On traffic

We hold these truths to be self-evident:

1. There is a lower bound, which is strictly greater than zero, to the area occuppied by any given vehicle.
   
2. All cities have finite area.
3. The probability of a traffic-jam occurring in a city is proportional to the area occupied by the cars and other vehicles driving in it.
4. The purpose of commuting is not getting vehicles from one place to another, but rather, getting people from one place to another.
5. The area occupied by a mass-transit (bus, rail, tram, subway) system, per user, is smaller than the area occupied by normal car, per user (even when the car is full to its capacity, and all mass transit users are sitting down).
6. Mass transit systems can be planned and scheduled, while individual cars cannot.
7. The number of cars in a city can increase much faster than the total length of paved road for them to roll on.

From all of the above, it can be easily proven that if you are driving your car instead of riding the bus, you are increasing the probability of a traffic jam occurring.

On the other hand, if you ride the bus or train, you decrease the probability of a traffic jam occurring.

Therefore, if you drive a car you have no fucking right to complain about traffic jams, for you are contributing to the probability of them occurring more than you would if you used alternative commuting methods.

On the other hand, if you are riding the bus or tram, you have every right to spit at cars.

All of the above is specially true in rush hours.

Nuevo Capitalismo?

Reproduzco desde el blog de José Saramago.



Ha llegado el momento del cambio a escala pública e individual. Ha llegado el momento de la justicia

La crisis financiera esta de nuevo aquí destrozando nuestras economías, golpeando nuestras vidas. En la última década sus sacudidas han sido cada vez más frecuentes y dramáticas. Asia Oriental, Argentina, Turquía, Brasil, Rusia, la hecatombe de la Nueva Economía, prueban que no se trata de accidentes fortuitos de coyuntura que transcurren en la superficie de la vida económica, sino que están inscritos en el corazón mismo del sistema.

Esas rupturas que han acabado produciendo una funesta contracción de la vida económica actual, con el aumento del desempleo y la generalización de la desigualdad, señalan la quiebra del capitalismo financiero y significan la definitiva anquilosis del orden económico mundial en que vivimos. Hay pues que transformarlo radicalmente.

En la entrevista con el Presidente Bush, Durao Barroso, Presidente de la Comisión Europea, ha declarado que la presente crisis debe conducir a “un nuevo orden económico mundial”, lo que es aceptable, si éste nuevo orden se orienta por los principios democráticos –que nunca debieron abandonarse – de la justicia, libertad, igualdad y solidaridad.

Las “leyes del mercado” han conducido a una situación caótica que ha requerido un “rescate” de miles de millones de dólares, de tal modo que, como se ha resumido acertadamente, “se han privatizado las ganancias y se han socializado las pérdidas”. Han encontrado ayuda para los culpables y no para las víctimas. Es una ocasión histórica única para redefinir el sistema económico mundial en favor de la justicia social.

No había dinero para los fondos del Sida, ni de la alimentación mundial… y ahora ha resultado que, en un auténtico torrente financiero, sí que había fondos para no acabar de hundirse los mismos que, favoreciendo excesivamente las burbujas informáticas y de la construcción, han hundido el andamiaje económico mundial de la “globalización”.

Por eso es totalmente desacertado que el Presidente Sarkozy haya hablado de realizar todos estos esfuerzos con cargo a los contribuyentes “para un nuevo capitalismo”!… y que el Presidente Bush, como era de esperar en él, haya añadido que debe salvaguardarse “la libertad de mercado” (¡sin que desaparezcan los subsidios agrícolas!)…

No: ahora debemos ser “rescatados” los ciudadanos, favoreciendo con rapidez y valentía la transición desde una economía de guerra a una economía de desarrollo global, en que esa vergüenza colectiva de inversión en armas de 3 mil millones de dólares al día, al tiempo que mueren de hambre más de 60 mil personas, sea superada. Una economía de desarrollo que elimine la abusiva explotación de los recursos naturales que tiene lugar en la actualidad (petróleo, gas, minerales, coltán…) y se apliquen normas vigiladas por unas Naciones Unidas refundadas -que incluyan al fondo Monetario Internacional, al Banco Mundial “para la reconstrucción y el desarrollo” y a la Organización Mundial del Comercio, que no sea un club privado de naciones, sino una institución de la ONU- que dispongan de los medios personales, humanos y técnicos necesarios para ejercer su autoridad jurídica y ética eficazmente.

