Monty Halls presents this two hour special about the Earth's structure. Again, it is not featured on IMdb.

The documentary follows the steps of Jules Verne and tries to analyse the same ideas with modern knowledge. In the process, explains how our planet is made, why it has an iron-nickel core, where does the magnetism come from, how deep humans have reached into the crust, etc. Interesting documentary, although a bit too "popular" for my taste. But it does explain a few things that I didn't know.

I would really like to see documentaries that are full of non repetitive data and that focus on information more than on special effects and deep voice presenters. But hey, in the same "session" somebody sent me a clip from a TV show where a guy was asked what orbits around the Earth, the Moon or the Sun. The guy asked the public and promptly said "the Sun". So, these docs are not completely useless. I just wish there was more.

You know, even about Bush people have said that he is in reality a very smart man and his obvious stupidity is an act. Could it be that Basescu is the same way? Oh, it seems I need a politics tag for this blog.

Well, Basescu is back in his presidential office, just like Ariel is back in school, and in his very first day as a not-ousted president the very day of the referendum that decides to oust him or not he does this incredible stupid thing. Basically he first goes shopping in a mall (like a normal citizen, mind you) and then he gets annoyed with this reporter woman that kept filming him with her cell phone. So he takes her cell phone. He has no idea how to turn off the phone, so it continues to record, including a conversation between Basescu and his wife in which he calls the reporter an aggressive stinking Gypsy. Then the recording is being analysed by the president's SPP corps (kind of like Secret Service) and the bit about the stinking Gypsy is removed. Little did they know that a recording like that can be restored; and it was and now all this is public domain.

There was great protest against the obvious racist remark, also about the way the president of a country treats a reporter and nobody does anything about it. How stupid can you be to do something like that, right?

But let me bring you this conspiracy theory: Basescu did this on purpose! After the elections he faced a publicity void, one that he either had to fill with keeping his promises (a rather difficult feat for most politicians) or one that had to be replaced with a new stunt. It is already obvious that a lot of the people that voted against his ousting this time are zealots, loyal to Basescu personally, so a little incident like this would not decrease his popularity, maybe it would just show (again) how human and average and of the people our president is. And also shift the attention from the presidential duties to a more common, easy to understand, irrelevant topic. Yet the last thing, the recording that was supposedly deleted then restored, was a stroke of genius. He now got really close to the racist electorate. And, funny enough, the Romanian Press Group decided to boycott the president in the media, thus removing any need of him to do anything. I mean, if you are not on TV or in the press, why do anything? Meanwhile, the press devoted to Basescu would write only the good stuff. And the reporter herself, after receiving an apology note (Basescu is good with notes) and some flowers, decided not to charge the president with anything.

Could this have a hint of truth in it? Who knows but Basescu and his inner circle, but there is this joke circulating in Bucharest about two Basescu supporters. One of them says "Oh, it would have been great for this thing to happen before the referendum". "Are you crazy?", the other one replies, " people might not have voted for him!". "Nah. He still would have been president, but now 75% of the population would get rid of the stinking Gypsies".

The incident can be easily found on YouTube, but I am not going to give you the link, as it is irrelevant.

I just had to blog about this, Night of the Living Dead, the original movie from 1968 and the only one worth anything, is now in the public domain! You can watch it for free! Online! Where? On Siderite's blog!!

This is a documentary about Daniel Tammet, a guy that is a savant, but without the loss of social skills. He can make incredible complex calculations in his mind, has a fantastic memory, learned Icelandic in seven days then conversed in it on live TV.

The most incredible stuff is when he does math, though. He "sees" numbers as colored shapes and the operations he does in his brain are plastic, rather than numeric. He just sees some shapes that then reveal digits. As a guy in the film said "he does math without even knowing".

As a film it is not terribly elaborated, but you don't need it to be. It just shows the facts and lets you be amazed. I am getting annoyed with IMdb for not having a lot of the documentary films I am watching these days, so I had to blog about them. Bottom line, this doesn't really help anyone do anything, but it does display a normal looking person seeing the world in a completely different way than most of us and being capable of "superhuman" feats. These guys are the real superheroes, even if in comic books they would have probably been the bad guys. You know, no muscles, not really handsome, lots of brain.

The best part of it is that you can watch it all, right here, on my blog, thanks to google videoYouTube. Isn't the Internet fab?

I usually comment on films on the IMdb site, but there was no mention of this program episode there. Watching it was much like reading "I am a Mathematician", immersed in a fascinating, yet inaccessible world, the one of professional mathematicians.

