Bloxes

I wish I weren't a poor grad student so I could afford some of these.

Barack is good

John Stewart summarizes perfectly Barack's best speech so far. It is weird, yet refreshing to see a politician that stands up there and speaks like a rational human being. This "us vs. them" rethoric in American politics is starting to get really old and unproductive. The problems are very complex and the solutions are not very linear anymore. Take for example Sergio Vieira de Mello (or this), a diplomatic genius famous for his crisis mending skills as a UN envoy.

Book recommendation system

I've always liked Pandora, although I don't have time to listen much anymore. I was wondering if something similar is available for books. Although any book (no matter how good or bad) is worth reading, it would be nice to have a little guidance, something like a well-read personal assistant. That's how I found LibraryThing. I guess this book recommendation system is more like last.fm , in the sense that the recommendations are social not stylistic. Google has now it's very own My Library module. Coupled with their online BookSearch project I can envision that we'll be able to read any book anytime anywhere, just with the click of the mouse.

The Devil and Daniel Johnston

This is one of the best documentaries and most heart wrenching stories I've seen in a while. Daniel Johnston reminds me of Bob Dylan in his early days. The sad part of the story is that he develops a severe form of bipolar disorder. This movie not only shows how unbelievably talented this guy is, but how all this talent gets washed down the drain when his manic depressive episodes kick in. Daniel Johnston is still around, although physically and mentally far from the bubbly talented genius he once used to be. He's playing in Denver in April, but his story is so sad that I cannot drag myself through it again.

Ape genius

While I am at it, another great TV show was NOVA's "Ape Genius." Chimpanzees are apparently more of a hunter than we thought. The language and numeral skills some of these trained apes showed were simply amazing.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/apegenius/

Sad and outrageous

One of last week's "60 Minutes" segment almost brought me to tears. Something is not right when the wealthiest country in the world cannot take care some of its citizen's basic needs. Is it really worth having highly specialized high tech super expensive medical care a la John Hopkins at the cost of not being able to provide reading glasses and routine checkups for millions of people? I don't think so. Even in my native second world country things are not this bad.