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First time we went back to Brazil, besides the 40 degrees heat at nights and family discussions about how much more time we spent at the other aunt’s, it was no big deal. So the idea the second time we not to plan better and not to spoil the family any more. That time, there was little discussion, but we forgot to check for the little one’s passport and spent two weeks on queues at the federal police to get it, involving sending his documents over from UK via Fedex (thanks Guto!).

A lot of time (and planning) later, we decided to go, our style, and check all documents before flying. It was wonderful! Besides the usual family fight, all went well. We went to the beach and it was sunny and fantastic. On our way back from the beach I said: “We did it! Nothing went wrong this time, eh?”. It came out as a relief, but turned out to be a curse! At the exact moment I said that, a giant pool of lava decided to come out into existence, as if feeling my moment of joy, just to spoil it. It was a masterpiece, from a Norse god or something.

Wednesday, 14th April 2010

All flights stopped, and on Wednesday itself I knew ours (on Sunday) would be included. As business continuity planning (BCP), I coordinated with my company, my family and KLM to get the most out of the zillions of different news flashing on Twitter, Facebook and BBC.

I have to say that we were a bit disappointed with Eurocontrol. They stopped all flights for safety reason (quite reasonable) but they sat and waited until the volcano would stop spilling lava. As if that would solve anything, even after all geologists said it could take months, or even years, to stop.

Friday, 16th April 2010

Feeling the pressure of $200mi a day each, all airlines got their planes flying with no passengers. Some flew at lower altitudes, most at regular and some even got right into the ash, just for fun (and results). And even with all results negative, Eurocontrol delayed days to slowly restart flights.

Monday, 19th April 2010

We were still stranded in Brazil, with two hyper-active boys, mum without her medicines and dad without his nerves in the right place. We were offered a flight back, but KLM warned it was only to Amsterdam, so we didn’t take it. I said to the advisor to only book us if the flight was all the way to London.

Tuesday, 19th April 2010

We were booked on the same flight as before, but, according to KLM, all the way to London. I was amazed. KLM had done some flights to London already and I thought we were going home, much easier than I had foreseen… how naive.

At the Guarulhos airport, KLM said they couldn’t guarantee both flights, which came as a surprise. But with all the chaos, I thought it was only fair to accept their apologies and proceed with our travel back.

Wednesday, 20th April 2010

But it was only when we got to Schipol that I really understood what chaos really meant. There were a few thousands of passengers queueing for no apparent reason, going in random directions, being directed by random people in random uniforms, working for random companies, pointing to nowhere in particular.

One guy, dressed with a KLM suit, said I should get information directly from KLM (I didn’t ask). Another said that, in order to get info, I should take the queue that would take approximately 2 hours. When I finally got to the electronic ticket machine and had difficulties, the helping person told me she could not help because the machine was not helping.

In the end, we found out that our flight to London (KL1017) never existed. There were other flights to London (KL1019), but they were all full, and there were no confirmed flights in the next day. I had to queue to know that, too. Nowhere to go and no flight to take, we decided to rent a car and head to Calais to get the ferry. We got a big car, put all the bags in and headed south.

Holland, Belgium and finally France, we got first to Dunkirk to check for ferries. There was only a very stupid lady that refused to answer me if there was a passenger ticket, just because I was not in the queue. Of course I would get the queue if there was, but what would be the point to get the whole queue if there wasn’t? Well, there wasn’t. Another fine lady answered me in 3 seconds, and it didn’t even hurt.

We headed to Calais, broken, hungry and without a single Euro, we could only find MacDonalds in Belgium and Holland. But we made it. After several U-turns along the way (the car got no satnav nor AVIS had any), we eventually got there. Now, it was just a matter of dropping the key back and get the 4 hours queue to buy our tickets to cross the channel…

As the sunset began, the cold that was already there began to show its face. The temperature dropped quickly, my hands froze and Renata and the kids went inside. No panic, as it was just a matter of waiting… how naive.

Reaching the tickets office, I checked passports, bags and wallet… wait, where’s my wallet?! Desperately looking in all bags, I called Renata, who kindly reminded me it was in the car’s arm pocket… But I had already gave the car keys already back, in the night safe.

When I got inside the building (3.5hours later), I ask them to stay in the queue and we decided to look for a way to get the wallet back. A French staff wanted to break in with a rock, but I reminded him there were hundreds of policemen around, British and French. It’d be harder to explain than to come home without the documents.

