Feynman on rubber bands

the great physicist talks like a character from "The Sopranos"

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Worse than losing your computer in a taxi

Lily Sussman's story
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Website I shoudl check daily

The browser (thanks to manu manu)
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Mercedes Sosa

I'm listening to the CD they gave us at LACEA. Gracias a la vida

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Colombian friends

What do you think about this

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Reverse causality

My 4-year old daughter: the moon did not come out because the sky is very dark and the moon is scared of darkness

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Google!

Data searching and plotting

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Interesting research topic

Very interesting indeed.   It starts like this: 

It used to be conventional wisdom among biologists that human beings are unique in experiencing female orgasm, but no longer. Nonetheless, female orgasm remains both a marvelous phenomenon and a contentious, unsolved mystery among evolutionary biologists.

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The Olympics may be good for your exports

The Economist thinks that hosting the olympics is always a lousy deal (can't find the article with the exact quote), but Rose and Spiegel find that it may be good for trade.

Thanks to Salvatore

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This is amazing

It works (I tried)

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Why Spain is better than Italy

Here Thanks to Francesca
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Check out these blogs

Zen-Habits
LifeHacker
Seth Godin
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Nadine and the UNSG

A friend told me that UN Newsletter has a picture of the Secretary General with Nadine.

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Performance Enhancing Drugs

Here is the article from The Economist. I tried Provigil (don't even ask) and it's amazing.
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Before and after

Here
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Prejudices

The Economist has a nice article about our hidden prejudices. Among other things, it shows that many of us are biased (without realizing we are) against overweight people. This reminded me of something that happened during my first year of grad school. I was taking, together with a dozen of other graduate students, a course for future teaching assistants. One day, the course facilitator showed us pictures of several students and asked us to guess the best and worst students.  There was a wide variance in the choice of the best student, but everybody picked the same person as the worst student: it was an overweight woman (actually, almost everybody; my friend Nada said that it was impossible to answer the question by just looking at a picture.  OK, I know what you are thinking and, no, Nada is not overweight).

Here are some racism tests.

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Most loathsome people of 2008

Here (for earlier lists: 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2002) . A few examples:

• 1. Sarah Palin: Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency.
• 4. George W. Bush: Charges: It’s hard—believe us, we know—to keep coming up with new things to say about this brutally stupid narcissist, who may have ruined this country irrevocably and certainly has ruined a couple of others, mugging amiably all the way... We used to think that incompetence was just a good cover story for this administration, an excuse that masked their deliberate criminality, but it turns out that Bush and his inner circle are both treasonous, corrupt warmongers and inept fools. One good thing about him, though, is that he has no real interest in politics, and probably won’t give a flying shoe what happens to the world when his term is up. As he once put it, ““History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Here’s to George W. Bush being history.
• 7. Dick Cheney Charges: Still alive. The amount of medical resources devoted to keeping this black hole of decency operational could have cured cancer by now, but if they had, Cheney would make sure to keep it a secret. Since Watergate, Cheney’s been fighting to rehab Nixon’s image, and he has succeeded in a way, by showing us all just how much worse a presidency can be.
• 10. Bernard Madoff: Charges: Normally, the idea of a bunch of billionaires getting robbed blind for believing in a free lunch would amuse the hell out of us, but Bernie Madoff stole a lot of money from charity endowments, and is responsible for two suicides so far. Here’s a tip, Bernie: If you’re running the biggest scam since the Catholic church, handling billions of dollars, and all it takes to get busted is that some of your marks ask for their money back, you really should take some of that money and set up an escape plan. Still, he gets some credit for making Mort Zuckerman look like a jackass. The real villains here are Christopher Cox and the SEC, who investigated Madoff eight times, the last time specifically on suspicion of running a Ponzi scheme, each time “finding” no wrongdoing, which begs the all-too-familiar question of the last eight years: Satanically corrupt or grossly incompetent? Either way, Madoff was finally brought to justice… by his kids.
• 11. Rush Limbaugh: Charges: The father of modern stupidity, Limbaugh spins reflexively, never struggling with issues, because he knows his conclusion must favor Republicans, and his only task is finding a way to get there. In other words, he may or may not actually believe what he’s saying, but it’s beside the point. His job is not to say what he thinks, but to instruct his listeners on what they should think. If the facts don’t agree, he can always change them, as his “ditto heads” are already armed against the contrary evidence with the all-purpose “liberal bias” attack. “Rush is right,” as the slogan goes, and all those nerdy reporters in the “drive by media” are lying, because they secretly love terrorists. It’s this creepily worshipful, breathtakingly infantile abdication of intellect to a blatantly dishonest hypocrite that makes Limbaugh’s audience so goddamn sad. These pathetic, insecure, failures of men look to Rush as the champion of their impotent rage, helping them to externalize responsibility for their own deficiencies, pinning the blame on those darn liberals and their racial and gender equality.
• 21. Michelle Malkin: Charges: It’s a remarkable achievement in unconscious projection that the author of a book called Unhinged could lose her fucking marbles over a patterned scarf in a donut ad, but that’s what Michelle Malkin did when she sounded the nutbar clarion call and sicced her half-cocked league of masturbators on Rachel Ray and Dunkin Donuts for the flatly absurd notion that they were sending a message of solidarity with Palestinians. Right, Michelle—you just can’t sell donuts without joining the intifada these days. What did the nauseously spunky Ray do to incur the wrath of the Malkinoids? She wore a black and white scarf. A paisley scarf. A scarf that was clearly not a kaffiyeh, which, by the way, is just a hat that Arabs wear, not some universal symbol of jihad. In terms of completely false outrage, the only thing that rivaled this travesty of reason this year was the “lipstick on a pig” metaphor panic. But what puts this embarrassing sham over the top is that Dunkin Donuts actually apologized and pulled the ad, rather than try to explain to the fact-phobic horde that they were just blind, raging idiots with the collective brain-power of a lobotomized howler monkey.
• 50. Barack Obama: Charges: Beyond a few token acts of bipartisan marketing, Barry's major duty in the Senate was to avoid legislating, so he could pretend Washington-outsider status and nullify attacks on his non-existent policy positions. That's the thing about Obama and his candidacy: He was a blank slate, the pinnacle of vapid public relations—onto which the benighted masses may project their sincerest, yet unfounded, hopes in the wake of the worst administration in history. Couldn’t disown Rev. Wright, until he suddenly could, and then marred his first moments as president ahead of time by inviting a pastor whose advice to gays is just to refrain from sex for life. Promised not to run for president, then did; vowed to take public election funds, then didn't; backed telecom immunity, then accepted the nomination at the AT&T sponsored convention; expressed displeasure with Clinton's hawkish foreign policy and vote for war in Iraq, then named her as Secretary of State. And despite all that, he's plenty affable. There's nothing more loathsome than a likable politician.

