"Hey!", you will shout, "You are Romanian, what do you know about the American mind?". And you would be right. I don't know much about the American mind, but I do know what I see on the news and in the movies. And three movies I've recently seen opened my eyes even more.

First of all This Film Is Not Yet Rated talks about the MPAA and the way they enforce the ratings on movies. You might think that is not so important, but each rating brings with it a different possible audience size. There is a huge difference between the last two ratings R and NC-17 because an NC-17 movie doesn't get picked by distribution companies, nor does it reach into theaters.

What does that mean? It means people in the entire USA see nothing but what the MPAA deems "decent". Statistics show that in the last 50 years they mostly rate R violent movies, no matter how violent, while NC-17 are films which involve sex or even the manifestation of sexual pleasure. Do you think that has any connection with the fact the average American is a violent and militaristic puritan? Interesting enough, the MPAA "council" is completely secret. Movie directors get answers like "your film is NC-17 and we don't tell you who we are and why we rated it like this". Also, check out how the MPAA is financed by the biggest 7 film studios in Hollywood, which own 95% of all movie industry in the US and belong to conglomerates that own 90% of the entire US media!

Another interesting fact is that in that council there are two religious representatives, which brings me to the next two movies: Jesus Camp and The God Who Wasn't There.

Jesus Camp is a pretty famous documentary, because it was mostly comprised of filmed video footage and there were almost no comments in it, yet it spun a lot of controversy. Fundamentalists praised it and so did Anti-fundamentalists and atheists alike. It showed how children are entranced and then conditioned to believe in Creationism, to actively oppose abortion (when they are children), to support Bush and to think that they must act as soldiers that bring America back "under God". This camp teaches the Pentecostal religion, maybe only an extreme version of it, but what is majorly important in this religion is the Rapture. The Rapture is the second coming of Jesus, which will quickly take all true believers to Heaven, then end the world. Maybe even reformat the hard drive. 22% of Americans are Pentecostals who believe Jesus will come during their lifetime. Why wonder Americans don't really care what happens to the Earth? A major Pentecostal preacher is a weekly counselor for the White House and, interviewed in this movie, said that if Evangelicals vote, they determine the outcome of US elections. Pretty scary stuff. Even more scary is the fact that they are a big religion with between 40 and 80 million adepts and no one can do anything about this child brainwashing that they do in this camp (and a lot of others, I guess). David Byrne, from Talking Heads, said in his blog that he saw no difference between this camp and the extreme Muslim madrases training people to blow themselves up.

The God Who Wasn't There starts off like an atheist movie that proves most of Christianity is copied from other older religions, including details, and that average common sense makes believing in a religion like this kind of stupid. The special effects and direct attacks against religion made me think that this is an extreme in itself. Atheists turned anti-theists and throwing everything they have at poor people that believe stuff like that. This until the guy admitted he was a Christian Fundamentalist until the age of 15, when he actually decided everything he was taught under threat of eternal damnation was plain stupid.

OK. Back to the main point. Now I understand more about the American Mind. I understand how a nation that created the ideas of secular state, individual freedom and freedom of faith can also be hard ass conservatives, God fearing and warmongers in the same time. How most American morality is ridiculously naive when concerning sex while in the same time the US is producing the most adult content in the world. I realize why some of the Americans I talk to are really smart and funny people and others sound like rednecks from old Westerns, why US science is the most advanced in the world while in the same time regulated by people following 1st century morality.

Therefore I highly recommend seeing these films. Eye openers.

This is not one of John Saul's best books, but then again, when you say John Saul you say cliche book. All his books contain some sort of drama, usually concerning children, always in a backwater town or suburb, always playing the child in danger, family connection, deep instinctual fears, etc. But some of them are more interesting than others, me liking science related books more, even if I almost always relate to the mad scientists and their evil creations than to the pseudo-moral rednecks that fight against them. This one is plain boring.
The Perfect Nightmare is about a child abductor. He goes for young innocent girls, he takes them into a makeshift playhouse and "plays" with them. Being a mass production book, it presents some brutal violence, almost no sex at all, even if it hints towards it, and the first and largest part of the book is simply puffed with the actions and fears of the people left behind which are mostly average boring people. This makes the book average and boring. The murderer himself is not something truly original, neither is the way he is portrayed.
The ending of the book has a catch, but after reading 90% of it, it doesn't really has any effect. Bottom line: not even for John Saul fans.

