Mastering EJB3.0

Yes, it's a new book and I almost finished it. I read it for a certification exam, after that I'll return to some more novels. It's not entirely new to me since I work with EJB 3.0 for one year and a half now. It's good important concepts like ORM, dependency injection and AOP are becoming part of the official JEE specification, it's bad it took them so long to react. These concepts are de facto standards in the Java world thanks to Hibernate and Spring frameworks.
I also still remember when I first heard about AOP(aspect oriented programming) in Bill Pugh's class at UMD. It seemed a very natural paradigm and I'm glad it made it to mainstream programming so fast.

The Last Cato

It seems that Dan Brown wasn't original even with his plot idea: following an ancient church secret by taking your characters in a quest around Europe. The Last Cato by Matilde Asensi, which was written before "The DaVinci Code", takes the reader into a quest to discover the "earthly paradise" as described by Dante in his "Divine Comedy". This is the initiation process to become a member of a secret society that is the keeper of the True Cross. The book is full of historical references, but the style is better than Dan's Brown as all these details are better integrated in the overall story. The ending was not very good, as the description of the "earthly paradise" is not credible, but since no such thing could ever exist it's hard to imagine it in a convincing way, especially that it is setup in middle age technological era.

An education, but which one?

An education is the social movie of this year. It tells the story of a girl who is seduced out of school and into the easy life of her playboy lover. In the end she returns to the school kind of education. Nevertheless, it is worth questioning the traditional education ans seeking ways of improving it. Probably the worst part about going to school is when it is not fun. Well, the breaks might be fun, but if you sit for an hour and the teacher is boring and you don't understand why do you have to study that subject it can become very annoying.
Here is an alternative view about what the education system should be about:

Earth Hour - 2010

This year even more cities, countries and ordinary people participated at the Earth Hour event. Year after year we become more and more dependent on electricity. This year I turned off everything in the house except for the fridge. I also didn't cheated by using the laptop or mobile phone which run on batteries. A counter movement called Edison Hour (see details here) was started in order to stress that electricity is good and we shouldn't go back to the dark ages, but instead we should try to solve the environmental problems by discovering some new technology. I think these guys are missing the point of the Earth Hour campaign. It is about waste, consumerism and selfishness. And I also see it as a reality check: how dependent are we on all these tools powered by electricity? What happens if someday an accident will leave us with no electricity for a day or a week? Are we even going to survive?

If There's a Rocket Tie Me To It

... and send me far, far away...

The land of green plums

I finished reading "The land of green plums" ("Animalul inimii" in Romanian) by Herta Muller. It's a somber book where the meaning of the universe disintegrates under the weight of the secret police and the communist party. The humanity is squeezed out of people until they commit suicide or leave the country. But many of those who try to leave also die in fact cause borders were like a prison wall with barbed wire and heavy army surveillance. And this barbed wire survives even today between Romania and Moldova. After the fall from power of the communist party in Moldova last year they finally decided to take this barbed wire down on the border between the two countries. One more prison is falling down.

Teach me tonight

While in high school I used to go about once a month to some jazz lessons. I was not passionate about jazz, but some of my friends were, so we all were attending the concerts of Harry Tavitian and Corneliu Stroe. Harry was literally jumping on the piano keyboard at moments, he was just a little man, but so alive. It all came back when I went to the last concert of "Teach me tonight" series. This time Tavitian was joined by Ion Baciu jr. at piano and Cserey Csaba at percution. It was a fine concert, suited for Christmas with many adaptations of Christmas carols.

As a bonus, here is the original "Teach me tonight" song performed by Nat King Cole:


I didn't have time to blog about many events, but I attended other performances this fall, so I will just mention them for the record: "Princess Turandot" from National Theater from Sibiu, "All My Sons" by Arthrur Miller at National Theater from Bucharest and "La Boheme" and National Opera from Bucharest.

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.