After almost an hour looking for a way to retrieve the key, with no avail, they decided to call the AVIS guy, who arrived after half hour, and he also wasn’t in his best mood… Well, who would? Finally, we made it to the boat, with all bags and children and documents… But our car was still parked on the Long Stay at Heathrow airport, 3 days due.

Thursday, 21st April 2010

When we finally reached Dover, we found that there were no cars to rent, buses were full and the next train would be only hours from then. To make matters worse, the only taxi big enough to carry us didn’t know where Cambridge was…

The Travel Centre in Dover was the key. Not only I could withdraw money (using my credit card, as my account was blocked), but someone gave me a list of telephones to call for a taxi. After a few attempts, one of them got the call and had a car big enough. We agreed on the price and he came to pick us up.

It took around 2 hours to get home, all of us (including the driver) trying to stay awake, but we finally got home around 3am, and after firing the usual emails (family, work, friends) to signal our arrival, we went to sleep.

After 2 days without sleeping (yes, I didn’t sleep a second), it was a miracle I could wake up at noon. We had a minimalistic breakfast (there was no food at all at home) and, without so much of a shower, I headed south, to Heathrow airport, via train.

The train was fine, but the underground train decided it didn’t want to go all the way to terminal 4, so it stopped at Northfields and spat everyone out. I got the next train, which also didn’t go to terminal 4, and politely asked us to leave to get the next train yet, which finally took us to terminal 4.

3 hours after I left home, I was inside our car. All working, I just forgot the ticket, which was easy to work around since I had the booking confirmation and they opened the gates for me. I was expecting some traffic on the M25, which came as sure as rain in England, but my tiredness was so great that I couldn’t stay awake for too long.

I stopped at the A1 services, and had a light meal and a quadruple-espresso that I mixed with a heavy-chocolate milkshake and swallowed in a few gulps. It was yet another hour or so, almost falling asleep, that I finally got home… after 7pm.

All of us, safe and sound, and I had all the time in the world to sleep comfortably in a nice bed. There was only one detail.. During all that adventure, both kids slept like angels through the long boring parts, so they weren’t tired at all!

It is only now, three days after we arrived, that I feel I’m getting back my energy.

A long time ago I read an article about some dangerous psychological studies in the 70′s. It’s funny to think that, at that time, things that we don’t even consider doing, were acceptable.

Can you imagine yourself with a periscope counting the seconds some truck drivers take to piss in a public toilet? Or pretending to rape a girl and risk getting shot (especially in the US)? It’s not just ethically incorrect, it’s dangerous!

Recently, I read an article about some students monitoring 350 million mobile calls just to figure out if the callee’d call you back. Not only in the 70′s that would be nonsense, but people would explode in rage, as it’d be just enough to prove all conspiracy theories at that time (not to mention the cold war).

This is not the first research using “unnamed” data from carriers or websites, nor will be the last. I myself proposed something similar to Yahoo! when I worked there to get the trends and act on the average (rather than tag individuals), and I see now that it’s becoming acceptable to allow research groups to openly read entire databases that before was considered private.

I don’t particularly dislike such type of research, especially when they’re done by universities, but the slight paranoia feeling creep up my spine sometimes. I guess that’s one of the issues that is dividing people into two very distinctive groups: those that ignore completely the privacy for the sake of comfort, and those that ignore comfort for the sake of privacy.

I am in between the two groups, but I can’t say I’m exactly average. I think I’m an extremist on both sides. I don’t mind storing my private emails on Google but I disable all Facebook add-ons and restrict access to all my personal data. I pay everything on the internet with my credit-card but I’ll refuse to the end of my days to use the biometric passport or iris recognition at airports.

There is no logic, really, it’s just the kind of thing you stick with. It is true that governments have more power to dig your data when they want, while Amazon will probably only have my credit-card number. But it’s also true that no government in the world can dig everyone’s data all the time, so it’s pretty improbable that someone is monitoring how many times I cross the Heathrow border.

In the end, only one thing makes out as logic in the whole scene: during the recent years, it was far more likely the government loosing all banking details of everyone in the country than some hacker invading Amazon to get my credit-card. Maybe that’s what’s keeping me from accepting IDs and biometric passports… or maybe I never will…

Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

Most game-changing scientific discoveries had a lot of logic and critical thinking, but also a bit of luck involved. As most scientists, I don’t believe in luck, so the definition of luck here is being the right person in the right place at the right time. As most (good) scientists, I don’t believe, I state, hypothesise, prove, refute, so the definition of belief here is also obvious.