I often wonder where do they get the money to sit years on end at their desk to prove a theorem, without telling anyone they intend to. Anyway, the story is about this guy, Andrew Wiles, who had the dream of solving Fermat's last unsolved puzzle and one that Fermat himself wrote he had a beautiful solution to. You see, Fermat wrote some conjectures, some ideas he had, and did not write the solutions, thus failing to turn them into theorems.

A lot of mathematicians struggled to prove them and they succeeded, all but one, a problem so simple to define and yet very difficult to solve: show that there are no natural non zero values that satisfy the following equation for any N larger than 2 : x^N+y^N=z^N.

It is amazing the math that this guy has to explore to solve it. Of course, I understand nothing of it, and the show doesn't try to make anyone understand the math, but the feeling and effort are truly remarkable. A must see for anyone needing motivation to better himself.

You want to watch the film, here it is:

Space Mowgli is a short novel that describes, much like Solaris, the first contact with an alien race. There is a twist, though, as the alien is a human kid, modified to survive on a planet by unknown beings with unimaginable power.

You can immediately separate Russian scifi from American scifi.
The Russian space exploration expeditions are mostly civilian, led by the smartest and more rational scientist around, acting as the brain of the expedition; the characters are unique and react unpredictably, led by their own feelings or beliefs; their biggest problems are bureaucratic or social and mostly internal in the group.
In contrast, American scifi usually deals with military expeditions led by a charismatic or at least authoritative figure, acting as the heart of the expedition; the characters usually act within a strict set of rules which, if they chose to bend, they do as a group rather than as individuals, their greatest issues being external or technical.
I personally prefer the Russian version.

This particular book explores the way humans understand their own humanity, rather than a true interaction with an alien race. The aliens are there, but they choose not to be characters in the story. Each human character has their own view of things and of how things should go on. Reading the book, one is forced to evaluate humanity together with the crew of the expedition and the ending becomes irrelevant. The inner exploration of the reader himself becomes the story.

Bottom line: nice and introverted. Easy to read and rather short. Lacking a conclusion because their is no need for one. The Strugatski brothers considered this story the closest to their hearts.

People know me as the guy who won't put AdSense on his blog. I didn't do this before, because I don't believe in getting money for something that I would have done for free and I dislike the idea of people annoyed by ads.

However, it crossed my mind the other day that I could get some money and give it to charity. More than that, I could even use it in the charitable that I choose! Like teaching kids to use computer (or at least their brain).

So, I am asking you, dear readers, would you accept ads on my blog if you knew the money from your clicks go to a good cause? Please feel free to add a comment or use the chat to discuss it. Thank you!

BBC News released an article today, regarding the referendum in Romania about the decision to oust or not to oust the president, Traian Basescu. The picture in the article was very representative and it is the same in this post. That's why I feel robbed! I go vote and I see that this kind of people stole the vote from under me.

But I went to vote anyway. It is my first time (political deflowering?), and I knew it was for nothing just as well as I knew it the times I didn't go to vote, the idea being that even if I will be (again) in the minority that no one cares about, Basescu will look at the numbers and see me there! He will see that some of the people don't really like what he does and how he does it. Maybe this will stop him from going all Elvis on us.

Anyway, to people who are not employed in the budgetary system, this ousting of the president thing was like a good opportunity to watch something interesting on TV for a change. Nothing changed when he got suspended by the Parliament and nothing really changes today. Maybe that will make people see soon enough that we don't need a hero, just a good system.

However, I still fell pissed off because I always get ignored in the votes because of the "people" in the picture. Geez! Use head, don't bang!

For those of you who didn't hear about it until now, Pandora is a free online music service that tries to detect characteristics of songs and allows you to make your own "radio stations" that play the songs or artists you like and/or songs that are similar to those you like. You have a nice and simple voting system that allows you to say if you like the currently playing song or not.

But lately, some new legislation in the US, making licencing for the Internet a few times more expensive and adding more restrictions for access outside US made them restrict the site. Now you can't listen to music on Pandora unless you are American.

However, there is no way they can be restricted from showing the relations between songs, so you can search the songs for yourself. Here is a excerpt of an email I received from Pandora about allowing access to their song clustering system:

email from Pandora

You can essentially use our Backstage service (http://pandora.com/backstage) as a recommendation tool. If you search for an artist and click on their image, then you will see a list of Similar Artists. If you select an album, then you will see a list of Similar Albums. If you select a song from that album, you'll be presented with Similar Songs, along with 'Features of this Song'.

