Our president

Our dearest president is an idiot. "His" party lost the elections for finally doing something (in contrast to the time when he was a prime minister-he talked about reforms but haven't done most of them), most notably for their reform of health care system. Some people even mention very unpopular, yet very necessary, end of rent control.
Our president recently said: "If you would ask me if I remember any reform done in the past few years, I wouldn't be able to name any". Well, except the one or two that lost the ODS (his) party the elections, obviously. But those do not count, right?

Well, our president is just using this opportunity to get even with a guy he did not like from the very beginning, who took the position of head of the party from him and whom he tried to "kill" right after he (Topolanek) was elected to lead the party.

I would not bother to write about this, except that the government after 20 years of total failures, finally seems to understand what needs to be done. The quality of their work is not at what most western democracies are used to, but it moved from East to West in the past two years more than ever before. It would be a pity to see such government fail.

Law and Order

I have always preferred Law and Order to CSI because of more realistic stories and script. However, after watching season finale of SVU, I can't stop thinking how lame the script is. Imagine a no-lawyer self-defending himself who questions basics of standard techniques police uses or a cop, who goes to get his partner who was kidnapped and DOES NOT TELL anyone. More stupidities keep coming, as the story unravels. I guess 18 years is 18 years. But it seems more acceptable that Maggie did not age during that same time.

Louis Vuitton

I always consider LV as a firm which existence I have to accept, but will never be really happy about. I could not articulate why, but this is one of the good reasons:

An artist named Nadia Plesner recently put together a project to try to raise money for the victims of genocide in Darfur. As part of the campaign, she created a t-shirt with a drawn image of a Darfur victim "pimped" out to look like Paris Hilton -- that is, carrying a designer handbag and a small dressed up dog. The entire profits from the t-shirts are going to help the victims. The handbag drawn in the image is not specifically a Louis Vuitton bag, but the design firm seems to have gone ballistic, claiming all sorts of intellectual property rights it simply does not possess. First, it sent a (admittedly friendly) cease-and-desist, which Plesner wrote about on the site, while responding and telling the company that she would not take down the t-shirt or the image. In response, LV went from friendly to nasty. It sued, demanding $7,500 for each day she keeps selling the product, $7,500 for each day she displays its original cease-and-desist letter and (my favorite) $7,500 for each day she mentions the name "Louis Vuitton" on her website.

Skynet

Watching Sarah Connor's chronicles and reading about Google, I can't stop wondering whether the first worldwide artificial intelligence will not be a military network, but Google's Cloud.
As this report claims Google has about 1 million computers (other estimates generally agree), plugged into the network, reliable, robust, redundant.

Technology

Isn't technology making us stupid?



Well, it probably isn't always making us smarter.

EU and Czech Republic.

IDnes - Czech news website has decided to completely ruin its already poor reputation by publishing this piece called "End of the old times". Author, Petr Kostka, claims to be an economist and seems to aim to join a group of "economists" around Vaclav Klaus (he will appoint couple of Board Members of Czech National Bank, so it's good to be a member of such group) by his article that tries to criticize European Union.
Unfortunately, the author does a very poor job at what he is doing and some of his claims seem to reach level previously rarely found even in the worst articles. For example, he claims that EU resign on military power and that USA, who twice sacrificed millions of its soldiers and citizens may not do so again. (I leave this pearl of wisdom without further comment).
He is weak in other arguments as well. He criticizes strong over-bureaucratic center, which is not unusual (and may be even correct), but does not tell us anything else. He also criticizes that the internal market is not free enough.
It is not clear what Petr Kostka actually wants. Part of the article seems to want EU to do more, some of it want it to go away.
And this is the core of poor Czech criticism in general. We are there, EU is not going away. Plenty of things are wrong (some of them are great), so let's fix them. Occasional proclamations like "too much bureaucracy" without any additional detail certainly won't help.
P.S. Those who know me probably remember the time I was criticizing EU. I still disagree with many things it is doing, yet I have come to accept the good things. Thus, I want to criticize to improve it, not to destroy it. Because that would be the return of old times we certainly don't want to see.

Intelligence

A friend of mine asked me once whether I consider myself "smart" and I answered "No". She explained to me that it means that I'm very smart. Allegedly, people smarter than average but not really smart consider themselves very smart and are proud of it (why not). Very smart people are aware of the fact that they are smart but also realize that there is a plenty of people much smarter then them.
After that explanation, I'm ready to answer the question about my intelligence by saying something like "yes, but not much". Nobody asks anymore.
I have recently discovered another measure of intelligence. It makes me look smart so why not to write about it. It relates your intelligence with the number of people you know who are so much smarter than you that you hardly understand them.
I did not know anybody like that till I came to San Diego (That's the part that should make me look good). I of course knew plenty of people smarter than me. With those people, however, I was able understand their reasoning, even if I was not able to think that fast or clearly myself.
This is different - you hear someone saying something, it makes perfect sense yet you know that the person means more than you understand. It's a strange feeling. I would like to have an opportunity to see whether I will eventually be able to understand or whether the difference is so big that I have no chance.
P.S. The guy I have in mind is probably the only person who (I think) qualifies or will qualify for a Nobel prize and did not get it yet. He is too young.