomach are features that appear -although dependence traits still persist-. Likewise, the love for a parent, or for a relative, cannot be the same type of love as the love for a child or for a partner because of unique contexts for each.

Our ancient sages tought us that love is only of a single kind: love is love. As stated by the words of our ancient sages, "love thy neighbour as you love thyself". This well known versicle, also commonly known as 'The Golden Rule', in fact suggests that the love we have for another person not only can, but should, be of the same nature as the love we have for our own self. How is this possible?

The only way in which we can understand all types of loves as one is knowing what love is about. It is necessary to understand that love is not a physical need of our Body; as a matter of fact, love is more intimately connected to our other two levels of existence (Mind and Soul). As such, love is a capacity to which only a deep level of consciousness can grant us access: We can only love someone by bonding to them mentally and spiritually.

To love someone, then, is to connect to them in Mind and Soul. By doing that connection, it is possible for us to get closer to them and actually being able to feel them in a spiritual sense. We can feel their pains, their happiness, their frustrations, their pleasures and their desires. Likewise, we are able to understand their feelings and to connect with them in a way that we care about their lives, ideas, feelings and thoughts in the same way that we would care about our own life, ideas, feelings and thoughts. We care about them as we care about us: The very nature of The Golden Rule.

In that regard, loving a life partner is not different than loving a child, or loving a parent, or loving a neighbour, or even loving the Universe. Love is a bond, a connection that allow two separate entities to compliment and support each other, eventually resembling more a single but well reinforced entity aligned towards fulfillment.

Time as a relative element

2011-06-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

From our perspective, the fourth physical dimension is straight forward in its strongest sense. It is a straight line that we call time, and we all travel through it in a direction that goes from past to present, from present to future, and from future - deeper into future itself. For everybody and everything in our world, time is a one way journey.

But despite the fact that time (and by consequence, our lives) seem to travel in an unavoidably straight direction, there still appears to be an intimate relation that influences present by our past, our future by our present, and even past by our future. Indeed, it is easy to understand that present and past are directly related because there cannot be a present without a past. Likewise, since present is future's past, the relation between both is akin to that of present and past. But what can we tell about the influence of our future in both in our present and our past? Is there even a influence at all of our future over our past?

In our world, and our average understanding of Universe as a whole, that is impossible. Future only happens because past and present have already happened and shaped the direction of said future. But even from a scientific point of view, we acknowledge that our perception and understanding of the Universe is very limited. For instance, Einstein explained that time and space are relative, and both can be bent and altered by each other. Likewise, quantum physics agree in that our potential understanding of the Universe is very restricted, since all we can potentially study and understand from it is whatever we can sense from our 5 physical senses only. There is so much more that surrounds us, which we can't possibly perceive - let alone understand. We are aware of our own inherent human limits, and all of our knowledge, perceptions and understanding will be limited by them in consequence.

These principles support the theory that the Universe is, in fact, multi-dimensional (as opposed to restricted to the 3 dimensions -height, width, depth- plus the 4th dimension, time, that we can perceive from our perspective). If that is true, then time is a dimension that can be modified from other dimensions beyond our capabilities of understanding, in a way that our past, present and future could be occurring simultaneously, but in different dimensions and in different spaces.

This knowledge is a wake up call to realize that every single moment in our lives counts. Despite the fact that we seem to have only control over our present, in fact we have also control over our past and future. The decisions we make every second have a repercussion in who we are, and who will we be, and potentially who we were some time before. At the end of the day, time not a straight line and sometime, somewhere, we can find ourselves coming back in it as well. Thus even if we made mistakes in our past, correcting them in the present will also correct our past and will allow for a better future, which will in turn help us fulfill our mission in the Universe.

Does the body rule the mind, or does the mind rule the body?

2011-06-06T00:00:00.000-07:00

Ever since I heard "Still Ill" by The Smiths for the first time, I have been wondering whether the body rules the mind or the mind rules the body. Indeed, "does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?" makes for an excellent line in a song, but it is nevertheless a valid dilemma (which, in my opinion, only Morrissey -one of the best, if not the best, lyricists of our time- could have posed so beautifully in a song) that goes beyond a mere timeless song.

This question has a more of a spiritual value than a musical one. It requires, first of all, a definition of what is the body and what is the mind. To put it in simple terms:

The body represents all of our physical existence - that is, our physical needs (eating, sleeping, etc.) plus all of the physical stimuli that we perceive through our 5 senses.
The mind is our connection to the Infinite, the conscience that sets us in a higher level of understanding of the Universe as compared to animals and other living beings.

Put in those terms, it would appear that the body and the mind are in fact two separate entities, completely independent one from the other. But that could not be a true statement either, since we are a single entity and both our mind and our body are part of ourselves. How, then, do they relate to each other to create a unity in our existence?

The secret lies in the heart. Our heart is the connection between the body and the mind. It is the core that keeps the body alive by pumping blood, oxygen and nutrients to the rest of our body. In turn, our body serves as a vessel to keep our mind (and hence our connection to the Universe) running in our physical world. In turn, the heart is a vessel associated to elemental parts of our consciousness, such as emotions and feelings. The heart is indeed a central piece key of our existence and the one that allow us to be connected between the physical world and the Universe.

In that spirit, the body cannot rule the mind, and the mind cannot rule the body, since they are both separate entities. Each of them have serve completely different purposes in our existence. Yet, they keep us together in mind and body as a single being by connecting one to the other one through the heart, and hence through our feelings and emotions. Then body, heart and mind are three attributes that make us rational beings capable to assimilate our existence in the physical world like the earthly animals, yet able to connect to rationality and a higher spiritual level like no other species on Earth.

Hidden beauty

2011-05-28T18:58:00.001-07:00

Funny that we, limited beings, could spend a lifetime looking for goodness in life. We could easily spend every day and every night, every hour and every minute regretting its absence. We could pray every morning and every evening for it to come to us. We could do all that, even though we know it's here by our side, all around us. It has always been here. It has never left. But for us, limited beings, it is easier to ignore the goodness since we take it for granted.

For us, it is easier to perceive all the negativity in our life and assimilate it as our own. We get a bittersweet joy from thinking that our life is plagued with problems, even when those problems might not exist and we create an image on them in our mind: Our lives are hard, our lives are boring, our lives are lonely, our lives are empty. This or that person does not accept us as we are, this or that group does not listen to us, someone does not like us, someone rejected us, someone laughed at us and we dare caring about them. We are not smart enough, we are not pretty enough, we are not good enough. Life is full of hardship... All these ideas take precedence over all the goodness in our lives.

The truth is, goodness is all around us. We have physical goodness in staying healthy, waking up tucked into a warm bed to the light of another day, enjoying a warm shower with clean water and beautiful scents, dressing clean clothes, breathing the fresh air, and perceiving our world by seeing, touching, smelling, tasting and hearing what surrounds us. We get goodness out of the people that care for us, who listen to our thoughts, who are interested in our well being. We have to spiritual goodness in connecting to our soul and to the universe where we live. There is goodness in everything. We just choose to ignore it.

The secret is that goodness, just like anything else in life, comes in small amounts at a time. Sometimes it slaps us in our face, yet it remains unnoticed to our limited senses. We discard it thinking that there is always something better waiting for us, because goodness is not good enough for us: I deserve a better partner, I deserve a better job, I deserve a better house, I deserve better food and better clothes. If you really do, concentrate on that and when the time is due, it will come into your life. But we live in the present, we live in the here and in the now, and for all the goodness that is here and now with us, we should be grateful.

So be grateful for every little piece of goodness in your life. It is a gift to you.

The end of Osama, the joy of a nation?

2011-05-03T22:04:00.001-07:00

Osama Bin Laden is dead. That is the news that shook the world last Sunday, when the U.S. president, Barack Obama, made a public appearance to inform the world about the end of Osama Bin Laden. The announcement spread around the world in no time, and very soon the images of happy Americans celebrating the killing of Osama were available on the mass media.

With all that in scene, I couldn't help but to have a flashback to September 11, 2001. The image of the World Trade Center in New York falling down before the unbelieving eyes of the world, while a group of people in the Gaza Strip and West Bank rejoicing reappeared in my mind. The view of people singing, dancing, baking cakes and eating sweets to celebrate the death and destruction of civilians elsewhere was frankly disgusting. How could people cheer such a coward act?

Back to 2011. The tables are turned around. While in Gaza a spokesman of Hamas condemned the killing of the "holy warrior" (sic) Osama Bin Laden, thousands of Americans poured into the streets to show their joy and excitement about Bin Laden's death. Despite my repulsion towards Osama Bin Laden and all that he represents, I found the celebrations to be ironically resemblant to those Palestinian celebrations of 2001. Why would the death of an individual be celebrated in such a way? Does his death make up for the damage made to the families of those lost during the different terrorist attacks orchestrated by Bin Laden and his organization? Will this end the threat that terrorism has posed against the world in the last decades? Unlikely.

The elimination of Osama Bin Laden is indeed a hit against terrorism, and should be a reminder that no terror leader is untouchable. But it should not be a matter of joyful celebration: It should be tribute to those victims who lost their lives in acts of terrorism, a bit of the justice that is long due to them.

Earthquakes, shakes and thoughts

2011-03-12T16:33:00.000-08:00

The tragic earthquake and tsunami that earlier this week shook Japan is a wake up call for us. It is a reminder that we are small and our power limited, when compared to the might of nature. It is also a reminder that we are all here to help one another, and not to fight and dominate over the others.

It is sad that only in moments like these we remember those basic concepts. Last year, it was first Haiti and then Chile who were caught in times of distress after massive earthquakes, and the world united again. A few weeks ago, th

e city of Christchurch in New Zealand went through a similar ordeal, gathering compassion and solidarity from the nations of the world. Now, it is the Japanese nation who needs from the world's solidarity to repair, wherever possible, the loss and damages caused by the massive earthquake that hit their country.

May the recovery be fast and wholesome, and may this episode unite the nations of the world and inspire us to live in peace. My heart, thoughts and sympathies are with the people of Japan.

Photo by MSNBC

Growing up

2010-10-09T01:07:00.000-07:00

Human relations are not easy. They are not even logical; we are meant to pursue what in essence makes no sense whatsoever. Giving it a second thought, it is clear that human relations are all about either trying to please another party or trying to get other people to please our own desires. And that's about it.

Why does all this comes to mind right now? Well aside from the long period of absence of my blog I have had lately, I have also had the opportunity to analize more in depth people's behaviours. That has proved to be crucial in order to understand why people act the way they do, and what can be done about it.

Bottom line, people have a real need to be noticed. No one, ever, enjoy being ignored and considered outside of the 'main circle' of friends within a group. The complexity of the relationships becomes more and more complex when men and women become older and (allegedly) more mature, because the definition of "good" and "desirable" starts to stand away from any sense of reality.

My theory is that, with age, people change. But despite the general idea that such changes are positive, I find that people change in order to accommodate themselves in a comfortable social status. A social status that is not too isolated, but it's not very far away either: A social status that will allow you to gain a social rank on your own; but which nevertheless will be hard enough to preserve.

And now, my dear people, go figure why men and women were programmed by the default by automatic greeting machines... I might have an idea now

Custom made babies, a great advancement... not

2010-01-05T15:16:00.000-08:00

An interesting article titled "Designer Babies - Like it or not, here they come" and dated on February 25, 2009, popped up as a result of a search I made on Google. There, the author debates the multiple benefits that custom-made children have, such as a lesser risk of having babies inheriting conditions from their parents. Currently, it is possible to choose the baby's gender in advance through this "technology", and not long from now, parents will even have the option of choosing the future-to-be-born's hair and eyes color, skin type, and complexion. The article claims that this "era of designer babies is officially here and there is no going back", and it might be right.

Even if this so-called technology is already available (supposedly any couple can currently go and custom-make their child's gender for only $18,400 USD), we should step back behind the hype that this could mean and really think of the consequences of having such a trend becoming mainstream. The issues that immediately come to my mind include:

The disproportion between the amount of boys and girls born each year. See, for instance, the case of China, where currently there is a remarkable amount of men not being able to find partners. And that is just one example. Give certain cultures the option to select beforehand the gender of their babies, and it won't take many generations until the ratio of men and women will be scary.
The considerable reduction of ethnicities. Let's face it, there are certain stereotypes that people tend to regard as "beautiful". Some parents would not hesitate to choose for their children certain attributes that are not proper of their race or culture. Light colored eyes, white / tanned skin, and blond hair are among other nonsense attributes that individuals would choose for their offspring. That, of course, to the expense of losing continuity on some unique, nice features that other races show too.
Genetic modification of the human race. We all know, Mother Nature does not spare us when we mess with her. Artificially modifying our genes won't go unnoticed. Eventually, the same modifications that will have reduced the chances of inheriting or developing certain medical conditions in future generations, might also potentially bring new conditions that we can't even imagine.

As far as I am concerned, there are already available a few technologies that allow to detect the risk of developing diseases in a baby and to take actionable steps to remedy that, if necessary. I don't really see what benefit will create having tailor-made babies, and in my own point of view, I think these practices should be heavily regulated or banned.

In my particular point of view, I find these new "developments" very far from exhilarating. To me, it looks more like our society, just like Aldous Huxley predicted, is moving towards the mass production of individuals in which people won't be people anymore. They will be more like products.

Photo: www.californiaprolife.org

One full decade into the 21st century! And the end of the world, v 5.0... ish

2009-12-30T23:50:00.000-08:00

Seems like yesterday when people were on a frenzy about the imminent, but catastrophic coming of the year 2000. Anybody born before 1991, or even 1992, should remember those awkward behaviours within certain clusters of society in the years between 1997 and 1999. The coming of a new century (and a new millennium), in the minds of a few hordes of individuals, meant that terrible things were coming:

Computers would collapse because of their inability to tell the difference between 1900 and the year 2000 (the famous Y2K problem), causing a worldwide chaos. Bank savings would be lost, airplanes would not be able to fly, databases would vanish... and so on>

Terrible things from the outer space would doom the Earth, for which an amazing surge of sects was witnessed worldwide. Who could forget for instance fellows like "heaven's gate" (whose website still runs, although it -obviously- hasn't been updated since 1997) committing mass suicides to 'save themselves' from the catastrophe?>

World War III would happen soon.

Maybe not World War III, but Armageddon!
Gee, even the end of the world was just about to happen!

Utter nonsense. Fast forward a whole decade, and we can look back to those days and smile to ourselves, knowing that the paranoia created around the year 2000 was simply that: Paranoia. Created because back on the 16th Century, a man named Gregory and who happened to be a Pope, calculated that exactly by that time the year should turn from 1999 to 2000. Not only that, but the world would go from the 20th to the 21st century, and a new millennium would begin.

Is our civilization really beyond that paranoia yet? It is somewhat painful to admit that it might not be the case. Well, it is indeed over for the case of the year 2000 (anybody still believing that the year 2000 did indeed bring chaos and misery upon us should be considered extremely dangerous). But what about the years to come? More specifically, what about the year 2012?

Before getting any further on the matter, here is a bit of background about the paranoia about the year 2012: The Mayans were, or are, a prominent civilization that, among other things, are credited with putting together the most accurate calendar ever made. Such calendar has proved to be accurate for predicting astronomical phenomena, for measuring beginnings and ends of seasons, years, etcetera. That calendar 'ends' on December 21, 2012: An otherwise unnoticeable event that Hollywood has used to do their business-as-usual, and by the way, to create confusion and panic among the most vulnerable sectors of society.

Whether the Mayan calculations (and for the matter, any other calculations and 'predictions' available) mean that December 21, 2012, will be the 'end of the world', 'the end of an era', 'the Day of Atonement', or whatever not, we won't know for sure. And honestly speaking, it shouldn't be anything to lose sleep about. At the end of the day, everything seems to point out again that this is just part of the constant paranoia that humans have about the end of the world. Or at least the end of the world as we know it.

My two cents: Let's sit back and work to be good as a race in the meantime. When the end times have to come -- they will. Imminently. And we, mortal humans, won't be able to do anything to impede that.

Happy new year, and let's make from our stay in this world a hell of a time!

Good deeds...?

2009-11-10T22:02:00.000-08:00

"What better place than here? What better time than now?"

That's precisely what I thought when I decided to do a good deed. And that good deed would be charity... helping the needy. Giving food to people who might be struggling to fill their bellies throughout the day. Being compassionate about those who are less fortunate and might even not have a shelter to cover themselves from rain. What can be more self rewarding than the feeling of having helped someone who needed it?

With that in mind, while walking through the aisles of a grocery store, I decided to buy two food items, some snacks. But one would be for myself, and the other one would be for a needy person. So I did. I paid for them and placed one of the snacks in the inner pocket of my coat, while I just walked out and had my snack.

It didn't take me too long to find a candidate to be recipient of my spare snack. Two blocks away from the grocery store, I found a man in his 40's (I think), not extremely bad dressed but not very tidied up indeed, asking for spare change. And right across the street... another guy, this one in his early 30's and more or less in the same physical condition, doing the same. Some 20 meters ahead, a third individual with a wildly grown white beard, worn out clothes, and probably in his 50's. Some older, some younger... but all of them in need.

Having this scenario, I entered a dilemma: Under what grounds does one decide to give food to one homeless person, but not the other one across the street? How to choose who needs it more? Should I just stand and observe which one receives coins less often than their counterparts? Or maybe we should just be able to tell by their physical aspect? Is that a reliable indicator? Is the old one always more in need than the young one? Oh well. I came up with so many questions, and with so little answers.

Determining what person was in more need was not the only issue. Think about this: how correct is it to give food to one homeless person, while just telling the others that I don't have any spare change? That is quite a tough scenario, especially if those others witnessed how you handed food to a needy guy, just like themselves. Is it more correct (or ethical, if you like) to not give anything to anybody under those conditions? How could I look those people in the eyes and tell them "sorry, I don't have anything to help you with"...?

I ended up giving the spare snack to some needy woman a few blocks further away. She was in her 50's, lacked her front teeth and appeared hungry. But let's face it, she was probably not the only hungry one there. Strangely, I thought that I'd feel alright by giving food to a needy person. But after accomplishing my good deed, the sentiment of fulfillment was not as powerful as I expected. It was very far from that. Not that I felt miserable either, but I could not avoid thinking whether she was indeed the correct choice... and all my questions just kept bouncing all around my head as I kept walking on the streets, finding panhandlers literally in every corner.

Moreover, these thoughts can be extrapolated to so many levels...

Honduran "coup d'état"?

2009-06-30T14:24:00.000-07:00

During the last couple of days, I have been following close the events related to the so-called coup d'état in Honduras, in which President Manuel Zelaya was arrested and forced into exile by the Honduran Army, and Mr. Roberto Micheletti was sworn as new President under the approval of the Parliament.

Indeed, this political crisis in Honduras has received a full coverage from the media around the world, which has been greeted by the international community with less than sympathy. Leaders from around the globe, especially from countries in the Americas, have promptly expressed their disapproval of the "coup d'état", and demanded the restoration of Mr. Zelaya in power. What the international community is ignoring though, is that Mr. Zelaya was arrested and overthrown because he refused to follow the orders issued by the Supreme Court of Honduras, which forbid him of going ahead with a referendum to modify the Constitution in order to reelect himself as President, when the current Constitution clearly prohibits reelection and its promotion, and demands that any public servant incurring on those activities to be removed from their position.

As one could expect, the first leaders to condemn the "coup" were Mr. Zelaya's closest supporters: President Hugo Chavez, from Venezuela; President Rafael Correa, from Ecuador, President Evo Morales, from Bolivia, and President Daniel Ortega from Nicaragua. All of which are loyally aligned to Mr. Chavez's ideas to shift Latin America towards socialism and, by the way, to turn their backs to the Empire (a.k.a the United states) and its allies. In fact, Chavez was prompt to threaten the newly formed government of Honduras with a military operation, should his friend and ally Manuel Zelaya not be restored in office.

No surprises up to this point. The impressive part comes when President Barack Obama, too, joins Chavez's group to declare the "coup d'état" as illegal. And so do virtually all the regional leaders, even some of the most conservatives and tending less to meddle into foreign affairs: Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, among others. But what everybody is ignoring here, as I previously pointed out, is that President Zelaya violated the national Constitution and the mandates issued by the Supreme Court of his country, which constitutes an abuse of power and hence makes him unfit to rule the country.

I seriously doubt that this is a case of coup d'état, as the regional leaders and the media alike have been reporting. This is more a case in which the people decided to overthrow a power-abusive tyrant, in the hopes of restoring real democracy and Rechtsstaat. I welcome the bravery of the people of Honduras and hope that this transition will bring a bright future to their country.

With information from Yahoo! News
Photos by Reuters and ABN, respectively

"Camping weekend" in Italy

2009-04-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

The recent earthquake in the city of L'Aquila, in central Italy, left the town in ruins and 17,000 people lost their homes. The response by the Italian government was prompt, setting tents for the affected people and providing them with food and temporary shelter; an experience that the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, suggested the homeless inhabitants of L'Aquila should enjoy as a "camping weekend".

This absurd comment, far from injecting positiveness into the public and confidence that the Italian Government is working for the well being of the people of L'Aquila, sparked a wave of criticism towards Berlusconi and raised doubts about the seriousness with which he is handling the aftermath of the devastating earthquake in Italy. It is not rocket science to figure out that the Italian public, and particularly the people directly affected by the earthquake, would not enjoy to have someone making inappropriate comments about their tragedy. And what could be worse than having an Italian leader himself making them?

But, as a report that appeared in The Guardian suggests, the help that the Italian government has provided to the people of L'Aquila is far from feeling as a "camping weekend", especially when as many as 200 people lacked a tent to sleep during the night, which was worsened by the rain and cold conditions in the area. Needless to say, the mood of the people affected by the earthquake does not allow them to enjoy the "camping weekend" at all. Despite Berlusconi's bizarre comments, it is remarkable that the Italian Government has had a fast response to help its citizens in these hard times.

My sympathy goes to the people from L'Aquila, wishing that they recover fast from this catastrophe.

Photo by AP

Terrell Owens, the newest Buffalo Bill

2009-03-09T15:16:00.002-07:00

As a Buffalo Bills fan myself, this is some news that I could just not leave out of my blog: Terrell Owens signed a one-year deal with the Bills, in a move that was completely unexpected, and also totally unusual in the traditional modus operandi of the team.

How good, or bad, is this radical step taken by the Bills? Terrell Owens is a very talented player, who has made a huge reputation with his performance on the field... and his eccentricities outside. He is famed not only for his outstanding abilities as a tight end, but also for his disciplinary slip ups that have caused some indiscipline in the teams where he has played in the past. And this is definitely a matter of interest for the Bills, who traditionally have had low-profile, young rosters of players who typically keep themselves away from the limelight of disciplinary issues.

On the other hand, the Bills' performance as a team has been far from outstanding during the last ten years. The reasons? Nothing has been proved for sure, but I would think there have been several flaws in the game structure planned by the Bills in the last decade. But, although there have been several improvements in the game style utilized by the team (most remarkably during the last season), and even though the current roster is made up by energized and passionate people, a couple of pieces are still lacking from the puzzle to achieve success: I would say those are experience, and steady perseverance. And Terrell Owens is definitely a player that will bring both to the teams' performance during the following season.

I welcome the deal signed with Terrell Owens, on a personal title I think his participation with the Bills will definitely boost up the teams' possibilities of (finally) making it to the playoffs, for the first time in about a decade.

What media don't mention about the Gaza conflict

2009-01-06T15:57:00.000-08:00

This new year 2009 has started pretty fast. And very hard as well. The news of another conflict in the Middle East is definitely not the kind of news that anybody would expect to start a new year. But, if you ask me, it was just about time until this conflict ignited.

I have heard from different newspapers and other information sources the outrage that the Israeli invasion on Gaza has brought. Thousands of people around the world have demonstrated their disapproval of the operation performed by the Israeli Army (IDF), and most of the media I've seen have clearly put Israel in negative light for its actions. Is this a fair judgment?