This is essentially the same information that the tuner was using to find new music for you. The big difference with Backstage is that you won't have any audio.

I have been reading this very nice blog (in Romanian) called BookBlog, where people talk about and review books. They had a nice initiative of getting people together to swap books. I've decided to go and see how it is.

The result? Man, I'm old! And if so much opinionated and energetic youth, as were the people that came to the meeting, did somehow manage to infest me with their vitality, someone inevitably bumped a chair into me then excused themselves using the polite form of addressing your elders.

The meeting took place at Carturesti, a nice book shop/tea shop in Bucharest, one that has a very nice atmosphere, but lousy service. You see, the whole thing was organised with the approval of the people at Carturesti, but when we got there, no one knew we were coming and were very apprehensive about us moving tables around. Then they've decided to bring a big mug of fruit infusion (improperly called tea) to all of us, as it was too much the trouble of making individual tea pots for each request. I was bent on drinking mate tea and I hate boiled fruits, so it did upset me a lot.

But back to the meeting. The layout (a big makeshift table) did not encourage group discussion, but rather a group of small discussions. I've talked a little with the nice girl next to me, until a lot of her friends came and make it awkward. They all seemed to know each other, more or less, making me feel like an outsider. And I was outside everything you can imagine: size, age group, book interests.

Yes, the books everyone brought were mainly taken from the second hand book shops, not that mine was different, but I could find no single book that caught my eye. Eventually I bought a Strugatski book and left them my beloved "Fisherman's Hope". I do hope someone that knows how to appreciate it fished it home. Or I could have gotten A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis, by David M. Friedman, which was a huge success, although I doubt anyone took it home.

Eventually I got bored, talked a little to the organizer, a very nice guy from BookBlog. He has what it takes to make it in life... that particular energy that is found in both successful businessmen and sales people. Then I left.

At least I had the opportunity to read some more on the way back and at the Pizza Hut place, for now I return to my designated purpose for today, viewing as many movies as possible before the wife comes back. Muhahahahhaa!

My preferred method of watching SciFi is to download it from the Internet. I have these shows that I watch religiously, even if they are not all very good. But given the low quality and scarceness of scifi these days, that's all I've got. One of these shows is Stargate, a series that spun from a Kurt Russel movie and that managed to reach 13 seasons together with its offshoot, Atlantis.

Anyway, my method is to watch for the show air dates, then look for it on the Internet the next day. However, once I happened to find the entire Atlantis series for a few weeks way before the release date. Now it happened again. Stargate and Atlantis episodes till July are on the net. I am now watching them all. The quality is way down, the self-irony of the writers has gone way up, but they are there. What's going on?

Update:
Oh, damn! Having just seen Stargate episode 20 of season 10, I've learned that there is not going to be a season 11 anymore. That being the reason why the show has been released online, probably. SciFi Channel cancelled the show. MGM, the owners of the Stargate francise, promised two Stargate movies, as you can see in this article.

Devastating as this is, considering the total lack of climax or seriousness of both season 3 of Atlantis and season 10 of SG1, ending Stargate to turn it into something better might not be a bad idea. I just lack the confidence that profit driven corporations have the right stuff to create something that should be art and brain driven.

Ah, that's that. Another decent scifi show bites the dust. I'll be watching Battlestar Galactica till it gets completely Lost (pun intended) in new "spiritual" developments.

For the melancholics, watch these videos released on YouTube as 200th Stargate special and this little video, which is a fun one, and I believe fits perfectly with the topic of this article:[another youtube deleted video, guh!]

I had this English teacher in high school. She was very nice, and I also enjoyed her classes, mainly because I already knew English and because she did the unthinkable, she said she would pass anyone who didn't want to learn English, provided they didn't come to disturb the class. She was a good teacher.

Anyway, one day she started talking about the place where she is alone with her thoughts and she can feel calm. I, being even less tactful than I am today, replied "Oh, the toilet!". She felt offended, because she was talking about church. But the scene stuck with me. And sometimes, on the toilet, alone with my thoughts (and my cat - so not quite alone) I recall her reaction and my own. You see, I understood why she felt offended, it was because I compared a place she considered clean with a place she considered dirty, but I also thought about why a woman that believes in a deity that made us all considers dirty something like we do by design and clean something we do inside a building with trainers and specific rituals that are not by design.

