If you want to have an idea about the amount of time you have when tsunami arrives, look at this 5-minute video of tsunami attacking in Minami-Sanriku.
Warning: the video gets tough.
Not much is happening in the first two minutes or so - except for some dust above the distant beaches - even though the cameraman seems nervous from the beginning. You will understand why.
But the actual scary events eventually begin. I found it impressive how the houses remained compact yet swimming - they turned into boats. Nature is very powerful and cruel. Such events sometimes occur and they're more far-reaching than 0.008 °C of warming or cooling per year.
Thanks to Gene
Showing posts with label everyday life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label everyday life. Show all posts
Monday, May 30, 2011
Saturday, May 28, 2011
How not only Spanish bureaucracy works
Spanish filmmakers have finally shot a documentary movie accurately showing how the bureaucrats operate:
Holy cow, I totally identify myself with the blonde entrepreneur. That's exactly how I approach bureaucratic offices most of the time and the bureaucrats' behavior is exactly what I usually get in return.
My emotions for the bureaucrats and their apologists have often been so intense that I have played this scene of Mafia I about 50 times in my life, imagining that the people whom I "interact" with are state employees, the kind of creatures who support - for obvious reasons - the expansion of the government and pseudo-government bodies whose main purpose is to make living for similar folks who are "working" on similar things. The kind of people who constantly harass those who actually pay for their living.
Whenever I played the game, I was loving the people. I was mostly loving them with the Thompson 1928 submachine gun whenever it was available. Needless to say, if Al Qaeda had chosen the headquarters of IRS, INS, or one of numerous other criminal organizations that have been treating me in a similar way as the Gentlemen in the video, I wouldn't object to Al Qaeda's act for a second.
Thanks to Jiří Wagner
Bio-cucumbers kill in Germany
When we talk about Spain, there have been 7 deaths and 1,000 hospitalizations in Germany caused by the deadly O104 serotype of Escherichia coli (E coli). It's been quickly found that the germ comes out of cucumbers.
But they're not ordinary cucumbers. They're Spanish cucumbers. But they're not ordinary Spanish cucumbers. They're organic cucumbers - we call them bio-cucumbers - for salads. 100 pieces of them were also sold by Country Life Co., a company promoting healthy life style :-), in the Czech Republic.
The message is that if you want to eat literally shit, destroy your kidneys, and die, eat organic food. If you want to suffer from plague and the same other nasty diseases as our ancestors in the Middle Ages, eat the same unrefined medieval food. In the modern language, the medieval food is called organic food.
Holy cow, I totally identify myself with the blonde entrepreneur. That's exactly how I approach bureaucratic offices most of the time and the bureaucrats' behavior is exactly what I usually get in return.
My emotions for the bureaucrats and their apologists have often been so intense that I have played this scene of Mafia I about 50 times in my life, imagining that the people whom I "interact" with are state employees, the kind of creatures who support - for obvious reasons - the expansion of the government and pseudo-government bodies whose main purpose is to make living for similar folks who are "working" on similar things. The kind of people who constantly harass those who actually pay for their living.
Whenever I played the game, I was loving the people. I was mostly loving them with the Thompson 1928 submachine gun whenever it was available. Needless to say, if Al Qaeda had chosen the headquarters of IRS, INS, or one of numerous other criminal organizations that have been treating me in a similar way as the Gentlemen in the video, I wouldn't object to Al Qaeda's act for a second.
Thanks to Jiří Wagner
Bio-cucumbers kill in Germany
When we talk about Spain, there have been 7 deaths and 1,000 hospitalizations in Germany caused by the deadly O104 serotype of Escherichia coli (E coli). It's been quickly found that the germ comes out of cucumbers.
But they're not ordinary cucumbers. They're Spanish cucumbers. But they're not ordinary Spanish cucumbers. They're organic cucumbers - we call them bio-cucumbers - for salads. 100 pieces of them were also sold by Country Life Co., a company promoting healthy life style :-), in the Czech Republic.
The message is that if you want to eat literally shit, destroy your kidneys, and die, eat organic food. If you want to suffer from plague and the same other nasty diseases as our ancestors in the Middle Ages, eat the same unrefined medieval food. In the modern language, the medieval food is called organic food.
The New York Times invites you to Pilsen
The New York Times just published an invitation to an unlikely tourist destination,
That's quite an unexpected promotion given the fact that only 1/40,000 of the world population - or 170,000 - live in Pilsen. And not even municipal patriots such as your humble correspondent would include the city among the three prettiest places in Czechia. ;-)
The NYT article mentions some of the unsurprising places to visit - the large gothic cathedral on the main square, our renaissance city hall, the third or fourth largest synagogue in the world, the Techmania science museum, a puppet museum, our Patton Memorial, and various breweries, restaurants, and hotels.
Of course, there are other things to visit, including a decent zoo with dinopark (a local Jurassic park where dinosaurs were resuscitated), a famous law school of the local university where gangsters' friends and relatives get a degree in a few months :-), an insufficient soccer stadium where the team became the winner of the top Czech league a week ago, an ice-hockey stadium where the team owned by Marty Straka won the presidential trophy a year ago, and Czechia's most famous prison where Havel has spent quite some time. Pilsen also has an interesting and nontrivial historical underground.
The city was established as an industrial town according to a modern, technologically up-to-date project, in 1295. ;-) There was a nearby village with a similar name centuries earlier, too. But you know, those events already took place some years ago so despite the constant "working character" of the city throughout the centuries, it has become "somewhat" historical, too. In 1295, our American friends were scalping each other and waiting to learn how to ride stolen horses from the Spaniards 200 years later. ;-)
Pilsen used to be very dirty - not only because of the Škoda Holding factory (amusingly called "Factories of V. I. Lenin" during communism) - but after the fall of communism, it has become much prettier. The facades of both historical buildings and the concrete blocks are just one major manifestation of the change. Much cleaner air is another. Lots of malls and effective (usually German-owned, such as the newly opened largest Hornbach in Czechia) large stores is a third example.
See Google images to check some random pictures from Pilsen.
Obama in Poland
Barack Obama is visiting Poland and he also met Václav Klaus. Well, Klaus is always ready to meet the people. Lech Walesa refused to meet Obama because of the latter man's ass-licking of Russia and the cancellation of the Czech-Polish U.S. missile defense system unit.
During the dinner last night, Obama compared the recent Arab "revolutions" with the fall of communism.
Of course, Czech President Václav Klaus behaved diplomatically and didn't scream at his American friend that such a comparison is insulting. But he still made his point, explaining to Obama that Northern Africa and the Middle East are not ready to the kind of changes that the Central and Eastern Europe underwent in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Obama replied to Klaus that Klaus is too pessimistic. Well, Klaus is primarily a realist but whether his prediction is a pessimistic or optimistic one could be a matter of perspective, too, I add.
Generally, the visit is meant to be just a symbolic gesture showing that Obama hasn't forgotten that there exists something like the former socialist Irope, or Yourope, or Herope or more likely Sherope, or what was the exact name of the continent next to Asia. ;-)
Czechia fifth most peaceful country in the world
Some people think that your humble correspondent is combative - just because he wants thousands of Shmoity crackpots and alarmist jerks to be shot into their heads. But according to an objective survey, they're as wrong as you can get.
Czechia is the fifth most peaceful country in the world. And it should clearly occupy the #1 spot because ahead of the Czech Republic, you find Iceland whose volcanoes are aggressively attacking the whole Europe; New Zealand with the dangerous kiwi bird that can peck meat out of your palm; Japan with its tsunami, not to speak about its harmless power plants that some people consider dangerous; and Denmark that has nearly caused the clash of civilizations with its nice pictures of Mohammed. ;-)
Iranian Fat Cats invent Internet
Comrade Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have achieved the same thing as Al Gore did years ago - they inventetd the Internet. They will build a totally new structure that will rival the global Internet so that they will be able to disconnect the dirty global Internet. However, unlike the global Internet, it will be totally halal. If you don't know what "halal" means, it's just like "kosher", except that aside from pigs, it also bans the Jews. They have also declared a "soft war" against the Western culture.
The Czech mole in space
The mole (krtek), a Czech astronaut, is finally in space where he's installing the AMS to detect antimatter in cosmic rays:
The astronaut is smiling but he's also asking: what the hell did grow out of my buttocks?
A week ago, Pope Benedict 2^4 called the international space station by phone. He is usually speaking to other Fat Cats in the heavens but the holy father decided to change the gears at least once.
He wanted to to know whether the Earth was really round. The mole astronaut told him that the AMS is supposed to be observing antimatter. Benedict didn't like it because if matter was created by God, antimatter had to be created by the Devil. It didn't help when they revealed that the gadget could also see the dark matter - because it's Lucifer's handiwork.
In Pilsen, Beer’s Not the Only Thing on Tapmy hometown of Pilsen, the 2015 European Capital of Culture.
That's quite an unexpected promotion given the fact that only 1/40,000 of the world population - or 170,000 - live in Pilsen. And not even municipal patriots such as your humble correspondent would include the city among the three prettiest places in Czechia. ;-)
The NYT article mentions some of the unsurprising places to visit - the large gothic cathedral on the main square, our renaissance city hall, the third or fourth largest synagogue in the world, the Techmania science museum, a puppet museum, our Patton Memorial, and various breweries, restaurants, and hotels.
Of course, there are other things to visit, including a decent zoo with dinopark (a local Jurassic park where dinosaurs were resuscitated), a famous law school of the local university where gangsters' friends and relatives get a degree in a few months :-), an insufficient soccer stadium where the team became the winner of the top Czech league a week ago, an ice-hockey stadium where the team owned by Marty Straka won the presidential trophy a year ago, and Czechia's most famous prison where Havel has spent quite some time. Pilsen also has an interesting and nontrivial historical underground.
The city was established as an industrial town according to a modern, technologically up-to-date project, in 1295. ;-) There was a nearby village with a similar name centuries earlier, too. But you know, those events already took place some years ago so despite the constant "working character" of the city throughout the centuries, it has become "somewhat" historical, too. In 1295, our American friends were scalping each other and waiting to learn how to ride stolen horses from the Spaniards 200 years later. ;-)
Pilsen used to be very dirty - not only because of the Škoda Holding factory (amusingly called "Factories of V. I. Lenin" during communism) - but after the fall of communism, it has become much prettier. The facades of both historical buildings and the concrete blocks are just one major manifestation of the change. Much cleaner air is another. Lots of malls and effective (usually German-owned, such as the newly opened largest Hornbach in Czechia) large stores is a third example.
See Google images to check some random pictures from Pilsen.
Obama in Poland
Barack Obama is visiting Poland and he also met Václav Klaus. Well, Klaus is always ready to meet the people. Lech Walesa refused to meet Obama because of the latter man's ass-licking of Russia and the cancellation of the Czech-Polish U.S. missile defense system unit.
During the dinner last night, Obama compared the recent Arab "revolutions" with the fall of communism.
Of course, Czech President Václav Klaus behaved diplomatically and didn't scream at his American friend that such a comparison is insulting. But he still made his point, explaining to Obama that Northern Africa and the Middle East are not ready to the kind of changes that the Central and Eastern Europe underwent in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Obama replied to Klaus that Klaus is too pessimistic. Well, Klaus is primarily a realist but whether his prediction is a pessimistic or optimistic one could be a matter of perspective, too, I add.
Generally, the visit is meant to be just a symbolic gesture showing that Obama hasn't forgotten that there exists something like the former socialist Irope, or Yourope, or Herope or more likely Sherope, or what was the exact name of the continent next to Asia. ;-)
Czechia fifth most peaceful country in the world
Some people think that your humble correspondent is combative - just because he wants thousands of Shmoity crackpots and alarmist jerks to be shot into their heads. But according to an objective survey, they're as wrong as you can get.
Czechia is the fifth most peaceful country in the world. And it should clearly occupy the #1 spot because ahead of the Czech Republic, you find Iceland whose volcanoes are aggressively attacking the whole Europe; New Zealand with the dangerous kiwi bird that can peck meat out of your palm; Japan with its tsunami, not to speak about its harmless power plants that some people consider dangerous; and Denmark that has nearly caused the clash of civilizations with its nice pictures of Mohammed. ;-)
Iranian Fat Cats invent Internet
Comrade Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have achieved the same thing as Al Gore did years ago - they inventetd the Internet. They will build a totally new structure that will rival the global Internet so that they will be able to disconnect the dirty global Internet. However, unlike the global Internet, it will be totally halal. If you don't know what "halal" means, it's just like "kosher", except that aside from pigs, it also bans the Jews. They have also declared a "soft war" against the Western culture.
The Czech mole in space
The mole (krtek), a Czech astronaut, is finally in space where he's installing the AMS to detect antimatter in cosmic rays:
The astronaut is smiling but he's also asking: what the hell did grow out of my buttocks?
A week ago, Pope Benedict 2^4 called the international space station by phone. He is usually speaking to other Fat Cats in the heavens but the holy father decided to change the gears at least once.
He wanted to to know whether the Earth was really round. The mole astronaut told him that the AMS is supposed to be observing antimatter. Benedict didn't like it because if matter was created by God, antimatter had to be created by the Devil. It didn't help when they revealed that the gadget could also see the dark matter - because it's Lucifer's handiwork.
Saturday, May 21, 2011
Hospoda: food arrives to starving New York
It's hard to believe that literally millions of inhabitants of the New York City could have survived decades without a decent restaurant. Food has been nearly unavailable - unless you count the third-world cuisines and freedom fries.