The bias that the media has against Israel is nothing new. Throughout the years, sources of information have depicted Israel as a repressive State that systematically abuses the rights and freedoms of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. Even though it is not a secret that the current military operation in the Gaza Strip is the result of more than 10 years of daily missiles launched from Gaza into Israel, some people have tagged the current operation as a butchery and a genocide orchestrated against Palestinian civilians by the Israeli Army. Is this an accurate judgment? Here are a few facts that should be considered when making up our minds:

Israel is a sovereign, democratic, non-repressive State (Fact: The Israeli population is comprised of Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other minorities. Despite the Jewish majority among Israeli nationals, there are Israeli Christian and Muslim minorities that enjoy full Israeli citizenship, which includes the possession of Israeli identity cards, enjoy freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and right to vote).
The current operation in Gaza is NOT aimed against Palestinian civilians, as some media have (willingly or unwillingly) reported (Facts: 800,000+ leaflets disseminated by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to Gaza civilians instructing them to stay away from terrorist and weapons storage sites // 70+ times the IDF warned populated areas before conducting airstrikes).
The Operation Cast Lead (as the military operation in Gaza has been dubbed) is the result of the ongoing missile attacks made by Hamas against Israeli civilian targets (Facts: 10,000+ rockets and mortars fired from Gaza since 2001 // 6,500+ rockets and mortars fired from Gaza since Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 // 3,200+ rockets and mortars fired from Gaza in 2008 alone // 28 deaths caused by rockets and mortars fired from Gaza into Israel since 2001. The dead include Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers).
Most of the Palestinian casualties during the Operation Cast Lead so far are a result of Hamas using the civilian population as human shields to protect themselves and their weapons across Gaza (Facts: 3 mosques in Gaza used as weapons, ammunitions and explosives depots that were struck by the Israel Defense Forces during the operation in Gaza. The strikes occurred only at night and never during prayer times, to avoid civilian casualties // 0 -that is, zero- wounded Palestinians allowed by Hamas to cross from Gaza into Egypt for treatment, whereas at least 20 Palestinians, including 2 children, have been evacuated to Israel for medical treatment).
Hamas has constantly refused to negotiate peace with Israel, ignoring the willingness of the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority to reach agreements through negotiations. Instead, Hamas believes in the jihad (holy Muslim war) to reach its goals (Facts: In 2005, Israel evacuated 100% proportion of the Gaza Strip and handed it over to the Palestinians // Hamas' charter explicitly calls for the destruction of the State of Israel and the instauration of an Islamic State in the territory that comprises Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza. // Hamas' charter also explicitly considers peace talks and negotiations a waste of time, and considers Jihad as the only path to success).

Whereas the death of Palestinian civilians must be condemned by all means, it is also true that those casualties cannot be blamed on Israel alone. Hamas has a track record of utilizing civilians to protect their own terrorist interests, and at the end of the day, Palestinians in Gaza elected Hamas as their leadership in early 2006, being clearly aware of Hamas' ideology and modus operandi. Hamas is a terrorist organization, and the world should fight terrorism so we can have the hope of handing a peaceful world to the generations to come...

With information from The Israel Project and Hamas Charter
Photo by AP

The light at the end of the tunnel?

2008-12-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

Roughly three weeks have passed since I wrote my last entry in my blog. And believe me, it's not a lack of interest in writing stuff here -- at the end of the day, writing is one of my favorite things to do in life. But there have been other factors that have kept me of writing posts, most notably lack of time and lack of good (i.e. positive) things to write about.

Yes, there have been interesting things going on in our world lately. Most of them have not been positive though: A series of despicable terrorist attacks against tourist and religious centers in Mumbai, India, left hundreds of casualties and thousands of injuries. Also, the world economic recession has prompted a wave of layoffs that have left thousands of people around the world without a job. On top of that, the purchasing power of consumers worldwide appears to be reducing more and more everyday, and we are just wondering when will this economic recession come to an end...

Even though there is a real scarcity of positive topics to write about recently, from time to time it's possible to hear out there things that really make us remember that ours is a civilization in motion, and that there is always a flip side to all the turmoil that happens at times. This time, it is a news that, if it is true, will bring benefits and hope to thousands, maybe millions, of people who live with HIV.

Luc Montagnier, the French scientist who, with the help of a group of collaborators discovered in 1982 the retrovirus guilty of causing HIV in patients, believes that within 5 years there will be a vaccination to treat and prevent HIV available in the markets. According to a note published by CBC news, there are no evident clues as to why would Montagnier set the 5 year timeframe to come up with a treatment and preventive vaccination. But I want to believe that Mr. Montagnier has some inside information, that he knows well the status of all the research done so far surrounding the treatment of HIV, and that his predictions will be correct.

It is hard to imagine that the day when the cure for HIV will be available is coming. Too good to feel true, but the fact that my mind cannot currently see that happening does not mean by any means that I am negative or skeptical about Mr. Montagnier predictions. At the end of the day, he is the expert and he knows much more about the topic than I do... and if his thoughts are correct, then mankind will have given another huge leap in 5 years time.

Very nice indeed. I would love to hear about the day when the announcement of the cure of cancer and other diseases will be made, if ever. These successes will benefit millions of people around the world, and all the generations to come.

With information from CBC news, available here.

XPS or PDF?

2008-11-18T21:57:00.000-08:00

It is unbelievable how little time I have had lately to post new entries to my blog. But there are good reasons for that: work has kept me busy, contributing to other blogs has also absorbed a little bit of my spare time, and ultimately fixing some issues with financial institutions lately has had its effect on my schedule as well.

And it is precisely about these issues with the financial institutions I want to talk about. Not about the issues themselves -- but rather about some interesting findings I made in order to get them solved. I will start by saying that right now I am on an extended stay in another city for work purposes, and currently I don't have a printer to print out stuff from my computer. Moreover, I don't speak the local language in order to go out to the streets and asking pedestrians about a place where they can print out stuff for me. In the meantime, I still have to pay bills back home, so instead of printing out the receipts of my payments, I thought that it would be easier just to keep copies of my online receipts, and storing them in my computer.

Well, of course I am not a computer geek, and there are a lot of things that I don't know about computers. And my surprise was big when I learned that the only way to keep my online receipts stored in my computer was to save them as XPS files, which by the way, I never heard of before. But, since I discovered that it was possible to view those files later using Internet Explorer, I thought that it would do no harm to keep them in such format, and just printing them out whenever I needed them. Later, I found out that XPS is a file format developed by Microsoft, which is designed to keep files in the same way that PDFs work, overall (as I said, I am not very techie, so I won't discuss here any technical specifications or processes of each type of file).

The time to utilize those receipts came to me much earlier than I expected, when I had to show them to financial institutions in order to avoid getting charged with unfair interests. So I thought that sending them the online receipts along with instructions to open them with Internet Explorer would be enough for them to get my issue solved as soon as possible. But my surprise would be big when I found out that the bank could not open the files, and they were requesting me to convert to another file format!

The natural option to send this kind of information is PDF files. But I wondered whether there was a way to convert XPS files into PDF's? I found in the internet a couple of programs that pretty much converted any type of MS Office document (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc) to PDF format. However, they were not freeware, and I had no guarantee that they would work on XPS files as well. What to do?

After about an hour of doing extensive research through the web, I came across a site that spoke about an utility named CutePDF writer, which essentially is a freeware program that "installs itself as a printer subsystem", according to its creators. In other words, it is possible to "print" any document that can be printed out from any computer into a PDF file. The interface is not rocket science, in fact everything works exactly in the same way as printing out anything through a regular printer, with the difference that instead of getting a hard copy of the file, you will get a window that will ask you for a folder where to save your new PDF. Amazing!

I believe that XPS files work quite well, but their main drawback is that they are virtually unknown among regular, not-so-techie users, such as myself. In the meantime, I believe that PDF's will still be the standard for non-modifiable documents, and CutePDF is about the best way to create such widely used documents... I would dare to say, even better than using Adobe's products themselves.

President Obama... the wind of change?

2008-11-05T00:41:00.000-08:00

This is today's news that is not news anymore: Barack Obama is voted president of the United States.

Yes, it is true that Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States. I am not sure whether that is necessarily a relevant fact; it might be if we consider it as a proof that minorities in the United States are progressing in terms of holding more relevance in national decisions. However, I don't necessarily see the election of Barack Obama as a reflection of such progress; let's not forget that other African Americans have already held important national positions in the past. For instance, the current Secretary of State, Condolezza Rice, and her predecessor Colin Powell.

The election of Barack Obama is in fact relevant for many reasons other than his race. He brings tons of hope to some Americans, who believe that the power of change towards a better future for the nation is in Mr. Obama's hands and ideals. He's also becoming president in times of turmoil, when the U.S. is submerged in the worst economic recession that the country has seen since the Great Depression of 1929. Also, his coming to office will come by the time when U.S. troops are still present in Iraq, in what has proven to be one of the most unpopular wars of all times amongst the U.S. citizens. People trust that Mr. Obama will be that person who will finally direct the country to the path of sustained progress for all.

I sincerely hope that Mr. Obama can achieve that. It would be extremely sad if, at the end of the road, he proves to be another populist that comes to power by means of selling people hope without necessarily making that become true. The winds of change appear to finally have hit the US, and let's hope that change works for the best interests of the free world.

Ironic? The plastic bags case

2008-10-24T02:26:00.000-07:00

Back in January, I wrote a post about activists in city of Vancouver, Canada, trying to convince the local authorities to eventually impose a ban on plastic grocery bags. It is certainly a great idea, as plastic grocery bags have proven to be harmful to the environment (low biodegradability, pollution of waters, etc).

No wonder that this kind of ideas are promoted in a country like Canada, and more specifically from the province of British Columbia, where inhabitants boast about their green practices, such as recycling materials and utilizing cleaner transportation (trolleybuses, bicycles, buses that run with biofuels, and so on). Interestingly, even though lots of British Columbians already own reusable grocery bags and use them routinely, it is still very common to see patrons who prefer to avoid paying CAD$0.99 to buy a reusable bag. Instead, they still choose the standard plastic bags, which stores happily provide for free... and which, of course, won't be reused in most of the cases.

Whilst Canada is highly regarded as one of the cleanest countries in terms of green living habits, China is regarded as exactly the opposite. Discharge of industrial waste into rivers, uncontrolled emission of greenhouse gases, and lack of recycling programs in place, are some of the issues that have given China its fame as a non environmentally-friendly country.

Now to the ironic part: since June this year, the Chinese authorities have started a campaign to shift the peoples' habits from choosing plastic grocery bags to leaning for reusable types in the very short run. Even though reusable bags are not readily available for purchase everywhere in China (as opposed to what happens in Canada), grocery stores apply a fee to new plastic bags for customers! Of course, the purchase of plastic bags is not mandatory, but it is a standard practice across the country. The result? People are avoiding the use of plastic bags, and they are carrying their groceries in other non-disposable items (such as backpacks). Their strategy is definitely working!

The question is: why can they succeesfully put in place these practices in China (a country that traditionally doesn't emphasize a lot the preservation of the environment) in an accelerated fashion, whereas in Canada it is progressing in slow motion...? Just an idea to think about.

Learning survival Chinese, the hard way!

2008-10-19T07:27:00.000-07:00

I seldom use my blog to write about personal experiences. However, I will have to make an exception for this post, as my story today is really worth of posting on my site. I think that, other than doing nice dramatic novel, the story reflects the taste of issues of life that some people have to deal with when traveling and living in foreign lands. Enjoy.

Shanghai, 5:50 am. It's still dark outside. As a result of the jet-lag, I wake up early on a Sunday morning and decide to check my email and checking whether any friends are available for chat prior to taking a shower. If I only knew of how messy would be my first morning in Shanghai...!

I send a couple of emails, check my facebook, and surf the web for a bit. At about 6:50 am, I see that it's not that dark in the street anymore, and decide that it's a perfect time to take a shower. Hum... last night, when I took a shower, I remember that for some reason the water heater was not working properly, so it would probably be a good idea to see if I can fix that before having to take another cold shower, just last yesterday. I approach the electric heater, and notice that it's indeed connected, so everything should be working. But hey!! What are those two valves (one blue, one red) below the heater? Maybe they are for turning it on? Let's find out. I'll start by turning the blue one... geez... it's hard... maybe I can try to turn it harder... success!!! I finally moved it... but wait... What the...?!!

"Houston... ehh... we've got a problem here!!". Indeed, I just popped out the valve, and now I have a beautiful fountain inside my apartment, furiously throwing out water and flooding the place! Great! Now, WHAT SHOULD I DO?

Step 1: Remain calm. Breathe deep. Now, time to think fast... what to do?
Step 2: Try to fix the problem yourself. Well, if popping off the valve started all this problem, just putting the valve back will solve it. But the pressure of the water is so high, that it's just impossible to put it back. The water itself will just push it off forever!
Step 3: Shut down the water stream coming from the street!. Great idea!!! Now, where the hell can I find the valve to shut it down...?! No clue!!
Step 4: If you can't fix the problem yourself, just ask for help!

Okay, so here I go. While my apartment is getting flooded by tens of liters of water per minute, I run out and the first thing that I decide to do is to knock my neighbor's door as loud as possible. No answer. Is anybody living there at least? Who'll know? At the end of the day, yesterday I was so tired after my 12 and a half hour-long flight that I didn't really feel like going out to explore the surroundings here. Big mistake.

As no one answers next door, I come back to the apartment to admire the flooding there! Ok, if things are to get screwed up, at least let's try to make the best out of it. I take my whole luggage lying on the floor and throw it outside the apartment before the furious water reaches the area where I left it since the night before. Of course, I didn't have time to close the suitcases properly and make sure that things would remain inside of them, so there you have clothes flying to the hall outside my apartment and making a mess outside. But at least, my luggage was not getting wet.

Ok, my stuff is safe for now, but that's not even close to a solution for the problem here. What now? Let's go downstairs and ask for help! Barefoot, but well equipped with my pyjama, my keys, my wallet, and the little booklet of "survival Chinese" phrases, I rush downstairs and run to the entrance of the complex (yes, I live in a complex of 5 buildings) to seek help. I don't find anybody, except for the security guard, who seems to be enjoying a lot his Sunday morning. I enter his office, and take out my Chinese pocket emergency phrasebook to utter some words that let him know that I am in trouble.

"Jiu ming a!" ("help!", according to my booklet) I yell, to which the guy leans back on his chair, smiles at me as if he was enjoying seeing my agitation there, and calmly replies something in Chinese (something like "bu duo", who'll know?), which I assumed meant "I don't understand". I try to give him some keywords that would hopefully make him understand what's the matter. Almost playing charades, I explain "wo de... jia... you shui...!!!" (my... house... has... water). The guy keeps smiling, and he replies something in Chinese that of course I couldn't understand, but from his behavior I assume that he did not get a hint of what was going on. Given my failure to obtain any help from this guy, I just rush to my building, and then up to the apartment, to see if I can make a skype call to my landlord. When I walk inside, unsurprisingly, I find out that the water keeps raising its level, and now it is about to reach the area of my bedroom and bathroom. Isn't that cool.

Well, people normally don't enjoy to work on a Sunday morning if it's not absolutely necessary, so the landlord decides that he wants the day off, and the best way to make sure that people won't bother him is to turn off the cellphone. On his end, turning it off proves to be a great success, since he is not bothered by my calls asking for help! On my end, it is just a prolongation of the wet tragicomedy in my apartment.

So what other big ideas come to my mind? Well, try knocking another neighbor's door to ask them for help! There is another apartment across the hall on the floor I live in, so hopefully someone will come and give me a helping hand. I rush there, knock the door desperately, and some voice inside says something in Chinese. I ask for help in English, hoping that the person inside is a foreigner and can finally understand that I have little problem to take care of. But my hopes vanish quickly, as after explaining that my place was getting flooded, the same voice replies again in Chinese, saying something that I can't understand, but which clearly suggests that he won't open the door, let alone giving any help.

7:00 am. Just about ten minutes, which appear to be more like hours, have passed since the incident began. The flooding, of course, keeps getting worse as time goes by, and I am already in an act of desperation. What else can I do? I have no choice but to rush downstairs again and trying to convince the security guy, who is about the only person around, to come and see by himself what is really going on, which I cannot explain in Chinese. So there I go. Nicely dressed with my colorful pyjama, I run across the yard and find again the security guy leaning on his chair. He looks at me and makes a gesture that I understand like if he was saying "You again?! What the hell do you want?!". Given the fact that he does not understand English whatsoever, I try to come up again with some keyword that picture my case there: "Wo de jia... you shui... qing lai jian!" (my house... has water... please come to see!). Just like before, the guy smirks and replies something like "bu duo", and then starts talking very long sentences that of course I don't understand. But clearly, he doesn't seem to be interested in coming to see, even though I am waving my hand, signaling him that I want him to come. It looks that body language is also not effective for these matters.

Then, the security guy finally gets his rear off the chair and he appears to be eager to do something. "Maybe he did understand this time!!" I thought. He yells something, for which he gets an answer from some guy who was in the backroom of his "office". Then they start making a conversation, replying forth and back to whatever they were saying, until their conversation comes to an end when the two of them start laughing (probably at me!). Again, he starts talking to me something in Chinese, and I just keep saying the words "jia... shui!" (house... water!). The guy heads off the "office", and comes into his washroom, where he turns the knob of his sink to show me the running water. He points at it and says "shui?", as if he was trying to make sure that I knew what was I saying. I nod, so he goes back into the "office", picks up the phone and calls some number. After his conversation on the phone, he gives me some instructions in Chinese, from which I only understood the words "zheli" (there) and "wu" (five), which I thought might mean that someone would be coming to the building number 5 (which is my building) to take care of my case.

I rush back to the entrance of the building to wait for the help to come, but no one appears to be coming in this direction. So I rush up again to see the progress of the flooding, and hopefully to come up with the bright idea that will get me out of my little problem here. When I reach the apartment, naturally, i discover that the water has already reached even the bathroom and bedroom. Of course, water keeps coming, and coming, and coming, and coming...

07:05 am. My desperation is extreme. Since no one appears to understand that there was a problem here, I just start yelling "HELP! HELP!" across my floor, hoping that someone, either at my floor or from a nearby floor, will at least be attracted to come out and see why is there someone shouting that early in the morning. Then suddenly, the doors of the elevator open, and a Chinese guy, also dressed in a pyjama and smoking a cigarette comes out. It was the help that the security guy called before (and probably just like you, I have no idea how he knew what floor exactly to come), so I quickly wave my hand so he can walk inside the apartment and see what is going on there. He follows me and sees the beautiful mess that the flooding was causing inside, to which his immediate reply was a lengthy, yet calm "ooooooooooooh!" exclamation. Then, clearly unimpressed by the scenario, he walks out of the apartment, and with his hand signals me to follow him. I do so, and he shows me a little door in the opposite side of the floor, which he opens. Inside, there is a knob that he turns, and as soon as he does so, the sound of the water coming out of the water heater ceases. Then, in a perfect Chinese accompanied by some charades, he explains to me that, whenever I'm ready to resume the water stream into my apartment, I should just turn that knob. I tell him a number of times "Xiexie! xiexie!" (thank you! thank you!), and with all the calm of the world he gets inside the elevator and leaves.

I spend the next couple of hours drying up the place. First, I need to "shovel" water with a dustpan into the sink or into the shower, since those are the only sewers in my house. While I am doing that, someone knocks the door of my apartment and, since the door was already open, just walks in and starts talking to me in English (at last!). It is my neighbor, the guy who lives in the apartment next door, where I thought that probably no one lived... another foreigner, this one from England, in China. He sees the mess, asks me about what happened there, and apologizes for not coming out to help before. But at the end of the day, I was feeling good that at least I could talk to someone! We agree to go sometime for a few beers. The rest of the morning I would have to spend it waiting for the landlord to come, bring some people to fix the heater, cleaning up... and who knows what else. But I feel great that the problem is under control now.

The morale of this story, is that learning some "survival language" when traveling to a foreign country is crucial. I saw myself in big trouble with this problem, and the desperation of not being able to explain to people what exactly I wanted was utterly frustrating. That's probably the key drawback of living as an expat, and I learned that too quickly in this trip. I am sure that I'll find myself in many other situations in which language barriers will be an issue, so I'd better learn quicker some survival phrases. My recommendation? Instead of learning things like "hello" or "my name is Eddie" in the local language when visiting a foreign place, it is best to learn things like "help!", "I need a doctor", "does anybody here speak English?" or "call the police". I am just learning it the hard way.

For now, it is noon, and I still haven't had my shower...

Go Bills!

2008-10-08T14:10:00.001-07:00

It has been a while since the last time I wrote something about the Buffalo Bills. This doesn't mean, of course, that I don't care about them anymore. In fact, I would like to mention that their performance so far this year has been pleasantly surprising, a 4-0 record to start the season is something that Buffalo wasn't able to achieve since 1992, year in which they reached the Superbowl. Thus, we (the Bills' fans) have some hope that this will be their best season in the last decade. If they manage to reach the playoffs for the first time since 1999, then we can say that their improvement is for real.

At the end of the day, it is not a coincidence that the Bills have been having a good season. During the last 3 years, coach Dick Jauron and his staff have been working hard to put together a dynamic team of young players to conform a solid team. The inclusion of quarterback Trent Edwards to the offensive starting lineup has brought more dynamism and accuracy to the passing game, which, along with the receiving capabilities of Lee Evans and James Hardy, make an effective air play for the Bills. But also in the ground, an improved offensive line and the strength and speed of runnerbacks Marshawn Lynch and Fred Jackson have had great results so far.

The defensive line is also improved. All of the defensive players have made a great effort to keep Buffalo's defense ranked as one of the top 6 in the league; some outstanding work has been done by Paul Posluszny, Terrence McGee, Jabari Greer, Aaron Schobel, among others. This is a very big difference when compared to the previous couple of seasons, when Buffalo's defense was steadily ranked among the bottom 3 of the league.

Of course, last but not least, the special teams have been performing well. This is not uncommon; in fact during the last few seasons, the special teams in Buffalo have had a very high performance under the direction of special teams coordinator Bobby April.

This might be the year in which we can witness the long-awaited return of the Buffalo Bills to the elite group of teams contending in the playoffs. Hopefully that will be the case, although it is still early in the season and there's still a long way to go before calling the current year a successful one. But, even if they don't manage to go all the way to the superbowl, at least giving their fans a playoffs ticket for this season would be good for now.

Winter Olimpics "with glowing hearts"

2008-09-27T06:10:00.000-07:00

Almost one year ago, I posted a note in which I praised the official mascots of the Vancouver 2010 winter Olympics, even mentioning that the "honor of Olympic mascots are restored". Indeed, I still believe that the VANOC (Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic winter games) did a good job by choosing Quatchi, Miga and Sumi as the mascots for such event.

I also would have liked to praise VANOC for coming up with a cool slogan for the Olympics, but unfortunately, that won't be the case. A press release published in VANOC's website unveils the official slogan for the upcoming winter games: "With glowing hearts".

Don't take me wrong, I do believe that "with glowing hearts" is a nice, warm, and catchy slogan that encompasses well the whole spirit of the Olympics. But here's the questionable part: Where did they come up with that line? Well, please find it in the lyrics of the Canadian National Anthem:

O Canada! Our home and native land!
True patriot love in all thy sons command.
With glowing hearts we see thee rise,
The True North strong and free!
From far and wide, O Canada,
We stand on guard for thee.
God keep our land glorious and free!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!
O Canada, we stand on guard for thee!

I don't think that utilizing a part of a national anthem for commercial purposes is a good idea, no matter what. National anthems, essentially, are patriotic songs that have to be respected. Turning a portion of a national anthem into a commercial slogan is definitely not the best example of respect for a national symbol. It's just as if they were taking a part of a country's national identity and turning it into a pure marketing tool, just as if "with glowing hearts" could eventually be comparable to, for instance, McDonalds' "I'm lovin' it". That's not alright, but it's just my opinion.

However, regardless of what I think about the slogan, VANOC is going ahead with that. I believe that, for the sake of selling more memorabilia and making more profitable the 2010 Olympics, they could have done than just taking a part of a patriotic symbol. But we'll have to give it a chance. I hope it works well.

