The missing link

In a top of scientific discoveries of 2009 the discovery of a human-like fossil was name the science breakthrough of the year. This is a long debate and one of the arguments of non-believers in the theory of evolution: the fact that there are no species between monkeys and humans and the gap between them is too big to be explained by evolution. The scientists were looking for years for this type of fossil and it seems the finally found it: a creature that looks like a monkey but has some characteristics that indicates a biped walking. Unfortunately the evidence of talking cannot be seen in a fossil, so we will still debate for some time about where do we come from.

New book: Super-freakonomics

I just finish reading a new book, Super-freakonomics. It is written by an economist who deviates from the mainstream themes of economics and applies the "economic method" to various other domains from prostitutes to terrorists. In fact this is a sequel, in the first book he was also writing about drug dealers. There is also a chapter about global warming and geo-engineering as a possible solution. Overall it's a very good read and no, there are no formulas and equations in this book :)

And the winner is...

Costi Rogozanu.
Out of the blogs I read during the presidential election campaign I consider the one of Costi the most objective (detached from either contending part) and with good humor.

Other contenders:
Teodor Tita
Alin Fumurescu
Doc@Hotnews
Tolo

I hope that more and more people will practice critical thinking relative to what happens in our society. And maybe this type of ideas will rule one day.

Where is our mind?

There is an election coming in Romania and the winner is uncertain yet. The electoral campaign was an hysterical one with accusations flying around and a lot of negative campaigning. I made up my mind a long time ago (I will vote again for the current president Traian Basescu), but I cannot stop wondering: where is our mind? Why is everybody hitting at their opponents, why can't they debate on principles and solutions?



Is this country a fight club?

Excellence in education prizes

I don't like the way Patriciu made his fortune and his political actions, but I do appreciate that he is using some of his money to sponsor education related projects. One of these projects is the prizes for excellence in education that are offered each year. Last week the awards for this year were announced and I was glad to find out that Mihai Dimian, one of my friends from University of Maryland won the third place in the researcher of the year section. Congratulations Mihai!

As for Mr. Patriciu, I hope he will finance a university in the near future, a real one, not another diploma factory like Spiru Haret University. A famous example is one of best universities in the world Carnegie Mellon University which was founded in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie, a steel tycoon at that time.

Timeout

Usually I don't like shopping, especially for cloth since I find it very hard to find something I really like. So I was happy one or two years ago when I found a chain where I could find stuff I like at reasonable prices. I got jeans, shirts and T-shirts (e.g. Run Like Hell) from Timeout, but the crisis stroke again and this retailer went out of business. All their shops in Bucharest were closed and so I'll have to ramble again through countless stores to find something to buy. Luckily my Merrell shoes bought in Delaware six years ago are still in very good shape and I also run 3-4 km in park every now and then so I should be able to go for a shopping session when I will really need it :)

Future cars

Today we have diesel and petrol cars and a few hybrids, the most successful being Toyota Prius. As this industry is build on inoculation of the idea of having a personal vehicle, unless some catastrophic event (natural or economical) happens I don't see that many people giving up their beloved cars no matter how good the public transport will be.
So what will be the future of cars? Among the alternatives to oil based propelled cars the hype is nowadays on electric cars. Some estimates are saying that by 2020 10% of new sales will be electric cars, others estimate the adoption rate will be much slower to only 1-2% of new sales. At least one big company (Renault) is betting on the first estimate and plans to launch a full range of electric cars in a few years. The main drawbacks for electric cars at this moment are the cost of batteries (most of them use lithium which is not that abundant) and the infrastructure for recharging them. See the full story here.
As for myself, I hope the next car I buy will be at least a hybrid one.

Architect, IT architect

So what does an (IT) architect do, apart from designing railroads? Apparently this is a role that started to appear in IT projects around the begging of 21st century (I never heard about IT architects in Star Trek, so I guess they solved the problem of writing software meanwhile) and does something to handle complex projects. I don't see myself as an architect (at least for now), but if you receive an envelope giving you this title, what can you do? Hopefully I'll have some fun when playing the architect part :)

Horse jumping contest

Last weekend I went to an interesting event: a horse jumping contest at Hipocan club in Corbeanca, near Bucharest. I occasionally saw this type of event at TV, but it was the first time I saw a live contest. It was very nice to see all those horses, although the weather was rather chilly. I didn't have a camera to take photos, but I found some from this event on another blog here.