My point is that evolution wouldn’t have been formulated if Darwin hadn’t gone with the Beagle, genetics wouldn’t be so solid if Mendel hadn’t believed the contrary so fiercely, Plank wouldn’t have found the quantum if there wasn’t a major argument about the black-body spectrum and Einstein would have won the Nobel prize for any other thing if he hadn’t been so drawn by God playing dice.

My story today starts in a similar way, but in a much more mundane problem… I lost my keys.

There is nothing I hate more than loosing my keys, especially in the 25th of December when we’re going to hit the road in the 27th. I lost all my keys, car, house, even my USB key. These modern car keys are not easy to replicate, I’d have to buy the whole thing again and loosing your front door key is not the kind of thing you let pass with a simple copy, you have to change the whole set, especially when you’re going away for a week.

Well, after despair came fear. After fear, despair again. We searched the whole house, inside, outside and in between. Nothing. Brute force wasn’t helping, but that hadn’t stopped me to do it once in a while again, just in case. In between the despair brute-force moments, we decided to be logical about the situation and think, rather than search for the answer.

First point, we had a spare of either car and house, so at least we could still travel and come back home. My worries were, in fact, what would we find when we came back home… If I had lot my keys outside or had left them hanging off the front door’s key hole (happened more than once), it’d be just too easy for someone to clean the house while we were away.

So we tracked down every place we went, every thing we did. By logic, I couldn’t have lost them in the city or anywhere I would have gone by car. Nor I could have lost it inside the car, so at least we knew that it’d be either inside the house or around it (including the key hole, unfortunately). I almost cancelled our trip because of the key hole probability, but Renata, very logically, convinced me that everything we did could not have caused me to leave it there. It was very, very unlikely. So we went…

However very unlikely, that still bugged me the whole week and I felt a bit of panic when we got home. But to my comfort, the house was exactly the way we left. That was, in a twisted way, another indication that the key was not left in the key hole. It had to be inside the house. I went back to work, still using the spare keys, but always thinking about it, wondering wherever it was. Sometimes, just in case, I’d imagine that I would look somewhere and see the key there, and be very surprised I haven’t seen it there before. That feeling never came.

This week I thought enough was enough. I had to continue with my life, change the front door keys and buy the very expensive key set from the car’s manufacturers. I put a to-do in my mobile: “call toyota, landlord wrt keys”. It was then that luck stroke with an impeccable logic. I felt like Darwin finding the platypus or Mendel smashing peas.

I looked at our bag of snow jackets, hermetically sealed for the next winter (Cambridge has only one chance of snowing each year, and that was before Christmas), and thought: “If the keys are in there, we’ll only find out next winter.” The simple logic led me to think it’d be much cheaper for me to re-open the impossible-to-close-hermetically-sealed bag now and not find the key than to wait until next winter and have spent thousands of pounds for nothing. The risk assessment was positive, and that led me to the next piece of information that closed the gap: it was snowing before Christmas! It had to be there!

I opened the bag and tapped my jacket, nothing. But the logic was impeccable, I couldn’t be wrong. I wore the jacket and trusted logic above my own despair. Gently sliding my hands inside the pockets, as I always do. The pockets are deep, and I felt nothing at start, but that didn’t stop my trust in logic. Spock would have laughed at me if I did, it’s that serious, a vulcan could actually laugh. It was not out of faith or belief, it was the ultimately trust that scientists lay on logic above all feelings, common sense and general knowledge, that kept me going until I finally felt something…

One of the good characteristics of human beings is to be able to understand other people’s pains. To impersonate them, feel what they feel and know how bad/good to them was something you did. But this post has nothing to do with it, it’s just about the pains I had, and why I abandoned having a wireless connection on my desktop.

Freedom

The first benefit of having wireless is freedom to move around. Not a particular strong one with desktops, though, but still appealing if you like to move furniture (as we do). To the desktop, the best benefit is not laying cables around the house, which for a family with kids is a big deal.

Nevertheless, you still have other cables, like USB, video, sound and especially electric cables all around, probably the same length as a network cable would be. And the benefits stop right there…

Configuration

Wireless configuration is not as easy as it should be. Most boards require driver installation on Linux and Windows (although Linux has been particular strong in wireless drivers, just not to my board). That alone makes your installation of the OS a pain, as you have to install it locally, install the drivers and then update it.

Another problem is that you have to set up passwords and keys, which nowadays is more a user configuration. You can’t just start up all stuff (like sshd or web servers) before you actually log in. It means, before you say it’s a geek thing, that you can’t turn on your computer and log in remotely without logging in locally, if you don’t fiddle with the wireless/network configuration of your “easy-to-use” desktop.

