If people made the right fucking decisions, the world would not only seem better, it would be better. Less car crashes, less time wasted, less unemployment, less abortions, less suicides, less disasters, less stupidity.

• Action-reaction: you decide to marry the wrong person, you have a child, you divorce, the child grows up. The child either becomes l/g/b/t, kills someone, becomes a criminal, commits suicide, or in a few cases, lives a “normal” life.
• Action-reaction: you are skilled in arts but pursue a career in finance to become an investment banker, your ego outshines your skill, you make bad choices, the market collapses, you lose everything, you kill yourself.
• Action-reaction: you are bullied in school, you feel you are being bullied for life, you feel so much better than the rest inside, you feel powerful, you take a gun, you go to school, you shoot everybody.

It’s not hard to make the right decisions, just think before you act, measure your options, make the best choice.

When it doesn’t work out, you know you tried your best, and it will probably turn out better next time.

If you lose your money, break your mobile, crash your parents car, befriend the wrong person… think, measure, then act… Next time. Tomorrow never comes when tomorrow is all you wait for. Today is the only time, this moment.

Lets stop acting like mindless fools and get our act together, lets make the right fucking decisions, for the sake of humanity.

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I have been attached to the BBC News coverage through their website and I saw an interesting tweet posted there:

At first I thought. Pre-empt where the next bout would take place? How on earth would they manage that?

But it actually isn’t that hard. They have a mountain of CCTV data, they have a good amount of servers, all they lack is a bit of artificial intelligence.

The best way I can think of to determine where possible bouts of violence could sprout in what seems like an apparent random non-deterministic method of choice is as follows:

The IT team of the police should annotate the direction of each CCTV camera, including which streets are in view and the coordinates.

Afterwards, the CCTV cameras should be plotted on a 2D map, as vectors (pointing in the direction they are facing, with the length of the vector being the distance the camera covers).

Additionally, all points of interest should be mapped, such as shopping centres, residential areas, commercial areas, shops with high-value items, and shops with low-value items. Most of this data can be readily obtained from Google Maps, amongst other online maps. This data can be extracted and annotated with the values we require (such as the value of the goods sold per area, etc.)

If you think this is a very hard task, it is not. A very simple way of doing this would be to go to the website (or ask by phone) of each major retailer and chain for a list of addresses of their shops. Google Maps can plot them on a map using a spreadsheet as input. There you go, simple as that!

A Machine Learning program could be developed using WEKA (for instance), in which an SVN is programmed to take data from the map-plot, where priority spots include places where high-value items are sold. Additionally, it would take data from each CCTV camera.

Now, how do we represent the data from CCTV cameras? One way would be to take a selection of pixels from each camera, measure the amount of change for a second, and wherever there is a large enough change in different areas of the same camera, we might have a lot of movement going on. So we automatically annotate the data per CCTV camera as having “movement” or “no movement”. Additionally, a range from 0-1 would produce better results (hopefully).

So now we run an SVN machine on the data and hopefully come up with some interesting results.

What could essentially be obtained from this is a vector describing the movement of as mass of people from camera to camera, this vector would be projected on the 2d map. Multiple vectors could be plotted at the same time if there were multiple riots taking place at the same time in the city. A confidence level can be given to each vector (assuming we have built in a few mechanisms to differentiate people from cars, etc). The places of interest could be mapped as hotspots, and furthermore we can predict paths to possible places of interest, derived from the speed and direction of each vector.

So there you go. If you belong to the MET, please share this blog post with your boss (or the IT team) and get working on a system to perform such actions, it would certainly help prevent further stupidity in the future. 6,000 police officers should be able to deal with outbreaks of crime provided they knew where the rioters would be gathering and where they are heading.

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Desde hace años me llegan correos, algunos de ellos re-enviados cientos de veces, en los que los ciudadanos no hacen más que culpar a los políticos por todas las desgracias. Correos electrónicos sobre promesas que no se han cumplido, correos en los que desearían que México fuera un país mejor. Sin embargo, todos aquellos correos solo apuntan hacia los errores que se han cometido, y pocas veces dan una solución concreta hacia los problemas del país.