The most recent decent addition to the market occurred exactly fifty years ago, in 1961, when Ray Kroc - whose father was born in Břasy near Pilsen, 15 miles away from my home - bought some restaurants from the McDonald brothers for USD 2.7 million and made the company just a little bit bigger. ;-)
But as the New York Times blogs and the Wall Street Journal - among others - noticed, some humanitarian aid is finally coming to the City. ;-) On Monday, they are opening a new restaurant in the Bohemian National Hall, a building owned by the Czech Republic, on 321 East 73rd Street, (212) 861-1038.
They had to invent some witty but professional enough name. So they were waiting for inspiring telephone calls, decided to ignore ideas by anyone who hasn't collected at least two Oscars as a film director. Finally, Mr Miloš Forman called them and told them that the restaurant should be called "Hospoda" which is the most common Czech word for a pub. In Czechia, a hospoda is a building where many men are going every day to drink beer and to complain about everything. ;-)
So the website is HospodaNYC.COM.
The name sounds sufficiently easy to be pronounced and it happens to have no non-English characters. They should cook traditional but fancy enough Czech cuisine - and cuisine of nearby pseudo-Czech provinces, Austria and Bavaria (ABC when you combine them, funny). Well, the menu looks a bit exotic to me but it may be partly because they omitted the Czech names.
Well, the duck breast with red cabbage, apples, and potato dumplings sounds familiar enough and I would probably pick it, to be sure. The prices are just half an order of magnitude above what we pay for similar things in Pilsen but I guess that it will also be better. ;-)
This is called beer.
Of course, Pilsner Urquell is the main beverage over there but it's been reported that the Yankees will be educated it to drink it with the foam. :-) So if you're in the City, you may try it.
By the way, if you know how to counterfeit Pilsner beer at home, you may enter the Pilsner Urquell Master Home Brewer Competition - in August, NYC, DC, and Chicago. In 1842, dissatisfied Pilsner citizens and beer consumers hired the best guy they could - a young emerging Bavarian brewing big shot and boor Mr Josef Groll. He combined the Bavarian experience, his fresh ideas, and the unbelievably soft Pilsner water to the new classic.
Pilsen overtakes Czech soccer!
If you were asked to enumerate at least one Czech soccer team, chances are that you would say "Sparta Prague". But that would be dumb! ;-) Sparta Prague is just a Buzerant Gang - although it doesn't rhyme in English :-) - and Prague is an irrelevant village.
FC Viktoria Pilsen celebrates 100th anniversary this year - 1911-2011 - which was an excellent opportunity to become the winner of the 2010-2011 Czech Gambrinus Soccer Extra League! We've been waiting since the Big Bang, for one century, and now it's here. Given the fact that the sponsor, Gambrinus, is a beer from Pilsen, it would be silly if someone else than Pilsen would win.
The Fall 2010 was excellent and the Pilsner team had built such an advantage over Sparta behind us that we couldn't lose it. Today, one round before the end, we have already secured the trophy. In fact, the people had to feel so certain that we would beat Ostrava today - it was 3-to-1, even though the score began at 0-to-1 after five minutes - that celebrations of the trophy were organized for tonight! ;-)
And the plans worked out perfectly. Semi-hardcore Pilsner fans such as your humble correspondent :-) watched the second period on a large screen on the Square of the Republic, the indisputable center of the city. And the players plus couch came there to celebrate, too. Add beer for free and fireworks - it was fun.
The Pilsner soccer deserved the victory. The team hasn't lost at home since August 2009. Also, it won both matches against Sparta this year. It was the only team that was playing a genuinely offensive game. Fans have been attracted and become almost as faithful and supportive as the Pilsner ice-hockey fans. Perhaps most importantly, it was a team with some chemistry that bound it together.
You know, I was in Great Boston when the cursed Red Sox won the baseball league after those long decades. Fortunately I had ear plugs so that I could sleep when the obnoxious drivers with their horns were trying to make the night unsleepable. You know, I admire Boston, it's an American classic, but I still had no special emotional attachment to it as a fan, and I have no idea about baseball. The soccer team in the town where I was born is different...
The most recent decent addition to the market occurred exactly fifty years ago, in 1961, when Ray Kroc - whose father was born in Břasy near Pilsen, 15 miles away from my home - bought some restaurants from the McDonald brothers for USD 2.7 million and made the company just a little bit bigger. ;-)
But as the New York Times blogs and the Wall Street Journal - among others - noticed, some humanitarian aid is finally coming to the City. ;-) On Monday, they are opening a new restaurant in the Bohemian National Hall, a building owned by the Czech Republic, on 321 East 73rd Street, (212) 861-1038.
They had to invent some witty but professional enough name. So they were waiting for inspiring telephone calls, decided to ignore ideas by anyone who hasn't collected at least two Oscars as a film director. Finally, Mr Miloš Forman called them and told them that the restaurant should be called "Hospoda" which is the most common Czech word for a pub. In Czechia, a hospoda is a building where many men are going every day to drink beer and to complain about everything. ;-)
So the website is HospodaNYC.COM.
The name sounds sufficiently easy to be pronounced and it happens to have no non-English characters. They should cook traditional but fancy enough Czech cuisine - and cuisine of nearby pseudo-Czech provinces, Austria and Bavaria (ABC when you combine them, funny). Well, the menu looks a bit exotic to me but it may be partly because they omitted the Czech names.
Well, the duck breast with red cabbage, apples, and potato dumplings sounds familiar enough and I would probably pick it, to be sure. The prices are just half an order of magnitude above what we pay for similar things in Pilsen but I guess that it will also be better. ;-)
This is called beer.
Of course, Pilsner Urquell is the main beverage over there but it's been reported that the Yankees will be educated it to drink it with the foam. :-) So if you're in the City, you may try it.
By the way, if you know how to counterfeit Pilsner beer at home, you may enter the Pilsner Urquell Master Home Brewer Competition - in August, NYC, DC, and Chicago. In 1842, dissatisfied Pilsner citizens and beer consumers hired the best guy they could - a young emerging Bavarian brewing big shot and boor Mr Josef Groll. He combined the Bavarian experience, his fresh ideas, and the unbelievably soft Pilsner water to the new classic.
Pilsen overtakes Czech soccer!
If you were asked to enumerate at least one Czech soccer team, chances are that you would say "Sparta Prague". But that would be dumb! ;-) Sparta Prague is just a Buzerant Gang - although it doesn't rhyme in English :-) - and Prague is an irrelevant village.
FC Viktoria Pilsen celebrates 100th anniversary this year - 1911-2011 - which was an excellent opportunity to become the winner of the 2010-2011 Czech Gambrinus Soccer Extra League! We've been waiting since the Big Bang, for one century, and now it's here. Given the fact that the sponsor, Gambrinus, is a beer from Pilsen, it would be silly if someone else than Pilsen would win.
The Fall 2010 was excellent and the Pilsner team had built such an advantage over Sparta behind us that we couldn't lose it. Today, one round before the end, we have already secured the trophy. In fact, the people had to feel so certain that we would beat Ostrava today - it was 3-to-1, even though the score began at 0-to-1 after five minutes - that celebrations of the trophy were organized for tonight! ;-)
And the plans worked out perfectly. Semi-hardcore Pilsner fans such as your humble correspondent :-) watched the second period on a large screen on the Square of the Republic, the indisputable center of the city. And the players plus couch came there to celebrate, too. Add beer for free and fireworks - it was fun.
The Pilsner soccer deserved the victory. The team hasn't lost at home since August 2009. Also, it won both matches against Sparta this year. It was the only team that was playing a genuinely offensive game. Fans have been attracted and become almost as faithful and supportive as the Pilsner ice-hockey fans. Perhaps most importantly, it was a team with some chemistry that bound it together.
You know, I was in Great Boston when the cursed Red Sox won the baseball league after those long decades. Fortunately I had ear plugs so that I could sleep when the obnoxious drivers with their horns were trying to make the night unsleepable. You know, I admire Boston, it's an American classic, but I still had no special emotional attachment to it as a fan, and I have no idea about baseball. The soccer team in the town where I was born is different...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
New IMF headquarters
I have a message from the boss to all the world financiers and politicians who read TRF. The International Monetary Fund has relocated its headquarters to a neat island in New York:
See more videos about the facility.
Out of the 14,000 inmates (maximum capacity is 17,000), 92% are black or Hispanic and 90% have not graduated high school. A nice place.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has graduated high school but he decided to relocate after an unpleasant experience in a hotel near the Times Square. It turned out that a 32-year-old 6-feet-tall :-) black maid called Ms Nafissatou Diallo wasn't included in the USD 3,000 fee for one night.
Moreover, he wasn't in the hotel at all - instead, he was having a dinner with his daughter and his cell phone has quantum tunneled to the hotel room. But the chief of the IMF fund doesn't really need a cell phone so he simply left the restaurant for the airport.
Well, more seriously, I can't be any certain whether he is innocent. My guess is that he is not; given some known data, his alibi sounds awkward, indeed. If the DNA tests have indeed shown that pieces of his p*nis ended on the Guinean maid's lips and an*s, it sounds more convincing a piece of evidence by a few orders of magnitude.
And there may have been other cases in which he was not innocent. Of course, if he is proven guilty, he should spend some time in a prison, and of course, it's a good news that a top socialist leader of a big country and the leading 2012 presidential candidate in the same country - the kind of guys who can get away with anything - may be punished like that.
About this large...
Still, I think that 15-20 years for an act that hasn't really substantially hurt anyone is excessive. This isn't really equivalent to a murder, is it? I think that some other activities of the IMF have been much more hurtful. According to the Czech president's speech in October 2010, the IMF is a barbaric relic of the Keynesian era that should be abolished as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, it's not difficult for the French leftists to replace Strauss-Kahn by a morally cleaner person. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a co-chairman of a leftist group in the European Parliament, is just a pedophile. ;-)
See more videos about the facility.
Out of the 14,000 inmates (maximum capacity is 17,000), 92% are black or Hispanic and 90% have not graduated high school. A nice place.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn has graduated high school but he decided to relocate after an unpleasant experience in a hotel near the Times Square. It turned out that a 32-year-old 6-feet-tall :-) black maid called Ms Nafissatou Diallo wasn't included in the USD 3,000 fee for one night.
Moreover, he wasn't in the hotel at all - instead, he was having a dinner with his daughter and his cell phone has quantum tunneled to the hotel room. But the chief of the IMF fund doesn't really need a cell phone so he simply left the restaurant for the airport.
Well, more seriously, I can't be any certain whether he is innocent. My guess is that he is not; given some known data, his alibi sounds awkward, indeed. If the DNA tests have indeed shown that pieces of his p*nis ended on the Guinean maid's lips and an*s, it sounds more convincing a piece of evidence by a few orders of magnitude.
And there may have been other cases in which he was not innocent. Of course, if he is proven guilty, he should spend some time in a prison, and of course, it's a good news that a top socialist leader of a big country and the leading 2012 presidential candidate in the same country - the kind of guys who can get away with anything - may be punished like that.
About this large...
Still, I think that 15-20 years for an act that hasn't really substantially hurt anyone is excessive. This isn't really equivalent to a murder, is it? I think that some other activities of the IMF have been much more hurtful. According to the Czech president's speech in October 2010, the IMF is a barbaric relic of the Keynesian era that should be abolished as soon as possible.
Meanwhile, it's not difficult for the French leftists to replace Strauss-Kahn by a morally cleaner person. For example, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a co-chairman of a leftist group in the European Parliament, is just a pedophile. ;-)
Friday, April 29, 2011
Monarchies and republics
Prince William and Kate Middleton have become Duke and Duchess of Cambridge after they married, congratulations. The British imperial taxpayer has happily paid $40 million for the wedding, enough money to feed dozens of people throughout their lives.
I suppose you haven't watched it. Neither have I. It's great and lovely. Kate Middleton, a daughter of flight attendants, found something that many girls dream to find, namely her prince. And the courageous prince whom I consider an utterly positive character has found a pretty babe, too.
Some nations remain monarchies, some nations became republics after they abandoned all the artifacts of feudalism. We did so in 1918 when Czechoslovakia was created. After a millennium of the Czech Kingdom, which had been a part of dominantly German-speaking empires for most of the time, a key to independence from the German-speaking masters were allies in the U.S. and France, so it was pretty much guaranteed that we would reproduce much of their republican systems and abolish monarchy, too.
Does it make a difference? Which system is better?
First of all, it doesn't really matter much. The main difference resulting from a monarchy is the existence of one additional family of celebrities who are celebrities just because they belong to a particular family. Capitalism and democracy in the U.S. and the U.K. don't differ much. Neither do the legal systems.
Let me admit to the U.S. readers that throughout the 10 years I spent in America and despite my great and gradually increasing admiration for the U.S. founding fathers, I had no strong opinion about whether the independence - or the loss of a major British colony - was such a great event. The crazy king wanted you to pay taxes, didn't he? Well, the non-aristocratic leaders including Barack Obama often insist on the same thing. You had smaller capacities to influence the British politics? Well, that's because you lived in a province used as a storage for prisoners etc. It was different than today but it did work, too. And even today, with the U.S. democracy, it's still true that people's wealth does depend on the place of birth - even though the change of the functional dependence since 1776 may be viewed as being beneficial for the U.S. territory. ;-)
In the case of Czechoslovakia, to pick an example where I know details, the kingdom was formally abolished but the president has literally inherited much of the perceived status that used to belong to the king. So he (and maybe in the future, she) enjoys an immensely high approval rate and everyone finds it appropriate that he is using the Prague Castle, a highly representative place formerly associated with the kingdom, as a place to work and show his appearances.