Get this right: Melamine and baby formula don't mix

2008-09-19T14:07:00.000-07:00

In recent days, there have been big bad news about tainted milk powder in China flying around the media. During the last week at least, Chinese parents have been massively rushing their babies into hospitals, as some of them were suffering of serious kidney failures, and some others simply wanted to make sure that their children were healthy. The reason? Some dishonest milk producers who, in order to produce cheaper milk to boost their profits, 'enriched' their products with melamine. Then, the tainted milk was sold to milk powder manufacturers, who utilized it as raw material for consumption products like, for instance, baby formulas, which were later distributed to final consumers through their various distribution channels. Initially, it was thought that a single manufacturer, Sanlu, was responsible for stocking in shelved tainted formula, but after the quality other formula brands in the Chinese market were tested, it was discovered that at least 20 different brands had been selling formulas with melamine.

To have an idea about how bad this is, let's just mention that melamine is a chemical material utilized in the production of glues, floor tiles and flame resistant materials, among others. Of course, melamine is not a compound intended for human or animal consumption, but given its low cost, availability, and (relatively) low toxicity, it has been unethically utilized with the intention of increasing the apparent protein content in foodstuffs.

There is an interesting question to ask here: How could anyone dare to willingly poison food that will be later sold to innocent consumers, just for the sake of increasing their profits? Letting aside the financial side of their rationale, wouldn't that go against the very basic ethics of any rational human being? Moreover, as if those questions were not challenging enough, here comes another one that puzzles me even more: Given the fact that, back in 2007, there was in North America a massive recall of pet foods made with Chinese ingredients tainted with melamine, how come the Chinese authorities just turned a blind eye on the issue instead of increasing the quality inspections of all foodstuffs produced in their country? Fonterra, a New Zealand-based cooperative that owns 43% of Sanlu's shares, has an answer for that: They know "of no dairy company in the world that tests for a chemical such as melamine that would have to be deliberately mixed in milk". Too bad that not even that record of tainted pet food didn't prompt food producers or even the government to test for that. Who is responsible for the ultimate quality of the food products then?

If you thought that not ensuring the quality of baby food sold in Chinese supermarkets was a condemnable attitude from the authorities, here goes some even more shocking news: According to news reports, there is evidence that the Chinese authorities learned about the melamine case in early August, but kept it in the dark to avoid a public shame during the Olympic games. In the meantime, people kept buying baby formulas, and an increasing number of infants got sick on a daily basis. Was it really worth it to keep such information as a secret? Those poor sick children's parents probably have an answer for that.

This is just as disgusting as it can get. A few people who have confessed to deliberately taint milk with melamine have been already arrested in China, but that will hardly repair the damage made to those families that once trusted their products to feed their children. This whole story just proves again that, just as my own personal saying goes, "if you think you've seen the lowest of it all, you'll find out that there's always a new low". What can be lower that this terrible episode about deliberate poisoning of baby formula? Unfortunately, I'm sure we'll find out, sooner or later.

My sympathy goes to those parents who have sick or dead babies as a result of this pathetic chapter of the dairy industry in China.

With information from The Globe and Mail and New Zealand Herald.
Photos by AP

"Let's celebrate our birthdays with... cakes??"

2008-09-08T17:07:00.000-07:00

I've been told in the past that my curiosity to research about weird topics reaches the freakiest levels at some points. I happened to find out how true that statement is, while preparing a birthday present. Just as I was working on that, I thought that including the image of a birthday cake in the whole thing would be a great idea, but then I backed up and thought: "the birthday cake is an overused way of expressing good wishes for someone's birthday, it lacks all originality... but why is it so popular? and how did people adopt the habit of celebrating birthdays with cakes anyway?". Some big, deep thoughts that I had to reflect upon.

Yes, there can be no doubt that birthday cakes are a very widespread tradition nowadays, and certainly not a lot of people would care about the origins of that custom or the meaning behind it. But to my surprise, I did some research on the web and I found out that there are people out there who have made some extensive research about (apparently unimportant, yet interesting) topics like this. Here are my results:

Historians have two hypotheses about the origins of birthday cakes. One of them is that it all began with ancient Greeks preparing the first cakes and eating them in birthdays, although they were also commonly used to worship the goddess of the Moon, Artemis. They were baked in a round shape to represent the full moon, and then the cakes were decorated with candles to represent the shine of the moon -hence the omipresence round-shaped birthday cakes with candles nowadays. Later, Romans acquired the custom of birthday cakes from Greeks. in the case of Romans, the cakes were prepared for the person celebrating their birthday by close friends and relatives, just as we do in our times. I would presume that the expansion of their empire helped to spread this tradition to many regions.

The other hypothesis suggests that the custom began in the Middle Ages in Germany, where people prepared sweet breads, known as Geburtstagorten, with religious shapes to commemorate the birth of a child. Later in the 18th century, the Germans also introduced the custom of placing candles on top of the cakes, but unlike the Greeks, they were not intended to be mere decoration: candles were believed to bring birthday wishes up to God. However, as the use of candles began to spread out to other regions of the world, it gradually lost all religious significance. Then the use of both cakes and candles spread all across Europe, and I would think that it reached other parts of the world (such as America or Africa) with the expansion of colonialism.

Well, knowing the history behind birthday cakes and candles is definitely interesting. I am not sure about how useful it is, but as I usually say, 'it never does any harm to know a little bit more'. But, while it is true that it is not harmful to know more about birthday cakes now, it is also true that it didn't help a lot to get fresh ideas for the birthday present that I'm currently preparing. So i guess it's time to get back to work for me and make good use of my creativity.

With information from Wikipedia, available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_cake

With information from 'History of Birthday Cake' by Linda Stradley, available at http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Cakes/BirthdayCake.htm

With information from 'The birthday cake: its evolution from a rite of the elite to the right of everyone' by Shirley Cherkasky, available at http://www.chowdc.org/Papers/Cherkasky2000.html

With information from FTD, available at http://www.ftd.com/content/news_views/global_birthday_traditions.epl

Google Chrome rolls out

2008-09-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

Google unveiled its latest product this week. Its name is Chrome, an open-source browser that, according to Sundar Pichai (VP of Product Management at Google) is intended to "make sure that browsers are really evolving along with the web, so the web can evolve to the next level".

There is an interesting video on Youtube in which the developers of Chrome explain some of the state-of-the-art features that they created for their browser, and the rationale behind them. I embedded it so you can check it out (click here if the movie below doesn't work).

Well, although I haven't used Chrome myself, I have been reading posts of users in different forums around the web (including, of course, Youtube's postings), where users appear to be quite satisfied with the new browser's overall performance. They especially praise Chrome's speed and customization capabilities. However, it appears that there are a few bugs that have to be corrected, although it is not a big deal.

It is very hard to have an opinion about a product that I haven't tested myself. In fact, although I've seen some tutorials about the way in which Chrome works, I can hardly find a reason to switch from Firefox, whose newest version 3.0 is quite similar to Chrome. However, I'll give it a try sometime in the near future, but I would like to hear a few further comments about Chrome and the users' experience to know if spending my time downloading and installing is really worthwhile.

Famine? Have some noodles!

2008-08-29T10:23:00.001-07:00

Hearing about the intermittent famine that has hit North Korea for more than a decade now is not really news. Kim Jong Il's regime has depended during these years on foreign aid, mostly from South Korea, China, Japan and the US, in order to feed its population. Nevertheless, the North Korean government keeps its Military First policy in full effect, for which the Korean People's Army is considered the priority in the national budget, and gets allocated a huge portion of it as a result.

Well, not everything is bad news for the situation of North Koreans. Their government does allocate some part of the budget (I don't know how much, but it must certainly be a tiny amount compared to the portion destined to military and nuclearization purposes) for useful research! Kim Jong Il's regime is claiming that North Korean scientists have developed a new type of noodles, made from soybeans and corn, which can suppress the feeling of hunger due to its unique nutritional properties: twice as much protein and five times as much fat as regular noodles. Bonanza!

It is utterly upsetting to hear Kim Jong Il's regime to boast about developing noodles that delay hunger, while North Korea's national budget spills money over military activities, development of new weapons, and of course its Dear Leader's eccentricities (palaces, gourmet food, industrial amounts of expensive wines and cognac, movies, race cars, and all types of luxuries). Indeed, the noodles will keep people from suffering hunger pangs whenever they are available all across the country, but are they really the solution for the famine? Will North Koreans be appropriately nourished by eating these fat-rich noodles? I doubt it. As Spanish-speakers would say, this is just like 'covering the sun with one finger', or in different words, to minimize the seriousness of the issue by providing a very temporary relief to it. Sadly, a very normal attitude from the North Korean government towards its citizens.

Hopefully someday there'll be a North Korean government that truly believes that the well being of its people is more of a priority than the development of weapons, or the worship of a leader that couldn't care less about them.

Click here to read the full note from BBC News
Photo by China Daily

Olympic feats

2008-08-24T18:48:00.001-07:00

No more shiny, sunny days in the Canadian West Coast. We're back to our usual, almost year-round rainy weather, which pretty much indicates us that summer is over. And along with it, the Beijing 2008 Olympics also came to an end. They will be certainly remembered in the years to come, for many reasons.

It was not only Michael Phelps' feat of winning 8 gold medals in the same Olympics. Not only the Jamaican runner Usain Bolt smashing the world records for both men's 100 and 200 meters. Nor Elena Isinbaeva breaking the world record for women's pole vault, which was previously held by herself. Of course, all of those achievements are remarkable themselves (among many, many other feats by athletes from different parts of the world in different categories - I believe that all of the contestants deserve some credit, regardless), but the Beijing Olympics themselves also broke a record: The most viewed Olympics in history.

That's right, a few days some newspapers around the world, along with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) noted that no other Olympics in history have been viewed more than Beijing 2008. The rating achieved here, which surpassed the old record held by Athens 2004, was partly boosted by the numerous communications tools that made it easier for people around the world to follow the different events. More precisely, internet tools such as Youtube, helped a lot to allow people to watch different events during the Olympics, including the opening and closing ceremonies.

This is good news for the organizers of Beijing 2008. But it is indeed an ironic fact, given the controversy that arose about the Olympics a few months ago, when the torch relay was going worldwide and it appeared that numerous groups were making their best to guarantee a boycott to these games. Well, the news for those groups couldn't be worse than this, as not only the Beijing 2008 games reached unprecedented levels of audience, but also the Chinese authorities managed to keep protesters, activists, and other 'threats' (so to speak) silent during the games, and mostly out of their country.

Congratulations for the success of Beijing 2008, and thanks to the organizers for such a wonderful event. Last, but not least, the Paralympics are coming, which I am sure will also be full of amazing feats and memorable successes.

A bit-too-overcrowded world

2008-08-19T10:01:00.000-07:00

After taking a little break from writing stuff for my blog (I apologize for my sudden and momentary disappearance), I come back home and read the newspapers to get an update about the world. Then I find a note that calls out my attention on The Globe and Mail. It claims that the poorest countries in the world have the highest rates of population growth. According to the note, at the present time there is a total global population of 6.7 billion people, from which 1.2 billion (18%) live in developed countries (as defined by the United Nations), while the remaining 5.5 billion (82%) live in the so-called developing regions. Now, is that really news?.

There is nothing in that note that we, as a global civilization, didn't know yet. I have never done any formal research about the correlation between education level, income per capita, and population growth, yet to me it was quite evident that it existed. Maybe it was just a feeling I had, or maybe it was a concern that everybody else noted, but just a few saw that as a concern. This phenomenon, of course, contributes greatly to the mother of all of our major problems on Earth: Overpopulation. Thomas Robert Malthus, the famous economist and demographer, got it right in his work An Essay on the Principle of Population: From any perspective that we want to analyze this issue, we can find that overpopulation contributes to the generation of different problems we currently face in many ways, in different parts of the world.

For instance (please note that the following thoughts come from my own rationale, and not necessarily based on Malthus' works), if we analyze the situation from an economical perspective, it won't be very difficult to discover that overpopulation means scarcer resources for larger populations, ultimately resulting in uneven distribution of wealth. Such uneven distribution of wealth contributes to the widening of the gap between rich and poor, meaning that less people will have access to basic products and services (such as food, education, house, and so on). In turn, the impossibility to satisfy basic needs will create clusters of low skilled, uneducated, and needy people. As a consequence, these people will generally have access to low-paid jobs, and as a result of their poor education background, will potentially also have a poor family planning, resulting in large families being supported with low, insufficient incomes. This situation will bring social unhappiness and socioeconomic exclusion, which may in turn derive in some other different scenarios: immigration (frequently as illegal aliens), crime, diseases (as a result of inadequate sanitary conditions), etc. Then, the new generations face similar socioeconomic problems as their parents did, ultimately resulting in a vicious, never ending cycle.

Without overpopulation problems, it would be much easier to provide individuals with the necessary products and services to live a decent life. But I have seldom seen governments addressing this urgent issue (the Chinese government being the most notable exception). Moreover, the problem seems to be transferred to developed nations with good population planning practices in place, as in fact it becomes their responsibility to help regions where populations keep growing exponentially, and where social and economic problems arise on a daily basis.

Needless to say, I believe it is important to help those nations with people suffering all the problems I've described in this note. But it is equally important that those nations put in place regulations to guarantee that their populations don't grow at almost astronomical rates, just as the Chinese did with their one-child policy. Otherwise, our social issues worldwide will keep growing, while developed economies will keep providing short-term remedies to long-term concerns. I know, it does sound harsh, but I am convinced that controlling the population growth rates with strict regulations and sanctions will be the most effective and humane way to gradually reduce this problem, so all humans can enjoy decent lives in generations to come.

Grand Theft Auto... a scapegoat of social violence?

2008-08-06T14:51:00.001-07:00

A story published recently in the Globe and Mail talks about the case of a guy in Thailand who decided to take his passion for Grand Theft Auto to the next level. The 18 year old guy, a compulsive player of the popular video game famous for its explicit violence, apparently liked a lot to steal cabs in the game and kill the cabbies, so he wondered whether doing that in the real life would be as exciting and easy as he found it to be in Grand Theft Auto.

Thus the teenager went for it. He hijacked a cab in Bangkok, severely wounded the 54 year-old driver (who died shortly after the incident) with a knife, and tried to flee the scene of his crime unharmed! Unfortunately for his case, he learned the hard way: carjacking, killing cabbies, and escaping the crime scene while hitting pedestrians is not fun, and leaving the cops behind is not as simple as he thought. This Tommy Vercetti wannabe faces now charges of manslaughter and robbery, and if found guilty he could be facing even death penalty.

As a result of this bizarre incident, the Thai distributor of Grand Theft Auto decided to stop the sales of the video game, pulling it off the retailers' shelves and game arcades. And of course, I have no doubt that more than one were happy that Grand Theft Auto was somehow censored after the incident.

Can we blame Grand Theft Auto for the actions committed by its users? Can pulling the game off the shelves and game arcades be a successful measure to prevent real-life recreations of it? My personal opinion is that it won't make a difference. Being a player of Grand Theft Auto myself, I find no real benefit on banning the game. Let's face it, violence is not only depicted in Grand Theft Auto, but virtually everywhere. If we wanted censor violence in the media, we should start by censoring numerous Hollywood movies, cartoons, TV dramas, books, magazines, etc.

There might indeed be a relation between the interest of the Thai youngster in Grand Theft Auto and the crime he committed. But it is probably (and hopefully) an isolated case. I don't believe that people who play Grand Theft Auto is prone to committing crimes that they see in the game, the same way as I don't believe that movie aficionados would go out to the streets to kill people in the same fashion they enjoyed watching on movies like The Godfather or Goodfellas. The moral of this story is that we cannot believe just anything that comes to us from the media, and of course, we have to act consistently according to our moral and social values, and not according to what the media tells us is good or bad.

Cuil: The small fish spawns

2008-07-29T15:58:00.000-07:00

Cuil is a word that comes from the Irish Gaelic language. I couldn't find the exact meaning of such word in online Irish Gaelic-English translators (help from Irish Gaelic speakers would be appreciated), but it is supposed to mean knowledge in such language. And that's the name that Tom Costello and Russell Powell, both of whom formerly worked for Google, chose for their brand new search engine (www.cuil.com), which looks more or less like this:

It should not be impressive the resemblance between Cuil's and Google's interface. It is essentially the same design: The engine's name, the text box to input keywords to search, and links to their corporate info. The only notorious difference between Cuil's homepage and Google's is that the latter also offers links to access some of their numerous services (email, maps, videos, etc), which Cuil doesn't offer... at least at this time.

According to Cuil, their new search engine is better than Google in that it searches for websites by sorting them by relevance, and not only popularity. In other words, it does not look up things in the web by the amount of links and visits to a certain website containing specific key words, but it analyzes the whole content of a website and assesses the relevance that it has compared to the search criteria specified by the user. After it finds relevant results, Cuil sorts them in a different way than other engines, as it organizes results in columns and posts also images relevant to the search.

Another interesting thing about Cuil is regarding its privacy policy. A hot topic recently has been Google acting as a cyber Big Brother, as it collects information about people's searches, IP addresses, pages visited, etc. Given this issue, Cuil boasts about not keeping any logs of users' searches, or any information related to users' online activity (not even in cookies!).

The overall idea of Cuil sounds interesting to me. As they also say they have the largest index on the internet, I decided to take a look at the website myself and try to look up something there, so I used the query "Maglev". The results satisfied me: It not only provided me with relevant results of what is the maglev, history, projects, images, and so on, but the interface was very user friendly and it also suggested some other possibly related categories to explore (in this case, all about the city of Shanghai, which hosts one of the few Maglev systems currently operating in the world). The search was very quick, and it returned a very reasonable amount of results (129,577).

But not everything about Cuil is currently that pleasant. I gave myself another opportunity to test their search engine, this time I typed the name of this blog, "Everythings Corner". The results were less than satisfying, as it couldn't find it on its index. When searching for the same keywords but without the brackets, the results were unrelated to what I was looking for.

Generally speaking, I can say that I am pleased with this new concept of online search engine proposed by Cuil's business model. At the end of the day, it is unclear whether in the long run, Cuil will become the small fish to beat the big fish, Google. But at least for now, it provides users with a fresh idea of an online search tool, improving some of the flaws that its founders (and some users) have found in Google and other popular engines. Hopefully the creators of Cuil can perfect their engine so it can also find very specific concepts, keywords and websites.

The concept pleases me. I will certainly be testing Cuil further in the future. In the meantime, I wish good luck to Cuil and their innovative idea.

Another war criminal bites the dust

2008-07-22T13:04:00.000-07:00

It is always a pleasure to hear that war criminals are brought to justice to get what they deserve. No matter how old or how healthy they are, it would just not be fair to let this people live a peaceful life while we know that they were responsible for the torture and assassination of hundreds, or maybe thousands, of people. The time for them comes: just as happened to criminals like Slobodan Milosevic, who was brought to justice in 2001; or Nuon Chea in Cambodia, who was arrested at age 82; the time to face the law has come to Radovan Karadzic.

Well, this guy was nicknamed "the butcher of Sarajevo" for good reasons. During the Bosnian war, the Serb-Bosnian army under Ratko Mladic's command (who received orders directly from Karadzic) carried out operations like the infamous massacre of Srebrenica, where about 8,000 people (mostly Muslim Bosnians, or Bosniaks) were systematically killed, in a genocide that is thought to be the worst in Europe since the end of World War II. Another incident directly linked to Karadzic is the siege of Sarajevo during 1992-1996, during which an estimated of 12,000 people (mostly civilians) were killed and many others wounded.

There are many other charges against Karadzic, such as taking hostages and crimes against humanity. Since 1995, he had been a fugitive of the International Court of The Hague, and just yesterday he was finally arrested in Belgrade. Unsurprisingly, the current look of Mr. Karadzic is radically different from how he used to look: A long, white beard, a hat, thick glasses and a ponytail substituted the messy hairstyle and expensive suits that he used to wear during the Bosnian war.

It is now a matter of time until we know what sentences will be laid upon him. No matter how severe they will be, it won't repair the lives of those who were killed or lost loved ones under Karadzic's orders. But at least it will be better than not having done anything about the case at all.

Photo by AP

OneVoice: Good intention, bad approach

2008-07-13T18:04:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, a video titled "Israel & Palestine to co-host World Cup in 2018?", posted by an organization called OneVoice, was featured on Youtube's main page. The organization advocates for the creation of an independent Palestinian State, mutual recognition for both Israel and Palestine, and peace. I am convinced that their cause is very noble and their intentions are good, but the way in which they are trying to reach people with their message is just lousy.Click on the video to watch (or click here if the video below doesn't work).

As you can see, the video claims that Israel and Palestine are joint official candidates to host the 2018 World Cup. I don't know whether this claim is true, but I would have serious doubts about it, considering the following points:

The ad looks more like a joke: Players are playing the match over a clay field instead of a grass pitch, the wall lies just inside the field (is the point that Israel and Palestine will co-host a World Cup, or rather to emphasize their differences?), and the overall lack of any professional equipment and features in place (a stadium, goals and nets, etc) makes the spot lose all seriousness.
Security issues: As long as there are armed terrorist organizations like Hamas, Al-Aqsa Martyrs and Hezbolla present in the region, the threat of terrorism is latent. Once said that, would Israel open its borders with Palestine to co-host a World Cup, and to allow the free transit of people (which may include Hamas and Al-Aqsa Martyrs) through its territory? Unlikely.
Infrastructure: Let's face it. An event of the nature of a soccer world cup requires high investments in infrastructure, which lacks especially on the Palestinian side. It is indeed possible to build nice stadiums, hotels, transportation systems, etc, when peace is reached (i.e. when terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas are disbanded). But would these investments be priorities to the Palestinian authorities in the near future? Why not building hospitals, schools, and homes first?
Time constraints: Organizing world sports events, such as Olympic games and soccer world cups, is not an overnight task. Normally, the organization of these type of events take about 7 years, which would mean that, by 2011, the preparation for this event should get started. That is only 3 years from now; is it that both sides can take the fast track to peace and start working on the world cup preparation on time?

Unfortunately, this video is not much better than other materials that they've posted in Youtube. Here's another example; in this spot a supposed Saudi prince visits Tel Aviv. But the whole thing looks extremely fake, and at some points it turns hilarious (Click here if the video below doesn't work).

I believe that OneVoice's ideal is essentially good. Their will to achieve peace in the region is a noble cause and they are looking for ways to promote such cause, to reach people with their message. What I find absurd is the choice of marketing tools they are using: Rather than making them look as a NGO (non-governmental organization) committed to seeking peace in the region (which is what they are), their ads makes them appear as a NGO that is looking to promote peace through the side of humor. That's an error. I applaud their idea and their core message, but if I were them, I would be seeking for a new marketing communications person to produce these promotion materials.

Lawn sprinklers... water saving tools?

2008-07-10T20:15:00.001-07:00

After getting showered by a lawn sprinkler while innocently walking on a sidewalk today, an interesting thought came to my mind: Do sprinklers really help to keep more sustainable irrigation practices? My reflection, of course, would not be oriented towards the industrial use of sprinklers (e.g. for agriculture), but merely to residential utilization.

The idea of using sprinklers is essentially good. These systems probably reduced significantly the amount of water used to irrigate residential gardens, since they distribute water more efficiently to larger portions of land than regular hoses do. And, although there are more efficient sprinkler systems available in the market, which reduce significantly the amount of water used to irrigate land (such as the underground dripping systems), the conventional sprinklers commonly used for residential purposes offer an inexpensive method to rationalize water used for irrigation.

Up until this point, it would seem that the use of sprinklers is all positive. But what happens when people who use these sprinklers do not see social responsibility as one of their major virtues? Well, the result of such lack of social responsibility is normally reflected in one or both of the following unfortunate (yet common) urban scenarios:

The sprinkler is positioned incorrectly. This normally results in having well-irrigated sidewalks instead of well-irrigated lawns.
The sprinkler is left working for too long. I have seen cases in which plants would be yelling for help if they could speak, as they are about to drown in pools created by sprinklers left to operate for hours without supervision.

From all this reflection, I would conclude that sprinklers are great tools to manage better the irrigation of gardens, as long as it is done responsibly. Otherwise, the waste of water becomes enormous, maybe even comparable to the waste produced by hoses. So, for people who normally handle sprinklers, please remember to use them in a responsible way... else, please consider purchasing underground dripping systems instead!

New Orleans, like no other place on Earth!