Not to mention that, if you have a home server and want to mount the filesystem over the network, you can’t. Once you fiddle with the configuration and manage to allow it, it still disconnects on log-off and blocks your mount points to unmount themselves cleanly. All in all, the wireless network was designed specifically to laptops on-the-go and not to any other kind of device.

It is true that this issues are being resolved in Linux (drivers, global configuration) but it’s still a good source of problems for the day to day use.

Reliability

Wired networks have a very stable communication channel. If no one is cutting your cables or laying it around NMRs you’re very likely safe from interferences. Once the connection is established, the likelihood of it falling down is very, very low and if something do happen, it’s probably server related (i.e. it crashed) than any cable/card issue.

On the other hand, wireless connections are completely unreliable, prone to errors in transmissions, channel overuse (especially problematic on overcrowded areas like most cities) and walls. Most programs are not ready to accept huge delays on transmission.

I’ve put my router on top of the printer and bought an antenna booster, changed to a channel far away from all others in the area. The speed has increased a bit, but the reliability is still bad. It often lags, slow down and the latency is just not the same with cables.

Conclusion

Obvious as it is, wireless desktops are not rare. Many of my tech savvy friends (and me), have opted for wireless connection on their desktops in favour of a safer bet, mostly because of cabling issues. I’ve been using wireless for all my needs (desktops, laptops, mobile phones) for over three years now and I can say that I’m more dissatisfied than happy about it. This is why I’ve decided to have a long white cable around my sofas and TV set. Luckily, my power cable is also white, and as I can’t get rid of it (yet), it blends nicely.

Even my boot efficiency (boot and login) increased a lot (about 2/3 of the time), I have no more mount issues, using the server’s shared drives is easy and fast, gaming issues are over and browsing has lost a source of problems.

It’s not all roses, though. When I had the drive mounted via USB, things were a bit faster (my router is 100mbps, unfortunately), but still way better than wireless. Besides, I now have a printer and scanner server!

Since the early days (millions of years ago), the human race is being watched. Not by any sort of god or alien race, but by itself.

During the cave age, human-apes lived in groups. Either on trees or proper caves, they were all together. It was, then, pretty impossible to do something and not being noticed. If you want to enjoy the sunset while all others are working hard on protecting the cave, you’ll be spotted. If you get someone’s else wife for a ride, people would know.

Empires came and went and the only thing they brought as a relief for that was the number of unknown people around you. People would know you on your neighbourhood, but you could go away a few blocks and you’d be a total stranger. Moving cities was even better, but that was nothing that you couldn’t do during the cave age.

Even with the ability of changing homes, during your stay in a particular place, you are being watched. Not all vigilance is bad, though. Some might learn that you like football and invite you for the local team. Others could notice you left your door open and warn you, and even babysit your children.

Whenever you interact with the people, you invariable leave a trace. If a policeman asks your neighbour where have you been, he’ll probably have a good hunch and that will probably help the police to find you. The only thing that matters, really, is if you’re lost (and needs finding) or running away.

The Internet is a much bigger place than any city or country, it’s far easier to go on without being noticed. But, as with real life, people are watching. Sometimes for good, other times for bad, and that doesn’t make the Internet any different than the real world.

If you come to my house, I’ll remember. When you visit websites, your IP and page you visited is logged on their servers. We eventually forget your visit, if you were not that important, or clear old logs from the server, but for a while, you are there.

Being logged in a server is no different than being remembered, and that’s hardly a bad thing. What is bad is what you do with that piece of information. And for that, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the net or at my house, it’s a violation of your freedom for me to use that information solely to my profit. Hiding behind proxies is not the way to go, because that is only pushing your freedom even further away.

So, what is neutrality?

Net neutrality is to give the freedom to people do whatever they want, whenever they want and not cap their ability for profit or legal reasons. This may seem dangerous, if someone is trying to do any harm, the chance they’ll succeed is big, but that is also the case with real life. Suicide bombers,, for instance, always manage to explode themselves and no one can do anything about it.

Well, they can, and that leads us to a much worse scenario: Guantanamo Bay. Caping everyone’s connections and inspecting everyone’s packets because some will abuse is against human rights. The same with locking people in far away prisons without any charge just because there was a hunch that he/she would do something wrong whenever they would.