The first Czechoslovak president Dr Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was a "daddie" of the Czechoslovak nation and he was almost universally loved. His successor, Dr Edvard Beneš, a bright man largely chosen as the successor by Dr Masaryk himself, was viewed as the political and intellectual elite of the nation - and he also became the mirror of the hopeless situation of the democratic nation when it faced Nazism as well as communism.
The approval rates of all the communist presidents were between 100 and 105 percent. It's not just the communist fabrication that was playing a role. I think that even largely anticommunist ordinary people would have some respect e.g. for Mr Gustáv Husák, the last (Slovak) communist president of Czechoslovakia. Mr Husák fought against the Nazis and was later, in the 1950s, given a life in prison by (other) communists. His predecessor Mr Ludvík Svoboda - the president who unfortunately became a tool to legitimize the "normalization" regime after the Soviet destruction of the 1968 Prague Spring - was a top general leading a group of Czechoslovak soldiers who came from the USSR and helped the Soviets to liberate our territory.
In all cases, including the era of late communism since the 1960s, the president has been chosen so that he (or she?) is awarded for some of the life-long achievements and courage. In this sense, he's analogous to a king. The approval rate of President Klaus fluctuates around 70 percent despite the fact that he used to be controversial as a prime minister, with the approval rate often slipping below 30 percent. He may still be controversial in some circles but he has become a representative of a large majority of the nation, anyway.
This figure of 70 percent is impressive given the obsession of the Czechs to complain about everything. It is much closer to the 80 percent approval of Queen Elizabeth than to 47 percent approval rate of Barack Obama or the 20 percent approval rate of Nicolas Sarkozy, the current leaders of republics that inspired the republican character of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Our president, much like the Queen, is a person who is allowed to be so much above everyone else that he doesn't really participate in the confrontations that people consider to be divisive. He is paid enough so that the people don't have to think about the ways how he steals things. (And when it is about a pen, everyone knows that it is just some fun.)
Now, of course, there is a striking difference. The status of a king or queen is hereditary. This has consequences. While the first feudals had to be exceptional people, or they have at least done some exceptional things which earned them their titles, nothing can guarantee that the same description applies to their arbitrarily distant descendants. But does it?
I don't know. I think that the royal families across the world are OK but in some sense, they're no longer "genetically" exceptional. (Let me avoid comments about their inbreeding that doesn't seem to be too frequent and far-reaching today, anyway.) Most of their special skills may be reduced to social effects, especially to the wealth given to them by the people of their kingdoms. With a lot of money and with some traditions, it's not shocking that you may become much better with the horses and in golf. The young members of royal families may also be trained to speak many languages, and so on.
But are they better, for example, in science? I think that it used to be the case. While the background of top scientists used to be diverse, and parents of great scientists could have been both superpoor as well as hyperwealthy, I think that the wealthy people were overrepresented - and not only because of their families' better access to education.
I am not sure it is still the case. In particular, I am not aware of any member of an aristocratic family who is extremely good in theoretical or particle physics. (Of course, most of the explanation is that the Jewish nation doesn't have too many aristocratic families.) Even if I have forgotten about someone, or if I am unaware of someone, I think it is fair to say that these folks are not surely overrepresented in the top physics community. ;-)
Instead, the royal families are largely what the tabloid press makes out of them: celebrities analogous to actors and singers who are being watched on every step. They're trained in skills that can be appreciated by the most average citizens. When a prince tries to act as an intellectual who struggles for far-reaching and long-term results, his being an average thinker usually badly manifests itself - and William's father is one of the most obvious forbidding examples. If a few more people targeted by the tabloid press and the hereditary character of the ruler are the only major differences between a kingdom and a republic, I don't think we're losing much by not having a monarchy anymore.
The other differences are infinitesimal and I don't think that they're terribly harmful for the monarchies, either. Of course, I am talking about some constitutional monarchies only. An aristocratic dictatorship makes it way too easy for the ruler to prevent progress for long decades which is a bad disadvantage in the modern world. Democracy is hugely imperfect but its ability to self-regulate still makes it a better system than the previous ones.
However, when some special people - who differ by their financial security throughout their life - just influence the society in some way, I don't think it's bad at all. Hunger is a good cook but a bad adviser, a Czech proverb says. Because ordinary people's chances of becoming a king or queen - and Kate Middleton and her colleagues are the only exceptions - are essentially zero, the jealousy aspect evaporates, too. Monarchies can work but they're not necessary.
I suppose you haven't watched it. Neither have I. It's great and lovely. Kate Middleton, a daughter of flight attendants, found something that many girls dream to find, namely her prince. And the courageous prince whom I consider an utterly positive character has found a pretty babe, too.
Some nations remain monarchies, some nations became republics after they abandoned all the artifacts of feudalism. We did so in 1918 when Czechoslovakia was created. After a millennium of the Czech Kingdom, which had been a part of dominantly German-speaking empires for most of the time, a key to independence from the German-speaking masters were allies in the U.S. and France, so it was pretty much guaranteed that we would reproduce much of their republican systems and abolish monarchy, too.
Does it make a difference? Which system is better?
First of all, it doesn't really matter much. The main difference resulting from a monarchy is the existence of one additional family of celebrities who are celebrities just because they belong to a particular family. Capitalism and democracy in the U.S. and the U.K. don't differ much. Neither do the legal systems.
Let me admit to the U.S. readers that throughout the 10 years I spent in America and despite my great and gradually increasing admiration for the U.S. founding fathers, I had no strong opinion about whether the independence - or the loss of a major British colony - was such a great event. The crazy king wanted you to pay taxes, didn't he? Well, the non-aristocratic leaders including Barack Obama often insist on the same thing. You had smaller capacities to influence the British politics? Well, that's because you lived in a province used as a storage for prisoners etc. It was different than today but it did work, too. And even today, with the U.S. democracy, it's still true that people's wealth does depend on the place of birth - even though the change of the functional dependence since 1776 may be viewed as being beneficial for the U.S. territory. ;-)
In the case of Czechoslovakia, to pick an example where I know details, the kingdom was formally abolished but the president has literally inherited much of the perceived status that used to belong to the king. So he (and maybe in the future, she) enjoys an immensely high approval rate and everyone finds it appropriate that he is using the Prague Castle, a highly representative place formerly associated with the kingdom, as a place to work and show his appearances.
The first Czechoslovak president Dr Thomas Garrigue Masaryk was a "daddie" of the Czechoslovak nation and he was almost universally loved. His successor, Dr Edvard Beneš, a bright man largely chosen as the successor by Dr Masaryk himself, was viewed as the political and intellectual elite of the nation - and he also became the mirror of the hopeless situation of the democratic nation when it faced Nazism as well as communism.
The approval rates of all the communist presidents were between 100 and 105 percent. It's not just the communist fabrication that was playing a role. I think that even largely anticommunist ordinary people would have some respect e.g. for Mr Gustáv Husák, the last (Slovak) communist president of Czechoslovakia. Mr Husák fought against the Nazis and was later, in the 1950s, given a life in prison by (other) communists. His predecessor Mr Ludvík Svoboda - the president who unfortunately became a tool to legitimize the "normalization" regime after the Soviet destruction of the 1968 Prague Spring - was a top general leading a group of Czechoslovak soldiers who came from the USSR and helped the Soviets to liberate our territory.
In all cases, including the era of late communism since the 1960s, the president has been chosen so that he (or she?) is awarded for some of the life-long achievements and courage. In this sense, he's analogous to a king. The approval rate of President Klaus fluctuates around 70 percent despite the fact that he used to be controversial as a prime minister, with the approval rate often slipping below 30 percent. He may still be controversial in some circles but he has become a representative of a large majority of the nation, anyway.
This figure of 70 percent is impressive given the obsession of the Czechs to complain about everything. It is much closer to the 80 percent approval of Queen Elizabeth than to 47 percent approval rate of Barack Obama or the 20 percent approval rate of Nicolas Sarkozy, the current leaders of republics that inspired the republican character of Czechoslovakia in 1918. Our president, much like the Queen, is a person who is allowed to be so much above everyone else that he doesn't really participate in the confrontations that people consider to be divisive. He is paid enough so that the people don't have to think about the ways how he steals things. (And when it is about a pen, everyone knows that it is just some fun.)
Now, of course, there is a striking difference. The status of a king or queen is hereditary. This has consequences. While the first feudals had to be exceptional people, or they have at least done some exceptional things which earned them their titles, nothing can guarantee that the same description applies to their arbitrarily distant descendants. But does it?
I don't know. I think that the royal families across the world are OK but in some sense, they're no longer "genetically" exceptional. (Let me avoid comments about their inbreeding that doesn't seem to be too frequent and far-reaching today, anyway.) Most of their special skills may be reduced to social effects, especially to the wealth given to them by the people of their kingdoms. With a lot of money and with some traditions, it's not shocking that you may become much better with the horses and in golf. The young members of royal families may also be trained to speak many languages, and so on.
But are they better, for example, in science? I think that it used to be the case. While the background of top scientists used to be diverse, and parents of great scientists could have been both superpoor as well as hyperwealthy, I think that the wealthy people were overrepresented - and not only because of their families' better access to education.
I am not sure it is still the case. In particular, I am not aware of any member of an aristocratic family who is extremely good in theoretical or particle physics. (Of course, most of the explanation is that the Jewish nation doesn't have too many aristocratic families.) Even if I have forgotten about someone, or if I am unaware of someone, I think it is fair to say that these folks are not surely overrepresented in the top physics community. ;-)
Instead, the royal families are largely what the tabloid press makes out of them: celebrities analogous to actors and singers who are being watched on every step. They're trained in skills that can be appreciated by the most average citizens. When a prince tries to act as an intellectual who struggles for far-reaching and long-term results, his being an average thinker usually badly manifests itself - and William's father is one of the most obvious forbidding examples. If a few more people targeted by the tabloid press and the hereditary character of the ruler are the only major differences between a kingdom and a republic, I don't think we're losing much by not having a monarchy anymore.
The other differences are infinitesimal and I don't think that they're terribly harmful for the monarchies, either. Of course, I am talking about some constitutional monarchies only. An aristocratic dictatorship makes it way too easy for the ruler to prevent progress for long decades which is a bad disadvantage in the modern world. Democracy is hugely imperfect but its ability to self-regulate still makes it a better system than the previous ones.
However, when some special people - who differ by their financial security throughout their life - just influence the society in some way, I don't think it's bad at all. Hunger is a good cook but a bad adviser, a Czech proverb says. Because ordinary people's chances of becoming a king or queen - and Kate Middleton and her colleagues are the only exceptions - are essentially zero, the jealousy aspect evaporates, too. Monarchies can work but they're not necessary.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Busch Campus suicide catalyzer indicted
Between Fall 1997 and Fall 2001, I lived in a dormitory at the Busch Campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey - in greater New Brunswick.
That's where an act that is effectively a murder took place in September 2010. Chances are nonzero that the key events have occurred in the same apartment where I lived. What happened?
These two folks, Mr Dharun Ravi and Ms Molly Wei, had quite some fun to monitor their gay roommate, music student Tyler Clementi.
On September 19th, Mr Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro streamed the video with a sexual encounter of Mr Clementi with another man, M.B. - using Twitter as a tool to promote the show. Even though a kiss could have been the only thing seen on the "live show", Mr Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge to the Hudson River on September 22th - using Facebook to inform his friends and "friends" about his last decision.
Mr Tyler Clementi, the gay victim
The New York Times just reported that Mr Ravi has been indicted by a New Jersey grand jury on hate-crime charges for his usage of the webcam which exposes him to a 5-10 years in prison.
Ms Molly Wei of Princeton who has arguably been as important a part of the "project" as Mr Dharun Ravi will probably escape with no punishment whatsoever. It is pretty obvious from the text that she transferred all her guilt to Mr Dharun Ravi and the jury has bought it. However, her case remains active.
I find Mr Ravi's behavior outrageous. He has probably been a fanatical homophobe. However, the situation has transformed a homophobe to a de facto murderer. Now, it is obvious that people who destroy other people's lives in this way have to be severely punished. The only question is whether the punishment should be distributed among all the bullies, including those whose victims don't commit suicide (or don't get comparably far in their discomfort), or whether only the "unlucky" bullies who effectively kill someone else should be charged with these big charges.
But much more generally: what Mr Tyler Clementi did was totally legal, so any behavior that brings a huge discomfort to such a young man is immoral and should be classified as a crime. Technically, Mr Ravi has "only" violated Mr Clementi's privacy - except that such violations have repercussions, as this sad example clearly demonstrates. These repercussions - the actual ones and maybe even the potential ones - should be included to the juries' decisions.
This was a very sad story. To improve your mood, a new event from the world of "crime" that took place today and that is amusing.
Just as the Hungarian president was beginning his visit to the Prague Castle, two police women from the Republic of Chile arrested Czech President Václav Klaus for his theft of the pen. They announced the decision in Spanish and Czech. However, both cops were rather quickly taken into custody by two Czech cops who happened to be real. ;-)
By the way, Jay Leno has noticed (click) that the main thief during the event was not Prof Klaus but actually his Chilean counterpart who stole... almost everything.
Marilyn Monroe has already paid tribute to Prof Klaus, too. Hollywood is preparing a new movie about Indiana Klaus and the pen of Chile. I hope you don't believe it is just a parody.
Well, some people can't distinguish reality from parodies. Slovak TV JOJ has informed its viewers that Klaus will begin to medically cure his kleptomania this month. When Ban-Ki-Moon visited Prague, they had to take his credit cards from the pockets because it would be painful if those disappeared. And so on. It turned out that TV JOJ has simply bought a story from a fun portion of an online Czech magazine Reflex - without realizing that it's a hoax! ;-)
That's where an act that is effectively a murder took place in September 2010. Chances are nonzero that the key events have occurred in the same apartment where I lived. What happened?