And that got me thinking (hmm, is my blog the best thing since toilets?) about the general situation where we put so much value on an external thing, while the value itself is internal. And I am not talking here only about religion (which by now you know I consider stupid) but also about everything else. Fashion, for example. It's the human equivalent of monkey see monkey do. It's putting value on a thing, person or trend simply because you feel like it. So it's something that has internal value, you gave it importance, but you attached it to something external.

Take another example: the things we get attached to, apparently by brain design. A child is being told that his favourite toy has been cloned into a perfect copy. And he is given "the clone", which is actually the same object. And the kid wants his toy back, not the copy. And the examples are infinite.

I think it's because in our brains, things are not things, but intersections of meanings. A red pill is the intersection between "pill" and "red", themselves intersections of other concepts. The church is nothing but a silly building, but it has meaning, for it gives peace and solitude for a while. So does a bathroom. So does this blog. But there comes a time when we realise that the intersections don't add up. It's called thinking, and it's the equivalent of Bonzai trimming of one's thoughts. We start cutting away the lines that don't make sense or that hurt us, while we strenghten the ones that give us sense and pleasure. We start with a thin scaffolding of chaotic wires and we bring it to a sturdy iron bar cage where our thoughts are stable and protected. That is the real place where we are alone with our thoughts, and we are alone because we don't allow anybody or anything in.

So trim carefully, some thin wires are good while some iron bars are bad.

I was too tired to work this morning, so I got on Digg to read what people were reading.

And I've seen some interesting articles, like for instance one about Starbucks. They started this campaign in which people write stuff and the company writes it on coffee cups. One man dared to question praying in God, based on the assumption that people are rational beings with a strong will. Obviously that assumption was wrong, as some chick got 'offended' and started bitching about the text. It got me thinking, you know, of why nobody cares if I am offended by all the God crap I hear everywhere. Some guy said on TV a few days ago that in Romania 99.8% of the population are believers. Yeah, right! Like, they are not full time declarative atheists. How easy it is to spin things.

Anyway, back to interesting topics. There was one about how lawyers are behind the times. They write these 'cease and desist' letters, with a threatening language that no one can ever sympathize with, but nowadays these documents get on the Internet, for everyone to read. And hate. So they cause public relation troubles for the companies they were trying to protect. I don't really see a problem, though, as there are a lot more lawyers ready to sue these lawyers so there you go.

But even religious and legal idiocy fades compared to the total mind numbing dumbness of these two Vegan parents. Apparently, they've decided to make their 6 week old infant a Vegan from birth. They fed it soy milk and apple juice. The baby died.

How gullible are we?! How can we believe in all these stupid things and advertise them as indie revolt against 'the system' or 'healthy' lifestyle against the food corporations and so on? Is it so hard to mind your own business and let other people think and decide for themselves?

Apparently, the summer has brought all kind of nasty insects. A fly has gotten loose on my blog! It's a bfly! Until it finds something useful to do (like allowing people to search stuff or going to the interesting bits or acting as a friendly button) and until it will find friends to join it, it will just annoy us. Alas! It is an unswatabble fly.

Yes, we went to the Mitsubishi dealership. It was nice to actually have someone talk to us and give us all the details, thing that did NOT happen to us at any showroom except the Seat part of the Skoda showroom.

As a side note, I tried entering the Pajero, the Mitsubishi SUV and... I couldn't fit. Not even a tortured position. The front seat moves electrically (yes, some people are so lazy that moving their own seat takes too much. My foot was turned at 90 degrees, my leg could not find a proper position and it wouldn't pass past the steering. It was horrible. But then it dawned on me: tall people don't buy SUVs! The usual suspects when we're talking SUV drivers are fancy women and small, fat people. You don't buy an SUV because you need it, but because it compensates for some shortcomings (pun intended).

Now, back to the car we preordered!! The Mitsubishi Colt is a normal droplet shaped hatchback. But I could fit in! A little effort was required on the driver's seat, but it was ok. More than that, I am sure the rails of the seat can be lengthened or at least moved a little back. The back seats also move back! You can also collapse them or even remove them entirely, giving a huge space in the back if there are only one or two people in the car. It also has automatic gear shifter, which is terribly difficult to find in small cars (or any cars for that matter) in Romania; yet, unfortunately, only the gasoline car models. No matter. I was looking for a gasoline car anyway. The color choice was rather poor, I had to choose between white, black, gray and red nuances.

So, we preordered the car! A carmine Mitsubishi Colt Hatchback, 1.3 Gasoline, Automatic/manual gearbox (that means you can switch between them whenever you like).

Now, all we have to do is get the money (from a bank!) and pay a lot of money every month for 5 years. Wish us luck!