¿Cual es el problema verdadero? Nosotros, los ciudadanos Méxicanos. Vaya, al menos no estamos haciendo protestas estúpidas como Francia, España y Grecia que pocas veces logran un cambio verdadero, pero estamos esquivando el problema verdadero a final de cuentas. El país no está unido, los Méxicanos parece que por naturaleza queremos aplastar a los que nos rodean, no le damos la mano al compañero para que suba, queremos ser los primeros en alcanzar un puesto mejor, queremos ser los que nos reconocen como “los buenos”, a expensas de otros la mayoría del tiempo.

Para que México en realidad mejore tenemos que actuar como un país unido, dejarnos de mamadas, y empezar a cambiar la cultura negativa que nos rodea. Tenemos que empezar a confiar en aquellos que quieren lograr un cambio, y luchar para que se logre. Aquí estamos quejándonos del crimen organizado, de la guerra de los narcotraficantes, de que el IVA subió a 16%, de que se prometió remover la tenencia, en vez de trabajar más, dejar de quejarnos, ayudar a otras empresas y otros individuos, crear una mejor industria, proponer planes de mejora, y lograr cambios verdaderos y concretos.

Tenemos un presidente que está haciendo algo por primera vez en años para combatir el narcotráfico, o al menos disminuir sus consecuencias en la población general. Y nos seguimos quejando. Por el amor de Dios, cierren la boca y pónganse a trabajar. Démosle un aprecio al presidente Calderón por al menos intentar hacer algo positivo en vez de seguir quejándonos de nuestros gobernadores y políticos.

Ahora, después del huracán que ha devastado cientos de calles en Nuevo León y sus alrededores, ¿a quién le echaremos la culpa? Solo falta que algún ingenuo empiece a enviar una cadena de correos culpando al gobierno nuevamente. Es cierto, el drenaje podría estar mejor diseñado, las calles podrían ser de mejor material, pero no es tiempo de quejarnos, es tiempo de ponernos las pilas y comenzar a trabajar en la reconstrucción, en crear mejores planes de contingencia, y en actuar como el país que deberíamos ser.

Volviendo al punto de Alemania: Ellos no se quedaron sentados después de la guerra, no se pusieron a llorar, se pusieron a trabajar, reconstruyeron el país, y se volvieron mas fuertes que nunca, hoy siendo una de las potencias económicas más fuertes de Europa nuevamente. A nosotros nos revienta un huracán y a los dos días estoy escuchando comentarios negativos de que todavía no hay agua, quejándose que el gobierno no está haciendo nada, y todo esto sin saber si realmente está haciendo algo o no. Saquen las palas, las cubetas, las escobas y pónganse a trabajar. Hagan un mapa de daños, envíenlo al gobierno para ayudarles a que establezcan las prioridades. Aquellos en el gobierno: Hagan un plan de rescate y reparación, y pónganse a trabajar. Aquellos que tienen contactos en el gobierno: Insistan, propongan, mejoren.

Si luchamos unidos México puede ser una verdadera potencia mundial. Solo es cuestion de apoyarnos, unirnos, pelear. Esta es una guerra contra nosotros mismos. Para erradicar la corrupción, el narcotráfico, el crimen organizado, y la plena hueva, tenemos que dejar de quejarnos y empezar a actuar como los ciudadanos Mexicanos que somos.

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But we are a long way away from achieving this. As author Ariel Levy wrote in her first book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, “If Male Chauvinist Pigs were men who regarded women as pieces of meat, we would outdo them and be Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women who make sex objects of other women and of ourselves.”

And I think she has the right to say so, just look around us, walk around at night, you’ll notice it right away. The point is that we claim to be conscious beings, far superior to animals, because we have larger brains, we use a higher percentage of it, we have invented modals, we have literature, television, education, politics. We have started all these different organisations, languages. We have developed tools to aid us on a daily basis, but how can we say we are that much “higher” than animals when most of the time we do not act accordingly?

“This is our establishment, these are our role models, this is high fashion and low culture, this is athletics and politics, this is television and publishing and pop music and medicine and – Good news! – being a part of it makes you a strong, powerful woman. Because we have determined that all empowered women must be overtly and publicly sexual, and because the only sign of sexuality we seem to be able to recognize is a direct allusion to red-light entertainment, we have laced and sleazy energy and aesthetic of a topless club or a Penthouse shoot throughout our entire culture.” – Writes Ariel Levy

I remember at school, junior high, high school, and even at university. The girls just seemed to want to call for boys’ attention no matter how. It seemed like a contest of who could dress the least for school sometimes. If it were not for public intervention, and a very conservative background in mexico, the situation would have been much more severe, probably as bad as some schools in the USA.