These two folks, Mr Dharun Ravi and Ms Molly Wei, had quite some fun to monitor their gay roommate, music student Tyler Clementi.
On September 19th, Mr Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro streamed the video with a sexual encounter of Mr Clementi with another man, M.B. - using Twitter as a tool to promote the show. Even though a kiss could have been the only thing seen on the "live show", Mr Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge to the Hudson River on September 22th - using Facebook to inform his friends and "friends" about his last decision.
Mr Tyler Clementi, the gay victim
The New York Times just reported that Mr Ravi has been indicted by a New Jersey grand jury on hate-crime charges for his usage of the webcam which exposes him to a 5-10 years in prison.
Ms Molly Wei of Princeton who has arguably been as important a part of the "project" as Mr Dharun Ravi will probably escape with no punishment whatsoever. It is pretty obvious from the text that she transferred all her guilt to Mr Dharun Ravi and the jury has bought it. However, her case remains active.
I find Mr Ravi's behavior outrageous. He has probably been a fanatical homophobe. However, the situation has transformed a homophobe to a de facto murderer. Now, it is obvious that people who destroy other people's lives in this way have to be severely punished. The only question is whether the punishment should be distributed among all the bullies, including those whose victims don't commit suicide (or don't get comparably far in their discomfort), or whether only the "unlucky" bullies who effectively kill someone else should be charged with these big charges.
But much more generally: what Mr Tyler Clementi did was totally legal, so any behavior that brings a huge discomfort to such a young man is immoral and should be classified as a crime. Technically, Mr Ravi has "only" violated Mr Clementi's privacy - except that such violations have repercussions, as this sad example clearly demonstrates. These repercussions - the actual ones and maybe even the potential ones - should be included to the juries' decisions.
This was a very sad story. To improve your mood, a new event from the world of "crime" that took place today and that is amusing.
Just as the Hungarian president was beginning his visit to the Prague Castle, two police women from the Republic of Chile arrested Czech President Václav Klaus for his theft of the pen. They announced the decision in Spanish and Czech. However, both cops were rather quickly taken into custody by two Czech cops who happened to be real. ;-)
By the way, Jay Leno has noticed (click) that the main thief during the event was not Prof Klaus but actually his Chilean counterpart who stole... almost everything.
Marilyn Monroe has already paid tribute to Prof Klaus, too. Hollywood is preparing a new movie about Indiana Klaus and the pen of Chile. I hope you don't believe it is just a parody.
Well, some people can't distinguish reality from parodies. Slovak TV JOJ has informed its viewers that Klaus will begin to medically cure his kleptomania this month. When Ban-Ki-Moon visited Prague, they had to take his credit cards from the pockets because it would be painful if those disappeared. And so on. It turned out that TV JOJ has simply bought a story from a fun portion of an online Czech magazine Reflex - without realizing that it's a hoax! ;-)
Monday, April 11, 2011
Václav Klaus and pen in Chile
I am a great Klaus fan but let me admit that this video - that became a hit in the Czech Republic after it attracted 4 million views in a few days and overshadowed the "Public Affairs"-driven government crisis - has made me laugh out loud.
There even exists a version for those who believe that the macroscopic phenomena are reversible.
The story says that during his official visit to Chile, Czech President Václav Klaus liked the pen. Clever like a fox, he acted as a typical Czech and "borrowed" the pen. He demonstrated what the "golden Czech hands" mean, completed the privatization - and people have added all typical funny stereotypes associated with Klaus, too. At 0:52, he used his fingers to signal a "victory". Hilarious.
Of course, the reality is less entertaining. A diplomatic pen with the state symbols is a standard gift for leaders and members of their delegations. Visitors to the Prague Castle whose visits have a business part always receive a Czech pen, for example. I received my pens during my recent visit to a top privatet university in Belgrade; and during my talk to Czech pharmacy students, funded by Czech Big Pharma company called Zentiva.
So one of such official Chilean peans has been given to President Klaus and he had to pretend how impressed he has been by the pen. In particular, he had to visually appreciate the symbols of the Chilean state on the pen - something that Klaus inherently probably doesn't care about - and express his friendship to the amigos with a similar flag (as pointed out by the Chilean president Sebastian Pinera) by various other gestures.
When one is unaware of the context and diplomatic traditions, all those things get interpreted totally differently and the result is very shocking or entertaining. The semi-satirical "168 hours" program on Czech public TV, hosted by Ms Nora Fridrichová, has made an excellent job although it wasn't too hard in this case.
This is not the first funny story about Dr Klaus and a pen. So far, Klaus has been a net donor of pens. In 2003, when he was elected the Czech president for the first time, the official pen with which he should have signed his oath and new job contract refused to work. The legend says that the defective pen has been seeded by his predecessor, Václav Havel. ;-)
However, Klaus was one move ahead of Havel. He picked his private pen from his pocket, signed the document, and became the second Czech president. :-)
There even exists a version for those who believe that the macroscopic phenomena are reversible.
The story says that during his official visit to Chile, Czech President Václav Klaus liked the pen. Clever like a fox, he acted as a typical Czech and "borrowed" the pen. He demonstrated what the "golden Czech hands" mean, completed the privatization - and people have added all typical funny stereotypes associated with Klaus, too. At 0:52, he used his fingers to signal a "victory". Hilarious.
Of course, the reality is less entertaining. A diplomatic pen with the state symbols is a standard gift for leaders and members of their delegations. Visitors to the Prague Castle whose visits have a business part always receive a Czech pen, for example. I received my pens during my recent visit to a top privatet university in Belgrade; and during my talk to Czech pharmacy students, funded by Czech Big Pharma company called Zentiva.
So one of such official Chilean peans has been given to President Klaus and he had to pretend how impressed he has been by the pen. In particular, he had to visually appreciate the symbols of the Chilean state on the pen - something that Klaus inherently probably doesn't care about - and express his friendship to the amigos with a similar flag (as pointed out by the Chilean president Sebastian Pinera) by various other gestures.
When one is unaware of the context and diplomatic traditions, all those things get interpreted totally differently and the result is very shocking or entertaining. The semi-satirical "168 hours" program on Czech public TV, hosted by Ms Nora Fridrichová, has made an excellent job although it wasn't too hard in this case.
This is not the first funny story about Dr Klaus and a pen. So far, Klaus has been a net donor of pens. In 2003, when he was elected the Czech president for the first time, the official pen with which he should have signed his oath and new job contract refused to work. The legend says that the defective pen has been seeded by his predecessor, Václav Havel. ;-)
However, Klaus was one move ahead of Havel. He picked his private pen from his pocket, signed the document, and became the second Czech president. :-)
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
The Jewish Community of Prague
I have just returned from the Jewish Community Prague where I gave a talk show, or participated in a discussion with the members. It was a pleasant experience. The audience had a genuine interest in physics or at least philosophy etc.And I was happily surprised that the community was de facto a living organism.
Although the kind host has mostly prepared me for a uniform community of 100-year-old holocaust survivors born in the era of Austria-Hungary (the monarchy), the audience included people from many generations. A young man wanted to deny my entry, but he quickly changed his mind when I explained to him who I was and what was going on.
There were attractive girls over there, too. ;-) And it was good to meet one perfectionist instructor from my Alma Mater.
Before the event, I was studying some Jewish culture and realia, which I have never been "officially" explained by anyone, including various forms of Judaism, their lunisolar calendar, holidays, and so on. I wasn't even shocked that the conference hall, which was a kosher dining hall at the same moment, couldn't offer milk with the coffee because it was a meat dining hall and, as you must know, milk and and meat can't be mixed in the same room!
If the blog were not visible to the public, I would probably quip that the rule must be a pain in the ass. ;-)
The topics we talked about covered string theory, its testability, cosmology, the LHC, Lawrence Summers and feminists, climate change, and a few others. A task for me was to choose the author of the best and most concise question - a winner of a bottle of wine - and I chose a woman who asked whether dark matter had been experimentally proved. That was a pretty good choice because, as it turned out, she didn't like my opinions about women in STEM fields too much so at least she has some liquid to qualm a potential anger if any. :-)
As I expected, it was impossible to avoid a faux pas in a mostly religious environment whose big defender I am - but with which I am unfamiliar in practice. There have probably been many mini-scandals related to what I was saying but I have learned about one of them; the rest of this blog entry is dedicated to this faux pas. When I am studying the historical background right now, what I did looks like a genuine offense but my guess is that when I will tell the story about the offense to other Czechs, they will think that it is a kind of joke.
Well, it's not.
What happened? I was also explaining that CO2 wasn't a pollutant analogous to SO2, SO3, N2O, tar, and so on (those are really bad guys). In fact, 20 years ago, everyone agreed. The most environmentally friendly plastic bags would boast that they decompose to H2O and CO2 only. What is the offense? Well, I used the same word for the plastic bags as pretty much every Czech would: they're "igelit bags" ["igelitové tašky"] because the word "igelit" is being used for any plastic foils, especially those made of PVC and similar soft compounds.
Ouch!
So it was explained to me by a participant that "igelit" was a wrong word. Just to be sure, "igelit" has been a commercial name only, and it referred to PVC (polyvinyl chloride), which produces pollutants when it burns, while the modern plastic bags are environmentally harmless - and they are mostly made out of polyethylene.
As you might guess, this technical inaccuracy of mine, while a clear departure from perfectionism, was not the source of the real trouble. So what was it?
It turns out that what is important is the owner of the commercial name that continues to be used across our nation. Well, it was a company called IG Farben - a huge German corporation founded in 1925; "ige" in "igelit" comes from "IG". That already sounds risky, doesn't it? Well, let me tell you the full story: IG Farben established a chemical plant to produce synthetic fuels and rubber out of fuel. Where? Well, in Auschwitz. To make things worse, IG Farben was employing 83,000 slaves, was the main commercial subject connected with the holocaust, and was the owner of the patent to produce Zyklon B.
Holy crap. Imagine that our nation innocently continues to use their commercial name, and not only for the original material, but for the whole class of materials that look similar!
IG Farben obviously had to be fully liquidated after the war. I guess that some of the U.S. leftists won't be impressed by the terrible things done by IG Farben, so let me add another point that will make them stunned as well: it's proved that IG Farben has collaborated with George Walker, i.e. the grandfather of George H. W. Bush (and great grandfather of George W. Bush). George Walker was given a unit of spies from IG Farben, the Hamburg-Amerika Line [sic], whose task was to spy in North America.
Again, I was totally unfamiliar with the very name of IG Farben - if I have ever heard the name, I instantly forgot it. That's a pity because after 1925, IG Farben included BASF, Bayer, Hoechst, Agfa, and two more "Chemische Fabriks"; add the confiscated Czech and Polish factories after the occupation and you get pretty much all chemical industry in Central Europe (and one half of the industrial backbone of the Third Reich). Of course, this story was just 1% of the event but it's just another example of the unexpected processes that may occur when different cultures interact.
Meanwhile, I doubt that the Czechs (and Slovaks) will stop using the word "igelit". But your humble correspondent may change his vocabulary a bit.
By the way, the Czechs must love German commercial names for plastics. We use the term "bakelite" ["bakelit" in Czech, a trademark of Bakelite AG], which should normally represent polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride only (an early plastic whose name I wrote via copy-and-paste), for most of the plastics that are not "igelite". For example, it's believed that Trabants were made out of "bakelite". It's not too inaccurate because these funny vehicles were made out of Duroplast which is a similar compound.
The words with the "plastic" root became somewhat more frequent in Czech but I guess that they're still less frequent than "igelit" or "umělá hmota" (a "synthetic or artificial material"), the most common Czech term to describe plastics in general. I vaguely remember that some of the teachers - even during communism - wanted the pupils to switch from all other general names to "plastics" but such a change is largely impossible in a society where only a small portion of the people (pupils of a particular age) are being re-educated in this way.
Monday, February 14, 2011
How does an average French woman look like?
A topic for Valentine's Day.
Did you ever want to know how the/an average German woman or the/an average black American woman looks like? Those questions have already been calculated by Face Research. Here is a couple of nations:
Here are the averages for 46 nations. You may also create your own averages, including those involving your photograph.
The average women are pretty attractive. I think it's not hard to understand why. People are instinctively trained to dislike visual features that strongly deviate from the average and the average women have none of them. Moreover, the averaging is likely to remove all local non-uniform perturbations that are also considered "ugly".
Did you ever want to know how the/an average German woman or the/an average black American woman looks like? Those questions have already been calculated by Face Research. Here is a couple of nations:
Here are the averages for 46 nations. You may also create your own averages, including those involving your photograph.
The average women are pretty attractive. I think it's not hard to understand why. People are instinctively trained to dislike visual features that strongly deviate from the average and the average women have none of them. Moreover, the averaging is likely to remove all local non-uniform perturbations that are also considered "ugly".
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
International Year of Chemistry and Forests
The United Nations officials have defined the year 2011 as the International Year of Forests and the International Year of Chemistry. This blog entry is my celebration, and the only celebration, of these two bureaucratic events.
Boubín, a protected virgin forest in Šumava, i.e. the Bohemian and Bavarian forest on our border with Germany
Forests and your humble correspondent
Czechia is - and even Czechoslovakia was - a rather small landlocked country so we have a somewhat limited understanding of what "Nature" and "wild life" represent. Forests play an important role in shaping the meaning of the word "nature" in minds such as mine. They are among the environments we imagine when we talk about the world before the civilization era.
34.1% of the Czech territory is covered by forests.
