Last week, watching the news about discovery and the ISS a thought came to my mind.
Here at Earth we are protected from high energy radiations from outer space. Earth's atmosphere is the shield that filters most of these radiations. One of most familiar radiation is the ultraviolet. Without the atmosphere we will be burnt in a moment.
When we imagine intelligent live in other worlds we tend to think some creatures as humans, with a head, two arms and two legs. That is nearly impossible. In the same way some centuries ago humans used to think the Earth was the center of Universe nowadays we think about life outside Earth as humans or something similar.
We know so little of our world and even less of the space that we can not even imagine life outside and we simply represent it as human-like beings.
We are fools...

Here again :-)

Five weeks since my last post. It was my last week of work before holidays and now I have just come back.

Holidays have been a great learning time. I did my first application on Windows Mobile 5.0, I did my first trip to Asia and the best of all I am learning all about pregnancy :-)

I am the kind of person who can not just sit down and relax for a long time. I can spend a couple of hours listening music or reading, but not a whole month, even a single week, even a full day.

That's why I use to use my time in such different things as family, computers, trips or just thinking about physics, geometry or human behaviour.

So after such enriching time I'm here again ready to share my thoughts again.

Self interest

Galicia, the Spanish north-west area is suffering more than a hundred fires right now. More than half of Spanish fire brigades are there trying to control the fires jointly with thousands of volunteers and Spanish army forces. Spanish goverment has asked for help to the European Union. Why is Galicia a real hell?

More than 90 percent of fires are caused by men. Why anyone would set a fire? Some of them are caused by people who throws cigarretes, prepares barbeques, or does other actions without being aware of the risk of doing it during the summer. But the vast majority of fires are set by people who wants to create a big fire. The reasons for this shows how selfish could the mankind be. I heard that some voluntaries who are paid for participating in the fire squads set the fires to have a paid job during the summer, others who are not hired set the fires as revenge, others set the fire to force the cityhall to change the land from forest-land to urban-area raising its price and others have reasons I could not even imagine.

What is happening make me feel sad because other people are loosing their houses and even their lives on the fires. I don't know personally anyone who set fires but I would like to ask them if they think of the consecuences when they set the fires or they only think of their self interest. I believe is just self interest!

Commuting!

How long should it take to travel 30 kilometers? If we use the teletransporter imagined by Francisco at the The future is here! or not... post it should take no time. At an average speed of 120 kilometers per hour only 15 minutes, at a speed of 60 kilometers per hour half an hour. At a speed of 30 kilometers per hour an hour. So why the hell I need an average of an hour and an hour and a half to get to my job everyday? The answer is traffic jams and constructions all around the city. The fastest route to get to my job used to be the fast speed highway around Madrid called M-30. But now it is under construction because the city mayor wants to rebuild it, but this time underground. The result is some chaos and thousands of machines, some kind of paradise for some engineers but the hell for drivers. Here is a small sample of what I watch today: The M-30 inhabitants!

Just ask!

People tends to judge other people. It works this way:

Person A------------------Person B
Intentions - Actions<->Actions - Intentions

Person A has some intentions and he/she does some actions to get the result. Person B does not see Person A intentions, he/she observes only the actions and with them he/she infers Person A's intentions. And with the intension Person B could make a judgment about Person A.
The problem with this is it is very hard to identify the real intentions only watching some actions. When Person B infers wrong intentions about Person A, he/she would make also a wrong judgement.
Because it is so hard to be right judging people it is better not to judge them, unless you want to take the risk of wrong-judging someone. I know it is easy to say this but hard to do.
An example. Yesterday I wrote a post called How to see what you don't see. You could think I wanted to make you to look at the red car in the picture, or even make you discover any trick in the post. The answer is NO. My real intention was to check if I could post a picture with my PDA on the blog by sending an email to the blog page. I discovered that it is not possible and then I attached the picture by editing the post with the computer. Probably no one of you imagined my intentions of the last post so any judgment you could make would be wrong ;-)

So, the answer to really know anyone's intentions is ASK. If you ask you will get the answer to what you don't see.

How to see what you don't see

This is a picture of Retiro Gardens in Madrid (Spain). Between 1630 and 1640 the Count of Olivares and Duke of San Lukar gave the King of Spain Felipe IV some land next to Jeronimos monastery in Madrid. From then to now different kings built different areas in the gardens. 150 years later King Carlos III opened the gardens to the public.
Thanks to all these events today I walk around the Retiro Gardens after having lunch. It is healthy, enjoyable and even now I discover new places inside it.

The future is here! or not...

When I was a child I dreamt of being able to speak or see friends anytime anywhere, today the wifi PDAs make it possible with the video calling. I thought the useful to know where you are and where you are going, today we have the GPS and handheld navigators. I watched the TV and imagined the multilingual TV series, today I'm watching TDT and that is possible. Then it was the future, today is the now.

There are also some dreams to be fulfilled: Real time satellite images of the entire world, travel to anywhere on Earth in few minutes, electronic devices controlled by thought or by eyes, ... All these are much closer today, but let's redefine the future bit by bit ;-)