2008-07-05T13:39:00.001-07:00

I always suspected that New Orleans was like no other place on Earth. The mix of French, Spanish, and American cultures there would definitely guarantee a way of life that cannot be seen elsewhere. But I always wanted to prove myself that my theory was true... and after making a short trip to that city recently, I not only confirmed that culture is unique there, but I also learned that the city offers a travel experience that fits pretty much any kind of interests and tastes.

So what makes New Orleans special? It is not only the delicious food that can be purchased in the numerous restaurants in the legendary French Quarter and the central business district; in virtually any corner, it is possible to find a place where they sell typical Louisiana dishes, such as Jambalaya, Gumbo or Po'boys. It is not only the fantastic music that can be enjoyed in bars and music halls in the French Quarter and in the Faubourg Marigny neighbourhood, where jazz, blues and zydeco flow in the atmosphere to delight music lovers. It is not only the wild nightlife that can be enjoyed in the worldwide famous Bourbon street, where people are allowed to drink in the outdoors and where the mix of lights, colors, sounds and flavours seem to be ubiquitous from dusk to dawn.

New Orleans is much more than any those features alone. New Orleans is a mix of all of them. The warmth of its inhabitants, the feeling of meeting a part of the past and the present by walking on the French Quarter and seeing the central business district a few blocks away, the experience of riding a streetcar dating back to the early 20th century while admiring the beauty of the Mississippi river... all those make New Orleans a unique place. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend people to visit New Orleans at least once in their lifetime, in fact I think that I should visit it again sometime in the future to live again all those things that can only be lived in New Orleans. I must say, the city itself is a whole experience, and of course I confirmed that New Orleans is like no other place on Earth!

Licentiousness of speech

2008-06-27T13:14:00.000-07:00

The internet has become an excellent means to voice web surfers' opinions, feelings, and concerns. No matter where we live, what is our social status or people's education level, every person who has access the internet also has access to different tools that ease the exchange of points of view and comments with other users around the world. Up to this point, it would appear that websites that publish content and allow people to leave comments on it, such as Youtube, blogs or newspapers, are making a very positive impact in society.

Indeed, giving people the necessary vehicles to express their opinions and exercise their freedom of speech is a good thing. But there is a point in which all these positive impacts appear to turn into something rather deceiving and worrying: That's the point in which freedom of speech turns into what I call 'licentiousness of speech'.

The matter is not about people having different points of view. It is normal to have people entering into arguments about different topics, because it is valid to analyze issues from a variety of perspectives. This kind of behavior is undoubtedly enriching. But what happens when uninformed individuals decide to take part of these discussion threads? Moreover, what happens when people utilize the discussion threads to disrespect, insult, lie, or boycott? Of course, these behaviors are what I would classify as licentiousness of speech, which has unfortunately become a quite widespread practice in popular forums and websites.

Examples of this licentiousness of speech are numerous; we can almost pick any random video there and read the related comments to identify these libertines. For instance, I picked a video by Sacha Baron Cohen's character Borat, to illustrate my point. In such video, the English comedian (who is Jewish himself) lures some cowboys to sing along with him a song attacking Jews, just to demonstrate and ridicule how stereotypes against them are still believed and tolerated by some groups. Of course, this video posted on youtube and the possibility of leaving comments on it was a perfect opportunity for ignorant punks to exercise their licentiousness of speech. Some of the comments are both outrageous and worrying:

A user under the nickname ozcohen20 asks "what (sic) the problem with jews? they are nice people! i got a (sic) many jews (sic) friends, and they are very good people", to which another individual nicknamed zouritje replies: "ye right ure (sic) jew , jews take all the money and control america a**hole so they fight ure (sic) wars".
Another ignorant surfer, under the nickname Thelavendel, comments: "I hate jews. I wish you people got eaten by sharks". Not only the comment is totally disrespectful and condemnable, but it also gets voted as a "good comment" by other users.
Yet another uninformed speech libertine, hidden under the nickname Wraitheyes161, expresses the following: "Lmao yeah F*ck jews almost got killed by one!!!!!!! So the Germans had it right. Damn you America just cause the Japs spilled your shake!". This comment, too, gets voted as a "good one".

The list of inappropriate comments could go on and on, and as I say, it is not only a phenomenon shown in one specific video in Youtube, but it appears in virtually any online forum to which every user may have access. The key problem of this issue is the disrespect among people, and the publishing of inappropriate comments, based on untrue information, hatred and personal bias. It would be convenient, for the well being of internet users around the world and for the sake of harmony between web surfers, to have some sort of control in which these behaviors could be minimized. But who's here to act as cyber-cop? And how to define the exact border between freedom of speech and licentiousness of speech? I don't know. But hopefully someday we'll be able to get rid of this pandemic.

Zimbabwe: The day that democracy died

2008-06-22T17:31:00.000-07:00

Democracy was fatally wounded in Zimbabwe a long time ago. In fact, it is unclear whether ever the concept of "democracy" ever existed in such African nation. Since it became an independent state in 1980, Zimbabwe has been ruled by an individual whose populist ideas, brutal repression, corruption, and addiction to power have turned the once-prosperous country into an economical, political and social disaster: From being known as the bread-basket of Africa due to the exports of food from the fertile Zimbabwean soil to the rest of African nations, Zimbabwe is today a country sunk in a 150,000% annual inflation rate (by far the worst in the world), with an unemployment rate as high as 80%, and with a political system where president Robert Mugabe and his party, ZANU-PF, do not allow any sort of criticism (let alone opposition) to the regime.

In these times of turmoil for Zimbabweans, most of which are surviving below the poverty line and lack the very basic goods and services to live in humanly-acceptable conditions, it appeared that the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and his party, Movement for the Democratic Change (MDC), would finally bring Mugabe off power after their victory on the presidential elections held earlier this year. But even though Mugabe and ZANU-PF lost control of the Zimbabwean House of Assembly and the Senate for the first time since the independence of the country, they managed to manipulate the elections enough to call a run-off election scheduled for June 27, 2008.

From March to June, ZANU-PF had enough time to learn from their mistakes to make sure that they don't lose the election in June, as they did in March: As a report from The Guardian explains, ZANU-PF organized groups to seek and beat people who voted for the MDC in the previous election, to make sure that they 'change their minds' for the run-off voting. Civilians were even killed by these groups. Their crime? Wanting to be freed from the oppression, dictatorship, and crisis that Mugabe's regime has created as a means of keeping power.

Violations of human rights in Zimbabwe know no limits under Mugabe's rule, and it goes from censorship of freedom of speech, to threats, to beatings, to assassinations, and to any necessary means that help Mugabe and his party to keep in office. As a result of that, Morgan Tsvangirai decided today to pull out from the run-off election. Although he has not undergone the official procedures to quit his candidacy, it appears to be imminent. If Tsvangirai pulls out officially, that would mean the permanence of Mugabe and ZANU-PF in power.

We cannot blame Morgan Tsvangirai for his decision. At the end of the day, his rationale makes a lot of sense: "We in the MDC cannot ask them [the voters] to cast their vote on June 27, when that vote could cost them their lives". And it is not only the voters' lives, but Tsvangirai's own life is at risk as well. Let's not forget that he has also been subject to arrests, tortures, beatings, and other violations by Mugabe's forces. But having the opposition out of the run-off election also means a victory for Mugabe's oppressive methods, and moreover, it shows that democracy in this African nation is dead... and the hope for better days remains a distant dream.

More information available on The Globe and Mail.

A stop to free downloads in Canada?

2008-06-18T15:13:00.000-07:00

In recent days, a lot of speculation has arisen around the new controversial federal copyright legislation to be approved in Canada. It is essentially an update of the current copyright law (which was last updated in 1997), in which a few new measures and penalties are considered. Among the changes proposed, it contains penalties of up to $500 Canadian dollars for each copyrighted file downloaded illegally (e.g. mp3 files downloaded from P2P programs such as Limewire), fines up to $20,000 for each file uploaded illegally, and also severe penalties for breaking digital locks (also known as Digital Rights Management technology or simply DRM).

Well, that news has been rolling in the most important newspapers nationwide lately, and of course people have expressed their concern about this new regulation. I have analyzed the comments that people have posted in forums and other communication tools available on the web, and overall people agree that the copyrights law should be updated (even though that would mean that free downloads of copyrighted material would no longer be legal, as it currently happens in Canada). However, I come to the conclusion that people are worried about the following issues:

Privacy: Users are worried that the authorities will invade the people's privacy in order to locate illegally downloaded material. More specifically, people are worried that internet service providers will pass private online activity information to the authorities, and also that customs agents will act as watchdogs for this issue and will potentially analyze private information and confiscate electronic devices (mp3 players, laptops, cellphones, and so on).
Evidence: Digital consumers are also concerned about how will the authorities identify lawfully downloaded material from illegal contents, should they inspect a person's device. Is it that people will have to carry the proof of purchase of every piece of software they carry in their equipment?
DRM locks: Won't users be allowed to make copies of their own rightfully purchased content any longer if the producer decided to put a DRM lock on it?

The authorities have quickly issued comments where they state that privacy won't be affected by this new regulation. However, they didn't issue a clear statement on the DRM issue, which is one of the biggest concerns about the updated law. Since unlocking software to copy will be illegal, that means that making copies of legal material for personal use or backup will be prosecuted; and, as this sort of prosecution is in the best interest of producers, will there be any of them who won't be putting locks on their products at all?

Needless to say, software producers and music recording labels were the first ones to express their satisfaction with these new project of law. But the law is supposed to be protecting intellectual property, such as musicians, authors and programmers. The question would be, should the new law be approved, will those supposed to be protected get a benefit from it? The answer appears to be no, as the money collected from fines and other penalties imposed to consumers would most likely end up in the pockets of corporations rather than the actual creators of intelectual property.

This initiative is due to be discussed later this year. Not only some skeptics think that this law would be totally unenforceable, but many see in it a premature failure, as the minority ruling Conservative party will face criticism and opposition from other parties in the Parliament. Let's keep an eye on this matter, as criticism and emotions are guaranteed!

Please refer to the note in The Globe and Mail for in-depth information about this issue

New hurdles for the European Union

2008-06-13T17:56:00.001-07:00

Important things have been happening in Europe lately. While most of the attention in Europe is concentrated in the Euro 2008 soccer tournament, there are some matters that haven't been widely reported by the media recently, all of which affect the fate of the European Union's development.

The European efforts to make the European Union to become a single, multi-national country (as ironic as that sounds) were thwarted once again by voters. Just as it happened back in 2005, when French and Dutch voters overwhelmingly rejected a European Constitution, it was now the turn for Irish voters to decide whether to ratify or reject the Lisbon Treaty, which is regarded by many as a new effort to introduce the European Constitution.

The result is far from surprising: A great majority of Irish voters decided that they don't want their country to go ahead on its way to ratify such plan. That is a big hit to the European Union's plan, as its policies require unanimous approval from all member States to implement new laws and regulations.

As it was expected, the Irish vote against the treaty has brought lots of criticism from people not only in Europe, but around the world, claiming that Ireland is slowing down the development of the Union by opposing the Lisbon treaty. How is it possible that the Irish population of less than 5 million people can turn down the will of the rest of the Union, which adds up to more than 450 million people? Well, we cannot be sure that the rest of the European Union is really wishing this treaty to be ratified. Let's not forget that Ireland was in fact the only member State that let its population go to a referendum to ratify or reject such matter; the rest of the countries just held a parliamentary votes rather than going to public consultation.

What would have happened if every country in the European Union let its population vote to accept or reject the treaty? Would more countries have rejected it through referenda? We won't know. It would have been very interesting to see what would have happened in countries like France and the Netherlands, where voters turned down the European Constitution. But that was not the case this time, as both countries passed amendments to their national regulations where vetoes could be applied to referenda, in case that the democratic votes go against the European will. Fortunately for the Irish, their own Constitution requires the country to call referenda whenever these EU treaties, regulations and laws require an unanimous approval from the member States... at least for now.

So what's next? Donald Tusk, Prime Minister of Poland, has an idea about it. He made the following statement after hearing the results of the Irish referendum: "Ireland will find for sure a way to ratify this treaty". In other words, Mr. Tusk is suggesting that the Irish government will probably introduce vetoes and other reforms to ignore the voters' will and ratify the treaty without delay. That is by far the most anti-democratic comment I have read in recent times, and it is more surprising to know that it comes from a leader whose country belongs to a Union that boasts about its democracy and freedom.

Other than that, I congratulate the Irish voters for expressing their will in the ballots, and I also acknowledge the other member States for respecting the results of the referendum in Ireland.

More information about the Irish referendum and its results is available in The Globe and Mail.
Photo by AP

Tomatoes... we miss you

2008-06-10T22:29:00.000-07:00

The health authorities in the US issued in the past days a warning to consumers and businesses to avoid certain types of tomatoes after a salmonella outbreak. The situation is quite serious: according to a report by BBC, there have been 145 cases of salmonella reported since mid-April, distributed in 17 states across the United States.

As the FDA is investigating the origin of the outbreak, certain companies have decided to stop serving and distributing some types of tomato. Some of the companies include Wal-Mart, McDonald's, Burger King, and Subway, the latter of which has also pulled its tomatoes from its stores in Canada (not sure whether McDonald's and Burger King have done the same yet).

It is good that the authorities take this situation seriously. It is crucial to prevent the disease from spreading in North America, but for a person who really values the taste of tomatoes in their sandwiches and salads (such as myself), these are quite tough times. Hopefully the quarantine will not be too long, but in the meantime I can firmly assure: Tomatoes... we miss you.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons

Dunkin' terrorism?

2008-06-04T17:33:00.000-07:00

Dunkin' Donuts pulled out an ad from the internet last week. Such ad featured Rachael Ray wearing a black and white scarf and promoting an iced coffee beverage. Nothing extremely odd until this point, other than the reason for which the ad was pulled: the black and white scarf.

It looks that the scarf reminded people in the audience of the keffiyah that Arab mean wear in their heads. Moreover, although the keffiyah has been worn by Arab men for centuries, it was made popular in the western world by Yasser Arafat, the deceased Palestinian president, along with other terrorists who have been involved in attacks against civilian targets worldwide, especially against the interests of countries such as the United States, England, Denmark and Israel.

As a result of this odd link between terrorists, keffiyah and the western hemisphere, Dunkin' Donuts' ad received tons of negative criticism. Although the donut chain has denied any intentions to promote terrorism or anti-western messages with such online ad, I have reviewed some opinions posted by the audience in the internet where people seem to be really upset about the scarf in the ad, accusing Dunkin' Donuts of supporting terrorism and of fitting a subliminal message in their campaign.

I find the accusations quite interesting. Even though the design of the scarf does indeed remind of the keffiyah worn by Arab men (and linked to the image of terrorism), I seriously doubt that a donut company would be willing to support terrorism in such a bizarre way. It is more likely an odd coincidence of a marketing campaign that simply went wrong when Rachael Ray picked a scarf that would just not be welcome by the audience.

However, there is an important moral in this whole story, and that is that people demonstrating their awareness about the problem of extremism and terrorism, and they are rejecting it and raising their voice against it. Let's not allow any support to terrorism, or any of its organizations, by any means.

The fall of a kingdom

2008-05-28T23:02:00.000-07:00

There were lots of public celebrations in Kathmandu, capital city of Nepal, after the announcement about the abolition of the Nepalese Monarchy. A constituent assembly voted to remove king Gyanendra (and the whole royal institution that he represented) from power, and to turn Nepal into a republic.

Not everything were celebrations and jubilation, as some groups loyal to the king and the Nepalese royalty allegedly reacted violently to the decision. Regardless, the days of the Nepalese Monarchy come to an end after 240 years, and king Gyanendra was requested to leave the royal palace that will eventually become a museum.

An interesting fact is that a political party that claims to have a Maoist tendency will be ruling the new republic. It is not clear yet whether the new republic will follow a communist system. It is true that Nepal is leaving an absolutist system in which the king's will was the law. However, supposing that Nepal will indeed be ruled in a communist fashion, then we should really wonder how beneficial was to overthrow the Monarchy in the first place, as many communist regimes around the world have proved to excel in violations of human rights, censorship of freedom of speech, and brutal repression of ideologies that differ from the ruling party's. However, these are only scenarios that may happen, and by no means I am guaranteeing that this is the way things will work in a foreseeable future.

In any case, congratulations to the people of Nepal for finding a peaceful way to transition, and I sincerely hope that this change comes for good for their nation.

Read the full note from BBC News

Odds of making a hole-in-one are low, but...

2008-05-24T22:26:00.000-07:00

Ah! Scoring a hole-in-one... the dream of every golfer. They are rare events, and sometimes golfers who are able to score a hole-in-one (or "ace") receive cash prizes and other rewards. And that's exactly the point where hole-in-ones become an expense to golf courses and organizers of golf tournaments.

The odds of scoring a hole-in-one are not very high. According to estimations made by actuaries from insurance companies, the odds of an average golfer (just like myself) to make an "ace" are quite low: 12,000 to 1.

If that's so, then I should consider myself lucky of having made a hole-in-one today. It was on the 7th hole, par 3, 77 yards. It is very strange, and it is even more when you consider that my skills in golf are slightly lower than the average weekend player. But I just got lucky... and got my ace. Too bad I didn't get any sort of cash prize for it, but at least I got a certificate from the golf course and a pin that reads "Hole in one, Henderson Park Golf Course" (picture on the left side, my apologies for the poor resolution) to make the feat memorable. Pretty cool.

Instant messaging: The evolution

2008-05-18T14:21:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, back in the days when instant messaging was an incipient concept (i.e., in the mid 1990's), an Israeli company named Mirabilis launched a product to the internet. It's name was ICQ (which didn't stand for anything at all; the choice of those three letters was only to represent the sentence I-seek-you), and it became the most popular instant messaging tool in the web for many years. ICQ was a key factor that attracted people to instant messaging, to the extent that a great amount of users signed up for the service and they spent a fair amount of their time (free or otherwise) chatting. But the times when ICQ was the standard of instant messaging came to an end when Mirabilis got purchased by AOL, which also ran its own instant messaging service (AIM) that exists until today.

By the time when AOL ran simultaneously ICQ and AIM, instant messaging was already popular enough to be considered a business with a promising growth potential. But AIM was not the competitor that brought ICQ down from its throne as the king of the instant messaging services. It was not even Yahoo, which became a company known for its innovation and the reliability of its services. It was Microsoft's Windows Messenger. Microsoft found an excellent opportunity to gain a considerable market share of the instant messaging industry by including its messaging program on their Windows operating system. They were successful in becoming the standard for instant messaging.

It looks that the industry is taking a new twist again. As I have been having more spare time than usual lately, I have also had more time to surf the internet and explore what new tools are there available to allow users to keep in touch with their friends and contacts. My surprise was immense when I logged into my Facebook and I noticed a small green dot in the bottom right corner of the screen. Yes, it is true: That dot was Facebook's new chat system!

Well, the idea of adding an instant messaging tool to Facebook is very good, due to the high volume and the profile of users subscribed to such service. Even though their instant messaging service's interface is still rather rudimentary, it looks that the service has been welcomed by users and they're utilizing the service the same way they use Microsoft's Windows Messenger.

There are two big questions that come to my mind at this point:

If we consider that employees (especially teenagers often doing entry level, retail positions) were already spending a considerable time in their jobs to surf through Facebook, will the addition of this feature have an impact in their overall performance, and hence in their employers' businesses?
Will Facebook's instant messaging take a chunk of Windows Messenger's (and the other well-established) instant messaging services market share? Or will it rather be a complementary service to it?

The answers to these questions will definitely be reflected in the long term. For now, all we can say is that these types of service through the web keep evolving and flourishing.

Why is job hunting nightmerish?

2008-05-14T17:32:00.000-07:00

Job hunting is not a pleasant experience by any means. It may become extremely frustrating and boring, sometimes even painful, and from time to time the job hunter can reach the point in which it appears that their hunt will never end. It's not something to be glad of, and it doesn't look that the evolution of the labor market is really easing that.

From my experience, I believe that I found the reason for which job hunting is such a nightmare sometimes. It is not always related to the applicants and their skills set. There are quite a few factors that make the job hunting process a very unpleasant time for people looking to get a job (not necessarily the job of their dreams, but any job). They are related to the poor commitment of potential employers to ease the conditions for job seekers. Here are a few examples of that:

When looking for jobs, one of the most annoying phrases to read at the end of the job descriptions is: “We would like to thank all applicants, however only those under consideration will be contacted”. If I had to rank that from the scale from 0 to 10, 0 being not annoying at all and 10 being the most annoying level, I would place it right in the most extreme point of 10. Would it be too much hassle to at least notify applicants that their application was received successfully? Instead of that, employers do not notify anything, and they are giving the clue that “if we don't like your resume and cover letter, we will throw them to our garbage bin without further notification”. Nice.
As if the point above was not annoying enough, there are quite a few employers out there who add the following instruction: “No phone calls please”. This means that applicants will not only not be notified whether their application is being reviewed by the company or it went straight to the organization's recycle bins, but they also won't have the opportunity to follow up their case. In other words, they are giving the following message: “send your application and wait forever to find out whether our company is interested in your services or not. Don't phone us to ask directly, because we won't tell you”. Phew.
It is very understandable that companies are trying to pick the best people to work for them. But there is a difference between setting requirements to hire the best of the best, and setting requirements that are beyond all reality. It doesn't make much sense that companies ask applicants to have “3-5 years of experience, proven success in doing certain tasks, a master's degree, and a combined technical and business background” for entry-level positions that will pay low wages, and for which mainly new graduates will apply. How do they think that new grads will gain the years of work experience that they ask for, when all the companies out there want experienced people as well? There are very few companies that are really giving new grads a chance to gain experience, the one that all of the companies require applicants to have. At the end of the day, an applicant should better have some years of experience after graduation in order to have any aspirations to find a job afterwards... who knows how will they achieve that.

Normally employers make their best to let people know that applicants are the only cause for which they cannot place themselves, but they don't consider that they don't do a lot to make the process easier either. But well, that's the world of job hunting, everywhere. It is not a nice experience, but it appears that we all have to visit that dark chapter of life from time to time. To people who are out there looking for jobs, keep working on that, and have my best wishes.

Only 'voices in your head'?

2008-05-13T10:15:00.000-07:00

Next time you hear voices in your head, it might not only be your imagination: It may be hypersonic sound targeted at you.

A note published in a newspaper reports the development of a new technology, called hypersonic sound, that allows to send sound messages in open places (e.g. a mall, the streets, a park, etc) to a specific recipient. The interesting part is that only such intended recipient will hear the sound or message; the people around won't hear it. The trick is that sound waves are sent at a very low pitch, which can't be perceived by the human hear. The waves restore their normal pitch when crashing an object, or a person.

This concept sounds partly cool, partly frightening. As some groups advocate and fear, this can be used by marketers to flood target audiences with advertisements and other undesired messages, effectively invading people's privacy. But on the other hand, it might have other useful applications, such as in certain types of alarms intended for only a specific person or group of people.

Although the development and application of this technology in a wider sense looks to be coming in a few years, the idea (and the results of the first tests) are already being controversial. Hopefully, this kind of technology can be used for really useful purposes, and not only to flood people with marketing campaigns.

Click here to read the whole note from the Times Colonist

The $0.15 donut drama

2008-05-08T13:38:00.000-07:00

This is the story of a coffee-shop employee, a baby, a $0.15 donut, and a huge corporation -- and the tragicomedy that mingled them all.

As a bit of background for people who are not from Canada, Tim Hortons is the largest Canadian retailer of coffee and baked products, such as donuts and bagels. This restaurant chain is extremely popular among Canadian consumers, to the extent that it is very scary to pass outside one of their locations in the morning hours, as you can literally see lines of people around the block waiting to get served coffee and donuts there. One of their most widely-known products are the Timbits -- which are nothing more than donut centers (see picture below). That is, each Timbit is about the size of a golf ball at best, and they are normally sold in boxes containing 10, 20 or 40 units. However, it is possible to purchase each Timbit by piece, and the price is about $0.15 dollars each.

