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.

HANGOUTS

I chose this title because of a guess of mine on facebook's vision of socializing. There is no video choice anywhere. Facebook is very shy besides. It warns people of not trying to connect with others if they are not persons you know in the real world. One day I realized women love text-only chats. And they are very cautious about relating with new people. So facebook apparently is female-oriented. I read somewhere that more than 50% users are women. No surprise to me. I foretold that any social network site should be webcam-limited to survive the facebook phenomenon. Then a few days ago I find google+ and its hangouts. I confess my operating system is not capable of recognizing my webcam. So I am going to wait until I get one that works well. Until that day, no hangouts to me. Returning to my speculations, I was amazed that the hangouts thing was successful when I anticipated it would be a major issue in the realm of women. Yet google+ is growing rocket-speed. I was confused. So I checked the people in hangouts and found the answer: it seems most hangers are men. Next thing I found about google+ was a site claiming two thirds of google+ accounts are owned by men. Surprise! I really don't know how true is that. Anyway it looks like many googlers are male. If you are a single woman maybe google+ is the place.

THE FIFTY YEARS TO COME

I remember an article from the 1970's on the negative impact of automation in economics. No solution was found and things were left as they came. Now most developed countries are hitting the ground and becoming economically slow. More and more people are jobless. My guess is that not only automation is involved in the current economy's downfall. It seems World War II years were the last important techno-scientific revolution span. That happened long ago. On current time humankind is drowning in cars. To me, this is half the problem. Car factories cannot grow anymore or even survive. Building cars and parts appear to be an important segment of global economy. Some kind of tech-revolution should burst from somewhere. If not, a worldwide war might force the change with the risk of returning to past centuries after destroying the current civilization.

Automation and an economy focused on cars are the combination that leads to a failing economy from my viewpoint.

What to do with automation? There are four choices:

• Letting things flow on their own
• Stopping the automation progress (not likely as I see it)
• Developing some kind of welfare-economy led by corporations
• An unexpected correction devised by governments, companies or both

If nothing is done, the world's economy is going to deteriorate every day. A global war might arise or some kind of civilizations-collision could happen. My bet is that a sort of free income will be given to jobless people only by big corporations in the beginning. Then it should  spread to almost every company either big or small. It does not seem a good solution since nobody wants to give money away. So this free emolument should be very short if determined exclusively by the private sector. Therefore it would not boost any economical growth.

Perhaps the impulse to a change is coming from developing countries which are more free to experiment. So this means a different world with the power moving from Europe and The United States to China, India, Brazil and some other. It is already in course...

Forgive some misspelling. English is second language to me. By the way, this is not a translation from Spanish. There is no Spanish document similar to this.