Addictive

Radiohead - Jigsaw Falling Into Place

Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow

Ender's Game is probably the best science fiction novel I ever read. It was somewhere towards the end of high school and I liked both the science and the fiction in it. I stopped reading science fiction books in that period (more about this in another post), but recently I stumbled upon some books by the same author. On the cover of Ender's Shadow I read that it tells the same story as in the original book, but from the point of view of another character. So I bought it and after a couple of days I was done with it. The same fascinating story, but with new points of view and interesting twists. In the next couple of weeks I read the other three books (Shadow of the Hegemon, Shadow Puppets, Shadow of the Giant) from this new saga and they all live up to the expectations raised by the first one.

Economists and economics

I read two articles recently that lead me to writing this post. One by Paul Krugman who analyzes how most of the economists didn't anticipate the crisis that hit the world last year and another one (in Romanian) who criticize exactly Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz for their omnipresence in mass-media where they impose their "leftist" ideas.

First I should mention that I read both books of the Vienna school economists (like Mises and Hayek) and Stiglitz. The science of economics mainly tries to create models that explain the interactions of people in the context of goods and their value. Apart for the various competing models one big disputed point among economists is how much the state should be involved in economy. The adepts of a liberal ideology claim that we should always let the market free to reach its equilibrium, as the free market is the most efficient way of allocating resources. But the ideal market model has one important assumption: that the agents act rational. And this assumption is not true many times, for example in the recent asset bubble people were driven by an "irrational exuberance" and they kept buying properties at ridiculous prices. One may say that a model is limited by its nature and cannot account for all the complexities of reality, but if a model cannot predict bubbles in various markets that keep appearing and have devastating effects on the economy when they burst then that model is not very useful. On the other hand, if we understand that such bubbles can occur than maybe public policies that act to prevent such evolutions are desirable: for example, counter cyclical monetary policies like raising interest rates when the economy grows strongly.

Moreover, economic theory doesn't question the morality or rationality of our goals. For example, in U.S. under free market conditions it is clear that not all people will have health insurance. The fact that a society may choose to offer health insurance to all its citizens it's not an economic issue, but a moral one. Thus, the fact that the state collects taxes and redistributes money to achieve such a goal should not be seen as an interference with the free market, but as an voluntary action of that society. This particular example of health care was acknowledged even by Hayek in his Constitution of Liberty as a legitimate case where the state might play a role in the economy.

The free market theory says that given certain assumptions an equilibrium state is reached, having the expression of the equilibrium price of a good. However, it is important to notice there can be many possible equilibrium states. Some of them might be more desirable than others (for example having fewer unemployed people, or having universal health insurance, avoiding financial meltdown), so in this case the intervention of the state in the economy is acceptable. The same argument applies when talk about ecology and global warming. Although some say that no intervention is necessary cause the free market will lead us to an equilibrium state, what if this state is one where life is no longer sustainable on Earth? We'd better make sure that the equilibrium state where our environment is heading is one where we can also live around.

Space garbage

In the last 50 years the space exploration changed our lives: think only about GPS and satellite communications. But what happens with the satellites that are no longer in use? Some of them (the bigger ones) are driven back towards Earth and they burn in the atmosphere. But most of them are just left orbiting around the Earth. Thus the new place where garbage accumulates is in the space around our planet. This is more and more a concern because this kind of garbage can hit at any time a functional satellite or the ISS producing significant damage as satellites are designed to be as lite as possible, not resistant at impact with other objects. So now DARPA started to investigate ways to remove this garbage. Some more details here.

GDP to be replaced as a measure of well being

For a long time most of the people looked at GDP as the measure of well being of a country. This is misleading from at least 2 reasons in my opinion.
First, as the GDP measures what is produced inside a country it measures as positive output the work done by the firefighters after a fire, or the medication bought to cure an illness also contributes to the GDP. But the negative consequences of these events are not taken into account.
Secondly, we arrive at a state where the consumption is encouraged in order to increase the GDP. As we consume more, the GDP increases, people have jobs and everybody is happy. But the environment degradation (pollution and resource depletion) is not taken into account anywhere in this equation.

A number of organizations proposed alternative ways to measure "user satisfaction" and also the state of the environment so we can have a better picture of the real state of a particular region. See an example of such measures here.
The European Commission is heading in this direction too and it will investigate alternative ways to GDP of measuring the development of a country. I hope this trend will catch with other countries too, so the governments get rid of this obsession of increasing the GDP at any cost.