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Cars and Licenses

Megan McArdle tells us a surreal story about registering her car in DC. I have 3 car/driver's license-related surreal stories. One took place in Italy, one in Baltimore, and one in DC. I'll start with Baltimore.

1. In August 1992 I arrive in Baltimore to start graduate school.
   
2. In September 1993 I find out that I passed my comprehensive examinations and decide that I need a US driver license. I take the following steps: (i) Obtain a US social security number; (ii) Attend the required course on the dangers of DUI (the other attendees were 16-year old kids and repeat offenders) (iii) Take the law test; (iv) Rent a car, drive to DMV with my Italian license, take the driving test, and obtain a driver's license.
   
3. So far so good.
   
4. After a few months I realize that I cannot afford buying a car (the insurance is too expensive) and I decide to buy a motorcycle (Suzuki 500). This is where the surreal part of the story starts.
   
5. I go to DMV to take the motorcycle law test and I am told that I cannot take it because I have an unpaid speeding ticket from Florida dated sometimes in 1991. I tell the DMV employee that I moved to the US in 1992 (so, how could I have a ticket dating 1991) and that a few months before they gave me a car driver's license without any problem. She answers that the other time they did not do a background check because it was my first US driver's license?? Anyway, I find out that it is easier to pay than to argue against the ticket. So, I send a $50 check to Florida, I get a letter saying that I am clear, and I take my law test.
   
6. Two weeks after I go to take my driving test. The employee asks: "How did you come here?" I reply: "with my motorcycle." He tells me that I did something illegal (and thus I cannot take the test) because I don't have a motorcycle driver's license. So, I show him my Italian license (this is the same thing I did when I took the car exam). He says: "Sorry sir, I don't speak Italian." I tell him that they accepted the Italian license when I took my car test and he replies that they assume that all licenses are good for cars, but motorcycles are a different thing. I tell him: "look at my license it says: "autoveicoli e motoveicoli," even though you don't speak Italian, you can recognize the root of the words auto-vehicle and motor-cycle." He repeats: "Sorry sir, I don't speak Italian."
   
7. What should I do? He says that I have 3 alternatives: (i) go back with somebody who has a motorcycle license; (ii) go to court and have my Italian license translated into English; (iii) go back with the motorcycle loaded on a truck (note that the motorcycle was already there!).
   
8. Since I didn't know anybody with a bike license and I had no intention of going to court, I went to U-Hual and rented truck with a ramp to load my bike. However, I didn't have anything for tying the bike inside the truck and as soon as I left the parking lot the bike fell. So, I parked again, rode the bike to the parking lot of DMV, took a taxi back to where I had parked the truck, drove the truck to the parking lot of DMV, loaded the bike on the truck, called the DMV employee and showed him the bike inside the truck (of course two hours before he had seen me there riding the bike). He told me to download the bike and he let me take the exam.

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Paul Krugman is looking for a word

Here.
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Winning the Nobel

While writing this post I had a more general thought about Nobel Prize winners. It is a bit funny that after one wins the Nobel in a given field he/she seems to assume enough authority to make statements (either good or bad) about matters that are completely unrelated to the field for which he/she won the Nobel.
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