That puts us somewhere in the middle of the list of countries. We surely have many fewer forests than Sweden with 65.9% or Cook Islands with 95.7% but there are many more forests here than in the Netherlands with 11.1% ;-) and many of our forests are much deeper than what the people in countries such as France typically know.
A bulk of the "deep forests" in Czechia are composed of coniferous trees - an artifact of the human activities in the recent centuries. Even in the early 1980s when I was a small schoolkid, we were taught that the propagation of monocultures was a somewhat bad policy that was waiting to be undone because the broad-leaved trees and the diversity they brought were important. But these days, I think that these worries were overdone: coniferous forests are just OK. They're just different.
Czechs often go mushroom hunting. Some nations don't have this tradition - even though they may have very tasty mushrooms in their forests. It's funny to listen to the Americans' excuses why they don't do any mushroom hunting. They would surely be poisoned immediately.
Well, dear Yankees :-), one can learn to pick mushrooms safely enough much like one may learn the multiplication table. One or a few simple criteria is really enough to almost guarantee that a mushroom is edible. ;-)
Years ago, I have spent lots of time in the forests. The Czech and Slovak mountains dominated among the forests; in the U.S., the only noteworthy forests were the redwood forests in Santa Cruz where I spent H1 of 2000. Impressive trees, indeed.
In the Czech Republic, there have been lots of controversies about the bark beetle that likes to exploit the Bohemian Forests - and Bavarian Forest - or "Šumava", as we call the mountains on the Czech-German Southern border (with a tiny portion belonging to Austria). In the recent decade, the beetle became very active once again.
Some environmentalists like to say that it is unacceptably unnatural to fight against this guy. Well, even though I have spent weeks as a teenager by helping the trees in Šumava, I am much closer to the side of the likes of Miloš Zeman, a former nominally social democratic prime minister (who promoted Reaganomics in the Czech economy), who have criticized these environmentalist bigots. The parasites should be fought against (I primarily mean the bark beetles, not the environmentalists).
Don't get me wrong: the bark beetles don't kill the forest. The forest may exist and thrive even when it includes lots of dead trees. But the humans have simply learned how to manage the forest life more efficiently from an economic viewpoint. So lots of dead trees damage the economy of the forests.
Is the primordial form of the forests priceless? Many years ago, I may have answered "Yes" to this question. The humans are changing the world and it's important to keep a "natural museum" showing how the world looked like before we became so powerful. However, these days, I would probably answer "No". The term "virgin forests" is chosen in such a way that it creates the impression that the "cultivation" is irreversible. Once you lose your virginity, you will never become a virgin again.
However, I think that the terminology is misleading because the irreversibility doesn't apply to the forests. In fact, virgin forests are the "high entropy" state of the forest that each forest will natually converge to a few centuries after the eradication of the humans, if I put it this optimistically. ;-)
So I no longer think it is important to try to protect a high percentage of the Earth's surface as covered by virgin forests. Obviously, I find it important that the percentage of the "lungs" on the surface doesn't decrease, at least not dramatically. But whether they're primary or secondary, I don't really care. They may become primary after some time, anyway. In some cases, the difference is of a historical character, not a result of operationally testable differences. It's useful to have a few places that look almost identically as they used to look. But that's it.
At the beginning, I mentioned the Netherlands that only has 11.1% of their territory covered by forests. Of course, it is a highly civilized, densely populated country which makes a lot of difference. I have always been impressed how "totally cultural" their landscape is. Looking at some of the Dutch structures on the land and on the sea from the airplane is simply amazing. Of course, I don't want the Czech forest cover to decrease from 34% to 11% but if the only question were whether the forests should be as "managed" as the Dutch landscape, my answer would probably be that it's just fine to manage it.
Rain forests are a slightly different stories. The nations surrounding these "lungs of the planet" are often very poor. While they may "own" the rain forests in some technical sense, it is important for the civilized countries to realize that this ownership relationship is not "total" because the nations have no real tools to protect "their assets" against others.
So more civilized nations should perhaps guarantee a sensible environment for the poorer nations around the rain forests that will prevent those folks from destroying the rain forest for stupid reasons - or reasons that look stupid from the viewpoint of our priorities and values. If those poor folks would destroy a piece of a forest whose value may be estimated as $100 billion by us, and they will only do it to gain $1 billion, well, we should better try to pay them $1 billion - in cash or in goods - to cancel their plans. ;-)
It's as simple as that.
Chemistry
Chemistry was born as a child of two parents - alchemy and the scientific method.
Among the intelligent people, the mother alchemy died as soon as the child chemistry was born. Before the birth, alchemy didn't know the scientific method: it was a protoscience. Nevertheless, in a chaotic way - driven by people's predetermined "applications" such as their dream to create gold out of any shit and the dream to produce the elixir of longevity - the alchemists have invented many elementary methods that were simply inherited by the daughter.
Chemistry is all about the properties of different materials - solids, gases, liquids, and especially solutions - especially when it comes to their ability to interact with other materials and produce new kinds of materials (and/or energy) as a result.
This is a physics blog so you shouldn't be shocked to hear that chemistry is just a small portion of physics studied in a more mindless and less curious universalist way. ;-) In particular, the whole nontrivial and conceptual essence of chemistry boils down to atomic and molecular physics, pretty much exactly described by the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation, and that's it. In the 1920s, physics has understood chemistry, swallowed it, and since that time, chemistry is just a small autonomous province of the empire of physics.
Chemists aren't called atomic and molecular physicists only because they are much more obsessed with hundreds of examples of chemical processes and their applications rather than their desire to understand why they exist and why they have the observed properties.
I didn't have much access to chemistry when I was a kid. It was interesting to see some wild effects but spectacular effects were never a top real priority of myself so I didn't care much. While I would always get an "A" from chemistry at the elementary school (which included some limited controlled lab experiments) - all my elementary school grades were "A", after all - I received as bad grades as a "D" (4 of 5, to be more accurate) at the high school. This "D" was the worst final grade I have ever received; not even the physical training could compete. :-)
The bad grade was partly due to my personal fights with our very robust teacher. ;-)
A few months later, the Velvet Revolution began in Czechoslovakia. I was one of the high school's top anti-communist dissidents and moreover, the kids were suddenly in charge of the country since the end of 1989. :-) We have voted that we no longer wanted her to be our teacher so the 300-pound lady - note that I didn't call her an 800-pound gorilla - had to go away.
The teacher wanted me to copy a 100-page notebook because of a few things such as a drawing of an apple next to some text about the malic acid (apple acid in Czech). When I refused to do that in front of the class, she psychologically exploded and melted. But of course, there were other things at stake. I hated to memorize dozens of meaningless formulae and isolated facts about various compounds that looked useless to me and didn't help to enrich my understanding of the world, anyway.
A major part of my bad relationships to chemistry was based on my ignorance of quantum mechanics; I didn't really believe that the "explanations" were fundamentally right. I only understood why quantum mechanics worked - and how it worked - when I was 17 years old or so - a year after the fall of communism. So the previous stories about the shells and electron clouds were just unacceptable for me. They didn't fit into my dogmas of that time. Of course, after several mistakes of this magnitude, I became very careful in avoiding all kinds of unsubstantiated dogmas.
Needless to say, once I knew that I was wrong about many things related to quantum mechanics, many of my other teenage attitudes to chemistry may have been classified as deeply flawed, too. Chemistry is an important science. And of course, because its physical pillars are damn solid, as I know today, and because of its numerous experimental tests and applications, one has to take its conclusions seriously. Well, I still think that we were memorizing too much irrelevant technical stuff - isolated insights that are not linked to anything universally important.
This is a comment I would make about most of the things we have ever been learning at school. However, when one notices that the current generation of kids is apparently so much less skillful in learning things at school than we used to be, it makes one wonder whether the "useless stuff" was really so "useless".
You might conjecture that the "anti-quantum zealots" drive me up the wall especially because I recognize that I used to share their current attitudes when I was 16 years or less. But it's not really the case. In the case of the "anti-quantum zealots", I can at least recognize some of their drivers - the deeply felt belief that the inner workings of the world has to be rooted in the classical intuition. I don't know why it takes decades or life for them to understand why quantum mechanics is just right - while I, a relative former classical bigot, still needed just a few months to give up my flawed beliefs.
But it's still true that I encounter lots of stupidity in the world of the kinds that I have never experienced - and these kinds of stupidity are much more stunning for me than some fundamental mistakes that I have done myself. If someone believes e.g. that the world can't possibly have anything to do with mathematics or some exact mathematical formulae, I am simply flabbergasted. Fortunately, those people usually get decoupled from any deeper scientific debate very quickly so no full war with them erupts.
But that was too much stuff about crackpots, psychology, and my personal education history, so let me stop this rant.
Vivat forests and chemistry but screw the United Nations! ;-)
Boubín, a protected virgin forest in Šumava, i.e. the Bohemian and Bavarian forest on our border with Germany
Forests and your humble correspondent
Czechia is - and even Czechoslovakia was - a rather small landlocked country so we have a somewhat limited understanding of what "Nature" and "wild life" represent. Forests play an important role in shaping the meaning of the word "nature" in minds such as mine. They are among the environments we imagine when we talk about the world before the civilization era.
34.1% of the Czech territory is covered by forests.
That puts us somewhere in the middle of the list of countries. We surely have many fewer forests than Sweden with 65.9% or Cook Islands with 95.7% but there are many more forests here than in the Netherlands with 11.1% ;-) and many of our forests are much deeper than what the people in countries such as France typically know.
A bulk of the "deep forests" in Czechia are composed of coniferous trees - an artifact of the human activities in the recent centuries. Even in the early 1980s when I was a small schoolkid, we were taught that the propagation of monocultures was a somewhat bad policy that was waiting to be undone because the broad-leaved trees and the diversity they brought were important. But these days, I think that these worries were overdone: coniferous forests are just OK. They're just different.
Czechs often go mushroom hunting. Some nations don't have this tradition - even though they may have very tasty mushrooms in their forests. It's funny to listen to the Americans' excuses why they don't do any mushroom hunting. They would surely be poisoned immediately.
Well, dear Yankees :-), one can learn to pick mushrooms safely enough much like one may learn the multiplication table. One or a few simple criteria is really enough to almost guarantee that a mushroom is edible. ;-)
Years ago, I have spent lots of time in the forests. The Czech and Slovak mountains dominated among the forests; in the U.S., the only noteworthy forests were the redwood forests in Santa Cruz where I spent H1 of 2000. Impressive trees, indeed.
In the Czech Republic, there have been lots of controversies about the bark beetle that likes to exploit the Bohemian Forests - and Bavarian Forest - or "Šumava", as we call the mountains on the Czech-German Southern border (with a tiny portion belonging to Austria). In the recent decade, the beetle became very active once again.
Some environmentalists like to say that it is unacceptably unnatural to fight against this guy. Well, even though I have spent weeks as a teenager by helping the trees in Šumava, I am much closer to the side of the likes of Miloš Zeman, a former nominally social democratic prime minister (who promoted Reaganomics in the Czech economy), who have criticized these environmentalist bigots. The parasites should be fought against (I primarily mean the bark beetles, not the environmentalists).
Don't get me wrong: the bark beetles don't kill the forest. The forest may exist and thrive even when it includes lots of dead trees. But the humans have simply learned how to manage the forest life more efficiently from an economic viewpoint. So lots of dead trees damage the economy of the forests.
Is the primordial form of the forests priceless? Many years ago, I may have answered "Yes" to this question. The humans are changing the world and it's important to keep a "natural museum" showing how the world looked like before we became so powerful. However, these days, I would probably answer "No". The term "virgin forests" is chosen in such a way that it creates the impression that the "cultivation" is irreversible. Once you lose your virginity, you will never become a virgin again.
However, I think that the terminology is misleading because the irreversibility doesn't apply to the forests. In fact, virgin forests are the "high entropy" state of the forest that each forest will natually converge to a few centuries after the eradication of the humans, if I put it this optimistically. ;-)
So I no longer think it is important to try to protect a high percentage of the Earth's surface as covered by virgin forests. Obviously, I find it important that the percentage of the "lungs" on the surface doesn't decrease, at least not dramatically. But whether they're primary or secondary, I don't really care. They may become primary after some time, anyway. In some cases, the difference is of a historical character, not a result of operationally testable differences. It's useful to have a few places that look almost identically as they used to look. But that's it.
At the beginning, I mentioned the Netherlands that only has 11.1% of their territory covered by forests. Of course, it is a highly civilized, densely populated country which makes a lot of difference. I have always been impressed how "totally cultural" their landscape is. Looking at some of the Dutch structures on the land and on the sea from the airplane is simply amazing. Of course, I don't want the Czech forest cover to decrease from 34% to 11% but if the only question were whether the forests should be as "managed" as the Dutch landscape, my answer would probably be that it's just fine to manage it.
Rain forests are a slightly different stories. The nations surrounding these "lungs of the planet" are often very poor. While they may "own" the rain forests in some technical sense, it is important for the civilized countries to realize that this ownership relationship is not "total" because the nations have no real tools to protect "their assets" against others.
So more civilized nations should perhaps guarantee a sensible environment for the poorer nations around the rain forests that will prevent those folks from destroying the rain forest for stupid reasons - or reasons that look stupid from the viewpoint of our priorities and values. If those poor folks would destroy a piece of a forest whose value may be estimated as $100 billion by us, and they will only do it to gain $1 billion, well, we should better try to pay them $1 billion - in cash or in goods - to cancel their plans. ;-)
It's as simple as that.
Chemistry
Chemistry was born as a child of two parents - alchemy and the scientific method.