I have found this very cool game while browsing the net. While I personally hated Sonic games, I found this one strangely interesting. The minimalist design probably did it for me. Anyway, check it for yourselves.

I know it's bad taste, but it was too good not to blog about it. I just had this vision of this school bully, pushing kids around, hitting and scaring them. One day, one of the kids fights back and kicks the bully in the nads. So he crumbles to the floor, but then tells everyone how that attack was unmanly and cowardly and then beats the crap out of the kid.

The same thing happened with the 9/11 thing. Two every important American items, symbolically destroyed to show the otherwise almighty US that they can be hit, even by the little people. It hurt like hell and it made everybody angry, but it also made the point.

The vision of the twin towers, as giant testicles (with small sperm inside?) felt hilarious to me...

Agent Smith from Matrix once said "I hate this place. This zoo. This prison. This reality, whatever you want to call it, I can't stand it any longer. It's the smell, if there is such a thing. I feel saturated by it. I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it" and that made me like him instantly.

He described perfectly how I feel whenever I exit the subway or bus at Unirii and go towards the tramway 32 station. It's only 100 meters, maybe 150, but you have to fight your way through a river of people, a lot of them smoking, then wait for the green semaphore light a long time while smelling all kind of interesting flavours, then try to get in the tram without being rubbed away like a pencil trail by people who don't really care if they touch you or not.

If you are lucky enough and it's winter time, maybe before some holiday or another, you get to smell the homeless people who decide that either it's too cold outside and camp in the tram, either that you have to give them a holiday present and start begging and singing and other things which basically mean they also move or crawl, thus evenly smearing the air with their fetid stink.

The lead characters of this author seem to always be quiet guys, ready to accept anything and be taken anywhere by the story. The same incredible things happen, all narrated in a very calm way, making them real. The obsession for American or English music permeates everything. I've read two Murakami books, but also some reviews for other books, and the same situation seems to be repeating itself.

Dance, Dance, Dance is about this kind of a person, caught in a kind of metaphysical quest to find himself. Some symbolism, weird characters, absurd situations. In the end, surprise, he finds himself. Compared with Kafka on the Shore it is much slower at the beginning, but it picks up pace closer to the end, yet the very end is slightly different from the rest of the book. I first though that Kafka was a better book than this one, then I switched sides and now I see them as of similar quality. Not much else to say.

Now I can't say I didn't like the books. They are the kind of stories that take you nowhere, but on a very pleasant road. But in the end, you are left with nothing. Nothing really learned, nothing really gained, just like a walk in the park. And I rarely enjoy walks in the park.

So I have decided to call it quits. Harumi Murakami is a good writer, there is no doubt about it, just not my type of a writer. I feel his writing is too English and not Japanese enough, thus defeating the very purpose I started to read his books in the first place.

Check out this interesting piece of code:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void(0);

Pasted into the address bar of browsers like IE6, IE7, FF2 (haven't tested on others, but I think it should work on most) it allows the editing of HTML directly on the page. You can expand and shrink HTML elements, you can edit text, etc.

While on Internet Explorer the changes are not saved if you save the page, on FireFox you get spell checking while editing (with red underlines for unrecognized words) and you can save the changes with save page.

It's really weird, check it out.

I just finished watching a very cool documentary, called The Human Behavior Experiments, that I highly recommend seeing. It describes some of the mechanisms of the human mind that make us behave inhumainely, or iresponsibly and the experiments to expose them. I found very interesting the information on Wikipedia about these experiments and I will post a list of links below.
Doing the research, I've stumbled upon sites that describe (or plainly show the pictures) of the Abu Ghraib tortures. Those links I will not publish, but you can easily use Google to find them yourselves. It is incredible that after those things got published, people still support any war or detention center at all. The movie I was telling you about explains how things like blind obedience or difussion of responsibility function in most of us, ordinary people.