Even more pictures

The Danube river seen from Serbia


Plivice National Park

Pictures from Croatia

Brela seen from the sea


Dubrovnik


Dubrovnik


Baska Voda


Brela - the storm is approaching

Garbage collection in the countryside

So this is not about garbage collection in Java, but in the countryside of Romania. Large parts of Romania looks still like an old style programming language where no garbage collection takes place. People in the countryside are still throwing the garbage in some improvised landfills at the end of the village, or by the local river. But the garbage that used to be mostly biodegradable tens of years ago now consists mainly of plastics, cans, metals and whatever else you could imagine. No wonder many river banks look like this:




This is the first project I heard of where the garbage collection in the countryside is being greatly improved. It's in the Dolj county and 9 villages are involved. This is a tiny number from the over 2000 villages in Romania, but at least it's a start. Now I'll go back to Java and its automatic garbage collection.

Dream vacation

For those who are craving for a vacation on a remote island (see one of the earlier posts) should also consider the Garbage Island from Pacific Ocean. It's the newest island on Earth, it's bigger than Texas, so there should be plenty of room for many people. And if you are a scientist maybe you can join the expedition to study it. More information can be found here and here.

No more bottled water

A town in Australia has voted to ban the sale of bottled water. The issue arose after a company proposed to extract some water from an underground reservoir in the region, ship it to Sydney to be bottled and then bring it back for selling it. This shows just what a waste of resources we are doing every day. The full story is here.

You can't feel anymore

Is this the reason so many people are constantly looking for the next new sensation? But if they can't feel anymore isn't this search in vain? They should look inside themselves maybe.

I'm just rambling around here, in fact I'm just hooked on this song from Franz Ferdinand (the video clip is very nice too):

Things people would like to do

I read recently a kind of survey about what would various (young) people want to do in their free time if they had the means. What puzzled me was that most of the answers were in two categories:
- doing some kind of extreme (or at least exotic) sport like skiing, scuba diving, horse riding, paragliding, motorcycling;
- going to a more or less exotic place like Africa, South America, Asia or an exotic island;

So, basically, all these people are looking around for is a new sensation: adrenaline, visual and more.
I'm kind of tired of looking again and again for this next new sensation. I would like instead to have a couple of hours each week in which to lay in bed and look at the ceiling of the room (or even better at the sky) and re-imagine the world, each time in a different way. Cause if you can imagine it in your head then it is real, isn't it? (For music it is scientifically proven to be this way as Oliver Sacks describes in his book Musicophilia, but more on this later.)

Doing as much good as you can around you

A couple of days ago I read an interview with Gabriel Liiceanu. It is mostly about the state of the Romanian society and it has a part I like a lot. I will try to translate it here:

Question: Do you think, Mr. Liiceanu, that the progress of this country depends in any measure on the political elite? Can we still consider that the president of this country represents a force that determines in any way the social progress? And I ask you these questions because there was no other president than Traian Basescu with more good intentions and determination for the social progress.

Answer: "For a long time I asked these questions in the same manner as you and, having the tendency to think pessimistic, I thought that, indeed, there is not much hope. Years passed and I realized it is not productive to think in such radical terms. I start to think that the <> that you talk about is done mostly not by the <> of the good, but by decreasing the chances of evil. I'll always think that I'll have to chose between a smaller evil and a bigger evil and that is enough in order to achieve progress in an invisible way. And I tell to myself: Basescu didn't manage to do much, but maybe he didn't have a majority in Parliament to support him, maybe he didn't have a government to work with. Maybe after the next elections there will be better people in the Parliament, etc. And when I am desperate, like you, I think on the following: 1. that I live the miracle to have escaped the communism's nightmare (which I couldn't imagine as possible before 1990) and 2. that from 1990 till now there have been some big advances in a couple of areas.
We have nothing else to do but to struggle all of us, there is no refuge. It is enough if each of us is doing his best wherever he is. And to persuade the people around him that they have a choice between a smaller evil and a bigger evil. That's what I think we can do: as much good as we can around us. If the number of people who think this way will increase then the our society will progress irrespective of one political figure or another."

What stroke me in this part is the same argument that I heard a long time ago. Our philosophy teacher (Mr. Marica) used to challenge us in class in a Socratic way. And one day he asked one of our colleagues what would he do in life. My colleague answered that if he would be the leader of Romania he would change this and that, but for now there is nothing he could do. To this our professor replied that it is not productive to think this way. We should always think of the best we can do now, instead of dreaming on a distant future or relying on another person who has power for things to change.