Well, it looks that an employee somewhere in the province of Ontario, being very committed to providing customer satisfaction and a nice shopping experience for people there, decided that it would be a nice gesture to give a baby a single Timbit for free. It is very probable that the baby got a lot of customer satisfaction from the employee's action, and the employee herself potentially got some satisfaction for making the baby happy. But the store manager, and maybe the whole Tim Hortons corporation didn't find that gesture as nice, so they decided to teach her a lesson: they fired the employee!

This is a new low I never imagined could happen. Does it make any sense that a company that reported a net income of $61.8 million dollars during the first quarter of 2008 alone fires an employee (a single mother of four children) for giving away a product worth $0.15, for the sake of customer satisfaction? Say that giving away products for free is against the policies within Tim Hortons. In that case, why wouldn't the managers instruct the employee to pay herself for the Timbit she gave away, and warn her not to do something like that in the future?

Well, just like you and I, the Tim Hortons corporation realized that firing an employee for an absolutely irrelevant incident didn't make any sense, so they decided to hire the employee again and move her to a different location. At the end of the day, it looks that the only loser of this oddity is Tim Hortons' corporate image, as incidents like these don't enhance their reputation by any means.

Maybe I should start double checking the amount of Timbits I get when I purchase a 20-piece box. Then I could have good grounds to sue Tim Hortons if I ever find out that at least one is missing from my box!

Click here to read the full story from Yahoo Canada

Oh my! My email made me a millionaire!

2008-05-03T14:03:00.001-07:00

Good news keep coming to people's email accounts. Some of us have received irresistible offers to buy medicines and counterfeit products, some others have been selected to answer an online customer service survey in exchange of a monetary gratification from a bank in which we don't even have an account... but only a few of us are fortunate enough to win a lottery prize for which we didn't even buy a ticket!

I felt so lucky a couple of days ago, when I checked my email and found there a new message that got my attention right away. The subject was "Congratulation===Ref:PRLUK/56POLG/02", and it read as follows:

Premier League Lottery Sweepstakes,
Corporate Headquarters,
91 Station Road,
West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7LT,
United Kingdom.
*****************************
Ref:PRLUK/56POLG/02
Batch: 02/78/2010
*****************************

                      NOTIFICATION

The Premier League Lottery program held in London 2008.
Happily announce to you the draw of your e-mail address
attached to ticketnumber:512-20658001-034 with Serial
number 0712/04 drew the lucky numbers:20-4-11-19-05-1,
which subsequently won you the lottery prize in
the 2nd category. You have therefore been approved to
claim a total sum of GBP£1,000,000.00 (One Million Great
Britain pounds) in cash credited to file C/9080118308/02.
This is from a total cash prize of GBP£50 Million
pounds, shared amongst the first fifteen (15)
lucky winners in this category.

CLAIMS PROCEDURES:
AGENT: Mr.Gary Rodney/Mrs.Jewel Thompson
Email: premier.officer02@yahoo.com.hk
Phone:  +447031901402
+447031901403

Yours Faithfully,
Mr.Steve Hayes.
Premier League International

Exciting isn't it? But lots of questions came to my mind. For instance, what kind of generous organization was kindly rewarding me with £1 million for just having a free, web based email address? It was very interesting to find out that an organization based in England would be rewarding me with that kind of money, given the fact that I have never been myself to England. And the fact that the name of the lottery company is related to the English Premier Soccer League, along with the poor grammar to build some of the sentences in the message, makes it lose all credibility.

Another interesting detail is in the further actions to cash the prize. The lucky winner, in this case myself, has to contact either an individual named Gary Rodney or a lady named Jewel Thompson, both of whom can be reached in an email address belonging to the yahoo.com.hk domain. In other words, it's a free email account (which anyone can open freely, without any effort, and in a matter of minutes) held in the Yahoo-Hong Kong site. It is pretty bizarre that a company based in England has to open email accounts in Hong Kong, under the Yahoo domain. Is it possible that they don't have enough money to open their own domain (something like ...@premierlottery.co.uk) when they can give away prizes worth £50 million?

I decided to keep looking for things that didn't make any sense, and I certainly found them. I used some of the most popular search engines to find out more about this email message, and it looks that at least 5 more people 'won' money in this lottery... all of us with exactly the same ticket and serial numbers! What a coincidence. Just impressive.

There have been so many of these scams running through the internet lately, that someone decided to gather a compilation of lottery winning notification emails and publish them on a website. If you wish to have a nice time reading a few of these emails to find out all the incongruities and grammar mistakes, visit that page by clicking here.

I really wonder if there are people out there who can possibly take the bait of these cheap tricks...

Crime alert in Kinshasa?

2008-04-26T22:08:00.000-07:00

From all the crimes I've heard of in my life, this genre is the most bizarre. There's a wave of panic hitting the city of Kinshasa, capital city of the Democratic Republic of Congo, because of a series penis thefts. Yes, you read it right: Penis thefts.

It happens that in Africa there's a widespread belief that sorcerers have special powers, and people in Kinshasa have been warned to keep away from them. The victims of this curious kind of theft (who add up to more than 15 men) argue that sorcerers touched their penises, and they either shrank them or disappeared them. Pretty much they are suggesting to begin a contemporary witch-hunt to eradicate this crime from the streets of Kinshasa - a suggestion that might gain widespread support. But the police decided to arrest a few suspected penis-thieves to avoid a massacre.

Having penis thieves in Kinshasa is really bad, and men should be careful with their possessions there these days. I can't really understand what reasons could drive a thief to steal a penis, but in any case, men around the world should be cautious. Hopefully, the penis-theft wave won't hit sensitive places in the world, as the Vondelpark in Amsterdam could be, for instance.

Click here to read the entire note by Reuters

Magic swimsuits

2008-04-20T09:53:00.000-07:00

Swimsuits, and not swimmers, are breaking swimming records. At least that is the idea stuck in some German Olympic swimmers' minds. A note published in Yahoo explains that the German swimmers are worried that their performance in the Olympic games in Beijing will be hindered by the swimsuits they'll be wearing: After all, who would want to wear an Adidas suit when there is Speedo equipment available in the market?

It looks that a model recently introduced by Speedo, the LZR Racer, has been worn by record-breaking swimmers around the world. It's a pattern that the German Olympic swimming team has noticed lately, and they think that their performance in the upcoming Olympics is doomed unless their federation terminates a contract with Adidas, who has the exclusive rights to provide swimsuits to the German swimmers until 2009. Unfortunately for their case, they are not being backed up by the authorities of their own federation.

How can it be possible that a team considers their chances of success nil because of the swimsuits they wear? Not only that's a slap in the face to Adidas and all other swimsuit manufacturers, but it also reflects a lack of self confidence among the German swimmers. Interestingly, the FINA (Fédération Internationale de Natation), which is the governing body of water sports, has discarded a ban to the use of Speedo's 'magic swimsuit' in the Beijing Olympics, as they have found no scientific proof that the suit in fact provides unfair advantages to the swimmers wearing it.

It will be interesting to find out after the Beijing Olympics if, as the Germans suggest, there is indeed a correlation between the use of Speedo's swimsuit and the medals won in water disciplines.

The cellphone wars

2008-04-09T21:30:00.000-07:00

Back in January 2007, when Apple's iPhone was unveiled by Steve Jobs, I was less than impressed with such gadget (as I widely described in a post dated back in those days). Nevertheless, other people found Apple's cellphone attractive and they bought their iPhones as soon as they could, which has given the iPhone a high degree of popularity among technology consumers, and a good position in the market.

But the real question was never whether the iPhone will ever become popular or not. It looked more appealing to see how would the giants of the cellphone industry would react. Would companies like Motorola, Nokia or Research in Motion just sit back and watch while iPhone invaded their market, or would they retaliate by launching equal or better products than the iPhone?

Until not long ago, the reaction of those companies still remained as a mystery, as no real action could be seen as a response to the iPhone. But just recently Nokia leaked some information about the product which they hope will pose a face-to-face competition to Apple's phone: the Nokia Tube.

The actual features of Nokia's new gadget are not widely known yet, however there is a video in Youtube in which it is very well presented the way this phone works: (click here if the video below doesn't work).

Talking about resemblances, the Nokia Tube definitely has some resemblance to Apple's iPhone. Would it be as successful as Nokia expects? And what products will the other giants launch to avoid losing their portion of the market? We will see. The cellphone wars have just begun.

Resemblance?

2008-04-03T13:53:00.000-07:00

A picture taken by photographer Lula Marques in Brazil during Hugo Chavez's most recent visit to that country has become a source of anger for the Venezuelan president's followers:

Does he have any resemblance with anybody famous? Let's compare the picture above with the following one:

It is incredible the resemblance between Hugo Chavez and Mickey Mouse. To have the opportunity to see Hugo Chavez almost disguised as one of the Empire's most representative cartoons of all times is simply priceless. This is an ironic world, isn't it?

I'm sure that all the people who have been subject of Chavez's bad taste insults are enjoying this photo very much.

Photo by Reuters

Earth Hour 2008 aftermath

2008-03-30T13:42:00.001-07:00

March 29, 2008: The cities went into darkness. That was part of the Earth Hour project, in which people in major cities around the world (including Sydney, Toronto, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Manila) turned off their lights for one hour: office buildings, homes, shops, bridges and other facilities went dark.

The idea behind this project, promoted by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), was to raise awareness about the need of action to counter the climate changes worldwide. And yes, a very good step into that is to slow down global warming by reducing the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, some of which are a result of the production and consumption of electricity everywhere.

The Earth Hour project was indeed a remarkable success, and I want to believe it did raise awareness about this climate change problem that we are facing. However, it should be considered only as a first step. I believe that there is much more to do, a change of our attitude towards nature and a change of our habits (e. g. excessive use of cars, not recycling reusable materials, waste of natural resources, etc) is very necessary to consider that we are making a difference. But again, this is a nice first step, and as Confucius said, "a thousand mile trip begins with a single step". So thumbs up to the WWF and people around the world who contributed to the success of Earth Hour!

More about Earth Hour in its official website and WWF's website.

Beijing 2008, on its way (?)

2008-03-24T21:42:00.000-07:00

Easter weekend is over, but it left us after an interesting event took place on it: The Olympic torch was lit in Greece, and it officially started its world tour that will continue until August 8, when the Beijing Olympics will begin. But, unlike previous occasions, this time the ceremony to light the torch was full of political activism and protests.

Some of the protesters were specifically targeted to the unrest in Tibet in the past week, whilst another bunch of people were focusing on China's poor human rights records. A few more where concerned about the violations to freedom of speech in the Asian nation. As a response, the Chinese organizers blamed the Dalai Lama of the unrest in Tibet, and of trying to boycott the upcoming Olympics. So on, it looks that the first 'tangible' event related to this year's Olympics was full of details that really makes me wonder whether the Beijing Olympics will be an international sports event, or rather a platform for protesters to raise their voice against China's most notorious social issues.

It looks that the fireworks are just about to begin. The rest of the trip of the Olympic torch will be very interesting. How many protests and blockades will it find on its way to Beijing? Let's wait to find out.

Photo from the China Daily

Cars: Low price, or ultra efficiency?

2008-03-17T19:37:00.000-07:00

While the largest Indian car manufacturer, Tata Motors, is setting everything up to launch its Nano model (the cheapest car in the world) to the streets of India later this year, there are other companies which believe that the future success of the car industry does not necessarily reside in making cars as cheap as possible, but making them as efficient as possible.

The latter is the case of a company based in San Diego, California. Accelerated Composites is an organization founded in 2006, and it is still in an entrepreneurial stage of development. However, they came up with a very interesting car prototype: the Aptera (image on the left, click to enlarge), a hybrid model which, according to its developers, will be able to run 330 miles per gallon. That is 126.72 kilometers per liter! That's outstanding compared to any hybrid models available right now, from which I can hardly remember any able to run more than 30 kilometers per liter at best.

I found a very interesting article that talks about the Aptera and its specifications, which is worthwhile reading. It is located in the How stuff works website, and you can access it by clicking here.

If the Aptera is really as good as it promises to be, then that will be a huge leap forward in the history of cars and technology... and environmentalism too.

Image by Accelerated Composites

Amsterdam: A new blow to social values?

2008-03-07T21:50:00.001-08:00

Call me narrow minded if you wish, but I am nearly convinced that certain cells of society are progressing by becoming more decadent, and those cells have found their own Mecca in the city of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. It is right there where these groups are free to please all their lowest instincts within the boundaries of legality, more specifically prostitution and drugs. Yes, no doubt that Amsterdam looks like an exemplary city to the eyes of many who describe themselves as 'liberals'.

The authorities of this Mecca of Decadence have decided to add a new attraction for so-called 'liberals' from around the world. According to a report published in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, effective this summer, it will be legal to have sex in a public park. But not just any park, this will only be acceptable in the Vondelpark, which is a very central green area in Amsterdam.

The Dutch authorities, very conscious about morality and social values, have been very careful in the regulation of this new pastime. Certain restrictions will apply for people who wish to fornicate in the wild: It will only be allowed in the evening hours and nighttime, in areas away from children's playgrounds, and under the condition that condoms must be cleared from the area.

The National Diversity Expertise Centre (LECD), which is responsible for the promotion of this state-of-the-art idea, justifies this move with a very simple question: "Why should we try to maintain something that is actually impossible to maintain, which also causes little bother for others and for a certain group actually signifies much pleasure?". That's a very clever mentality; following that rationale we should also be thinking of other avant-garde steps: Why should we try to maintain drugs (apart from marijuana) out of society if it causes little bother for others and for a certain group actually signifies much pleasure? Or why should we ban people from relieving themselves in the streets when it causes little bother for others and for a certain group actually signifies a very physiological need? The list could go on and on.

Now, the LECD is trying to convince the authorities in other cities, like The Hague and Rotterdam, to also allow public sex. Hopefully the authorities of The Hague and Rotterdam won't be as 'open minded' as their counterparts in Amsterdam to allow some of the most basic social values to erode in their cities too, so they can avoid their cities of becoming new hubs of perdition.

Photo by Tom Haarman

Animal Rights vs Professional Athletes, part II

2008-03-06T22:18:00.000-08:00

First we had the case of Michael Vick, the NFL quarterback who was found guilty of felonies related to animal cruelty by the last quarter of 2007. Now we have another fellow who has gained a lot of criticism from animal rights lobbyists and from other lovers of nature: His name is John Henry Isenhour III, better known as Tripp Isenhour, and he is a professional golf player active in the PGA's Nationwide tour.

Unlike Vick's case, Isenhour is not being investigated for cruel activities against animal rights that took place during several years. In fact, Isenhour's case is related to a single incident, but a very reprehensible one: He's accused of deliberately killing a red shouldered hawk in December 12, 2007. According to the accusations, this fellow decided to do so when he was shooting a TV show at a golf club and the hawk was being a bit too noisy to his likes. Then he thought that an easy remedy would be to shoot golf balls at the hawk to scare it.

In a perfect scenario for Isenhour, the hawk would have flown away after the first ball passed close to it (let's remember that we're talking about a professional golfer who is, with all probability, very accurate in his shots). But this was not a perfect scenario for Isenhour, and despite his many shoots, the bird would not fly away. Then he took some other attempts until... SUCCESS! he hit the hawk right on its head, allegedly killing it instantly. The bird was buried in the golf course, and it is unclear whether the video shooting continued.

If Isenhour had hit a pigeon, it probably wouldn't be such a big concern for lobbyists and government (although it's equally condemnable). But he hit a red-shouldered hawk, a migratory bird. Now he got charged with animal cruelty along with the killing of a migratory bird, which could lead him to serve some months in jail plus a fine.

The interesting part is that Isenhour claims to be an animal lover, and he states that the killing was accidental. If that's so, why would he shoot several times at the animal to scare it? And why would he shoot with such a power to kill it? Didn't he know about the risks of shooting golf balls at living creatures?. It might very well be that this golf player is indeed an animal lover as he claims, but it looks that his impatience went a bit too far that day of December 2007.

Will the cases of animal rights against professional athletes have a part III?

With information from Yahoo! Sports.
Image from Wikipedia.

February 29, relevant at all?

2008-02-29T10:25:00.000-08:00

February 29 is the signature day of leap years. Indeed, we all know that February 29 occurs only once every 4 years, and we also know that the addition of such day is a result of an adjustment of our calendar to the revolution of our planet about the sun: As a terrestrial year takes 365 days and 6 hours, those hours are accumulated for a period of four years, at the end of which they add up to 24 hours. That is one day, which in a more familiar language is known worldwide as the 'leap day' or February 29.

Yes, all of the facts mentioned above are widely known, therefore, there is little need to write more about them, considering the plenty of specialized publications that explain very well the origins of leap years. However, there is a question that comes to my mind about February 29: As it is a day that occurs only every 4 years, what historically relevant events have happened on such date?.

It didn't take me too long to do a bit of research about it. I found in Wikipedia a very good list of historical events that have happened in February 29. Even though such article mentions several events related to the leap day, I'll just highlight the ones that appear to be more interesting to me:

A new course for a country (February 29, 2004): Jean Bertrand Aristide is well remembered as the first president to be elected democratically in Haiti, back in 1991. Eventually, Aristide got involved in scandals of fraudulent elections as he got elected for a second non-consecutive term in the year 2000. The discontent of a bunch of Haitians and the emergence of rebel forces in strategic points in the country finally forced Aristide to flee Haiti and resign as president on February 29, 2004, leaving Boniface Alexandre to succeed him as interim president.
Destruction of a city (February 29, 1960): The city of Agadir, in Morocco, lived a very sad leap day in 1960 when it experienced the strongest earthquake in the history of the country. The result was devastating: 15,000 people were killed in the incident and some other 35,000 lost their homes. It was necessary to rebuild most of the city.
Recognition to science in times of war (February 29, 1940): Ernest Lawrence, an American scientist, invented a device known as cyclotron, which he patented in 1934. His invention was a particle accelerator that would later acquire great importance in the field of nuclear physics. For his contributions, he was awarded with a Nobel Prize in Physics on February 29, 1940, in a ceremony performed in Berkeley, California, due to the development of World War II in Europe.

Needless to say, February 29 has special importance to some people, especially those who were born on such date, or those who remember the death of special people in the leap day. There is a very comprehensive list of births and deaths occurred on a February 29th in Wikipedia as well.

The moral of this story is that, even when February 29 occurs only once every 4 years, it is still a day in which world keeps moving, important things may happen, and is just as relevant as any other calendar day. Enjoy the day.

Progress: The good, the bad, the ugly

2008-02-24T17:19:00.000-08:00

Times change, world does too. It is true that nothing lasts forever, thus people, ideology, technologies, regimes, likes, and ideologies keep evolving, giving rise to what we most commonly know as progress. That's a natural cycle of things, and no matter how hard a few people try to stop that, history has shown that progress will keep going its way.

This week is leaving us with two very interesting cases of people who try to stop progress, and people who advocate for it. Who'll be the good, the bad and the ugly?

Example 1: People who try to stop progress.

Fidel Castro is a good example of people who fought for progress first, but tried to stop that later. When he led the Cuban Revolution that forced Fulgencio Batista's rule out of Cuba in 1958, he had a simple thought in mind: to bring prosperous times for his country (i.e., progress) through the evolution from a dictatorial regime to a socialist one. Initially, his plans succeeded properly, as he gained power over Cuba and implemented his socialist ideas in the country. But then, Fidel Castro lost the route to which he wanted to lead his country. Mr. Castro forgot that progress also means transition, and he became an autocratic dictator in a non-democratic system that after many years became one of the most stagnant economies in the world.

The good times for Fidel Castro also went by. The now-ailing Cuban leader is now 81 years old, and this week he decided to step down as president of Cuba, after 49 years in office. Today, a very dim light of democracy was seen again in Cuba, as after many years, the voters finally had elections in which they could choose from many candidates, and not only Fidel Castro himself. Yes, the result was less than surprising, as Raul Castro, Fidel's brother and interim president of Cuba for the past few months, became Cuba's new president. The aftermath? It's still early to know, but most likely Cuba will keep living in a socialist rule. However, today's election proved that progress is there, and Cuba is slowly approaching to the path of democracy that can take still many years to reach, but it will certainly be reached.

Example 2: People who promote progress.

Progress is not only about certain characters out there who try to stop it, but it is also about people who promote it. There are many of them out there. Sir Richard Branson has constantly been one of the individuals who advocate for progress with the introduction of new
products and services through the many branches of his commercial emporium Virgin, which from time to time has transformed the way in which businesses are done.

Today, Virgin Atlantic (Virgin's branch in the airlines industry) decided to take a huge step forward in the mysterious area of alternative fuels by flying an experimental flight. A Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 took off from Heathrow international airport in London, with no passengers on board. It landed safely later in Schiphol airport, in Amsterdam. With this flight, Virgin Atlantic proved the feasibility of greener fuels in the air transport industry: One of the four General Electric motors of the plane was fed with biofuel (a blend of 80% regular fuel and 20% coconut and babassu oil), whereas the other three motors used conventional fuel, in case anything went wrong.

The flight was successful, although some technical results and data of the flight will be analyzed in the upcoming weeks to determine whether the biofuel's performance was as expected. Nevertheless, it is an important step that can eventually reduce air transportation industry's carbon footprint dramatically. It is also said that the biofuel is made from renewable natural sources, which, in case of being truth, will help to fight a potential oil drought in the planet... and many of its collateral consequences too.

With some information from The Globe and Mail and The Associated Press.

The troubled birth of a State

2008-02-17T20:29:00.000-08:00

It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that Kosovo announced today its independence from Serbia, as this rumor has been flowing through the mass media for a few days now. What makes the independence of Kosovo different than that of other countries, is that it was a unilateral decision, and that the Serbians never agreed to renounce sovereignty over the province of Kosovo, let alone to recognize it as an independent country.

As controversial as it gets, the unilateral declaration of independence of Kosovo has been welcomed by some around the world, criticized by others, and condemned by some others. For instance, and independent Kosovo has been backed by the United States and some of the European Union members, such as Italy, England and France. On the other hand, Serbia and Russia have fiercely opposed the recognition of Kosovo as an independent country. Russians specifically says that the recognition of Kosovo's unilaterally-proclaimed independence would be a 'bad example' for other separatist movements around the world.

The dilemma of the recognition of Kosovo as an independent nation won't only remain in the Balkans. In fact, it promises to bring lots of debate to other nations and organizations, such as the European Union. By now, some EU member nations, including Spain, Greece and Cyprus, have expressed their opposition to an 'immediate recognition' of Kosovo as a sovereign country. Why? Because these countries also have separatist movements active in their territories, and recognition of an independent Kosovo would give those groups a cue on what to do next.

It looks that, after all, the Russians got it right: Not only the independence of Kosovo wasn't agreed with Sebia and wasn't even discussed in the United Nations, but the international recognition of Kosovo as a sovereign nation would bring lots of trouble to countries currently dealing with similar problems. Here are some of the most notorious cases around the world:

China and the separatist movements in Tibet and Taiwan.
Russia and the separatist movement in Chechenia.
Spain and the separatist movements in the Basque Country and Catalunya.
Cyprus and the self-proclaimed republic of Northern Cyprus (recognized only by Turkey).
Turkey, Syria and Iraq and the separatist movement in Kurdistan.
Georgia and the separatist movements in Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
Azerbaijan and the separatist movement in Nagorno-Karabakh.
Moldova and the separatist movement in Transnistria.
Somalia and the separatist movement in Somaliland.
Canada and the separatist movement in Quebec.

Regardless of these facts and threats to stability in some countries around the world, it looks that Kosovo, where about 90% of the population is Albanian, is decided to take a step forward and seek recognition after seceding without the approval of the Serbians. After all, they still remember those days in which Serbia, led by Slobodan Milosevic, undertook ethnic cleansing tasks against the Albanian minority. Seen from such perspective, an independent Kosovo would be fair.

This is a story that began many years ago and that has reached a quite foreseeable point. Now the only thing that is certain about this matter is uncertainty itself. Will Kosovo's dream of independence be recognized by nations around the world? No one knows, but time will say.

With some information from The Globe and Mail and AP.
Photo by AP

The 'choking game'

2008-02-15T16:47:00.000-08:00

When Albert Einstein said the famous quote 'only two things are infinite: universe and human stupidity, but I'm not sure about the former', he couldn't have been more accurate in his observations. There are people out there who are constantly making great efforts to prove us that human stupidity is indeed infinite, and the creativity to show us that has no limits.