Among the intelligent people, the mother alchemy died as soon as the child chemistry was born. Before the birth, alchemy didn't know the scientific method: it was a protoscience. Nevertheless, in a chaotic way - driven by people's predetermined "applications" such as their dream to create gold out of any shit and the dream to produce the elixir of longevity - the alchemists have invented many elementary methods that were simply inherited by the daughter.
Chemistry is all about the properties of different materials - solids, gases, liquids, and especially solutions - especially when it comes to their ability to interact with other materials and produce new kinds of materials (and/or energy) as a result.
This is a physics blog so you shouldn't be shocked to hear that chemistry is just a small portion of physics studied in a more mindless and less curious universalist way. ;-) In particular, the whole nontrivial and conceptual essence of chemistry boils down to atomic and molecular physics, pretty much exactly described by the non-relativistic Schrödinger equation, and that's it. In the 1920s, physics has understood chemistry, swallowed it, and since that time, chemistry is just a small autonomous province of the empire of physics.
Chemists aren't called atomic and molecular physicists only because they are much more obsessed with hundreds of examples of chemical processes and their applications rather than their desire to understand why they exist and why they have the observed properties.
I didn't have much access to chemistry when I was a kid. It was interesting to see some wild effects but spectacular effects were never a top real priority of myself so I didn't care much. While I would always get an "A" from chemistry at the elementary school (which included some limited controlled lab experiments) - all my elementary school grades were "A", after all - I received as bad grades as a "D" (4 of 5, to be more accurate) at the high school. This "D" was the worst final grade I have ever received; not even the physical training could compete. :-)
The bad grade was partly due to my personal fights with our very robust teacher. ;-)
A few months later, the Velvet Revolution began in Czechoslovakia. I was one of the high school's top anti-communist dissidents and moreover, the kids were suddenly in charge of the country since the end of 1989. :-) We have voted that we no longer wanted her to be our teacher so the 300-pound lady - note that I didn't call her an 800-pound gorilla - had to go away.
The teacher wanted me to copy a 100-page notebook because of a few things such as a drawing of an apple next to some text about the malic acid (apple acid in Czech). When I refused to do that in front of the class, she psychologically exploded and melted. But of course, there were other things at stake. I hated to memorize dozens of meaningless formulae and isolated facts about various compounds that looked useless to me and didn't help to enrich my understanding of the world, anyway.
A major part of my bad relationships to chemistry was based on my ignorance of quantum mechanics; I didn't really believe that the "explanations" were fundamentally right. I only understood why quantum mechanics worked - and how it worked - when I was 17 years old or so - a year after the fall of communism. So the previous stories about the shells and electron clouds were just unacceptable for me. They didn't fit into my dogmas of that time. Of course, after several mistakes of this magnitude, I became very careful in avoiding all kinds of unsubstantiated dogmas.
Needless to say, once I knew that I was wrong about many things related to quantum mechanics, many of my other teenage attitudes to chemistry may have been classified as deeply flawed, too. Chemistry is an important science. And of course, because its physical pillars are damn solid, as I know today, and because of its numerous experimental tests and applications, one has to take its conclusions seriously. Well, I still think that we were memorizing too much irrelevant technical stuff - isolated insights that are not linked to anything universally important.
This is a comment I would make about most of the things we have ever been learning at school. However, when one notices that the current generation of kids is apparently so much less skillful in learning things at school than we used to be, it makes one wonder whether the "useless stuff" was really so "useless".
You might conjecture that the "anti-quantum zealots" drive me up the wall especially because I recognize that I used to share their current attitudes when I was 16 years or less. But it's not really the case. In the case of the "anti-quantum zealots", I can at least recognize some of their drivers - the deeply felt belief that the inner workings of the world has to be rooted in the classical intuition. I don't know why it takes decades or life for them to understand why quantum mechanics is just right - while I, a relative former classical bigot, still needed just a few months to give up my flawed beliefs.
But it's still true that I encounter lots of stupidity in the world of the kinds that I have never experienced - and these kinds of stupidity are much more stunning for me than some fundamental mistakes that I have done myself. If someone believes e.g. that the world can't possibly have anything to do with mathematics or some exact mathematical formulae, I am simply flabbergasted. Fortunately, those people usually get decoupled from any deeper scientific debate very quickly so no full war with them erupts.
But that was too much stuff about crackpots, psychology, and my personal education history, so let me stop this rant.
Vivat forests and chemistry but screw the United Nations! ;-)
Friday, December 24, 2010
Merry Christmas
New articles are being posted below this one, so don't stop reading...
Merry Christmas to the TRF community!
Needless to say, I am not wishing any good Christmas to the environmentalists because it would be insulting for them. According to environmentalists, Everything that is wrong with humanity [...] is summed up in Christmas. Among other things, it is a turkey genocide day, we heard from Ethanol Greenfart, before he recycled his granny and wrote a book about it. ;-)
Yes, I mean a White Christmas. In 2010, global warming caused exactly the same winter as we have always been used to. So enjoy it. ;-)
Merry Christmas to the TRF community!
Needless to say, I am not wishing any good Christmas to the environmentalists because it would be insulting for them. According to environmentalists, Everything that is wrong with humanity [...] is summed up in Christmas. Among other things, it is a turkey genocide day, we heard from Ethanol Greenfart, before he recycled his granny and wrote a book about it. ;-)
Yes, I mean a White Christmas. In 2010, global warming caused exactly the same winter as we have always been used to. So enjoy it. ;-)
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
EU LGBT bureaucrats attack Czech arousal test
(Czech band) Nightwork: Global warming - I am gay. The song was marketed as a gay anthem and the band as well as the singer, Vojta Dyk, scored high in the most recent Czech Nightingale national music contest.
Homosexual activists officially paid by the European Union have attacked a sensible test that has been introduced in my homeland:
Czech Republic Denounced For Using Arousal Test on Asylum SeekersCzechia has become a destination of various asylum seekers. And because of the inherent tolerance of the Czechs towards various non-standard types of sexual orientation, the list of asylum seekers includes many gays who claim to be harassed by homophobes in their previous countries.
Czech Dick Test
Czechs using sex arousal test on asylum seekers
Clearly, we cannot afford to admit an unlimited amount of immigrants who could use any excuse to get here. There have to be some tests that remove at least most of the "false positives". In the case of gays, the relevant procedure is known as "phallometric testing" and was introduced by Kurt Freund, German-speaking Jewish Czech-Canadian physician, in the 1950s to fight "fake gays" who didn't want to serve in the Czechoslovak army (gays were banned).
Of course, you're not required to "stand up" while watching a homosexual porn movie: that could be discriminating against impotent gays or anyone who just doesn't find the immigration office environment "exciting". On the contrary, you're required "not to stand up" if you watch straight porn. ;-) If you claim that you're a gay but you "stand up" while watching a straight porn, your gay asylum application is pretty much doomed. It makes a lot of sense.
A hysterical report by the EU's own official gays has complained about the policy - Czechia is the only country clever enough to explicitly introduce it. They claim that the test is "scientifically unsound".
That's a bold statement, indeed. The homosexual orientation may be defined as someone's not getting aroused by the "straight stimuli" so the test, if performed accurately, is not only scientifically sound - it is scientifically valid pretty much by definition. OK, what is the "scientifically sound" test that the EU homosexual activists recommend instead of the phallometric testing?
A UNHCR booklet states that "self-identification as LGBT should be taken as an indication of the individual’s sexual orientation." Now, this is scientifically sound! ;-)
If you want to measure whether someone is a gay or not, you listen to what he tells you. Holy crap. It's like choosing a president or a world champion according to what he tells you about his or her qualities. At least 50% of the things that people say is untrue, and when the untrue propositions are needed to get advantages from a government, the percentage grows closer to 96%.
It's another example how various bureaucrats don't hesitate to denounce an almost perfectly scientific, yet ideologically inconvenient, test as "scientifically unsound" and replace it with a completely unscientific procedure that they don't want to be criticized.
The Czech Republic is responsible enough not to admit thousands of f*ke f*cking f*ggots and if the EU hacks can't understand that it is right to be cautious in this way, well, then they should scr*w themselves. ;-)
P.S. In the original Czech version of the song embedded at the top, gays - the "warm ones" in the Czech language - are being linked to global warming. Everything is getting warmer, they sing. There also exists a German and French version of the song. All of them are on YouTube.
If you want a song about McDonald's in the Muslim world, "Love in a Braided Roll", by Xindl X and Ms Olga Lounová, you will also learn that the supply determines the demand and other things. The Arab guy fell in love with a McDonald's worker haha - funny video clip.
Shoveling snow may be fun
We have lots and lots of snow in Central Europe.
Meanwhile, as Roy Spencer reports from the very place, Cancún in Mexico experiences the Gore Effect. They are living through the coldest December 7th on record.
Two weeks ago, Al Gore admitted that his support for the ethanol biofuels was a mistake that has raised food prices, among other things. Sorry, folks, I was wrong and you had to pay tens or hundreds of billions.
So far, Gore won't tell us that his whole life was a gigantic mistake that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and could cost us trillions or tens of trillions of dollars if we didn't stop the jerk. He's not brave enough to admit that much. Al Gore should have been responsible for his deeds from his very birth - because this was already pretty much his biggest sin. :-)
One of Al Gore's climate groups shrinks. I guess it won't impact himself.
News from the Google company
Google has presented the Cr-48 laptop with the Chrome OS, based on the Chrome browser. Note that Cr is the chemical formula of chromium.
Also, Google has opened the Google Webstore which is their database of "web applications" or bookmarks or extensions - possibly paid ones - created for Google Chrome in such a way that it should resemble the Apple AppStore as much as possible. ;-)
Meanwhile, as Roy Spencer reports from the very place, Cancún in Mexico experiences the Gore Effect. They are living through the coldest December 7th on record.
Two weeks ago, Al Gore admitted that his support for the ethanol biofuels was a mistake that has raised food prices, among other things. Sorry, folks, I was wrong and you had to pay tens or hundreds of billions.
So far, Gore won't tell us that his whole life was a gigantic mistake that has cost us hundreds of billions of dollars and could cost us trillions or tens of trillions of dollars if we didn't stop the jerk. He's not brave enough to admit that much. Al Gore should have been responsible for his deeds from his very birth - because this was already pretty much his biggest sin. :-)
One of Al Gore's climate groups shrinks. I guess it won't impact himself.
News from the Google company
Google has presented the Cr-48 laptop with the Chrome OS, based on the Chrome browser. Note that Cr is the chemical formula of chromium.
Also, Google has opened the Google Webstore which is their database of "web applications" or bookmarks or extensions - possibly paid ones - created for Google Chrome in such a way that it should resemble the Apple AppStore as much as possible. ;-)
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
Privatization of Czech railways
Just eight years ago, the Czech telephone industry would belong to one state-owned company that would be later known as Czech Telecom. However, the monopoly ended in 2002 and an intense competition took over.
As a result, the Czech consumers were able to get high-quality, cheap services. We could become the #1 nation in text messaging ;-), one of the fastest nations when it comes to the ADSL bandwidth, and there are many results of this kind.
Years ago, there would be people who would say that the free market didn't belong to the communication industry. They were spectacularly wrong - so wrong that no one even bothers to mention that such people have ever existed.
These days, the major communication companies are owned by international corporations - especially O2, Vodafone, and T-Mobile. You can't even distinguish which of them owns the former socialist monopoly (it's the first one, also known as the waterfarts which refers to their logo) and there is a healthy competition in between them.
Another sector that "surely" couldn't be privatized was public transportation - buses and railways. Here the success story is Student Agency, a company owned by Mr Radim Jančura, that owns lots of yellow buses.
For example, for CZK 95 (=USD 5.40), you can get from Pilsen to Prague (or back) in 1 hour. You get a coffee (or another drink), newspapers or a magazine, earphones if you want to listen to music or watch a movie, and connect your laptop/iPhone to a WiFi network in the bus.
It's not excessively cheap but I am still amazed that they can do it for this price.
Student Agency managed to re-teach many people how to use buses instead of trains. It's clear that with the capitalist twist, the buses became much more convenient and economical. These days, the train trip from Prague to Pilsen costs CZK 147 (=USD 8.40) - and the actual expenses are twice as high while the rest of them is paid from subsidies.
Now it seems more likely than ever that the real difference that matters is not one between trains and buses - but rather the difference between effective and small enough private companies and the state-controlled huge inefficient dinosaurs. Why?
Because Mr Jančura has just announced that he is planning to bring all of his consumers from the buses back to the railways and abandon the yellow buses that made him rich altogether. Wow! ;-)
This plan was made possible by the new right-wing government that is not going to block privatization. On the contrary, they're likely to help people like Mr Jančura as much as they can. To be sure, Mr Jančura has also sued the Czech Republic in the European Union for allowing the monopoly - one of the random cases in which the opinion of the European Commission could actually move things in the better direction.
So here is one of his plans:
To be sure, the interior of the trains should look nice, too. Here is the second class:
Not bad. But you may also choose to be a first-class passenger. In that case, you may also enjoy things like this conference room:
Well, the contrast with the stereotypically dirty and disgusting wagons we remember from socialism couldn't be more striking.
It seems that he is planning to preserve the bus prices. He is surely not an inexperienced dreamer who would easily talk nonsense. He has quite certainly done some calculations. Nevertheless, during his plans to drag the consumers back to the railways, he seems to suggest that the prices will be equal to those in his yellow buses.
How can he possibly get below CZK 100 - to take the Pilsen-Prague route as an example - if the state-controlled company has expenses around CZK 300 sounds plain unbelievable but it's probably true. In this context, the factor of 3 quantifies the difference between (post-)socialism and capitalism.