You know, maybe my philosophy teacher and Mr. Liiceanu went to the same school :)

M is for Michael

That was the motto on MTV over the week-end. And indeed, Michael was the idol of the MTV generation from the 80s. I remember Smooth Criminal was one of the first video clips I ever saw on a video tape that my dad copied from a friend. And I watched that video many times, cause there was no MTV to watch in Romania at that time.

And M is also for the Man in the Mirror that we should try to make a better person every day:

Joi.megaJoy

"Joi.megaJoy" by Katalin Thuroczy at Odeon Theatre

A group of old people is having a party every Thursday. With all their memories and nostalgia for their lost world and friends. But they still have a hack of a party. The problem is that after about an hour I checked my watch and asked myself: is this the only idea from this play? And that was almost all, with a little interference from the present and a confusion of whether the time of the action was during the communist era or in post-communism. Overall the performance was good, but a real plot and a resolution are missing in this play.

Do we still have a city?

This is how Bucharest looks more and more:



Can we still call it a city?, or is it just a jungle. The debate about how the architecture of Bucharest is ruined every day will take place here. And this is just about the beauty our eyes don't see, but what about the dust, the crowded places everywhere, the transport and many more? No wonder Bucharest has the lowest rating among the main cities in the European Union for the quality of life.

Destroying the planet

We are doing it every day: when we drive our cars, buy that stuff we don't really need, eat too much and then go to gym to keep us fit, wander around the planet to see it with our own eyes. We do it time and again until nothing will be left, or it will be too late to bring it back. Until we will make the Earth so hot, or so cold, or so dry, or so wet, or so acid that we will not be able to live here anymore. Some insects and plants will maybe still be able to live around and maybe it's better this way. We are the people that rule the world and know everything about it, too bad we are that blind.

Or we can try to save it, but that takes a lot of effort, perseverance and relinquishment. Will I do it, will you do it my friend, will all of us do it?

Doesn't this bother you?

The Seville Communion

I finished reading The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. This novel is a little different from other novels I read by Reverte, as the background theme is not an area such as Flemish painting, rare books or maritime life, but losing of battles. Each character in the book is losing something in the end (faith, marriage, money, dreams), and each one of them is coping differently with it. At some point I got the same sad feeling I used to have when reading Kundera's novels (Unbearable Lightness of Being, Book of Laughter and Forgetting), but as Coldplay says it so well: "just because I'm losing doesn't mean I'm lost, doesn't mean I'll stop".

Pintado una Canción

This site is really amazing. Try it now!

More theatre plays...

The end of theater season is approaching fast, but I'm not sleeping in my shoes, so here are the latest plays I've seen:
- The Egoist - National Theater Bucharest - 15th of April 2009
- The Death of a Salesman - Bulandra Theater - 30th of April 2009

"The Egoist" features Radu Beligan and as you guessed is about an egoist, which is not that a bad person in the end. The play explores the fine line between satisfying your needs and helping others with their needs. If you can do something for somebody else and you're not doing it, you are considered a bad guy, but sometimes nobody asks what your needs are.

"The Death of a Salesman" is one of my favorite plays (thanks to my high school friends who made me read it in the 12th grade when we studied a fragment of this play in the English class). And this interpretation is really impressive, Victor Rebengiuc actually won the best actor award at Uniter 2009 for this role.
The distorted perspective of life of Willy Loman and the never ending search of what to do with his life of Biff which conflicts with his father's vision of success is striking right into my heart yet another time...

Should software makers be liable for their code?

Many software vendors have an EULA (end user license agreement) that basically says that they do not guarantee their software makes a specific thing or is fitted for a specific purpose. Also they state they are not liable for almost anything that happens as a consequence of using that software. Here is an example from the Firefox EULA:

"4. DISCLAIMER OF WARRANTY. THE PRODUCT IS PROVIDED "AS IS" WITH ALL FAULTS. TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, MOZILLA AND MOZILLA'S DISTRIBUTORS, LICENSORS HEREBY DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, WHETHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION WARRANTIES THAT THE PRODUCT IS FREE OF DEFECTS, MERCHANTABLE, FIT FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGING. YOU BEAR ENTIRE RISK AS TO SELECTING THE PRODUCT FOR YOUR PURPOSES AND AS TO THE QUALITY AND PERFORMANCE OF THE PRODUCT. THIS LIMITATION WILL APPLY NOTWITHSTANDING THE FAILURE OF ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY REMEDY. SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF IMPLIED WARRANTIES, SO THIS DISCLAIMER MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU.

5. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. EXCEPT AS REQUIRED BY LAW, MOZILLA AND ITS DISTRIBUTORS, DIRECTORS, LICENSORS, CONTRIBUTORS AND AGENTS (COLLECTIVELY, THE "MOZILLA GROUP") WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, SPECIAL, INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR EXEMPLARY DAMAGES ARISING OUT OF OR IN ANY WAY RELATING TO THIS AGREEMENT OR THE USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE PRODUCT, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF GOODWILL, WORK STOPPAGE, LOST PROFITS, LOSS OF DATA, AND COMPUTER FAILURE OR MALFUNCTION, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES AND REGARDLESS OF THE THEORY (CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE) UPON WHICH SUCH CLAIM IS BASED. THE MOZILLA GROUP'S COLLECTIVE LIABILITY UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF $500 (FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS) AND THE FEES PAID BY YOU UNDER THIS LICENSE (IF ANY). SOME JURISDICTIONS DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF INCIDENTAL, CONSEQUENTIAL OR SPECIAL DAMAGES, SO THIS EXCLUSION AND LIMITATION MAY NOT APPLY TO YOU. "

This practice has become common because the complexity of today's software, the almost endless possibilities in which a software can be used and the interaction with other systems. This makes offering a guarantee on what the software does a very risky thing for the software developer.

It seems the European Commission wants to change this practice and force the software providers liable for their software. Details can be read here. As a consumer I can be only happy that more rights are granted to me, but as a software developer I think enforcing such liabilities on a software provider will lead to dramatic changes in the way the software is produced and priced. It will be much more expensive and more limited in communicating with third party pieces of software. Is this good or bad in the end? It's hard to say, but this kind of law should be carefully evaluated before enforcing it.

Universities in Europe

A very interesting article in The Economist about the universities in Europe in the context of the Bologna process. Apparently everybody understood and implemented what they want out of this process. The article also argues that the difference in performance between European and U.S. universities can be explained by the amount of private funding a university gets. Basically, the more private funding you have the more likely a university is to produce better research. The article can be read here.

Where do Romanian universities fit in this picture? They implemented the 3/2/3 years cycles, but on the other hand they are plagued by nepotism and plagiarism, so should we even count them as European universities?

Movie season

Each year in the period around the Oscar awards ceremony I usually talk around about the nominated movies. It's a kind of movie season. I remember one (Quintana) year when I saw almost all the important nominated movies. I saw a couple of the nominated movies this year too, and even movies that were rumored will be nominated, but in the end were not. The ones I liked most from this season are: Revolutionary Road and Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. The first one quite moved me and in the second one Penelope Cruz was exceptional, even when she made me laugh with Spanish-English mixture of cultures.

Earth Hour

A couple of weeks ago a global action called Earth Hour took place around the world. The idea was to turn off the lights for an hour between 8 and 9 in the evening. This year I was not at home at that time, so I couldn't take part, but I took part at this event two years ago. One of my colleagues at work argued this event is useless and even damaging as the electricity was still produced and wasted since you cannot stop an electrical generation facility for just an hour to make up for the lower demand. And since electricity cannot be stored it ends up wasted somehow in the system. I know this might be true from a technical point of view, although I might imagine somebody else (like a processing plant) could have scheduled some activity at that point to use the excess electricity, but the real meaning of this event is to make all of us aware of how much electricity we consume and many times just waste. For example, I know the TV consumes quite a lot of electricity while in stand-by mode and I started a while ago turning off the TV from "the button" (not by remote control) when I leave in the morning. So all of us should start thinking how to lower our electricity consumption. And that hour when you were supposed to sit in the dark was a good time to think about such things.

Six Characters in Search of an Author

I saw this play by Luigi Pirandello last week at Bulandra Theater in Bucharest. Extraordinary performance for an extraordinary play. Rebengiuc, Caramitru and Andreea Bibiri (the step daughter) were very convincing. A must see if you are in Bucharest.

The funny thing is that I saw this play about 10 years ago at the same theater, but I didn't remember much from it. I remember only that I liked the subject and it was with Virgil Ogasanu, but that was about all that I could say about it. This time I guess I'll keep a lasting impression :)

Keeping a promise

I'm always amazed on how things work in our society. Imagine you are traveling to a city in a foreign country. So you go to a website and make reservations for plane and hotel. And all you have is a piece of paper where it says that on the day X, at hour Y a plane will take off and you will be allowed to board on that plane. And then in that foreign city you go at the hotel with another piece of paper and they will just let you sleep and eat there. This is really the magic of the modern society, the fact that people learned to respect a contract, even if they never got in touch with their partner. Of course, it is not flawless, and it varies wildly by country and the type of business you are doing, but it is still amazing IMHO.

