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...

Body of ideas

I noticed I have this habit of not mentioning the names of the persons when I tell a story or talk about something. I somehow feel it is not the exact person who was the subject of the story that matters, but the story itself with the meaning it has for me. It is the same when I say a quote, many times I forget who initially said it, it is never my intention to become a fan of somebody who said something interesting, what matters is the idea she/he expressed. Any idea in fact becomes "open source" once it was uttered to the world. I think it is a body of ideas we are always talking about, isn't it, buddy?

Hamlet's prolog without words

European House (Hamlet’s Prologue Without Words), Regia: Àlex Rigola, Compania de teatru Lliure, Spania, Festivalul Uniunii Teatrelor Europene, Teatrul National Bucuresti, Sala Mare, 2008-12-20

First of all, it was not in Spanish or Catalan, but without words (and it was not pantomime) which made it quite challenging to get the idea. It was not Shakespeare, but some parable with the characters from Hamlet and one needed to know well Hamlet in order to identify all the characters. I didn't know Hamlet that well, but in the discussion we had afterward many of the mysteries were elucidated. The acting was good, but you needed a lot of imagination to fill in the the blanks (i.e. the missing words), otherwise you could get easily bored and lost. And the scenography was very nice.

For a different opinion on this performance read Less is bore.

New book - letters to my son

I started a new book, Letters to My Son by Gabriel Liiceanu. It's the first book by Liiceanu I read, I felt he is kind of a fashionable writer (not at the same level as the trio Eliade, Cioran and Noica, but still...) and I usually avoid reading fashionable writers. But since I received this book as a gift, I said I'd give it a try. And I like it, although this is supposed to be some kind of philosophy, the story telling style of Mr. Liiceanu is captivating. A while ago somebody said about me that I read philosophy (as a compliment I suppose :) ), but I was very puzzled when I heard that. I don't remember reading a philosophical system (like the one of Kant for example), I rather like story reading/telling. And if it happens the story has a deeper meaning that's for the better. But what I don't like from such stories is when the author explains at the end what you are supposed to understand. That is plain stupid. That's why I stopped reading Coelho.

City FM

City FM is probably the only radio station in Bucharest where you can listen Iron Maiden at 8 o'clock in the morning. One of their jingles sounds like this: "Hey, pelican, did anybody say you are not allowed to listen rock music in the morning?" They totally rock most of my mornings :)

Mathematics is hard, even when it's fiction

I finished the novel about the murders in Oxford. The book was fine, but I got somehow disappointed about the mathematics story the author was telling. One of the main characters was a professor of mathematics and he was trying to somehow minimize the consequences of the incompleteness theorem of Godel. So his idea, as the author puts it, was to show that the statements that cannot be proved true or false in an axiomatic system will be somehow not-natural and at another level of detail, so they will be irrelevant for the work of a mathematician. But this is completely wrong and we have a famous and well known example of the Euclid's fifth axiom (parallel postulate). It took mankind almost 2000 years to prove it cannot be proved true or false based on the other axioms of geometry, but has to be considered as an axiom. And for sure the Euclid's axiom is not some obscure statement or at another level of detail, but a very intuitive and "obvious" statement. And in 1963 another not such obscure statement in mathematics, continuum hypothesis, was shown to be impossible to proof or disproof in the context of the standard axiomatic set theory. So Martinez's character was in an impossible quest, but luckily for him and the readers he got involved in a series of crimes just to entertain us :)

Romanian stand-up comedy

I heard a while ago about this club in Bucharest, Cafe Deko, where there are stand-up comedy shows. I didn't have the chance (one wins the tickets at lotery of course :))to go there yet, but here is a very good piece from Teo (one of the comedians) found on YouTube. It is called "reflexive verbs and Eminescu". So in case you understand Romanian, enjoy!

New book - The Oxford Murders

I started reading a new book this week-end: The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez. So it is about some murders, finding their author and it also involves some mathematics. It should be fun to read, since I enjoyed other thematic mystery novels, like the ones of Arturo Perez-Revert and also novels about mathematics like Uncle Petros and Goldbach's Conjecture.

18 years

In 1995 when I started my studies at University of Bucharest I met a student at Mathematics who was in the sixth year (master degree) - Ionescu, who became a good friend of mine. And he told me one day: you know, Bogdan, these very steps that we are walking on in the Mathematics department were full of blood in June 1990; the blood of the students beaten by the miners, who also devastated the computer science labs (they were told the computers were used to print fake US dollars). Last night I saw comrade Iliescu again on TV giving advice about the economy. Seeing Iliescu on TV alone is a reason for me to go yet again to vote this week-end.

Prostanac

Go to www.google.ro type in "prostanac" and press "Ma simt norocos" ("I'm feeling lucky").
Mr. Geoana, you were (Google) bombed :))

Somebody to vote for

The elections for the parliament are approaching here in Bucharest. It is the first time when people will vote a person, not a party list. In fact, it is a mixed system (and also very flawed), but I think it is still better than the previous one. Unfortunately this new voting system didn't bring many new faces on the political scene, and even among the new faces there are few that one can trust. Still, in this "black sea" of Romanian politicians there is one name that I would like to recommend: Theodor Paleologu, the son of Alexandru Paleologu. Read his blog and his resume and see for yourselves. Since I cannot vote directly for him, I wish him good luck in the electoral college #9 from Bucharest. And I encourage everyone from that electoral college to go and vote for him.

Coming to an election near you

If an election is coming to your place then watch this video. And then send it to 5 of your friends.