Links:
The Human Behavior Experiments
The Milgram Experiment
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Das Experiment
Abu Ghraib abuses
The Bystander Effect
Asch conformity experiments
Depersonalisation
Responsibility diffusion

Telemarketing is already embedded in the western popular culture, but in Romania, we didn't have it until recently, and only very rarely. Usually they didn't want to sell stuff, but to poll opinion. So I was immediately annoyed when a authoritative male voice started to talk to me about increasing the money I get from my insurance. That annoyance increased when the voice continued "if you want to... bla bla bla, press 1". They didn't even bother to put a human to give the phone calls, it was all automated. Swearing at a machine would have been ridiculous, so they took away the only possible emotional outlet. They have denied my anger!

So of course I resorted to THE BLOG [lots of echo here] to shout my frustration! But since I have worked with telephony in my days, I thought "wait a minute, there is a solution". I could strike back. First of all, I would install an answering system that requests the user to press a key. "If you are a telemarketer, fuck off, if you are a human being, press 9". Then add the tone of the key "1" and repeat the message. But then again, why would I bother, for one lousy telemarketer? Because they took away my outlet! I want it back, damn it!

I've just remembered that I had to write a long overdue blog entry about the dogs of Bucharest. Bucharest is an old European city, meaning that it grew with the needs of the people, starting from a little village and becoming Romania's capital. A lot of things happened here, like the world wars. During the war a lot of pets were left homeless and ownerless and became street mutts. That created in time a large population of dogs, living in packs, having their own territory and so on and so on.

Now, fast forward to the Basescu era. This guy was so frustrated that Bucharest was not looking like most western European capitals, that he focused on transforming Bucharest, starting with what he probably saw while he was abroad. That meant getting rid of dogs and boutiques and street merchants, amongst other things. Well, I went for a small tour of Europe a while ago, and I didn't like it. All the cities were barren, like lifeless stone deserts, where you could only pay a lot of money for the smallest amount of food or walk aimlessly looking at old buildings. Basescu wanted to turn Bucharest into this.

A lot of people were for this getting rid of dogs business, while in the mean time, animal lovers were crying against it. In order to truly make a decision, one must know what the dogs of Bucharest are like. Most of them are very friendly, they let people pet them, while begging for food or attention. They are not wild animals, but liberated pets, and they act more like pets that way. Some of them, organised in packs, tend to become very territorial, defending their turf with loud barks and sometimes (when the human doesn't get it) with bites. Because of this kind of behaviour, most Bucharest dwellers agreed with the dog removal. But most dogs were having a very adapted life to the city. They had families, ways to get food that included being nice to humans as well as hunting and eating rats and, don't laugh, a culture of their own. I do say that because I have watched them behave and along with their natural instinctive behaviour and the stuff they learned during their life, they also exhibited learning and teaching abilities. I have seen mother dogs showing their pups how to grovel or how to cross the street and avoid cars.

But what does this say about us? That we want to destroy what we fear and don't understand. Even the more aggressive dog packs would not attack a human that doesn't provoke them and that faces them. A simple trick like walking backwards (and not trying to show the human superiority by kicking dogs or by throwing stones at them) would have left even a 20 dog strong pack barking, but not biting. And this kind of aggressive dog behaviour can be immediately fixed in each particular case. No, instead we chose to "nuke" the dogs, making us worse than the most bite happy mutt pack out there.

No dogs means also no life on the streets, no puppies except the ones in pet shops (the expensive ones that you have to buy because they have a pedigree and that get sick really easy), more rats. In some of the western countries that people like Basescu so blindly admire, dogs are being used in anger management programs in prisons. Taking care of an animal, just looking at a friendly, uncomplicated creature that craves your attention, gives us something that fights off anger and rage. We have enough rage in Bucharest, alright, but the dogs may soon be gone.

I am not a media person, so I usually don't use pictures or videos, but this is really cool. Check out how you can map a picture to a 3D model and then change the attributes to suit your needs.

It appears NASA has used the metric system extensively since 1990, but now they've decided to not use anything else. NASA finally goes metric, so what a good oportunity to rant this is.