It's fair to say that he would still benefit from some old infrastructure that already exists - and some new infrastructure that is being paid from the public money. The tracks between Prague and Pilsen offer the most spectacular example.
When I go from Prague to Pilsen (or back) by train (usually at night when the yellow buses no longer operate), it takes about 110 minutes these days (between the two main stations at the city centers, which is a longer path than the Student Agency bus distance that only brings you to the border of Prague). There are very realistic - and almost completely approved - plans to speed this up to 72 minutes or so.
How?
Well, the old tracks are extremely wiggly and slow near Pilsen. In the context of a project partially funded by the EU (just 3 million euros), the tracks should be straightened. That would also require to build a tunnel under the Chlum Hill, less than two miles from the place where I live, which would become the longest tunnel in the country.
Even if you don't speak Czech, you may enjoy an 8-minute video about the planned construction. It's extremely hard for me to believe that and understand how all the long tunnels, new tracks, reconstructed bridges, and so on can be built just for 6 million euros. Have I misunderstood something?
At any rate, the main message I want to convey is that private companies, especially if they're not too big, are able to achieve a vastly higher efficiency than the state-controlled companies and companies that are so big and badly managed that they have effectively become equivalent to the socialist dinosaurs.
And that's the memo.
As a result, the Czech consumers were able to get high-quality, cheap services. We could become the #1 nation in text messaging ;-), one of the fastest nations when it comes to the ADSL bandwidth, and there are many results of this kind.
Years ago, there would be people who would say that the free market didn't belong to the communication industry. They were spectacularly wrong - so wrong that no one even bothers to mention that such people have ever existed.
These days, the major communication companies are owned by international corporations - especially O2, Vodafone, and T-Mobile. You can't even distinguish which of them owns the former socialist monopoly (it's the first one, also known as the waterfarts which refers to their logo) and there is a healthy competition in between them.
Another sector that "surely" couldn't be privatized was public transportation - buses and railways. Here the success story is Student Agency, a company owned by Mr Radim Jančura, that owns lots of yellow buses.
For example, for CZK 95 (=USD 5.40), you can get from Pilsen to Prague (or back) in 1 hour. You get a coffee (or another drink), newspapers or a magazine, earphones if you want to listen to music or watch a movie, and connect your laptop/iPhone to a WiFi network in the bus.
It's not excessively cheap but I am still amazed that they can do it for this price.
Student Agency managed to re-teach many people how to use buses instead of trains. It's clear that with the capitalist twist, the buses became much more convenient and economical. These days, the train trip from Prague to Pilsen costs CZK 147 (=USD 8.40) - and the actual expenses are twice as high while the rest of them is paid from subsidies.
Now it seems more likely than ever that the real difference that matters is not one between trains and buses - but rather the difference between effective and small enough private companies and the state-controlled huge inefficient dinosaurs. Why?
Because Mr Jančura has just announced that he is planning to bring all of his consumers from the buses back to the railways and abandon the yellow buses that made him rich altogether. Wow! ;-)
This plan was made possible by the new right-wing government that is not going to block privatization. On the contrary, they're likely to help people like Mr Jančura as much as they can. To be sure, Mr Jančura has also sued the Czech Republic in the European Union for allowing the monopoly - one of the random cases in which the opinion of the European Commission could actually move things in the better direction.
So here is one of his plans:
To be sure, the interior of the trains should look nice, too. Here is the second class:
Not bad. But you may also choose to be a first-class passenger. In that case, you may also enjoy things like this conference room:
Well, the contrast with the stereotypically dirty and disgusting wagons we remember from socialism couldn't be more striking.
It seems that he is planning to preserve the bus prices. He is surely not an inexperienced dreamer who would easily talk nonsense. He has quite certainly done some calculations. Nevertheless, during his plans to drag the consumers back to the railways, he seems to suggest that the prices will be equal to those in his yellow buses.
How can he possibly get below CZK 100 - to take the Pilsen-Prague route as an example - if the state-controlled company has expenses around CZK 300 sounds plain unbelievable but it's probably true. In this context, the factor of 3 quantifies the difference between (post-)socialism and capitalism.
It's fair to say that he would still benefit from some old infrastructure that already exists - and some new infrastructure that is being paid from the public money. The tracks between Prague and Pilsen offer the most spectacular example.
When I go from Prague to Pilsen (or back) by train (usually at night when the yellow buses no longer operate), it takes about 110 minutes these days (between the two main stations at the city centers, which is a longer path than the Student Agency bus distance that only brings you to the border of Prague). There are very realistic - and almost completely approved - plans to speed this up to 72 minutes or so.
How?
Well, the old tracks are extremely wiggly and slow near Pilsen. In the context of a project partially funded by the EU (just 3 million euros), the tracks should be straightened. That would also require to build a tunnel under the Chlum Hill, less than two miles from the place where I live, which would become the longest tunnel in the country.
Even if you don't speak Czech, you may enjoy an 8-minute video about the planned construction. It's extremely hard for me to believe that and understand how all the long tunnels, new tracks, reconstructed bridges, and so on can be built just for 6 million euros. Have I misunderstood something?
At any rate, the main message I want to convey is that private companies, especially if they're not too big, are able to achieve a vastly higher efficiency than the state-controlled companies and companies that are so big and badly managed that they have effectively become equivalent to the socialist dinosaurs.
And that's the memo.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Josef Váňa wins his 7th Velká Pardubická Steeple Chase
In the morning, Josef Váňa who will celebrate his 58th birthday in two weeks said that 7 was a nicer number than 6 so he would prefer to win the race for the 7th time. This mathematical argument sounded sensible.
A few hours ago, he won the Great Pardubice Steeple Chase for the 7th time, indeed.
If you want to optimize your chances of winning the most prestigious Czech horse race, statistics strongly suggests that you should be approximately 58 years old, 166 cm tall, 62 kg of weight (the horse has to carry some extra baggage to avoid any advantage from your lower weight!), and you should have already experienced a clinical death as well (Váňa's heart has repeatedly stopped in June 1994 after a complicated collision with another horse in Baden-Baden). :-)
Also, much like Váňa, aside from the death, you should be sure to have collected a sufficient number of milder injuries, including a fracture of pelves, broken all ribs, two fractured vertebras, five fractures of the left clavicle, three fractures of the right clavicle, a fragmented right shoulder, fractures of both wrists, a broken left leg above the huckle-bone, fragmented heel bone, broken jawbone, and five concussions of the brain.
I forgot to tell you that his clinical death in 1994 was supplemented with another serious concussion of the brain, multiple fractures of pelves and ribs, contusion of chest, and a partially torn left lung. Two months after he experienced these mild symptoms of death, he was racing again. As you can see, the training needed for a good horseman is not quite trivial - it's not even easy to memorize what you have to do - but I don't claim you can't do it as well. :-)
You shouldn't expect that Váňa will simply allow you to win because of his compassion. As he has mentioned, if you want to get rid of him, you will have to shoot him.
See the nearly identical text from 2009. A simple argument based on mathematical induction implies that a similar text with the numbers 7,58 replaced by 8,59 may be posted on the second Sunday of October 2011. :-)
A few hours ago, he won the Great Pardubice Steeple Chase for the 7th time, indeed.
If you want to optimize your chances of winning the most prestigious Czech horse race, statistics strongly suggests that you should be approximately 58 years old, 166 cm tall, 62 kg of weight (the horse has to carry some extra baggage to avoid any advantage from your lower weight!), and you should have already experienced a clinical death as well (Váňa's heart has repeatedly stopped in June 1994 after a complicated collision with another horse in Baden-Baden). :-)
Also, much like Váňa, aside from the death, you should be sure to have collected a sufficient number of milder injuries, including a fracture of pelves, broken all ribs, two fractured vertebras, five fractures of the left clavicle, three fractures of the right clavicle, a fragmented right shoulder, fractures of both wrists, a broken left leg above the huckle-bone, fragmented heel bone, broken jawbone, and five concussions of the brain.
I forgot to tell you that his clinical death in 1994 was supplemented with another serious concussion of the brain, multiple fractures of pelves and ribs, contusion of chest, and a partially torn left lung. Two months after he experienced these mild symptoms of death, he was racing again. As you can see, the training needed for a good horseman is not quite trivial - it's not even easy to memorize what you have to do - but I don't claim you can't do it as well. :-)
You shouldn't expect that Váňa will simply allow you to win because of his compassion. As he has mentioned, if you want to get rid of him, you will have to shoot him.
See the nearly identical text from 2009. A simple argument based on mathematical induction implies that a similar text with the numbers 7,58 replaced by 8,59 may be posted on the second Sunday of October 2011. :-)
Monday, September 20, 2010
Adventures in self-publishing an e-book novel
Guest post by Ann Houston
I'm a newbie to writing fiction. Having just completed my novel, Blind Tasting, six months ago, I immediately began pursuing traditional publication channels. I researched potential literary agents (ones who represented books in my genre) and I tailored query letters to those agents, steeling myself psychologically to receive dozens, maybe hundreds, of rejections in the hope of getting one or two offers of representation. I created a database of agencies and publishers and sent my email and snail mail query letters along with synopses and sample chapters -- according to each agent's preference. I was prepared to wait, hearing that it often took weeks, months, for agents to reply, given the volume of unsolicited work they receive.
A week after sending off the first batch of queries I came across Smashwords, a recent online self-publishing service. I had been warned by those in the literary know to shun 'vanity presses' as exploitive dead-ends, but Smashwords didn't come across as a vanity press. Smashwords was inviting authors to retain most of the royalties for their self-published e-books and they were offering access to big e-book distributors (Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon (pending)). Acceptable works for self-publication included both long and short pieces, fiction and non-fiction covering most genres. Mark Coker, who founded Smashwords, sees huge potential for self-publishing digital material at this point in time, given the available reading platforms now in existence. Writers don't need the bankroll and the typesetting machinery to get their works to potential readers any longer, and thus they also don't need agents and traditional publishing houses. These professions are playing a smaller role as gatekeepers in deciding what the public gets to read. (Smashwords has published over 900,000,000 words to date, which is more than 12,000 titles of average 75,000 words in length. It's actually a much larger set of titles, because many works are short pieces.)
I then had an epiphany about my own novel: in the best-case scenario, (not to be counted on) my title would not appear in print via a traditional publisher for at least 24 months. Assuming an agent liked it, they would have to shop it to editors at publishing houses, which would add more months, and assuming someone bought it, the time to publication and distribution to retail bookstores would be more months. My novel is set in an ultra-contemporary time and place, and I worried that part of its intended appeal had an expiration date. In two years it might not create the same impression I was hoping for now.
Then and there I decided to go with Smashwords. It was a very smart and gratifying decision. It was also not without some hair-tearing and time commitment. For authors considering self-publishing, let me point out the major highlights of this experience in the hopes it will help your own effort be productive and successful. By the way, a month ago Amazon announced that, for the first time, it sold more e-books online than print books for a given reporting period -- 140 e-book units to 100 print-book units.
1) The most important point is that self-publishing technology is changing rapidly; in the five months I've been exposed to it things have changed in non-trivial ways, and they will likely keep changing. Changes are occurring in a) who the providers of self-publishing are, b) the distribution channels available to different self-publishing services, c) the input formats allowed for conversion to e-book outputs, d) the reading devices available for e-books, e) the style guides to follow when formatting your e-book for a given service, f) the royalties, pricing and copy-protection options available to authors, and g) the quality of available format-conversion programs and viewers.
2) The industry appears to be converging on one standard, ePub (Apple, Sony, and Barnes & Noble use this format), but Amazon (a huge player) uses mobi, and there are others. The most important point to remember about formatting an e-book is to forget about pages and think of a continuous flow of text whose appearance to some extent (font size, font styles) is under the control of the reader. Keeping your input formatting as simple as possible will result in fewer headaches and fewer surprises in how the output looks. This constraint poses more challenges for authors with technical books containing tables and charts; it's not so difficult for fiction writers. Style guides and user forums for e-book formatting are uneven in quality and coverage, but hopefully will improve in the future. If you are a computer-oriented geek, you may be used to online forums that provide clear and useful questions and answers; fiction writers as a group aren't as technically savvy and, unfortunately, there are a lot of confusing questions and answers posted on forums and websites, regarding specific formatting details and bug reports for various devices. You may have to sift through a lot to find useful information. Smashwords does provide a free on-line Style Guide which is quite helpful in understanding how to avoid ugly output and succeed in achieving attractive output for their conversion process. Smashwords accepts only Word docs as input format, and produces a variety of outputs, including ePub and mobi, PDF, html and others via their master converter -- which is named the Meatgrinder. (Boy, that name gave me pause :-) ) I found formatting for Amazon's Digital Text Platform more confusing -- Amazon has put a lot of effort into helping the big publishing houses get their authors' titles converted to e-books, and doesn't provide as much information to self-published authors. They do respond nicely to your email questions, however. I wanted exposure on Amazon and didn't want to wait for Smashwords 'pending approval' there. (Smashwords does not restrict you from pursuing any other publishing venues, by the way.) MobiPocket and Calibre are free programs that will help authors convert their input document into suitable mobi output for Amazon. I prefer Calibre, probably because it runs on the Mac as well as PC (MobiPocket is only for PC).