Today I heard about a game that is more stupid than any other game I've ever heard of in my life (yes, believe it or not, it is way worse than 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader?' or even than 'Subway jump'). The procedure of the game is easy: the 'player' intentionally suffocates or strangulates himself or herself (alone or with the help of another kid) to induce a loss of consciousness caused by the reduction of oxygen in the brain. The goal is to reach a state of euphoria or a brief high. This practice is commonly known as the 'choking game', although it is also known by other names such as the 'brownout game', the 'pass-out game', or the 'fainting game'.

Of course, the practice of this so-called game has had its consequences. A report by CBC indicates that 82 kids in the U.S., aged 6 to 19, have died in the last decade as a result of this amazingly idiotic pastime. Moreover, the activity has also spread to neighbouring Canada, where a few more kids have passed away trying to reach a 'high' that way. In most of those reported deaths, the 'player' was allegedly playing alone, however there are some skeptics who point out that the number of deaths is even higher, but those cases are not always reported. In any case, a study published in the U.S. concludes that the practice of the 'choking game' is on the rise, so we can expect to hear more about the game and its intrepid players who seek euphoria, and from time to time they find their own deaths in their pursuit.

I wonder if the kids who have died while playing the 'choking game' did indeed reach the state of euphoria that they wanted so badly. We will obviously never know. But, as those kids probably didn't receive any recognition for the achievement of their feat, I'd propose to give each a Darwin Award for their effort (and a honorable mention to all those who have played the game and lived to tell about it). Nevertheless, more seriously and more importantly, our education systems and moral values should be modified to avoid having children exploring extremely dark horizons.

Ignorance is a gift?

2008-02-08T00:11:00.000-08:00

Watching the TV today made me remember some of the reasons for which I've never liked to watch TV (except for sports). One of the reasons that keeps me away from TV is the more and more decadent shows that can be found in every channel: some of them appear to be committed to cheering people's stupidity, humiliating them live, and from time to time rewarding their ignorance and idiocy.

When I heard about Big Brother, I found the core concept of that show pretty boring. I thought that no worse shows could be ever shown on TV, until I found about Donald Trump's The Apprentice. Public humiliation was the value offering of the show to the audience, which made me feel sorry about the poor rookies that appeared there only to be humiliated by Mr. Trump. Could it get worse than that? Well, now I am convinced that TV has reached a new low after I found a game show that made me both laugh at the contestants and feel pity of the cheap and hollow TV products with which some audiences can satisfy their entertainment needs. The name of the game show was as pathetic as its contents: Are you smarter than a 5^th grader?.

For people who hadn't had the unpleasant experience of watching that game (or people who live in countries where TV programs are thought for more educated audiences, as opposed to most countries in the Americas), I'll briefly explain what the game is about: A random, adult contestant has to answer 5^th grade questions, accompanied by 5^th grade children who are there to test their knowledge against the adult's. To make the long story short, the adult contestant can win up to US $1 million for answering all questions correctly.

As I am a strong believer that images can speak more than a thousand words, I found an excerpt of the show in Youtube and I'm embedding it here so you can have a little taste of the idiotic show for your amusement:

I'm not against people who want to be humiliated and shamed in public. I believe in free will, if their choice is to act ridiculously and they enjoy nationwide audiences jeering at them, I accept that. What I find very unacceptable is for TV corporations to reward those attitudes. Why on Earth should any average person, who attended at least high school, be awarded with 1 million dollars for hardly remembering basic knowledge on TV?

That is extremely painful if you think it this way: There are classic game shows like Jeopardy, in which the contestants are normally highly-educated individuals who are expected to demonstrate a vast knowledge about a variety of topics (and of course, the questions are tough). An average contestant of Jeopardy will get a few thousands of dollars in the game, whereas its counterpart in Are you smarter than a 5th grader? will get at least US$ 25,000 for answering about three questions that might be as simple as "what is the capital of the United States?". Needless to say, I can hardly remember contestants who have walked away from Jeopardy with prizes nearing the million dollars.

The decadence of TV is notorious, and it's fueled by the low standards that audiences have accepted from TV producers throughout the years. It is true that the broadcasting corporations are also businesses, and if the audience accepts from them garbage, they'll continue to produce garbage so the audience keeps consuming from them. It is just a cycle that will keep decaying until people redefine their entertainment quality standards.

Super Bowl XLII aftermath: A "giant" win

2008-02-03T21:27:00.000-08:00

The aspirations of finishing a perfect season were gone for the New England Patriots after being beaten by the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII. Let's be honest about it: As a Bills fan, I've never hidden my lack of sympathy for the Pats, and seeing their aspirations for a perfect season fading away in the last few seconds of the game delighted me greatly.

In a way, I feel sorry for Tom Brady, who has proven to be a great player and team leader throughout his career, and who would had been a good recipient for the feat of a perfect season. In the other hand, unfortunately the Pats are not only Tom Brady himself, but it's a team that includes other arrogant personalities like Bill Belichick, the coach whose illegal videotaping habits used in the past to win games and even super bowls (as he has been accused of doing against the Saint Louis Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI, in the year 2002) have brought lots of doubts about the legitimacy of his team's previous achievements in the eyes of many football fans and critics worldwide.

In any case, the Super Bowl XLII won't be remembered for the high quality of the game. In fact, it was well below my expectations: what promised to be an offensive game with lots of points and outstanding plays turned to be a defensive and monotonous game during the first three quarters, in which only 10 points were scored overall. Only the last quarter could be classified in the category of high quality football, as it contained some emotion and offensive actions, which resulted in the scoring of the remaining 21 points that made the final 17-14 win for the Giants.

Eli Manning, quarterback for the New York Giants, was selected as the most valuable player of the game. For this, the last couple of seasons could well be remembered in the future as the Manning dynasty, as the other Manning brother, Peyton, won the Super Bowl XLI when the Indianapolis Colts beat the Chicago Bears. Moreover, Peyton Manning was also selected the most valuable player of the superbowl in that occasion.

Congratulations to the Giants and their fans for their terrific victory

Plastic bags, no more

2008-01-31T17:10:00.000-08:00

It is no secret that plastic bags to carry groceries have a good contribution to pollute the environment. People concerned about the environment have noticed this, and a few years back the first programs to reduce the use of such bags were implemented. For example, I remember that during my trip to France back in 1998, there was a convenience store chain named E. Leclerc, which had a very innovative system to reduce the use of plastic bags at the time: They would charge their customers 1 Franc (which at the time was equivalent to $0.16 US Dollars) for each new plastic bag they used. However, people were not charged whenever they brought used plastic bags to reuse them, over and over again. That was a good start to discourage people of using plastic bags indiscriminately, but there were more programs to come from other supermarket chains around the world in the following years.

Fast forward to 2008. The frenzy caused by the global warming phenomenon has made people and companies around the world to become more conscious about environment. In Canada, as well as in many other countries, some supermarket chains offer shoppers options to avoid the use of disposable plastic bags (and of course, to avoid the subsequent pollution arisen from the use of those bags). One of the more interesting and effective programs is the use of reusable bags made from 100% recycled materials. The customer pays a few cents to purchase the reusable bag, and it can be used ad infinitum. It is a very simple program that has had a limited success, as some shoppers are still reluctant to pay for their grocery bags and still prefer to use the traditional plastic bags and dispose of them afterwards.

The reluctance of people to turn to reusable bags has turned some activists in Vancouver, Canada, to ask the local government to impose bans on the use of plastic bags. If the proposal is successful, in the near future the use of plastic bags would be phased out in the city, and hopefully some other cities in the country would be following this example.

This kind of idea is not new in Canada, however. The town of Leaf Rapids, in Manitoba, got frustrated by the reluctance of shoppers to use reusable grocery bags, despite of their wide availability and proven durability. According to the town, the use of the disposable plastic bags not only has a bad impact in the community's environment, but it also gives it a bad aesthetics touch. This rationale drove the local government to impose a ban to the use of disposable plastic bags in 2007.

The idea to eliminate the use of plastic bags seems very interesting to me. It looks like a crucial step that communities will eventually have to take in order to really adopt a greener attitude, which will allow governments to better cope with pollution problems, and to avoid potential sour consequences in the short and long run.

With some information from CTV

Looking for a good book to read?

2008-01-27T20:24:00.001-08:00

Ah! This has been a busy week. Scheduling responsibilities is normally a challenge for many people, but for a few of us, scheduling spare time is sometimes more challenging. In this case, I think that I've done the right choice about how to spend my free times in the last few weeks: It is always worth to dedicate some time to high quality literature to have some fun and to learn new things.

It is precisely a high-quality novel what I have been reading lately, which I widely recommend to people who enjoy reading masterworks: Journey to the West is an anonymous Chinese novel (although some experts claim that it was written by Wu Cheng'en) from the 16th century. The story is inspired in the true story of Tang Sanzang, a monk who travelled from China to India during the 7th century to fetch some Buddhist scriptures. However, Journey to the West takes such story into a fantastic tale in which Tang Sanzang is escorted during his trip by his disciples Sun Wukong (Monkey), Zhu Bajie (Pig) and Sha Wujing (Friar Sand), who have to go through several challenges and life-threatening situations that may avoid them of reaching the West to fetch the scriptures.

The novel is more than just a fantastic story. It also contains philosophical teachings and lots of Buddhist and Taoist elements that sometimes makes it difficult for a non-Buddhist or Taoist (such as myself) to wholly understand the very substance of the events in the story, nonetheless it is a very informative tale that helps the reader understand more about Buddhist and Taoist cultures and ideologies.

Needless to say, I highly recommend to read this masterpiece of classic Chinese literature. After all, the best opinion of a book is the one that you get by yourself.

The Singelringen

2008-01-18T20:19:00.000-08:00

Are you single? Have you ever felt jealous of other people wearing wedding rings to show they're married or engaged? Do you feel unlucky not to wear your own ring?

Fear not. A guy in Sweden has just created a product for your needs! You won't feel socially shamed next time you show up in the streets without wearing a wedding ring: His name is Johan Wahlbäck, and his product is a ring that single people can wear to show that being single is nothing to be shamed of, moreover, it is a matter of pride and it's a way of life that more and more people are choosing to live in our times. The ring was named Singelringen (single's ring).

The Singelringen is not only intended to be a product to show the pride of single people, but it also has the purpose of creating a sort of community with which singles all around the world can identify themselves with. It is indeed a high quality product: it's made of silver and turquoise acrylic. Each ring is 'unique', as all of them have a serial number. The best part is that the Singelringen is for both men and women.

It's one of the most curious ideas that I've heard of recently. It promises to be one of those marketing products that set new trends in fashion, even though the idea behind them is very simple. It looks that some celebrities are wearing it already. I wonder whether I should buy mine right now too... or whether I should wait until the fake, cheaper Singelringen start to appear in the market.

More information about the Singelringen in www.singelringen.com

Tata's Rs 1-lakh, unveiled!

2008-01-10T20:27:00.000-08:00

It has been rumored for many months now. Back in August 2007, I even had the opportunity to write a note about Tata's Rs 1-lakh car, the cheapest car in the world, with the scarce information about it that was available at that time. And now, the car, under the name Nano (nothing to do with Apple) finally made its triumphal appearance in the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi, as Tata promised long time ago.

I have been very curious since I first heard about the cheapest car in the world to see how will it look like. A lot of speculation was made around it, but as I wrote in my first post regarding Tata's new model, "those who have seen the prototype say that this Tata model resembles the Daewoo Matiz". Ok then, as the car has finally been shown to the audience, the first pictures have started circulating in newspapers and other websites. With no further introduction, here are the pictures I've been able to collect from Tata's Nano, the cheapest car in the world:
That's the car. Does it really resemble a Daewoo Matiz? Is it an appealing model to your eyes? It looks ok to me, although its value proposition is more tied to its price rather than to its appearance. In any case, you be the judge.

Photos by AP

The coffee wars

2008-01-07T23:12:00.000-08:00

The winter break is over. The time for people to go back to their everyday duties has come, and I dare to predict that for the next few days some people out there will be suffering what is scientifically known as the post-vacations syndrome, which is nothing more than the period of time that takes to the people's mind to switch from leisure mode to work mode. Going back to routine is a must, and it can't be stopped in any way, not even by playing bizarre tricks such as gluing one's hand to the bed to avoid going to school, just as some little rascal did somewhere in Mexico according to a local newspaper.

That's the bad news. The good news is for companies whose philosophy is to serve customers in times when they are stressed and seek a break in their busy lives. I would argue that one of those helping companies is Starbucks, which is really committed to providing the customer with a relaxing experience in each of their stores, by providing high quality beverages and a peaceful, comfortable atmosphere. That's why Starbucks has been successful in exporting its business model to several countries all around the globe.

But hey, why going to Starbucks if people can go to McDonald's too? It is no secret that McDonald's' coffee has been highly ranked among coffee drinkers for many years, equaling (and sometimes defeating) the quality of Starbucks' basic beverages, like americano or espresso. That's why McDonald's, with a lot of bravery and a lot of money, decided to launch their own line of gourmet drinks in the US, which will supposedly include capuccinos and lattes. The system will be more or less the same as Starbucks' model, where a barista will prepare the drinks in front of their customers, with a high degree of customization. This is the beginning of a face-to-face struggle against Starbucks to take over the gourmet coffee market.

McDonald's is confident to be a good competitor in Starbucks' territory, as their economies of scale and convenience will push people to buy coffee from McDonalds. What McDonald's is not considering is that Starbucks' business is not selling coffee. Their core business is providing customers with a relaxing experience, where people sit in a comfortable couch, relax, have a nice conversation, have a sip of their beverage, smell the slight coffee odor that invades the atmosphere, and have a nice time. Very different from a McDonald's restaurant, where the typical experience includes the smell of fries, hamburgers and ketchup, children yelling and running around the place with the toys they just got from their Happy Meals, metal chairs attached to the floor, and the sound of trays pushing the door of the trashcans. Can you picture yourself having a relaxing experience under those conditions?

There is no doubt that McDonald's will increase its revenue from their new line of products, but I hardly picture it as a threat to Starbucks. At the end of the day, customers will have their own reasons to chose one or the other... or none.

With some information from msnbc.

China: New year, new restrictions

2008-01-03T19:25:00.000-08:00

The year 2008 is just starting. The Chinese knew that this year will bring some changes to their country: The year of the rat will be starting early on February. The Olympic games will be held this year in Beijing, and will attract millions of people to travel to China and spend money there, which will create an important revenue stream for the country. The Chinese car industry will potentially have a kickoff in NAFTA, with the introduction of some models in the Mexican market and the construction of an assembly plant as a joint venture with Mexican investors.

There will be, however, some other 'unpleasant' changes that the Chinese citizens will go through, and that they most likely didn't foresee. One of them is a further restriction of their freedom of speech. More precisely, these changes will be related to the information that Chinese surfers post on the net and download from it.

A newspaper reported today that the Chinese authorities decided to impose new regulations on internet videos, such as those found in pages like Youtube. Certain types of videos will be banned, for example those that show pornography or give a negative impression of China, damages its reputation, or reveals secrets. As in many other industries in China, the government will have its own video broadcasting website, which will be the only legal site of such type to be accessed from China. This new regulations will take effect on January 31.

Here we have another sad installment on China's record of violations to the rights of people. What I find funniest in this case, is that the videos 'hurting the reputation' of China are normally produced elsewhere, and displayed elsewhere. No matter how hard the Chinese government tries to clean their name, this type of actions only hurt them more in the eyes of the rest of the world, and makes us wonder whether China will indeed impose a new world order in the future.

With some information from The Globe and Mail

Last day of the year?

2007-12-31T19:07:00.000-08:00

Exactly one year ago, I wrote a note titled New year, how does it feel?. Essentially, what I tried to do in such post is to relieve the end-of-year melancholy that affects some people during the holidays season. New year is just that final piece of the season, the one that brings all that spirit down and back to reality. As the celebration and concept of New year hasn't changed a lot throughout the years (and it probably won't ever change), I believe it is appropriate to retake some of the stuff that I originally wrote in the 'New year, how does it feel?' post and update it accordingly, for all the people who might be feeling nervous, melancholic, sad, or frustrated about this specific day.

Once again, the big change that we'll be facing after midnight today is that we'll be ending one month and starting a new one. Just like happens when we go to sleep on March 31, and the next day we wake up on April 1st. The only essential difference in the transition from December to January is that we'll change a digit of the year in our calendars, passing to 2008.

Most of the people who celebrate the transition from December to January (a. k. a. New year) is not really celebrating the transition itself. The celebrations are more oriented to the feelings linked to the perfect time to have 'new beginnings' in life. Some of the ideas that wander in people's minds during the night of December 31, and on until January 2, are mostly related to challenges to pursue during the next 12 months in the shape of personal promises: "I promise myself that I will lose some weight this year", "I promise myself that I will quit smoking by the end of this year", "I promise myself that I will study harder this year", and so on. It is indeed a time that inspires some people to do changes in their lives, although I personally don't see why should we wait until a specific date in our calendars to do such changes. New beginnings, personal promises and changes in people's lives may be made anytime throughout the year.

The reason for which sometimes people wait until the night from December 31 to January 1st is that the end of the holidays makes them more sensitive. They take a more melancholic approach when they start thinking things like: "Oh, I wish I could have done xxxx this year", "I regret not having been able to xxxxx", etc. That's when depression and sadness come in.

Technically speaking, the new year in the Gregorian calendar should only have a specific meaning in the Christian, Catholic, and all other related faiths. For people belonging to other cultures, the transition from December 31 to January 1st is just like the transition from any day in the year to another. In fact, many cultures and religions around the world are aware of the Gregorian calendar, but they rule their activities based in different calendars, for which the beginning of their years does not match the beginning January every year. Here are some examples:

The Jewish Calendar is ruled by the behavior of the moon. It begins the first day of the Jewish month of Tishrei, which occurs every year sometime between the end of August and the beginning of October. The next Jewish new year will start on Tishrei 1, 5769, which in Gregorian terms will be on September 30, 2008.
The Muslim (Islamic) year is about 12 days shorter than the Gregorian calendar. The New year in the Muslim calendar, or Hijri calendar, is marked by the beginning of the month of Muharram. Curiously, Muslims around the world will experience two new years during 2008: The Islamic new year 1428 will happen on January 10, 2008; whereas the Islamic new year 1429 will occur on December 29, 2008.
The Chinese also observe an own calendar, different from the Gregorian. The beginning of the Chinese new year is typically marked by the second new moon after the winter solstice (although there may be some exceptions to this rule), usually sometime between January 21 and February 20. Each of the years in the Chinese calendar is related to an animal of the Chinese zodiac. The beginning of the Chinese year 4705, year of the rat, will happen on the midnight of February 7 to February 8, 2008.
In Ethiopia, a different calendar is also observed. Although it is linked to the Coptic calendar and it's also related to the Christian and Catholic faiths, it differs from the Gregorian calendar in terms of its beginning and the counting of the years. The Ethiopian calendar begins the first day of the month of Maskaram. The next Ethiopian new year, which will be 2001 according to their tradition, will happen on September 11, 2008.

Finally, I want to end this note exactly with the same words I used for my note last year:

"There's no reason to feel melancholic or nervous about the year that is ending, and the one that is just about to begin. The way I see it, the new year celebration gives people a good excuse to share and spend times with the family and friends, and it constitutes a good engine that keeps economies moving. So enjoy wisely the day, and happy new year!".

A very twisted end of the year 2007

2007-12-27T22:01:00.000-08:00

This year is coming to an end. It couldn't be closing in a more dramatic, bizarre and twisted fashion. The brutal assassination of Benazir Bhutto, former Prime Minister of Pakistan and leader of the opposition to Pervez Musharraf's rule, is certainly a catastrophic incident that will bring nothing more than instability to Pakistan, its neighbors, foes and allies. Bhutto's assassination was not only a very coward demonstration against democracy in a country where most citizens have struggled for years to establish a government that truly works for the interest of the people (instead of the ambitions of small groups), but it was also a very effective way to boycott the elections that were scheduled for early January in Pakistan. It looks that Musharraf's rule will stay in place, at least until the peace is somehow restored in the country.

This year is closing in a very shaken way. But the way in which 2007 is coming to an end is, unfortunately, not very different than the fashion in which recent years have ended as well. Let's do a bit of retrospective:

During the final days of December of 2006, the world had split opinions regarding the imminent execution of Saddam Hussein. The situation was tense, and people (especially in the Arab nations) were expecting a big turmoil were Saddam executed. In addition to Saddam's case, a terrorist attack to the Barajas International Airport in Madrid, Spain, left two casualties, a severe material damage in some of the airport's buildings, and panic among the Spanish population. This combination of incidents made the closing of 2006 a very negative one.
During the final days of December of 2004, a deadly tsunami hit several countries in the Indian Ocean, killing hundreds of thousands of people (some sources estimate the toll to be as high as 300,000 victims). Needless to say, the tsunami left several people homeless, provoked a shortage in food supplies, severed families, drove out tourists from a zone that typically survives from its income on tourism, and caused critical damages to the infrastructure of the places it hit. Such tsunami, nicknamed by some people "the Boxing Day tsunami" (because it happened exactly on Boxing Day - December 26), is the deadliest catastrophe in the recent history
Also on December 26, but of 2003, an intense earthquake devastated the city of Bam, in Iran. The death toll for this incident was estimated to be as high as 80,000 victims, plus many more injured. Additionally, the damages to the city's infrastructure and landscape (considered a World Heritage site by the UNESCO) were severe, to the extent that the Iranian authorities are still working to date in order to restore the site.

Let's hope that the year 2008 brings more fortunate events than the ones exposed above. However, I extend by now my most sincere sympathy to the people of Pakistan.

Photo by AP

Chavez' investments on 'science'

2007-12-19T13:48:00.000-08:00

I have a personal saying: When you think you've seen the worst, be prepared to prove yourself that you were wrong. This means that, each time we think we've seen the most stupid, or the most horrific, or most evil things on Earth, we should be aware that it is possible to reach new lows, and those new lows will be invariably reached by someone, at some point of time.

It is unbelievable the degree of foolishness that some individuals can reach in order to gain popularity. Evo Morales' proposal to move the UN headquarters and his initiative to force Coca Cola to remove the "Coca" part from its trademark seem to be very clever and humanistic when compared to the newest idea launched by his friend and ally Hugo Chavez in Venezuela: To examine Simon Bolivar's remains to determine the "true" cause of his death.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is as pathetic as it could get. History tells that Simon Bolivar (1783-1830), a Venezuelan native and Liberator of several South American countries (including Venezuela, of course), died of tuberculosis in Santa Marta, Colombia, shortly before leaving for exile in Europe. Bolivar has been used by Hugo Chavez as a symbol of his socialist movement, which he calls the socialism of the 21st century, and as such, Chavez believes that it is Venezuela's 'moral obligation' to investigate the cause of Bolivar's death, as he might as well have been intentionally poisoned. Not only that, but Chavez also wants to make sure that nobody has 'made the bones disappear'.

Chavez says that the Venezuelan government is ready to dedicate as many resources as the country can offer to solve this 'big' national concern. No doubt about it. The results of the DNA tests that are being proposed for Bolivar's remains will certainly allow Chavez to sleep peacefully at night, and it will also let the Venezuelan taxpayers know that their money is being invested in very important projects to improve the quality of life of Venezuelans. Pathetic.

Be prepared, however, to find something more pathetic than this in the distant future... or maybe not so distant.

More information available at Yahoo News.

Dry times ahead for China

2007-12-14T16:15:00.000-08:00

One could say that China's main problem is its deplorable environmental re cord, which is reflected by the extinction of endemic species and the dark 'honor' of having 2 out of the 10 most polluted cities in the world (and probably many more on the way) within its territory. But those problems are not that big compared with what China will be facing in its future.

According to an interesting article published by The Globe and Mail, the Chinese government just realized that the country will be running out of fresh water supplies by 2030. Major contributors to this potential catastrophe will be the population size (expected to reach 1.3 billion people by then), global warming, and the lack of strict regulations to promote the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and discharge of waste in rivers and other fresh water sources. As a result of the drought, China might reduce its crop production capacity, which will in turn lead to scarcity of food, death of cattle, famine, diseases, etc.

