THE PERFECT BLOG

I have been thinking of what an electronic text should look like. 

The core strategy is readability, which means:

• Simple and easy to understand fonts
• A single basic font and color
• Not huddled letters
• A pale background either yellow, brown or mustard
• Reduced width (some five inches)
• Some space between lines

Then it comes the content itself. It should be:

• Grammarly correct
• Easy-to-understand sentences
• Original
• Interesting
• Short
• Moving to reflection or action

HAPPINESS, A QUICK REFERENCE

Some hints to live an easier life

• People who perceive the divine as something we flow in, tend to be happier than those who see God as a distant and hard to access judge. I guess it is due to guilt and the fear on the outcome of death
• Accept yourself as you are
• Taking good health care
• Feeling or being loved by your surrounding people (relatives, neighbors, etc.)
• Not tormenting yourself with the past. There is no way to change it after all
• Not keeping grudges
• Being thankful for the learned lesson from who harmed you
• Have a lifeproject and keep on pursuing it
• Enjoying the present moment such as is
• Not distressing with a never coming future
• Experiencing the flow, which means getting lost in some activity one enjoys
• Not burdening the soul with guilt
• Not causing harm to others
• Seeing the funny side on everything
• Telling your problems to someone (you trust) so you can release pressure
• Having a secure financial life. Money isn't happiness but an uncertain future or present leads to worry, which leads to unhappiness
• Not worrying too much on what others think about you
• Help somebody solve their problems (and expect backfire not gratitude)
• Don't deny your negative emotions, just try to understand where they come from
• Never mask your problems but face them constructively
• Getting off the routine from time to time
• Avoid self-defeating inner talk (e.g. thinking how stupid I am)
• Take a risk, try new things
• Share the joy of your relatives or friends success
   

 Links:

Happiness I

Happiness II

Tricks
Eudaimonic happiness

UBERWEB

Current access to the Internet poses a series of problems to individual rights such as privacy issues, intelectual property threats coming from the terms of use (the contract). It seems the internet has evolved into a national security tool for the United States. Yet the whole world makes use of it. For US people some irruption into their cyberlives might be acceptable as long as it ensures their security and freedom. To the rest of us there is no benefit. I do not know if in the United States there are means to prevent other people from breaking into one's web connections. I guess there are, since it looks like they trust the internet for business. In my case that is not possible. I am outside the United States and I have never felt secure on the internet. Attacks to any of my web accounts have been common. Breaking passwords appears to be really easy. So it is hard for me to pass a credit card into any web service. One last and devastating issue on internet terms of use is that providers determine what you can upload or not. They define political correctness rules for anything you upload, even if it is a simple letter to a close friend. So the internet has become some kind of big brother that molds even your thoughts.

I think there is a lot of room for a new and very different electronic network. One that guarantees privacy, security, freedom, property and which should be world-wide dispersed so it does not become a national security instrument for a particular country. If it can happen it will come true. American corporations are surely going to refuse it. Are american individuals going to take it?

Links

The web 2.0

The web 3.0

THE JUDGMENT DAY

Terminator film throws a warning on robots taking over and wiping all of us out. It is not a new idea. It appears to be running around since XIX century. It brings some worry on the future. But there are many other concerns that can lead human race to self destruction much sooner than this robotic-artificial-intelligence-doom. Genetical engineering can lead to out of control mutations or diseases. Automation seems to be driving developed countries into a collapse. Even current nuclear weapons might kill most human population. People live huddled in cities. This exacts a sea of oil flowing to multimillion humans towns. If this black blood begins running short, the whole civilisation of cities would quickly die.

For machines to take over it is required two curious abilities that humans do not master yet: Self replication and self repairing. No device can rule humans if not carrying these skills. No single robot will decide our destiny if it is not self-aware and capable of desire. The only out-of-control-technology threat to mankind might be the grey goo. It is a nanotech hell of tiny machines replicating uncontrollably until they destroy all life on earth. When nuclear weapons were only a project it was suspected that a single detonation was going to spread through the whole universe and bring it all to an end. It did not happen. So even the grey goo is perhaps just too much fear. And same as nuclear bombs no grey goo or tech-doom will prevent people from trying new things.

DIE HARD2 AGAINST REALITY...

One of these weekends I found this movie on a public tv station. I usually do not invest time in action movies. But it caught my eye when reviewing the technological evolution. There were no cellphones. Wireless communication was a novelty. Scenes are slower than nowadays. So I found it less violent than I remember. The script is absolutely unreal. After all it is a movie to hypnotise the audiencie through violence. The story is about some guys who devise a bloody plot just to free a single man. But it takes seizing a whole airport in Washington. And as a warning bad guys crash a huge airplane full of passengers. Killing lots of people is a mass-crime thousands of times more relevant than simply attempting to save a man from justice. It is an absurdity only conceived to make possible a film of explosions. Could it happen in the real world? What if this movie was inspiring for the terrorist attacks of september 11th of 2001? Reality proved to be more fantastic than an action movie.