Society is complex and evil. Freedom comes with a high price: harm. If you start guessing who’ll do the wrong thing and punishing them before they do, you can surely save a lot of harm being done, but also you’ll harm lots of innocent people to a no return point. Your society will be as bad as the quality of your guess.

So, judging people for the crimes they have commited won’t change the harm they have done, but will save the lives of people that didn’t commit any crime. Crime is part of the nature. Not human nature, but life itself. It’s not possible to stop it once and for all, it’s not possible to accurately predict when it’s going to happen and the outcome of trying is far worse than not, so don’t even start.

Not only that, but these guess-works give permission to certain people (or groups) to deviate the logic for their own profit. That’s the case of recording companies and the fight against copying and borrowing. That’s the case of idea patents and the inherent inability to think. That’s the case of all major wars since the second world war (and probably many more before that).

Guessing on people’s freedom is evil, not even hideous crimes are that evil.

Spam is good for you, at least better than you may think. Spam accounts for three quarters of all emails sent worldwide and some even attached carbon footprint to it (and here one of the reasons why it’s nonsense). But it’s good for you in ways that does not meet the eye very easily and very few people would even consider it as good in the first place.

Not only emails, think on how much regular mail you receive is really worthy and how much is spam, it’ll probably account for three quarters as well. How much of that is really mean, how that really hurts you so bad that you’d put the sender in jail for it?

Sure spam is a nuisance, sure it gets in the way of the real work, but at what cost are we, the society, willing to pay to eradicate such problem? Well, lets take a look on how spam really started…

Local business

You’re a window cleaner and recently moved to Shlobershire in a very quite little village. How would you let people know about your business? You can go on, talking to each one of the local residents but that’s a nuisance, so you print some pamphlets and post through the door of everyone.

Some will read and call you, some will be pissed off but most will just ignore you. You’ll figure out pretty quickly about those that got pissed off (if you live in a small village you know that already), but then you buy them a pint and everything is settled.

What’s the final cost? A few pamphlets, a couple pints and you got two great things: one or two windows to clean and the whole village knowing who you are. This is, by far, the cheapest marketing ever. The rest of us that can’t afford a real marketing campaign have to find ways to promote our business.

With all the fuss about global warming, organic farming and fair competition in business (if there is such thing), we want to promote and use more of local business than big brands. We’re loosing creativity, diversity and quality if we don’t.

ROI

Just like the local business, some people can’t afford big marketing campaigns. Either because they’re poor or because their business is not so legal in every country.

So, why people still send those stupid ill edited loosely formatted emails, even when it’s obvious what they want? Who wants pills, fake degrees or enlarge their penises? Well, apparently some do and the do reply and may well get what they want!

The return of investment is much, much better than most marketing campaigns. Take Microsoft’s campaign with Jerry Seinfield or the “I’m a PC” thing? It was the most expensive piece of crap ever done. Seriously, I prefer spam than that!

The return rate is very low, one reply in millions of email, but if they send billions of emails, go figure.

But that’s clearly bad, isn’t it?

Well, illegal activities are bad, of course. Either on-line of off-line, drug dealing is bad, banking scams are bad, but not all spam is a scam or a drug selling point.

First, people receive so much spam from normal companies (even those that they have explicitly opted-out) including broadband providers, software, telephone and TV etc and etc.

The smaller companies are still sending physical spam and it’s probably working much better than the electronic spam, but that’s the deal: it works and it’s cheap.

Second, what’s really illegal? Downloading a music you haven’t paid for is illegal? What if you will pay later? What if the author allowed you to? Ripping your CDs to MP3 to listen in your car is illegal? You have paid for it already!

Google has become target of many accusations of illegal behaviour because they host a number of websites, videos, personal profiles on social networks. If people started to massively upload child pornography to YouTube, would the Google guys be in jail? I bet my little finger they wouldn’t.

RIAA kills a kitten every time you download (or rip) a CD while governments detain people for years on maximum security prisons without a single charge, what’s really legal?

Pirate Bay scam

I still don’t believe it happened, even though it was on all major journals for a week, but the Pirate Bay guy actually got a jail sentence for owning a website that allowed people to share files. They’re not criminals, they’re not killing people or (more importantly) getting in the way of the course of business (after all, money is more important than peoples lives nowadays). They just set up a list of things.

File sharing is one of the biggest revolutions of the recent internet and more and more people are asking the industry to finally adopt the technique rather than fight it. Whether they like it or not, it will prevail.

What is worse, a few old ladies downloading very old music (unavailable from any shop in the world) or the fear that the recording industry poses on most governments today that allowed such a scam to ever being turn into reality?