It is a very frightening panorama, indeed. In fact, China is just experiencing a taste of how bad that can be, as some western and south portions of the country have been suffering of chronic droughts for some time now. The government is realizing that the threat is for real, and if the country doesn't change its attitude towards environmental issues to assure a sustainable growth, then the consequences will be bitter. Not only they will lose the economic growth that China and the world boast about, but they will also be prone to never get it back.

By now, the Chinese are looking at short-term solutions, and they will use part of their massive foreign exchange reserves to purchase food from other countries for the areas affected by the current drought. But that sort of solution will not be enough to face the scarcity problems in the long run. If I was to give the Chinese authorities some suggestions, I would encourage them to stop utilizing excuses to not comply with the Kyoto protocol, or the new agreement that is being negotiated in Bali (if it ever gets through). Then, they should monitor the industrial activity throughout the country, to make sure that companies are working on the greenest standards possible, as most countries do, and apply severe punishments to companies that systematically break such standards. It will take some time, but the drought in 2030 is not impossible to revert.

Of course, I don't expect the Chinese authorities to take those words from me. But they have been warned now, and the future of millions of people depend on their capacity and will to manage sustainability from now on.

With some information from The Globe and Mail.

Garbage in, garbage out: The new 7 wonders of nature

2007-12-08T14:04:00.000-08:00

As if it was not enough to have designated a new group of 7 wonders of the world in the lamest selection process ever seen, now the same bunch of people responsible for those designations came up with the wonderful idea of voting what they will call the "new 7 wonders of nature".

That's right; believe it or not, there is a posse of individuals who think that some of the natural landmarks on Earth deserve more credit than others. To prove that, it is just a matter of time until we can hear from the 'official' candidate sites. Internet users are invited to propose their 'favorite' natural beauties through the New7wonders Foundation's website. But, if you are thinking of proposing some natural site that does not have a high traffic of tourists on a regular basis, here's a rule of thumb: Just as it happened with the so-called "new 7 wonders of the world", only famous places will be considered. Needless to say, only the top selling destinations will receive the honor of being named a 'wonder' by a group of individuals sometime in 2010.

It shouldn't be too challenging to figure out some of the places that have been proposed so far, which could also have any chance to be 'awarded': The Sahara desert, Mount Everest, the Galapagos Islands, Ayers Rock (Uluru), the Niagara Falls, and the Serengeti National Park, among others. I just can't wait to hear about the selection criteria for the 'candidates', to learn why Mount Everest is better than Mount Aconcagua, why does the Mid-Atlantic Range (the longest mountain range in the world, which is located under the sea) deserve less recognition than the Himalayas, or why can't the Gobi desert be considered wonderful if compared to the Sahara, just to mention some of the multiple examples on top of my mind.

My expectations for this new popularity poll are obviously pretty low, like they were for the 'original' new 7 wonders of the world circus. Just as my statistics professor taught us in his class, remember that garbage in, garbage out. Or, in other words, if an event with a lame purpose is organized, then its result will invariably be equally lame.

Chavez' revenge?

2007-12-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

It was extremely surprising to read the newspapers around the world last Monday morning, all of which highlighted the results of the referendum in Venezuela, through which the Venezuelan voters voted against reforms to the Constitution promoted by President Hugo Chavez. Those reforms were mainly targeted to perpetuate Chavez as the President and to modify labor and property laws that would turn Venezuela into a socialist state. But it was even more impressive to see Chavez serenely admitting his defeat before the mass media, even congratulating his opposition and the Venezuelans for the exemplary elections day that was lived in their country last weekend. His pantomime was so well planned and executed, that it even led people around the world to believe that Chavez was a real democrat and a good and honest leader for Venezuela.

It was very hard to believe that a president known for his habits of insulting leaders around the world and for being an individual who doesn't seem to know anything about diplomacy would suddenly have such sort of positive change in his attitudes. It was really odd to see a president who systematically bans freedom of speech in his country to humbly accept a defeat and congratulate his most hated foes for their victory. It was strange, strange, strange.

A newspaper confirmed today what I thought: all those attitudes were only part of Chavez' circus. That was just the kind of attitude that he wanted to show to the international community: a good, democratic, moderate president that has been unfairly tagged by some foreign governments as an autocratic and repressive dictator. But of course, the Venezuelan president had an ace under his sleeve, and as soon as he lost international attention regarding the referendum that took place last week, he switched to his normal dictator hat and warned his opposition: '[the opposition's victory] was a sh*tty victory. Our defeat, if you want to call it that way, is a defeat full of bravery and dignity. Hit us, Empire (the United States), we haven't moved a single millimeter. Well, we'll move, we're going forward'.

Just in case there were still any doubts about his addiction to power and his dictatorial style, he threatened his foes: 'Be prepared, as a new offensive will be coming soon with the proposal [to perpetuate him in power and to turn Venezuela into a socialist state], the same one [which was turned down in the referendum], or transformed, or simplified'.

Venezuela had a great victory last weekend in the referendum. They let the world know that the Venezuelans want a real democracy in their country, not an individual ruling for life like they have in Cuba. The Venezuelans are really looking forward to the economical, social and political integration of their country to the international community in order to have a modern and progressive State. But their main hurdle to achieve those goals is ruling their country right now, and he will do all in his reach to take Venezuela in the opposite way. At the end of the day, the more problems the Venezuelan nation has to cope with, the easier it is for him to shine as a great, almighty leader, especially among the poor majority of the population.

Photo: EFE

Tony Royster Jr., a contemporary prodigy

2007-12-04T23:37:00.000-08:00

From time to time, we have the opportunity to delight our senses with the art made by some prodigious people that are one of a kind. For people who are passionate about music, just as myself, listening to a gifted musician is always a pleasure that positively captivates our mind and soul.

One of those prodigious musicians is Tony Royster Jr., a highly talented American drummer that has amazed the world with his impressive agility to hit the drums. I believe it's worth watching the way he played drums at age 12:

Time has passed, and Tony is now 23 years old. He has had time to improve his drumming techniques these years. He currently enjoys a very strong reputation as a prodigious drummer and now he tours around the world, setting drum clinics in different corners of the globe. Here's one of his most recent performances, available in Youtube:

I'll summarize my thoughts about him: Just amazing.

Quatchi, Miga and Sumi: The honor of Olympic mascots is restored

2007-11-27T18:17:00.000-08:00

The mascots that will give a funny detail (and a marketing boost) to the Vancouver winter Olympics in 2010 were finally unveiled today. Meet Quatchi, Miga and Sumi.
The official website of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics describes them as follows (textual citation): "Each of the creatures is distinct and special – both in personality and in appearance. One is big, gentle and shy . . . one is small, mischievous and outgoing . . . and one is a natural-born leader with a passion for protecting the environment. All three are mythical creatures with roots in local legend. One is a sasquatch. One is a sea-bear. And one is an animal guardian spirit. They are all, to say the least, unique".

These cute winter characters, along with the five mascots that will represent the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing (named Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini -picture below-) come to recover the pride of nice, cool and beautiful mascots to represent Olympic games that was almost unseen since the unveiling of Cobi, a dog character created for the 1992 summer Olympics in Barcelona.Just for fun, let's take a look at the mascots that represented the Olympic games after Barcelona 1992, and until Torino 2006, to emphasize the real value of the mascots for both Beijing 2008 and Vancouver 2010:

These widely-unknown human characters, named Haakon and Kristin, served as mascots for the 1994 winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. Creativity here was virtually nonexistent.

Izzy was a dizzy blue thunder, or something like that, which was chosen to be the mascot for the 1996 Olympic games in Atlanta, USA. It was the first-ever Olympic mascot to be computer-created. Heck, why did they use a computer for that? Maybe a hand made design would have been better.

These beautiful long-nosed, yellow-eyed owls were named Sukki, Nokki, Lekki and Tsukki, and were the official mascots for the 1998 winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. These creatures couldn't be uglier. If real owls understood that those characters were a representation of their species, they wouldn't have hesitated to sue the Olympic Committee.

Olly, Syd and Millie are a kookaburra, a platypus and an echidna, respectively. They were the official mascots of the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. Although they are not as ugly as most of their predecessors, the creative execution here was not outstanding. The final product was just that: A kookaburra, a platypus and an echidna with no "Olympics touch" whatsoever.

Powder, Coal and Copper were a hare, a coyote and a bear, respectively. They were the mascots for the 2002 winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, USA. These characters were pretty decent to be Olympic mascots: their design was funny and friendly. No real complaint about them, they appeared as an oasis in the middle of the dessert in a period of time when the Olympics were throwing everything but nice mascots to the market.

These deformed (human?) creatures, named Athena and Phevos, were probably inspired in Bigfoot. These things were the mascots of the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece. I don't think they deserve any further description here, as their image speaks by itself.

Neve and Gliz were a bodied snow scoop and a bodied ice cube, respectively. I suspect that the organizing committee entrusted the creation of mascots to kindergarten children. If that was the case, then it was a nice try by the kids, else... they were just horrible characters that got somehow to be the official mascots for the 2006 winter Olympics in Torino, Italy.

Thankfully, most of the creatures shown above were left somewhere in the memories of the Olympic games. It looks that the organizers of future Olympics are putting more effort in creating characters that attract more people to identify themselves with the Olympic games. The mascots will also help to increase the revenues obtained from the games, which will eventually benefit the host communities.

I welcome Sumi, Quatchi and Miga, along with Beibei, Jingjing, Huanhuan, Yingying and Nini. We'll be hearing more and more from them in the upcoming months for sure.

With some information from the official websites of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics and Beijing 2008 Olympics.

Japanese whale hunting, reloaded

2007-11-19T21:36:00.000-08:00

A news that has been appearing in newspapers and other mass media around the world is both disturbing and upsetting: Japan has decided to resume their whale hunting program, under the excuse that they'll use the sacrificed whales for scientific purposes. It didn't take too long for them to get some crew members ready on board of the whaling vessel Yushin Maru, which departed from the port of Shimonoseki towards the Antarctica. The ship is being chased by another vessel, the Esperanza, which is operated by Greenpeace activists willing to follow the Yushin Maru until the end of the world to try to avoid a whale massacre.

With this action, Japan cheers the lifting of the whale hunting moratorium imposed by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in the mid-1980's, which lost effect after a resolution to restore commercial whale hunting was passed last year, in a very disputed voting session within the IWC. Although the Japanese whale hunters have been consistently killing whales even during the years in which the moratorium has been in effect, they've always justified their hunting activities under the excuse of doing them for supposed 'scientific purposes', which is one of the few exceptions under which the IWC allowed whale hunting.

But this expedition is different: The Japanese whale hunters are expecting to bring back 1035 whales, a number which more than doubles the amount of whales they hunted a decade ago. Moreover, some of the 1035 whales that the Japanese hunters are expecting to bring to Japan for 'scientific purposes' are actually humpback whales, which was about to become extinct about a decade ago and has not reached even a third of the population it had before the days of modern whale hunting.

The Japanese individuals who decided recently to relaunch their whale-hunting program probably thought: 'Screw the IWC, the endangered species and the public opinion'. Under that rationale, they found it convenient to set up an expedition of Japanese whale hunters to go and kill some endangered whales, to satisfy some gourmet desires. What an environmental disgrace this is.

With some information from CBC

"Why don't you shut up?"

2007-11-10T21:56:00.000-08:00

Hugo Chavez probably never thought that a person would be brave enough to tell him to shut up in his face, because he's used to insult whomever he wants, whenever he wants, and in the ways that he finds more humiliating. No one is allowed to tell him to shut up, not in Venezuela or elsewhere. In fact, Chavez is known to be very intolerant when it comes to be about criticism against him or his rule. He actually managed to change the Venezuelan laws so the mass media couldn't publish any ideas that oppose him. But when Chavez has to criticize other people, he just doesn't know any type of boundaries. Let's analyze some of the most infamous cases of leaders around the world who have been openly insulted by Chavez and have never told him to "shut up".

George W. Bush: The President of the Empire (as the Venezuelan President calls the United States) is Chavez's favorite target. He doesn't waste any opportunity to insult the US President. Chavez has called Bush a donkey, a drunkard, a coward, an assassin, a genocist, a psychologically-ill man, and he has even referred to him as the evil, just to mention some examples. Chavez nicknamed Bush Mr. Danger and insults him live on his radio program Alo Presidente, at the United Nations, or anywhere he has a chance to appear in front of an audience. But Mr. Bush has never replied to any of his insults, he has never told him to "shut up".

Vicente Fox: the former Mexican President became a recipient of Chavez's offenses because he openly defended the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), a project supported mainly by the United States. Chavez then decided to nickname Fox as the Empire's puppy. Fox's government demanded an apology from the Venezuelan regime, but it didn't take them too long to realize that Chavez would never apologize for publicly shaming the Mexican President. The conflict led the Mexican government to expel the Venezuelan ambassador from Mexico, which the Venezuelans countered by expelling the Mexican ambassador from their territory. However, Fox never told Chavez to "shut up".

Felipe Calderon: After Vicente Fox's rule in Mexico, Felipe Calderon, from Fox's party, rose as the President elect (and eventually the President of Mexico) in a tightly disputed election against the leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, allegedly aligned with Chavez. The Venezuelan president knew that Calderon would be willing to cooperate and strengthen ties with the United States, the main commercial partner for Mexico. His suspicions about the further collaboration between Calderon's government and the United States were a perfect excuse for him to launch another of his bad-taste nicknames, so Chavez started calling Calderon little gentleman and big ignorant. Calderon has paid little attention to the Venezuelan President's offenses, thus he has never told him to "shut up".

Alejandro Toledo, Lourdes Flores and Alan Garcia: Another recipient for his insults was former Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo. Toledo's "sin" was to show support for a Free Trade Agreement between Peru and the United States. Chavez took advantage of that to say that Toledo resembles Bush a lot, and that his government supported the oligarchy. As Peru was also approaching a Presidential election at that time (which would eventually be lost by Chavez's friend, leftist candidate Ollanta Humala), Chavez also decided to insult the right wing candidates Lourdes Flores and Alan Garcia, calling them Candidates of the right wing and the Oligarchy. Moreover, he later called Garcia a 7-sole thief and an alligator from Toledo's same pond. Toledo replied that "Mr. Chavez was elected to govern Venezuela, not Latin America as a whole", demanding him to stop intruding Peru's internal affairs. But neither Toledo, Garcia or Flores have ever told Chavez to "shut up".

Jose Maria Aznar: A former Spanish President, he was a close ally of the United States during his rule, and a key supporter of the Iraq war. He has also been around the world promoting true democratic governments, calling people to not follow populist regimes (like Chavez's in Venezuela). Chavez has accused Aznar of promoting the FTAA and of aligning Spain to the Empire, and decided to call Aznar a fascist in a summit of Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese Heads of State. Aznar, who wasn't present at the summit, didn't tell Chavez to "shut up".

It was king Juan Carlos of Spain who said to Chavez during the mentioned summit: "Why don't you shut up?". He said so because he couldn't stand Chavez calling Jose Maria Aznar a fascist anymore, he was fed up and notoriously angry at the summit of Latin American, Spanish and Portuguese Heads of State gathered in Chile. King Juan Carlos was seconded by the current Spanish President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who told Chavez that "I think there's an essence, and a principle in a dialogue. To respect and be respected, we must avoid to fall in dismissive insults. It is valid to disagree radically with ideas, and to denounce ideas and behaviors without falling in dismissive insults".

Chavez mentioned later that no Head of State has the right of shutting up any other Head of State, but he was very specific in saying that the Venezuelan government "reserves the right to answer to any aggression anywhere, in any space and any manner" they consider convenient (not excluding insults). However, I believe that the incident was a big hit to Hugo Chavez's ego, but it is more than fair. Many others should follow this kind of example given by Mr. Zapatero and king Juan Carlos from time to time too. Two thumbs up for those Spanish leaders.

Open software, the software of the future

2007-11-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

There couldn't have been a less appropriate time for me to reformat my computer than last week, yet I had to do it. All because of a virus that altered certain keys of my computer's registry. The result was not very pleasant: I lost tons of information (my bad, of course, I should have made backups long time ago) and I had to spend several hours reinstalling all the programs that were erased in the reformatting process, or at least those that I considered crucial to have installed immediately.

Microsoft Office was one of those crucial programs to install, because I was still working in a project that I had to deliver in the next couple of days. When I realized that, I looked for the installation CD right away. Where on Earth did I put it...?

Well, I had a hard time trying to remember where my Office installation CD was, but given the urgency that I had to have a word processor ready to go, I gave up searching for the CD and decided to act more creatively. Magically, while I was working on other installations in my computer, a balloon appeared in my screen. It invited me to download Office for free. Exactly the kind of solution I wished I had in that very instant!

The "free Office" happened to be a series of programs developed by Sun Microsystems, collectively named Openoffice.org. As soon as I started using its word processor, called Openoffice.org Writer, I realized that the interface was very friendly and similar to the original Microsoft Word (excepting the 2007 version) and that the program was able to create very nice documents in an easy way as well. It was, in fact, pretty much like using the normal Word. The other two major programs included in the Openoffice.org bundle (spreadsheet and presentation programs, named Openoffice.org Math and Openoffice.org Impress, respectively) seemed to be quite user friendly as well.

I normally don't trust this type of software, but after experiencing it myself I realized that open programs like that are not a bad idea. In fact, it is much more convenient to have open programs to install, than having to buy a CD and doing the traditional installation processes. I think that, even if open software was charged, it would still be more convenient (and less expensive) than having to buy installation CDs and store them in a shelf forever. Would you imagine how nice would it be to download Microsoft Excel directly to your computer by after paying a fee, without the need of buying the CD and installing other programs that you will never use (such as Microsoft Binder)? That's just beautiful. I am convinced that this approach will be the future of software... until better ideas come to the software creators' minds.

Wikipedia in Volapük, an "exponential" growth

2007-10-29T21:30:00.000-07:00

After doing a quick visit to Wikipedia, the widely-known free online encyclopedia edited by users and available in hundreds of languages, I noticed something curious (probably after millions of people already did): Among all the languages in which Wikipedia is available, only 15 have a collection of more than 100,000 articles ready to be read (and edited) by users. Those languages are: English, German, French, Polish, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Chinese, Finish, Norwegian, and Volapük.

Volapük? What on Earth is Volapük anyway? I did some research in Wikipedia itself to find more information about that widely-unknown language, and to understand why is is so popular in Wikipedia in terms of amount of articles available.

According to the Wikipedia article about Volapük, it is an artificial language created during the 19th century by a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer. It was actually the very first attempt (and failure) to introduce a language to be spoken globally. Schleyer based his language in vocabulary borrowed mostly from English, French and German. But the complexity of its grammar and the development of a much easier global language, Esperanto, quickly turned Volapük in a decaying language. In fact, there are currently only between 20 and 30 Volapük speakers worldwide.

That being said, it doesn't make much sense that the 100,000+ Wikipedia articles in Volapük can be only understood by 20 or 30 people worldwide, when other languages with far more speakers in the world, like Korean, (which is spoken by approximately 78,000,000 people) barely reach half that amount of articles. Moreover, it doesn't make much sense that 20 or 30 people could write 100,000+ articles for Wikipedia, unless all of them are intellectuals and geeks. Thus something is odd here.

I made a bit more research to understand a bit more about the origins of the articles of the Volapük version of Wikipedia. Not very surprisingle, I found the answer to my inquiries in Wikipedia itself once again, in an article named "Volapük Wikipedia": The administrator of the Volapük Wikipedia thought that he "could try to get some new people interested in learning the language and contributing by doing something a little crazy -- like increasing the size of the Volapük wikipedia as fast as I could, with Python programs for copying and pasting information onto pre-translated templates". This, because he is the only contributor of Wikipedia in Volapük and he hoped that, by doing this, he would attract more people to learn Volapük and hopefully to contribute to the Wikipedia in that language as well.

His idea did attract the attention of people, indeed. By adding thousands of stubs to the Wikipedia in Volapük, he created a bit of awareness about the existence of the language among Wikipedia readers. Will that encourage some of them to learn Volapük and to contribute to the Wikipedia in Volapük? That's difficult to answer, it is a matter of time to know whether that will happen. But the strategy to increase exponentially the amount of Wikipedia articles in Volapük proves once again the ease with which information can be manipulated there, and the low quality that certain articles may have because of automated translations. But Wikipedia is still, essentially, a beautiful thing.

'Grandiose' plans for a 'grandiose' threat

2007-10-20T19:51:00.000-07:00

Julius Caesar said in the year 47 BC: Vini, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered). Many, many years have passed since then. One would assume that a mentality from the year 47 BC is outdated in the 21st century, and that the world leaders of today should have a different kind of philosophy in their minds.

Wrong. Reading the latest international news makes me think that there is something wrong with some of the individuals who are actually ruling nations. It looks that the well-being of societies is not a priority anymore in the minds of some leaders, so they are turning towards twisted thoughts and ideas that they could as well cheerfully share with Julius Caesar, or heads of State of the 16th and 17th century: Strengthen your army, dominate foreign lands, rule the world. War is the key to victory.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, for instance has boasted about having 'grandiose' plans to restore the Russian forces. Some of his 'grandiose' plans include the development of new, more sophisticated nuclear weapons, which will certainly relaunch the nuclear race. That will give some other countries, such as Iran or North Korea, the perfect excuse to restore or enhance their nuclear activities.

Mr. Putin also talked about some supposed plans of the US to invade Russia in order to gain control of the oil reserves in Siberia. But his 'grandiose' plans not only will allow Russia to defend its territory, but also "other regions in the world". Those "other regions of the world" probably include the melting North Pole which, instead of attracting nations around the world to take measures to reduce or stop global warming, has rather become a nice opportunity to the eyes of many leaders to seize more natural resources for their countries and control possible future shipping routes. And Russia has taken a very anticipated step on this by placing a submarine flag right at the sea bottom corresponding to the Pole in an attempt to eventually control the oil and gas resources that are located right there.

Putin also spoke about his retaliation plans regarding the "Son of the Star Wars" defence shield that the US is setting up in Poland and the Czech Republic (and which is supposed to be in operation by 2013), mentioning that "if a decision is made without taking Russia's opinion into account, then we will certainly take steps in response to ensure the security of Russian citizens". He also demanded the US to set a specific date to withdraw its forces from Iraq, arguing that the fight has turned to be against the Iraqis and it's not against a tyrant's regime anymore.

All these statements and frightening comments come more or less simultaneous to George W. Bush's warning of having the world headed towards World War III. Bush just declared that if the world wants to avoid 'WWIII', then the international community should take the necessary steps to avoid Iran of having the necessary knowledge to develop nuclear weapons. Not surprisingly, Bush's statements came after Vladimir Putin visited Tehran and showed his support to Iran's 'peaceful' nuclear program.

All this situation looks bad. Very bad. When it looked that our twisted world couldn't get any worse after being threatened (and attacked) by terrorism anywhere, we have to painfully find out that the light is not yet at the end of this tunnel. We're actually heading back to the mentality of previous centuries, proving ourselves that history tends to repeat itself. Oh well.

With some information from Times Online and Tehran Times

Quit smoking in Niue, and get some cash!

2007-10-15T13:20:00.000-07:00

Are you willing to quit smoking? Don't do it for free, move to Niue and get money for it!

Yes, it is absolutely true. The government of Niue, an Polynesian island free-associated with New Zealand, has offered to pay US$1,500 dollars to each citizen that quits smoking. It is as simple as that.

The Niuean Prime Minister is convinced that paying cash to Niueans that quit smoking is cheaper than paying for their smoking-related medical services. Niue is a tiny island that lacks enough infrastructure to handle the health issues of all the patients who develop problems because of smoking. Usually, what happens is that the patients are transferred to hospitals in New Zealand (2,400 kilometers away), and the government of Niue pays for the airfare plus the medical attention that its citizen receives in that country. Moreover, the authorities in Niue have claimed that these cases are becoming more frequent, ranging from 2 to 5 transfers per week.

Smoking has become a serious issue in the tiny Pacific island. The authorities are currently working in laws that will prohibit the consumption of tobacco in any public place in Niue, just as happens in some other countries around the world, like Ireland or Norway.