On the other hand, apart for the B2B, is the P2P promise land where you have no written contracts, but you have expectations. You have expectations even if there is no promise made and others have expectations from you too. And when you fail to meet the expectations or, even worse, you fail to keep a promise you made disaster strikes. And it can be very bad, as you don't loose some money, you loose the trust of others. I remember one such occasion when me and a group of friends organized something funny. But on the day we were supposed to do it I missed it. It was not like I ruined all the surprise, they did it without me anyway and it was fine. But then I was told this: how do you expect somebody to trust you again since you didn't do even this simple thing? I was only puzzled and amused at that moment and only later I realized how tough that was...

Is there a conclusion here? Only that I appreciate when the promises are kept, I know how hard is to do it.

P.S. Last Saturday I saw "Eduard the third" by Shakespeare at TNB. This particular play of Shakespeare is not one of his masterpieces, but most of the drama there was in characters that had to choose between different promises they made explicit or implicit: fidelity to your husband or serving the king's wishes, fidelity to your father or to your best friend and so on.

Carbon added tax

This year the countries around the world are supposed to reach an agreement for the next treaty on preventing global warming. This new treaty will replace the current Kyoto treaty and it is hoped it will have bigger targets and involve most of the big polluters countries (one of the shortcomings of Kyoto treaty was that big countries like U.S., China and India didn't sign it). So there is much discussion about what this treaty should stipulate and how it will be enforced. I don't follow all the news on this subject, but in general (main stream media) I didn't see articles written by economists about how to handle global warming. And this is an economic matter after all, since we will have to pay somehow to protect the environment. I thought of the economists I read and I imagined Stiglitz should have written something about how to tackle global warming. And indeed, I found this interesting paper on his site. It discusses various proposals on how to tax CO2 emissions and how the implementation might work or not. The most fair solution in my opinion is the "carbon added tax" which is similar in concept with the VAT: each part of the production chain is taxed according to the emissions it produces for the goods and service he delivers. The total tax in fact is paid by the consumer, which thus has two incentives: to consume less and to consume "greener" products (that carry a smaller tax). For sure it's not trivial to enforce such a tax world wide, but this is a sound solution from the economic point of view.

And even more

The yellow semi-submarin



Fish and corals



The desert and the Nile valley



Temple of Hatshepsut

Finally, some more photos from Egypt

Obelisc from Karnak temple



On the way to Luxor




The camel and the pyramid



Pyramids of Keops and Kefren



A beduin village

Brother Lee

Whenever somebody calls me on my mobile phone I hear this song and I feel like running to find my brother Lee who's just like me... :)



...where they know when you're fakin' it...

Cu dus si intors

I write this blog in English (because I want to practice and also because I have a lot of friends who don't speak Romanian and they might read it some day, if they don't already do). I read, write and speak English almost every day. I often use English words when I talk in Romanian and many times I just say whole phrases in English although I am talking in Romanian to somebody. And yet, it is so far away to be "The language" I speak. I like to play with words a lot, I like to coin phrases with two meanings (depending on the listener's knowledge), I like the twisted meanings from hard crossword puzzles (I don't remember most of them, but there is one that somehow got stuck in my head: se pune greu la cale - lest), but I don't remember doing ever such things English (btw, if you ever notice that at me let me know :)). So definitely, Romanian is my language.
And what was I saying in the title? That was my busy status at one point on messenger (Romanian has diacritics too, which most of the time I don't use when I write on the computer).

Blogging is hard

I have a couple of things I want to blog about, but it's getting harder to find the time and the mood to write them down. I'll just make a brief list so at least I don't forget about them and hopefully I'll come back to each of them later:
- more about Egypt and maybe some more pictures;
- more about "Letters to my son", a very beautiful book indeed;
- some articles from The Economist about the planetary ocean and what mankind is doing to it;
- the paper about the carbon tax proposed by Stiglitz;
- the account I got for Google Apps and the release of Python 3.0; maybe I'll trick myself into learning this programming language, you never know :)

World seen from the back of a camel

Just a teaser from the trip to Egypt. More to come...