“Instead of trying to reform other people’s- or her own- percepton of femininity, the Female Chauvinist Pig likes to position herself as something outside the normal bounds of womanhood. If defending her own little patch of turf requires denigrating other women-”, writes Ariel, “so be it”.

“Women who’ve wanted to be perceived as powerful have long found it more efficient to identify with men than to try and elevate the entire female sex to their level.”, she righteously states throughout her book.

I particularly liked this following section:

“There’s just one thing: Even if you are a woman who achieves the ultimate and becomes like a man, you will still always be like a woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too.”

“It can be fun to feel exceptional- to be the loophole woman, to have a whole power thing, to be an honary man. But if you are the exception that proves the rule, and the rule is that women are inferior, you haven’t made any progress.”, she states further on in the book.

An example I would like to state, concerning issues similar to what she describes above, is this BBC article in which “A top lawyer who was struggling to balance a demanding career with caring for her three children drowned herself in the Thames”.

So, it seems being “powerful” and in an excellent position can put much more stress on your personal life, marital life, and life as a whole when you are a woman than when you are a man. It shouldn’t be like this, but there are many more “strings attached” to a particular high-profile job when you are a woman, rather than if you are a man. Specially if you are married and with children.

I will end this post with a few words the author talks about, refering to women: “If we believed that we were sexy and funny and competent and smart, we would not need to be like strippers or like men or like anyone other than our own specific, individual selves. That won’t be easy, but ultimately it would be no more difficult than the kind of contortions FCPs are constantly performing in an effort to prove themselves. More importantly, the rewards would be the very things Female Chauvinist Pigs want so desperately, the things woman deserve: freedom and power.”

Though I would not agree on the “power” issue, as I would state it more as “equality”.

Note: I am not bashing men in this story, nor am I bashing feminists, or the general female culture. I am bashing the fact that we can’t act decently according to what we perceive ourselves to be. If we are looking for a bright, intelligent future for society then let’s actually move things forward. If we are looking to continue with this utter and blatant nonsense that has been going on for thousands of years, then please, let’s stop calling each other humans, as the term animals might fit us more.

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Pirate Bay administrators Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde were found guilty in the case, along with Carl Lundström, who was accused of funding the five-year-old operation.

In addition to jail time, the defendants were ordered to pay damages of 30 million kronor ($3.6 million) to a handful of entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment, Warner Bros, EMI and Columbia Pictures, for the infringement of 33 specific movie and music properties tracked by industry investigators.” – Wired.com Article

Incredible, I didn’t think this would be the veredict. I really thought TPB had a strong defense. This just proves that rules and laws can always be bent to the benefit of those with the money.

“In a Swedish Supreme Court decision from 1963, he noted, a defendant who held a friend’s coat while the friend beat someone up was considered culpable“.

I just love this comment on the Wired article:

“Now its time for the RIAA to go after those google bastards, whos huge index allows far more torrents than TPB to be easily located. And Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple for making those browsers which make pirating so easy.

Oh and Dell, Samsung, Phillips, Sony etc who make the hardware on which Pirated material is so easily viewed.”

So, things look dim for TPB, or so it seems.

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Some of them can be discerned to be completely incorrect. The point is, developing a critical mind and being able to distinguish between whats real, and what some people want you to consider real.

Movies and Documentaries:

• Zeitgeist
• Zeitgeist II Addendum
• Lessons of Darkness
• 1984
• A brave new world
• The ring of power
• Da Vinci Code

Books:

• Modern money mechanics
• 1984
• A Brave new World
• Da Vinci Code

I will be writing newer versions of this list as I remember more interesting movies and books to check out. If you have any really good suggestions, do not doubt in commenting below.

No related posts.

I have read and been told uncountable times that our rights end where another being’s begin. Technically if we followed that politic, we would find ourselves unable to kill another animal, shout or insult another individual when this might derive a psychological impact on that person, etc.

There have been many attempts at trying to control behaviour, expression and communication via the implementation of laws of all kinds and flavors. In an attempt to be ever changing, ever progressing beings we have tried to become sistematic beings following law codes established by those believed to be “superior” or hold administrative positions, in companies, in courtrooms, in the goverment, etc.

Nothingness

Personally, I think life in the end is a constant battle between what we are told to do, and what we want to do. A battle for equillibrium. Sometimes a hard one for those who really want to express themselves freely and push their supposed limits.

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