There you go. Go to Niue, quit smoking, get some cash and live smoke free from then on. Sounds like a great deal, doesn't it?

Berlin marathon 2007: records, feats, and miracles

2007-10-06T21:26:00.000-07:00

The marathon of Berlin 2007 will be remembered in the years to come. Particularly, two names will be linked forever to such event: Haile Gebrselassie and Roberto Madrazo.

Haile Gebrselassie
The Ethiopian runner Haile Gebrselassie, 34, is undoubtedly one of the best known men in the athletics field. He has participated in many international championships in athletics, and also in three versions of the Olympic games (Atlanta 1996, Sydney 2000, Athens 2004), winning gold medals in two of them. In recent years, he has become one of the most prominent people in road racing and marathon, winning constantly and breaking time records for disciplines in which he performs. Gebrselassie was by far the favorite athlete to win the marathon that took place on September 30, 2007 in Berlin, and he definitely didn't disappoint: not only he won the competition, but he broke the world record with a time of 2:04:26, defeating the record of 2:04:55 set by Paul Tergat on the same course in 2003.

Gebrselassie is now considered the fastest marathoner in the world.

Roberto Madrazo
On the other hand, Roberto Madrazo, 55, used to be quite an unknown individual in the athletics world. In fact, he is best known for his career as a politician in Mexico, and for running for president of such country in 2006, being defeated by the current head of state Felipe Calderon.

Nevertheless, Roberto Madrazo is also an amateur marathon runner and he has participated in some competitions around the world. His participation in Berlin was, for instance, outstanding: He crossed the finish line in 2:40:57, wearing a red jacket, a red baseball hat, and black tights. He ranked 146th overall (out of 40,000 contestants) and first place in his category (55-59 years old). Surprisingly good for an amateur runner who timed 3:44:00 and 3:39:00 in two other marathons earlier this year.

The most incredible and amazing part of Madrazo's performance came after he hit 20 kilometer mark. Until that point, his time was of 1:42:42, which means that his average pace was more or less of 5 minutes per kilometer, or about 12 km/h. Mysteriously, there is no track of Madrazo in the checkpoints located at the 25 and 30 kilometer marks, but his records reappeared when he hit the 35 kilometer checkpoint... only 21 minutes after crossing the 20 kilometer mark!

But how did he achieve that? If he only took 21 minutes to run 15 kilometers, it means that he improved dramatically his pace and speed in that stretch of the course: 7 minutes every 5 kilometers... or about 42.8 km/h!!. That even beats Gebrselassie's performance in the same stretch, who was able to run at an average speed of just 21.4 km/h. It looks that Roberto Madrazo has some supernatural powers that give him enough speed to race against horses as well! Can his supernatural powers be called "taking an illegal shortcut"? Because, coincidentally, the course map shows that the checkpoints at the 20 and 35 kilometer marks are only a few blocks away of each other through a street that was not considered to be ran by marathoners, so that might explain Madrazo's superpowers.

This is a good example of how the dark abilities obtained in politics fit in the sports world.

More information about Madrazo's marathon performance in The Independent.

New headquarters for the United Nations?

2007-10-01T19:10:00.000-07:00

If you thought that Evo Morales' proposal to force Coca Cola to remove the "Coca" part from its trademark was funny and ridiculous, you have to check this note.

The Bolivian newspaper "La Razón" revealed that the government of such country, led by Evo Morales, does not like to have the United Nations headquartered in New York. Therefore, they'll launch an international campaign to relocate the UN elsewhere. According to Juan Ramón Quintana, Minister of the Presidency, the government decided to launch this project because some of the Bolivian representatives at the UN have had problems to enter the United States recently.

Quintana said that "the United Nations should be moved to a country where every country of the world can be granted the same citizenship status (sic) and not as they do in the US with so much arrogance". He boasted about having support from other nations, especially in Africa, for this awkward initiative. He obviously didn't give any details of who those mysterious supporters are.

In any case, I wonder if there is a country in the world where people from every single nationality can clear immigration without any formality, as Evo Morales' government suggests, to serve as the ideal place to move the UN. Is it that Bolivia grants these rights to visitors from around the world? That's not the case, especially after the Bolivian government decided to require tourist visas for US nationals visiting the South American country. Thus, according to the Bolivian government's rationale, La Paz or any other Bolivian city is discarded to be the future location for the United Nations' headquarters, should their initiative have any success at all. But they might have a plan B, which may consider cities such as Havana, Caracas or Tehran.

I look forward to the results of this doomed-to-failure adventure.

Our "friend" Ahmedinejad

2007-09-24T16:17:00.000-07:00

Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, president of Iran, is well known for his radical anti-western ideas. Who could forget:

His constant denials of the holocaust of Jewish people in Europe during World War II?
His invitations to the world to "wipe Israel off the map"?
His nuclear program for "civilian purposes"?
His measures to purify the Persian culture from western influences, banning western music and eliminating any foreign word from the Persian vocabulary?

It may be hard to believe, but there is a person who can easily forget about all those comments and ideas... and such person is, of course, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad himself. Or, at least, he can pretend that he never thought about his radical ideas according to the situation and his interests.

Ahmedinejad visited recently the United States to give a conference at Columbia University, an event highly criticized and protested against by several student societies and organizations. The ideas given on his speech could not be more risible and hypocritical. Some of the highlights he touched upon were the following (my comments in red):

His regime does not support terrorism (let's not forget about Hezbollah and Hamas, among others).
The conflicts in Middle East need to be addressed through dialogue (which is true, but his regime has not particularly supported that option in the facts. He rather invites leaders to "wipe Israel off the map").
Most of the world believes that Iran's nuclear program has a civilian purpose (Do you know any person, apart from Ahmedinejad and his friends, who buys this argument? I don't).
Iran's foreign policy is all about security and peace for the world (by providing weapons to kill US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq).
There is no homosexuality in Iran (there is, but it's banned and severely punished).

Logically, Ahmedinejad's points caused some laughs to the audience. He went to Columbia to demonstrate his talent to lie and to change his speeches and ideas as he considers appropriate. His goal was probably to show himself as a centered, caring and friendly leader to people in the US to gain some international support and to clean his own (and his regime's) highly rusted reputation in the western hemisphere. But the damage and the danger that he has set to Iran and the world will take much more than that to be repaired.

Click here for more information about Ahmedinejad's speech at Columbia University
Photo by AP

A bit of justice after the Khmer Rouge?

2007-09-19T22:28:00.000-07:00

Happily for people in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge Party's rule is not a way of life for them anymore. Still, the scars caused by such movement are fresh in the minds of people in that nation, and for those who survived it, there is a good reason to be happy today: Nuon Chea (also known as Long Reth), one of the highest leaders of the movement, was arrested and will be tried soon for crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge regime was one of the most ruthless, barbaric, criminal and inhuman political systems that mankind has ever seen. Such regime was controlled by a small posse of leaders, from which Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot (picture on the left), was the effective leader. The idea of the Khmer Rouge was to turn Cambodia into a "true" communist state (more or less in the same way that currently happens in North Korea, but worse). After reaching power in Cambodia in 1975, the regime changed the name of the country to Democratic Kampuchea, and took a series of extreme measures to successfully introduce their pure communism: Abolition of the currency, relocation of people from urban areas to rural communal farms, expropriation of private assets, isolation of the country from international influence and prohibition of religions were only some of the regulations. Obviously, as any other regime of its type, the Khmer Rouge did not tolerate any critics for their movement, thus students, intellectuals and ideologists were seen as enemies of the State.

Although the Khmer Rouge's rule lasted until 1979 (roughly four years), the results of their obscene regime were catastrophic and humiliating. Millions of men, women, children and elders, mostly intellectuals, monks, and individuals related to former governments, were killed in the numerous prison camps that operated in Democratic Kampuchea. The most remarkable camp was Tuol Sleng (also known as S-21), which serves today as a museum of the Cambodian holocaust.

The regime was forced out of power in 1979 by the Vietnamese army, who found in the Khmer Rouge a threat for their own national security and interests. Although the Khmer Rouge leaders tried to regain power through guerrilla, they failed and the Democratic Kampuchea was restored once again as the Kingdom of Cambodia

The Khmer Rouge was officially dissolved by its leader, Pol Pot, in 1996. Surprisingly, only a few leaders were arrested afterwards. Here's what happened to some of the most important figures of the Khmer Rouge:

Pol Pot died in 1998 and was never apprehended.
Chhit Choeun (better known as Ta Mok), another top leader of the Khmer Rouge, was arrested in 1999 and died in 2006 while waiting to be tried.
Ieng Sary, one of Pol Pot's closest collaborators, was officially pardoned by king Norodom Sihanouk in 1996 (thus he enjoys immunity). He currently lives happily and free in Cambodia.
Khang Khek Leu (also known as Duch), believed to be the individual that ran Tuol Sleng, was arrested and tried in 1999, after several years of hiding in Cambodia, Thailand and China, and changing his name a few times. He was found guilty of crimes against humanity and is currently imprisoned.
Khieu Samphan, a tenacious defender of Pol Pot and loyal supporter of such individual, surrendered to the Cambodian government in 1998 after the dissolution of the Khmer Rouge. However, he enjoys retirement now and lives as a free person in Cambodia.
Son Sen was murdered along with other members of his family in 1997 by orders of Pol Pot.

Nuon Chea (right), often referred to as "Brother number 2" within the Khmer Rouge elite, enjoyed a free, happy, peaceful and modest life in Cambodia after Prime Minister Hun Sen (a Khmer Rouge defector) gave up any prosecution against him in 1998. A considerable amount of Cambodians, as well as the international community, were concerned about Hun Sen's passive attitude towards Nuon Chea. It took 9 years, until today, that Hun Sen's government changed their passive attitude and decided to arrest Nuon, aged 82, and charge him with crimes against humanity. Many people see this as a step closer to justice for the victims of the Khmer Rouge regime, although people do not fully trust the Cambodian judicial system. However, at least Nuon Chea is not a free individual now, which is a step closer to punishment for the atrocities in which he participated between 1975 and 1979. Probably, the survivors of the Cambodian massacre would like to see Ieng Sary and Khieu Samphan following the same fate as Nuon Chea.

More information about the Khmer Rouge regime here.
More information about Nuon Chea's apprehension here.

Nuon Chea's photo by AP

The cheating New England Patriots

2007-09-11T21:52:00.001-07:00

As a fan of the Buffalo Bills, I want to start this post by wishing Kevin Everett a full recovery. Kevin, a reserve tight end for the Bills, got a serious cervical spine injury last weekend, during the game against the Denver Broncos. Such injury was described as "potentially lethal and grave" by the Bills' doctors, and it is feared that Kevin won't be able to walk again. I sincerely hope it is not the case, and once again, I wish him a full recovery from this injury.

In the league spectrum, as a Bills fan it is also normal to feel some sort of dislike for the New England Patriots. After all, they're divisional rivals of Buffalo, and definitely the rival to beat by the rest of the division during the last few years. Another divisional rival of the Pats are the New York Jets, team which apparently was able to discover part of the suspicious and dark power that has been used lately by the Patriots to achieve success. They discovered that the Patriots had a cameraman who aimed his camera at the Jets' defensive coaches that were sending signals to their players in the field. This kind of practices, of course, are against the NFL's rules.

The camera was confiscated to the cameraman and it was send along with its recordings for investigation to the NFL. After investigating the incident and the evidence, the league determined that New England indeed violated the rules (or, said in different terms, they did cheat!). Now the team will face a punishment that is still to be determined by the NFL, but potential measures are ranging from suspensions to fines. Surprisingly, a member of the league's competition committee who asked not to be identified confirmed that prior similar incidents were recorded for the Patriots, which means that the Patriots could have been cheating for some time now.

A very shameful situation for the coach Bill Bellichick (picture on the right) and his staff. The NFL is looking forward to talk face to face with Bellichick before deciding for a penalty, but if the Patriots have cheated, it'll be well deserved for them to be punished. After all, the game is also about ethics and fair-play, and every player should demonstrate their best on the field under the same rules and conditions.

More information about the Pats' case here.

Voting: With or without niqab?

2007-09-09T22:00:00.000-07:00

One thing that could hardly be denied about Canada is the fact that it is a very tolerant country. I would almost cite it as an exemplary place, although it is true that in some specific towns around Canada, such exemplary behavior is not necessarily followed. However, the record is reasonably clean, and people with thousands of different cultural backgrounds and beliefs live all across the country and tolerate one another.

In recent days, there has been an interesting political issue related to tolerance to multiculturalism and its boundary with civil obligations: Should Muslim women voters show their faces by removing their niqabs or burkas (sort of veils that cover their faces) to allow full identification?. It is a dilemma that has awakened a big controversy, especially among the electoral authorities, the Canadian Parliament and the Prime Minister.

Elections Canada, the main electoral authority in the country, released last week a policy in which they considered that women wearing niqabs or burkas and not showing their face should be allowed to vote. Such policy contravenes a law passed by the Parliament a few months ago, which requires all voters to identify themselves, thus demanding Muslim women to remove their veils exclusively to vote. However, Elections Canada defends its policy by adding that they will require Muslim women wearing niqabs to show two government-issued ID pieces at the voting booth, or to bring along another voter who confirms their identity.

Elections Canada's safety measures do not seem to satisfy the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, who expressed his disagreement with the electoral organization. The Liberal Party and the Bloc Québécois, opposition parties in Canada, have spoken against Elections Canada's idea. Even Muslim leaders have allegedly said that removing the niqabs or burkas for identification at the voting booths would not be a big deal (although, interestingly, Muslim women have apparently not issued any opinion about the discussion). Only one party, the New Democratic Party (NDP), has shown a neutral attitude towards the case. Elections Canada, however, seems to be a bit reluctant to pull their policy back, and the Prime Minister appears to be eager to dispute that issue in the Parliament.

I must agree with the Prime Minister and the rest of political players that have shown their concern about Elections Canada's policy. To ask Muslim women to remove their burkas or niqabs before voting should not harm the cultural sensitiveness that prides the country, it is only a safety measure to make sure that the voter is precisely the person who claims to be, so her right to vote can be fully respected and protected. That way, the possibilities of fraud or unlawful voting are minimized.

With so much opposition to the policy, it looks unlikely that Elections Canada can successfully implement their plan, but they will fight to settle it down. Nevertheless, their intentions might be doomed to failure.

Pascua Lama dispute

2007-08-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

Today, I received a chain email that seemed to me more interesting than the average message of its kind. It talked about the plans of a Canadian multinational mining company, Barrick Gold Corporation, to extract gold and other mineral resources from recently discovered deposits in the Huasco Valley, Chile, as well as in some areas of the neighbouring San Juan province in Argentina. The project, named Pascua Lama, would allegedly require to drill two big glaciers, which provide two rivers with fresh waters. The glaciers would disappear and the water of the rivers would suffer irreversible pollution effects, making it unsuitable for human and animal consumption. Moreover, the email emphasized the interests and influence of some stakeholders in the project, such as former U.S. President George Bush Sr and former Prime Minister of Canada Brian Mulroney, who are supposedly involved in Barrick's Board of Directors and among its main shareholders.

The email, which requested every recipient to write down the name and to forward it to as many people as possible to "gather signatures" that would eventually be sent to the Chilean government to show the opposition to this project, really touched my emotions. I found especially worrying the description it gave about the potential pollution that would be generated in the region and the irreversible effects that it would cause to local ecosystems and agricultural activities of local communities. However, I found necessary to research a bit more about the topic before forging a solid opinion about it.

I went through several websites, trying to find a neutral opinion about the case (because obviously the email was biased against Barrick). After going through several sources, such as Wikipedia and newspapers, I found that Barrick was indeed a company that has been involved in some legal issues concerning unfair deals to purchase lands in various locations, such as Australia, Philippines, the United States... and even Chile. In fact, a person named Rodolfo Villar sued the company when he sold his land to Barrick and received much less money than he expected from the Canadian corporation. This lawsuit is still on process, and it's Barrick's one of the key hurdles that Barrick is facing in order to begin its Pascua Lama project.

On the other hand, Barrick has a very clean record environmentally speaking, having notorious performance and waste management systems put in place in mines around the world, as are the cases in Australia and Papua New Guinea. They were also conditioned by the Chilean government to fully comply strict measures to make sure that Barrick will have little or no impact in the environment, and that they will benefit local stakeholders. Barrick agreed to these measures.

However, it looks that people don't trust Barrick about their intentions in Chile. What is Barrick's attitude towards these scandals? It was surprising to go through such multinational's internet site and find out that they have got the same email I received! They actually wrote an entire page of myths and facts about the Pascua Lama project, in which they take some key ideas written in the email message and respond to them by giving what they say are the true facts. The page can be accessed by clicking here.

What's the truth behind all this issue? As usual, more questions than answers are left in the air and there are two opposing parties that depict the situation in two radically different ways. On one hand, Barrick boasts about its corporate responsibility in environment, social responsibility by creating temporary and permanent jobs for the local communities. On the other hand, we have the project's foes who claim that environment will be affected regardless of what plans Barrick thinks of implementing to avoid so, and that local communities and their economies will be negatively affected by Barrick's operations. In between, the Chilean government who wants to attract foreign capital to keep its economic growth, but who also has the responsibility of keeping its population happy and protected. The landscape couldn't be more complex than that.

In the end, it looks that Barrick will be successful to set up and begin operations of their Pascua Lama project. Will opponents stand back and forget about the issue? Time will say. But it is an international issue that will have to be watched closely.

NFL: The end of the Vick era in Atlanta?

2007-08-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

Michael Vick, the Atlanta Falcons' quarterback, is in real trouble. He pleaded guilty to charges of illegal dogfighting operation, and he's probably facing some time in jail. This occurs only about a week after he pleaded not guilty to exactly the same charges.

Vick was accused of promoting illegal dog fights through a venture named Bad Newz Kennels, where some dogs were sacrificed and some others kept in harsh conditions. Unofficial sources estimate that he'll be given a sentence of 18 months in prison, plus a fine of US $250,000. This information, of course, is not confirmed. But this case against Vick will keep him off the next NFL season, and it is still unknown whether he will ever return to professional football activity.

It looks that the Atlanta Falcons will have to do something about their case, and quick. Michael Vick used to be the key player of the team; his contributions made the Falcons improve their games in the last years. But now, it looks that it's gone. Who'll be the brave quarterback who'll carry that heavy weight on his back?

I am sure that the Falcons are about to start a restructuring period, in which this radical change will negatively affect the team's performance. But they'll have to come through it.

More information about Michael Vick's case on cnn.com.

Tata's Rs 1-lakh: The cheapest car in the world

2007-08-15T22:18:00.000-07:00

The automobile industry might take a new course when the first ultra cheap car is rolled out of the assembly plant. At least, that's what Ratan Tata, chairman of the Indian manufacturer Tata Motors, is hoping to happen.

The car, currently known as the Rs 1-lakh car in India, will make its first public appearance in six month's time, during the Auto Expo 2008 in New Delhi. Those who have seen the prototype say that this Tata model resembles the Daewoo Matiz (picture above). Some technical specifications have been published by now; for example, Tata announced that its diesel engine will have 667 cc of power, and the structure will contain iron, alloys and plastic components - although they didn't specify in what proportion will they use each type of material, but we can expect to have much more plastic than usual, as Tata is trying to make the car as light as possible in order to reach maximum fuel efficiency.

Tata's plans are ambitious: the company wants to sell about 1 million units per year, which almost doubles the current annual sales of cars in India. However, they think that the price of their milestone car will be a key factor to achieve their goal. The price is expected to be the equivalent to $2,500 US Dollars. They are aiming to convince a fair amount of two-wheeler buyers in India (who purchase 7.5 million units annually) to switch to Tata's new model.

Not everything is so positive in Tata's plans. Many people have been wondering about the reliability of the new car; its low price could mean low quality components as well, and some safety devices, such as airbags (which are not mandatory in India) will be likely sacrificed. Also, Some NGOs have started to let their concerns out about the model, arguing that, should the car be as successful as Tata thinks, it will easily cause permanent traffic jams in the (still developing) Indian road system. Moreover, the consumption of diesel will soar, possibly causing increases in fuel prices and extreme pollution levels.

Still, lots of people in India are excited about the idea, and they are enthusiastically looking forward to buying the new car. If Tata's proves to be successful, this kind of model would probably be imitated by larger manufacturers in other countries and we could expect to have similar models all around the globe in some years. But the plan fails, Tata will take a long time to recover. It is an interesting challenge for the giant Indian consortium indeed.

Click here to read the original article from businessworld.in
Special thanks to Kirti for the info for this post.

Johnson & Johnson: Beyond a simple red cross

2007-08-10T22:56:00.000-07:00

Look attentively at the picture on the left. You probably recognize it as Johnson & Johnson's logo, but can you see the red cross in it? If not, you might want to give it another try, but seeing with more detail. Do you see it now?

If you were unable to locate a red cross in their logo, you were not the only one. I wasn't able to find it either, and millions of people around the world have failed to see it. But the senior management at Johnson & Johnson, one of the largest multinational pharmaceutical companies in the world, believes that a red cross is the trademark through which their company has gained their worldwide reputation and market share, and they have decided to sue the American Red Cross for utilizing their logo to make money.

Yes, it sounds ridiculous... and it is. Whilst it is true that Johnson & Johnson registered such symbol as a trademark in 1887, the disgusting fact is that they are suing a humanitarian, non for profit organization, just to increase the cash in their pockets. Their claim is that the Red Cross is supposed to use its logo "only in connection to non-profit relief services", but they have been stamping it in other products that they have been selling to make money.

The Red Cross does not deny that fact. They say that the symbol has been used to sell some products, such as hand sanitizers, combs and humidifiers, all of which are part of health and safety kits. Those kits are sold with the only intention of raising funds for the organization, to support their humanitarian tasks. The money raised from those sales is estimated to be of about $10 million US dollars, which shouldn't be a major concern for Johnson & Johnson given the fact that they reported net earnings for $11.05 billion US dollars for the year 2006, and $10.06 billion in 2005. Their net earnings, by the way, are in the range of billions of US dollars since at least 10 years ago.

Let's analyze a bit of history to determine who stole the logo from whom. The American Red Cross was founded in 1881, and began using its red cross symbol since then. But they received their congressional charter until 1900, 13 years after Johnson & Johnson registered the red cross as its trademark.

I have been looking at several Johnson & Johnson products' packages (from Band-Aids to Tylenol) to see the mysterious red cross that the multinational corporation is claiming as its own. I failed to find even a single product in which the "trademark" they're defending so fiercely appears. That can only have one meaning: Their market share and their success is not linked to the image of the red cross whatsoever. Yet, they are decided to defend it, no matter what the cost is... even if such cost is a bad reputation and the erosion of public opinion. That should be a major concern for Johnson & Johnson, as they have been ranking as a top company in the annual reputation surveys made by Harris Interactive, one of the most respected organizations in the field. But they might be willing to give that up in order to preserve their beloved red cross.

There is not much to comment on this sad and fairly pathetic episode. Even if Johnson & Johnson is entitled to file a sue against the Red Cross, in my opinion the pharmaceutical giant has just reached a new low.

Click here to read the original article from The Globe and Mail.

Barry Bonds: his 756th homer is a reality now

2007-08-09T22:03:00.000-07:00

On May 20, 2006, Barry Bonds made history by connecting his 714th home run of his professional career, tying Babe Ruth's record as the player with the second largest amount of home runs scored, just after Hank Aaron. At that time, I wondered (and many other baseball fans around the globe did as well) whether Barry would be able to reach Aaron's record of 755 home runs.

More than a year after that, we already have a definite answer to that question: Yesterday, Barry Bonds hit his 756th home run of his sports career, making him the player with the most amount of home runs scored in history. It happened during the 5th inning of a match against the Washington Nationals, at the AT&T park in San Francisco.

I see this as a major event in sports history, but many people claim that Bonds' success has been greatly supported by the use of illegal substances (like steroids). Such scandals have been out there for years, and whether Bonds has used steroids to achieve his records is something nobody knows for sure... except Barry Bonds himself.

Myth, reality? We don't know. There are no signs that let us know for sure whether his success is due to illegal substances, and given that the situation we can't do more but to celebrate his success as well: Congratulations, Barry!