Inversiones en energías renovables, en la producción de alimentos (agricultura y acuicultura), en la obtención y conducción de agua, en salud, educación, vivienda,… para que el “nuevo orden económico” sea, por fín, democrático y beneficie a la gente. ¡El engaño de la globalización y de la economía de mercado debe terminarse! La sociedad civil ya no será espectador resignado y, si es preciso, pondrá de manifiesto todo el poder ciudadano que hoy, con las modernas tecnologías de la comunicación, posee.

¿”Nuevo capitalismo”?. No!

Ha llegado el momento del cambio a escala pública e individual. Ha llegado el momento de la justicia.

Federico Mayor Zaragoza
Francisco Altemir
José Saramago
Roberto Savio
Mario Soares
José Vidal Beneyto

On Coherence

Things I'm too old to do (without getting jailed)

It is autumn.
All the leaves are brown....
I should be outside crushing them under my feet.

I can't get rid of this feeling that I didn't do all I could do, that I should be doing this or that... that my life runs past and I'm stuck in front of the puter.

1. Fuck a 15 year old
2. Fuck a 17 year old
3. Attend a college lingerie party
4. Attend a high-school lingerie party
5. Fuck a classmate in my generation trip (I never actually had one)
   
6. Win a medal on an IMO.
7. Become a black-hat hacker
8. Become a fighter-pilot
9. Become an anarchist
10. Become a (at least) descent chess player
11. Spend a summer on the shore of a lagoon
12. Be a freelancer photojournalist
13. Go to space camp
14. Drink beer straight from the keg
15. Build a training camp for G.I. Joe action figures
16. Build a Varitech out of LEGO Technic
17. Camp in my backyard alone
18. Be a fluent Russian speaker

When I started writing this I thought the list would be longer, and I thought even more sex-related stuff would be in it.

I'm going out there to crush some leaves, wanna come?

Human arrogance.

A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver,
and a bee puts to shame many an architect
in the construction of her cells.

But what distinguishes the worst architect
from the best of bees is this:
that the architect raises his structure
in imagination before he erects it in reality.

Karl Marx.

On the first pages of most artificial intelligence books, or on the first sentences of an introductory lecture on AI, a question is asked: What is intelligence?

We take for granted that we know the answer to an equally, if not more important, question: what does "artificial" mean?

I am not alone, I know, in thinking that the route to AI begins not with answering the first question, posed at least two thousand years ago, but rather with a systematic and intrepid quest for an answer of the second one.

Allow me, dear reader, to put forth this three questions, your answers of which I would really like to hear of.



What does artificial mean for you?

Where is the boundary between artificial and natural?

What do you think will happen as science approaches this boundary and clears the mist that makes it look so fuzzy?




There is a halo of mysticism surrounding the understanding of the concepts of intelligence, mind, creativity, etc. (and not only those, also social phenomena, and until recently, life itself). That idealism of which Russell was such a stern enemy is still around us, pushing us into the arrogant position of thinking that there is something in intelligence unattainable by objects not humane.

This idealism is manifest in our invention of the word artificial, and the common use we give to it. This idea, that the processes in which human intelligence intervenes are somehow different from those in which it is absent, is arrogant in it self. But this arrogance is not intentional in each human individual, but rather a common trait of our culture, in which the ignorance of the physical processes leading to that which we call intelligence, is taken as a sign that something metaphysical lies behind the mind.

This is a tempting position for it is easy to reconcile it with our sensation of self-consciousness, with our ability to recognize ourselves apart from other things. But it is also a dangerous position, for we tend to interpret it as the supremacy of men over all earthly things.

This arrogant position can be interpreted as the successor of vitalism, an idea long-abandoned in science yet still present in the layman. Science, at least, must get rid of this absurd idealism in order to advance not only in the field of AI, but in every other field of science in which interesting phenomena seem to come out of nowhere.

Dialogue

It isn't beauty
it is acting.

She looks like the kind of person who won't take any shit from life,
or from any one.

Does she?

There's something in that distant gaze...

If life is just a big play, why do we choose such crappy roles?

Look

It is indeed very neat to stare outside instead of inside.
It is there, after all, where the stars are
where the roads lay
where yellow leaves fall.