3) The effort required to market a self-published work cannot be over-emphasized. I completely neglected marketing efforts of my novel prior to publishing it -- a big mistake according to the e-book marketing gurus. If you want to make a splash when the book goes public, you must already have laid publicity groundwork. Social media can provide efficient ways to market the work: write a blog, have a presence on Twitter and Facebook and link your author profile to these and other similar social media sites. What e-books need most, however, are reviews -- word-of-mouth is what sells books, and nowadays, online reader reviews (e.g., reviews on Amazon) are what creates buzz for an e-book, or printed book, for that matter. Authors of e-books need to find their piece of the 'long tail'; in traditional publishing I read that 7 percent of the titles account for 93 percent of the sales, and 85 percent of all titles never sell more than 1000 copies. There are only a very few super hits. Most authors need to find their niche -- it's probably easier now than ever to do this, via social media and all the resources the Internet makes available, but it does take time and energy. Authors of e-books must be prepared to put in some hours to help potentially interested readers find their works. But, it's pretty exciting to see your book's cover appear at a major distribution site like Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble, and see a review, and that you have actually sold copies of your work! I was deep into this process, and about to upload a revised version of the novel, when I finally received replies to my first batch of queries to literary agents. They were all rejections, all nicely worded and they all encouraged me to continue to seek representation out there in literary-agent land. But, they came to me months after I'd sent them, and served as a vivid reminder of how slow old publishing moves compared to digital self-publishing.
-A.C. Houston
~ author of Blind Tasting ~
http://www.blindtastingthenovel.com
http://wordtravelstheblog.com
(Thanks, Ann! The URLs and images added by L.M. - Ann is too modest to include them herself.)
I'm a newbie to writing fiction. Having just completed my novel, Blind Tasting, six months ago, I immediately began pursuing traditional publication channels. I researched potential literary agents (ones who represented books in my genre) and I tailored query letters to those agents, steeling myself psychologically to receive dozens, maybe hundreds, of rejections in the hope of getting one or two offers of representation. I created a database of agencies and publishers and sent my email and snail mail query letters along with synopses and sample chapters -- according to each agent's preference. I was prepared to wait, hearing that it often took weeks, months, for agents to reply, given the volume of unsolicited work they receive.A week after sending off the first batch of queries I came across Smashwords, a recent online self-publishing service. I had been warned by those in the literary know to shun 'vanity presses' as exploitive dead-ends, but Smashwords didn't come across as a vanity press. Smashwords was inviting authors to retain most of the royalties for their self-published e-books and they were offering access to big e-book distributors (Sony, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Amazon (pending)). Acceptable works for self-publication included both long and short pieces, fiction and non-fiction covering most genres. Mark Coker, who founded Smashwords, sees huge potential for self-publishing digital material at this point in time, given the available reading platforms now in existence. Writers don't need the bankroll and the typesetting machinery to get their works to potential readers any longer, and thus they also don't need agents and traditional publishing houses. These professions are playing a smaller role as gatekeepers in deciding what the public gets to read. (Smashwords has published over 900,000,000 words to date, which is more than 12,000 titles of average 75,000 words in length. It's actually a much larger set of titles, because many works are short pieces.)
I then had an epiphany about my own novel: in the best-case scenario, (not to be counted on) my title would not appear in print via a traditional publisher for at least 24 months. Assuming an agent liked it, they would have to shop it to editors at publishing houses, which would add more months, and assuming someone bought it, the time to publication and distribution to retail bookstores would be more months. My novel is set in an ultra-contemporary time and place, and I worried that part of its intended appeal had an expiration date. In two years it might not create the same impression I was hoping for now.
Then and there I decided to go with Smashwords. It was a very smart and gratifying decision. It was also not without some hair-tearing and time commitment. For authors considering self-publishing, let me point out the major highlights of this experience in the hopes it will help your own effort be productive and successful. By the way, a month ago Amazon announced that, for the first time, it sold more e-books online than print books for a given reporting period -- 140 e-book units to 100 print-book units.
1) The most important point is that self-publishing technology is changing rapidly; in the five months I've been exposed to it things have changed in non-trivial ways, and they will likely keep changing. Changes are occurring in a) who the providers of self-publishing are, b) the distribution channels available to different self-publishing services, c) the input formats allowed for conversion to e-book outputs, d) the reading devices available for e-books, e) the style guides to follow when formatting your e-book for a given service, f) the royalties, pricing and copy-protection options available to authors, and g) the quality of available format-conversion programs and viewers.
2) The industry appears to be converging on one standard, ePub (Apple, Sony, and Barnes & Noble use this format), but Amazon (a huge player) uses mobi, and there are others. The most important point to remember about formatting an e-book is to forget about pages and think of a continuous flow of text whose appearance to some extent (font size, font styles) is under the control of the reader. Keeping your input formatting as simple as possible will result in fewer headaches and fewer surprises in how the output looks. This constraint poses more challenges for authors with technical books containing tables and charts; it's not so difficult for fiction writers. Style guides and user forums for e-book formatting are uneven in quality and coverage, but hopefully will improve in the future. If you are a computer-oriented geek, you may be used to online forums that provide clear and useful questions and answers; fiction writers as a group aren't as technically savvy and, unfortunately, there are a lot of confusing questions and answers posted on forums and websites, regarding specific formatting details and bug reports for various devices. You may have to sift through a lot to find useful information. Smashwords does provide a free on-line Style Guide which is quite helpful in understanding how to avoid ugly output and succeed in achieving attractive output for their conversion process. Smashwords accepts only Word docs as input format, and produces a variety of outputs, including ePub and mobi, PDF, html and others via their master converter -- which is named the Meatgrinder. (Boy, that name gave me pause :-) ) I found formatting for Amazon's Digital Text Platform more confusing -- Amazon has put a lot of effort into helping the big publishing houses get their authors' titles converted to e-books, and doesn't provide as much information to self-published authors. They do respond nicely to your email questions, however. I wanted exposure on Amazon and didn't want to wait for Smashwords 'pending approval' there. (Smashwords does not restrict you from pursuing any other publishing venues, by the way.) MobiPocket and Calibre are free programs that will help authors convert their input document into suitable mobi output for Amazon. I prefer Calibre, probably because it runs on the Mac as well as PC (MobiPocket is only for PC). 3) The effort required to market a self-published work cannot be over-emphasized. I completely neglected marketing efforts of my novel prior to publishing it -- a big mistake according to the e-book marketing gurus. If you want to make a splash when the book goes public, you must already have laid publicity groundwork. Social media can provide efficient ways to market the work: write a blog, have a presence on Twitter and Facebook and link your author profile to these and other similar social media sites. What e-books need most, however, are reviews -- word-of-mouth is what sells books, and nowadays, online reader reviews (e.g., reviews on Amazon) are what creates buzz for an e-book, or printed book, for that matter. Authors of e-books need to find their piece of the 'long tail'; in traditional publishing I read that 7 percent of the titles account for 93 percent of the sales, and 85 percent of all titles never sell more than 1000 copies. There are only a very few super hits. Most authors need to find their niche -- it's probably easier now than ever to do this, via social media and all the resources the Internet makes available, but it does take time and energy. Authors of e-books must be prepared to put in some hours to help potentially interested readers find their works. But, it's pretty exciting to see your book's cover appear at a major distribution site like Amazon, Apple or Barnes & Noble, and see a review, and that you have actually sold copies of your work! I was deep into this process, and about to upload a revised version of the novel, when I finally received replies to my first batch of queries to literary agents. They were all rejections, all nicely worded and they all encouraged me to continue to seek representation out there in literary-agent land. But, they came to me months after I'd sent them, and served as a vivid reminder of how slow old publishing moves compared to digital self-publishing.
-A.C. Houston
~ author of Blind Tasting ~
http://www.blindtastingthenovel.com
http://wordtravelstheblog.com
(Thanks, Ann! The URLs and images added by L.M. - Ann is too modest to include them herself.)
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Pilsen will be the EU culture capital for 2015
Ten seconds ago, some EU officials have just chosen my hometown of Plzeň to be the 2015 European capital of culture. Our goal will be to act as a role model for the other, younger European cultural wannabe towns and villages, such as Paris and London, so that they know what they have to do to become cultural cities sometime in the future as well. :-)
Plzeň - the capital of Western Bohemia whose population is just 170,000 - has beaten the mining city of Ostrava in the Northeast of the country whose population is 310,000.
Obviously, Plzeň - despite being an industrial city - has a much more cultural historical background than Ostrava which is usually thought of as a dirty city of miners and steel workers - although it has gotten prettier, too. However, I am still surprised by the choice, especially because the bulk of the Czech "cultural front", starting from ex-president Havel, has rooted for Ostrava; their support was partially explained by compassion (Ostrava has only received lots of natural resources and billions of dollars in subsidies every year, so there's much room for displaced compassion here).
Obviously, most of the nationwide polls on the Internet were won by Ostrava, too - approximately by the ratio equal to the ratio of Ostrava's and Pilsen's populations haha. ;-)
The difference in votes was just one (6-to-5). But the Pope has already blessed Pilsen with its conservative reputation: see Earth Times. The EU leaders haven't yet done the same thing.
The Pope's enthusiasm can't be surprising. During the Hussite wars, Pilsen was a Catholic stronghold. We have also stolen the precious camel from the Hussites; it became a part of our heraldry. However, Pilsen has been loyal in other periods, too. During the socialism, the whole Western Bohemian region was a "strong wall protecting socialism and peace" on many billboards. ;-)
For Havel, such a negative attitude to Plzeň is surprising because he has lived here for a pretty long time (years?) and his accommodation in Plzeň has helped him to make his future presidency more dramatic. Yes, he has lived in the Pilsner prison at Bory. ;-)
By the way, in 1993, near the Bory prison, an entrepreneur Mr Štefan Janda was shot dead, together with his bodyguard, Mr Julián Pokoš. A famous prisoner Mr Jiří Kajínek was sentenced to a life in prison for this murder. However, Kajínek has not only claimed that he was innocent but he also managed to escape from another prison, in Mírov, which is the most hermetically protected prison in the country.
To make things even more dramatic, the majority of the nation is now convinced - after some suggestive "investigative" TV programs - that Kajínek is innocent, indeed. (I am probably not in this majority although I am not convinced about his guilt, either.) So a new movie about this murderer or hero was recently shot. It's just being shown in the movie theaters and it has already become one of the most successful Czech movies ever. Kajínek himself likes the movie, too. It's so romantic, he says.
The Bory prison in Plzeň
Because the murder occurred in Plzeň, you may see that our hometown has contributed to the Czech culture in this way, too. ;-)
Financially speaking, the victory is plain negligible. Plzeň will receive something like 1.5 million euros - i.e. the price of the controversial modern fountains the city just built plus the price of Entropa; see below. But when it comes to feelings, the victory is probably much more important.
In order to win, Plzeň had organized lots of cultural events which were kind of fun (and Ostrava has probably done the same thing). One of the newest acts - that occurred two days ago - was the transfer of the controversial Entropa sculpture, a symbol of the Czech EU presidency that was celebrating the European entropy and diversity, from Brussels to the science and technology museum "Techmania" in Pilsen, its new permanent home that has bought the structure for $400,000. Of course, unlike the Belgian sourballs, Pilsner wise guys are not censoring any parts of Entropa, not even the Turkish squat toilet that represents Bulgaria in the EU. ;-)
I am giving a popular string theory talk in Techmania in two weeks.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Israel Gelfand: a birthday
Israeil Moisiyovich Gel'fand was born into a Jewish family in Okny, later Communist Crimson Okny, a small town in the Kherson Gubernia of the Russian empire, on September 2nd, 1913 (new calendar).He became one of the greatest Soviet mathematicians, with lots of representations, constructions, dimensions, definitions, functors, patterns, integrals, theories, equations, and conjectures named after him, among other things such as nonperturbative methods used by physicists.
This won't be a full biography and you will have to find better sources. But I just want to mention how small the world is. In 1995, we completed our Czech textbook on linear algebra, Gardener+Motl: We Grow Linear Algebra, with my (later) undergraduate advisor Miloš Zahradník ("Zahradník" means "Gardener" in Czech).
Because Gelfand also wrote a textbook on linear algebra in 1966, we cited him and his constructions at several places. Gelfand had also emigrated into the U.S. in 1989 - a pretty ironic year for emmigration from the socialist bloc (the date of the fall of communism), especially because he was 76. ;-) After a year at Harvard and MIT, he placed himself at the Busch Campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey.
Well, it just happened that I came to the very same Busch Campus of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, in 1997. So I could also attend some legendary Gelfand seminars in the math building that is adjacent to the physics department, too. These were the same seminars that were somewhat religiously mentioned in our textbook (by Miloš).
And in 2000, I had to spend a few hours in a hospital, probably somewhere in Somerville (although my doctor was in Highland Park) - I forgot the exact name but it was a pretty religious place - because right after I arrived from Czechia, some Campylobacter jejuni individuals have poisoned my digestive system.
Sadly enough, Gelfand kind of followed my example in this case. He died in a hospital in Highland Park, New Jersey in October 2009, less than a year ago.
The geography of New Jersey and Massachusetts is kind of confusingly isomorphic. As I have mentioned, the Campylobacter hospital was in Somerville. It's in Somerset County but Somerville (or at least nearby Somerset) is directly adjacent to Piscataway. However, Piscataway Township where the Busch Campus is formally located - including our dorms - is in Middlesex County.
Needless to say, in 2001, I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is "also" located in Middlesex County, just like my previous home (and workplace). And the town next to my new home - very close to my apartment - was "still" called Somerville, as many of you know very well. ;-) 350 kilometers of separation didn't play any role. Couldn't the Americans have invented better words instead of naming all counties after hermaphrodites and all adjacent cities after summer villages?
These words were sometimes enough for me to confuse places in New Jersey and places in Massachusetts, not to mention the years before September 2001 and after September 2001 (recall that my PhD defense, which is a fair middle date of moving, took place on September 11th, 2001 at 9:30 am in New Jersey, 50 miles from the World Trade Center).
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