How about the funding? In 2002 the entire NASA funding was less than 15 billion, in 2006 it reached 16.5 billion. The total cost of the war in Iraq is 350 billion and climbing, with an estimated 600 billion in 2010. The International Space Station seems lost in bureaucracy limbo, and this site suggests the highly inflated figure of its cost reaches 100 billion. So what does that mean? That we could have skipped the Iraq war altogether and build six space stations instead? I am sure this is not the case. Because actually building six stations instead of one would have used only once the cost of design, aproximately the same people and each part would have been built cheaper than the ones before. Critics say that the cost of the ISS goes well above the first cost estimations and compare it to MIR, which has cost only 4.3billion. Well, that may be true, but doesn't that mean that we could have skipped the war in Iraq altogether (well, actually not all of it, Kuweit still had to be liberated) and build over 100 MIR stations?! Or finance 30 years of NASA budgets!

Well, had to be done. I feel much better now. Thank you, I will pay for the damages.

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself some ear plugs, the kind that you stick into your ears, they expand like a sponge, and filter all but the loudest or low frequency sounds. At the time I was half ashamed of my reasons for buying it; first of all I planned to use them in bed, when I wanted to read and my wife wanted to browse the TV channels; second of all I wanted to filter out chit-chatting women and teensters from the tramway or buses. Yeah, I know, I sound like a grumpy old man, and that was the reason I was half ashamed of doing this.

However, now, after testing this new gadget and finding new applications every day, I am happy I made the purchase. I can read on my way to work in total silence, even with people talking and laughing as hard as they can in order for others to notice them, or people listening to music so loud on their headphones that you can't escape the sound even if moving further away. These babies even filter out the manele ring tones, spat out loudly by the latest model of cell phone.

Today I was especially glad I had my plugs on, since I boarded a bus that had the radio on. Pop music, silly monotone dance rhythms, loud and useless commercials that are even more spammy than spam email for the single reason you can't close your ears... they all went away. I now have that smug feeling of superiority about my ear plugs as I have about TV after getting Internet broadband and only downloading what I want and refusing to gulp all the idiotic programming the popular stations feed us.

Ear plugs rock!

I have always been fascinated by the concepts of Artificial Intelligence. I truly think that computerised brains are the next step of evolution, as biology (hindered by outdated morals, also) will never develop or evolve quickly enough. But enough of that.

I was thinking the other day of artificial neural networks, the electronic analogy to a brain, and the fact that for N neurons, you get to have N*M connections, where M is the average number of connections a neuron makes, which are in fact the important parts.

Click for details

Let's assume that we can simulate exactly a human neuron on a computer. We would have to have 100 billion of these simulated neurons to simulate a brain. Each neuron would have to be connected to at least 10000 others. That means one million billion connections. Imagine you could put the entire information of a neuronal link on a single byte and you would still need 1000 TB of storage. Multiply this value with the real number of bytes necessary to encode the information of a neural link. But it doesn't stop here. You would need to update this entire huge quantity of data in real time, as the brain itself is a parallel processor, not a sequential one.

Now, this is only an idea, Haven't thought it through, but if history is anything to go by, I will quickly forget it, so I'll just write it up. What if we could use a discreet interval for describing neural connections? Kind of like when paying money. You make thousands of payments every day, but you use only a finite number of coin and banknote values. Assume you want to operate a change on a neural link. You want to weaken it and make it twice less important or you want to make it twice as strong. Imagine the link is a money value, like 1$. Then you would weaken it to 50 cents or make it a strong 2$. But there is no two dollar bill, so you create another one dollar link.

The advantages of this, as far as I thought of it, are that you would have 10000 or more connections for each neuron, but only 6 or 10 types of them. So instead of operating 10000 operations, you would use only one operation per type. It also allows for different link operations, not only multiplications (as neural weights normally are used for). Maybe type 1 through 5 performs multiplications, but type 6 makes a logarithmic operation or something.

So the main advantage is that the entire structure can be scaled better. The only thing I can compare this with is a supermarket chain. You have thousands of customers and millions of transactions, but you have only three loyalty card types and only ten demographic groups that you compute your strategy on.

Now, of course, I will have to figure out the math of it, which I was never particularly good at, and the first problem I see is that each neuron will have to have its own neural neighbourhood lists and that might prove trickier than just making a note of each connection. However, since connections can only be of a certain type, compression of neural data is much easier, operations faster, as each list functions as an information index in a database.

Maybe all this is something trivial for a neural network scientist or I am just full of useless thoughts, but I'll note them nonetheless.