One mistake does not justify the other, but many (sane) people are already saying: Stop fighting reality, come back to it, be part of it.

You can’t fight them, help them!

I can’t imagine a world where we wait people to deliver a pamphlet to hand-cuff them, or where someone is jailed for listening music in his player’s speakers. Unfortunately, we’re not that far from it.

Why spam works? Because there isn’t any other way for those people. Yellow pages? Who reads them? Journal advertisement? Banners? People got used to them and can ad-block automatically. Our brains are trained to ignore them, it’s just not effective any more.

Some companies say they can provide a much better ad experience for the users by spying their lives closer than their lovers. I would object that approach…

There are many (free) systems for local business, but none of them seem to cut it. Maybe because people are always trying to get money in return (weird world, isn’t it?) and end up putting paid ads bigger, colourful and in the front page, and let the real local business somewhere between marriages and obituary.

I have no idea how a system would get rid of spam once and for all and it’s not my cup of tea to think about it, but I’m sure there are many people that could tackle this problem, they just need a bit of money (from the government) and time. It’s not a matter of filtering emails, it’s a matter of removing the need to send them in the first place!

If governments are really worried about spam, let them be creative and help freedom, privacy and good relationships rather than the totalitarianism we’re seeing around the world.

A new world is rising, new machines are taking life much faster than most governments would like and the digital hand-cuffs are showing that none of them understand a bit of what’s going on. All blinds, living in their caves watching the shadows on the wall. Whoever cry wolf is right for no one knows what wolf really is and where is it. Technology is like children, the more oppressed they are, the more you loose control over them.

Einstein didn’t go to the US because he liked the land of freedom, he moved because he hoped (in vain) that they would know how to use wisely the technology he knew how to build. He knew that others would be able to build it and it was just a matter of time before any bomb was actually available. Holding it back was not the answer and he knew it.

I just hope people figure it out sooner rather than later, or 1984 will seem like a pretty boring fairy tale for our children…

Recently the whole family has been engaged in a complete greenification and organification. We prefer regional organic food (fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy products) than regular ones. We recycle everything we can, even if that means a car trip to the recycling centre every now and then.

But the recent trip to Scotland made us to want a new car, and the new car we wanted wasn’t green at all: the Toyota’s Rav4. It took me a while to have courage to actually buy one, but in the week I was listing them to get one on the local Toyota dealer, I saw a talk by Prof. David MacKay at ARM and changed my mind…

Besides being one of the key world figures on information theory, inference and learning, he’s also pushing hard on sustainable energy. His talk was great and it was then I figured out how much difference you can make with little things. Not getting planes unless you really have no other choice, changing your car to something greener and buying food from local markets does make a big difference.

It was then that we bought a Toyota Prius. I have to say that I’m impressed. Not only it runs on battery for quite a while, but the petrol engine is super effective, only turns on when needed and doing 60mpg (21 km/l) at constant speeds. Not only that, but the amount of gadgets and technology they put in those cars is amazing.

I’m not saving the world, I know, but does help a lot. If those cars were more common, if the globalization used more internet and less aeroplanes, and if people ate more local food, maybe we could reduce the energy footprint and than sustainable energy could be viable.

One thing is for sure, people do need to change their attitude towards life and comfort and be prepared to live more and complaint less.

Would you give away your genome to research? It’s a bit tricky to define what kind of research and who will have access to it to do what…

I would kindly give mine, if it was licensed GPLv3.

We’re always trying to optimize everything. Taking as much dirty dishes to the sink each go, brush our teeth while peeing, studying in the bus to school. But there are some things that are practically unoptimizable.

While some cannot be optimized for obvious reasons, like writing an essay while driving a car, others have more subtle reasons for unoptimization…

Take, for instance, the time between you open your zipper and the time you start peeing. I’ve counted about three seconds in average (some people have more, others less). I thought that I could optimize that by allowing my bladder to relax around three seconds before the zipper is open. Then I calculated how many seconds I took to do the whole procedure and was hoping to find a point in time in which I could safely start the procedure in background.

Luckily I’m not as stupid as I thought (or used to be), so I have done my homework before actually starting the test itself. The average time of preparation is around 3 seconds, good, but the standard deviation is around 1 second down and up to 5 seconds up! Which means that I could wet my pants pretty bad if anything went wrong with the preparation procedures…

The “number 2″ test is more catastrophic but far easier to control if something goes wrong, so I had more progress on that one. But for the sake of all, I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

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