Category: personal AnGoL

In the Philippines we have a chorus of companies extolling the assertion that because one call center agent position in the states pays for 5 here the downturn only means more jobs. I don’t think so. The real economy is down, and when that happens some companies do dumb things, those dumb things that companies do, they mean lost jobs for countries like the Philippines.

Wal Mart has always had a pay-check related shopping spike – with a substantial number of customers living (as I did when a student) from pay stubb to pay stubb.
But for the first time they are having pay-check driven spikes in the sales of baby formula suggesting the economic pressure is more widespread.
It is about the real economy now.
Bronte Capital: It’s about the real economy now.

I’m beginning to think that this if ready for human ingestion must be regulated.
I believe primarily for people with depression or people who can’t cope with the memory. Basically suicide risks.
We learn by experience and personally pain for me leads to compassion and if we erase every painful memory then maybe we cease to really exist.

The memory losses, report the authors, are “not caused by disrupting the retrieval access to the stored information but are, rather, due to the active erasure of the stored memories.” The erasure, moreover, “is highly restricted to the memory being retrieved while leaving other memories intact. Therefore, our study reveals a molecular genetic paradigm through which a given memory, such as new or old fear memory, can be rapidly and specifically erased in a controlled and inducible manner in the brain.”
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Remembering to forget.

I once ate around 3 kilos of chocolate within an hour period, hmm maybe that caused my migraine attack. But what a way to go!!

Death by Chocolate
Where would we be without the internet and wikipedia?
Theobromine poisoning: Chemists with the USDA are investigating the use of theobromine as a toxicant to control coyotes that prey on livestock. Humans are also susceptible to chocolate poisoning if enough is ingested. The lethal dose is placed at around 10 kg (22lbs).
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong.

Nods head in agreement!

Unfortunately, I hear all the time from singles that their work usually lasts until 8 p.m. (or later), and there’s barely enough time to grab some dinner and a drink before collapsing into bed and starting the routine again the next morning. Despite all the possibilities to meet new people, the reality seems to be that a single in a big city is confined to a narrow set of acquaintances and co-workers; sort of like dying of thirst in the middle of an ocean.
Bert Sperling Answers Your Best Places To Live Questions – Freakonomics – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

I’d be lying if I said i would be a little sad If i haven’t even contributed to the field of artificial intelligence and the suddenly all the major obstacles have been solved. I would be but i would also be elated and would do everything I could to help this old but still infantile persuit.
Almost human
October 12, 2008
In the final round of competition for this year’s Loebner Prize in artificial intelligence, held today at the University of Reading in the UK, a robot came within a whisker of passing the Turing Test. In a series conversations with people, the winning robot, named Elbot, fooled 25% of its interlocutors into believing it was a genuine human being. A score of 30% would have been sufficient to pass Turing’s criterion for a true artificial intelligence.
Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Almost human.

I’m typing this on opera because firefox keeps on crashing, I want to debug this but I’ve got eclipse open and If I tried debugging it with Visual Studio, I’m sure to get an unresponsive computer.! If Opera had as good as a plugin system as firefox, It would probably be my primary browser.!

Well at least the electorate is responsive. In the philippines except for the presidensy you can buy your way into any elected seat! And because the president cannot go for re-election and there really is no party system , we have a personality system of government, this means we are screwed!

On its own terms, though this can sometimes produce unfair outcomes (like Jimmy Carter getting booted for problems that were far beyond his capacity to control) I think swing voters’ habit of punishing incumbents for poor performance is an okay satisficing strategy. It’s part of the reason why democracy manages to work despite massive voter ignorance. The electorate may be composed of people who don’t understand the issues or where the candidates stand on them, but the people running the government have an incentive to try to implement policies that work out okay in order to avoid “throw the bums out” sentiment. The trouble is that Bartels’ study of American elections, at least, suggests massive myopia on the part of voters. Economic performance in an election year has a big impact on election outcomes, but economic performance in other years doesn’t get you anywhere. If that carries over to the UK (and, indeed, it seems to) that means that Labour won’t get any credit from voters for the fact that current problems were preceded by a long and impressive string of growth. And by the same token, voters don’t understand comparative issues — the fact that your country is doing better than most other countries amidst a global downturn won’t get you any credit.
Matthew Yglesias » Democracy’s Myopia Problem.

At the end of the day what we leave this existence when we cease to be are the ideas, the ideas behind what we write, the ideas behind what we paint, the emotions that we put into each song, dance, or instrument we play.
We can’t live like this forever. We don’t have that much time. We must try doing someting of significane. Making art or music that would endure. Thinking thoughts that grows, thoughts that are passed on!
thanks to j kottke for the pointer:

Beyond Flash

Jonathan Harris recently gave a talk at a Flash conference, attended by a community of people that pride themselves on producing amazing work, and his constructive criticism didn’t go over too well.

With a number of notable exceptions, most of the work I see coming from the Flash community is largely devoid of ideas. There is great obsession with slickness, surface, speed, technology, and language, but very little soul at the core, very little being said. I believe that in the long run, ideas are the only things that survive.

That seems about right.

I first learned about Yom Kippur from the tv show The West Wing, I feel that it is a very nice oliday, you ask forgiveness from everyone for a couple of days before you ask God for forgiveness. Hope people from all religions do this. It is a cliche but this is because there is a grain of truth in it but, a lot of religous people are hypocrites , I know of a a very religous man who doesn’t talk to his gay son, and a couple of other stories like that. I consider it right that before God can forgive you you must first ask and give forgiveness to others.
Happy Yom Kippur to our Jewish brothers!
Yom Kippur from wikipedia

Happy Yom Kippur
Forgot to post this at the appropriate time. Oh well, better late than never.
By way of explanation: my father worked at a New York insurance company that was, rather oddly, an overwhelmingly Catholic institution. (A relative from the Sephardic side of the family, named Menahem, also worked there; everyone called her Monahan.)
Anyway, my father did take the Jewish holidays off, as a matter of principle — and his co-workers tried. So they would indeed wish him happy Day of Atonement.
Happy Yom Kippur – Paul Krugman – Op-Ed Columnist – New York Times Blog.