2007

And as many have pointed out, “definitely for real” synchs up as well. There’s room for love within O/XK-CD.

Via Richard, un bizarrisimo video local: La Tapatia de El Personal. Producido por alumnos del CUAAD ^WP, el video es practicamente una guia sui generis del centro de Guadalajara.

Ah, no se, es tan malo que es bueno… Ademas de que siempre es raro ver cultura local capturada en medios como el video y la musica.

Beautiful? Thoughtful? Well-composed? Ratatouille did much to made me remember how much I’ve always enjoyed food, but Kandinsky in the Kitchen, the abovequoted review of the New York restaurant WD-50 floored me. I had never read food described with such words before, nor had I seen dishes more beautiful than most paintings, nor had I been so enthralled with so original a combination of ingredients (how about a dish made of cured hamachi, lemon leather, cilantro sorbet and paprika ?).

Another great review of the restaurant by The Gourmet Pig, made me realize the restaurant is part of a much wider movement: molecular gastronomy, the application of science to culinary practice. Apparently they can now compress watermelon to give it the texture of raw tuna.

The pursuit of beauty and meaning will never end, will it?

I first saw David Elsewhere in Kinky’s Sister Twisted video:

English first names might be all the rage in Mexico^ELZR, but haven’t you noticed how American Hispanic last names are starting to sound? I’m not just taking about Jennifer Lopez, Cameron Diaz, or Ricky Martin, I’m talking biotechnologist Juan Enriquez^WP, essayist Richard Rodriguez^{WP, ELZR}, dancer David Bernal^{YT, WP}, Google’s George Reyes^WP, ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas^WP, filmmaker Robert Rodiguez^WP, Synopsys’s Brian Cabrera^F, cartoonist Michael Ramirez^WP, YouTVPC’s Sam Martinez^WSJ, actresses Sara Ramirez^WP and Michelle Rodriguez^WP, jurist Alberto Gonzales^WP. It is not my intention to give a Hispanic hit parade^WP, my only point here is how through habituation these most Latin of last names are getting an English ring to them.

Who would’ve guessed it? While chess playing programs grabbed all the headlines, the real world changing app was solving crossword puzzles.

(Google stock recently passed $600 for the first time btw.
It begun at $85 a share, in August 2004.)

A recent, furious storm marked the likely end of a particularly relentless rain season. Two stories from the (d)rain.

The first one has all the marks of an urban legend but my father claims it was a very notorious case, appearing in all the major newspapers of the time. Some ten or so years ago, two daughters of a famous doctor returned from a party late at night. A storm having raged not long ago, traffic was a deadlock and the streets were quite literally rivers. To save their friends from a long, slow detour, they got off at the sidewalk opposite their home, not minding overmuch the drench.

They never crossed. They never came home. Their bodies were found in the sewer. An open, overflowed manhole having sucked them that night.

The second story is neither as gruesome nor, really, a story, it’s just a droll scrap from the past. It comes down from my mother who, back in Guzman, her hometown, attended a relatively posh, nun-ran school where the good girls were raised. On rainy days a man used to wait at the school’s exit with the simplest of carts—a wheeled platform with handrails front and back. Booted, he would push the cart himself, across the main avenue and back, charging his passengers some cents of a peso in exchange of a dry crossing. Prim catholic schoolgirls crowded.

The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.

Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?

That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.

One painful thing about translating between two languages is that you usually have to specify a direction. That’s bollocks. Life’s already too complicated to worry about whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or the other way around.

In that spirit I created the str (“Super/Simple/Synchronous TRanslation”) YubNub command. You specify, in any order, 2-letter codes for the two languages you want to translate between and the text you want to translate. str avoids the direction decision by doing both at once, each one presented in an individual vertical frame. This is not only much faster in practice, it’s more unconscious and habit-friendly.

You can try it right here! (en stands for ENglish, es for ESpañol=Spanish)

You can see more instructions and the 2-letter codes at str’s man page.

YubNub, for the uninitiated, is “the (social) command line for the web”—a social webapp to use (and create!) handy commands that search your favorite websites and do a whole nother bunch of wonderful things. The simplest way to use it is from their homepage but there are a ton of ways to install it. Installing it in the location bar, as I once explained here, is in my opinion one of the coolest.

It used to be the only option to streetmap Guadalajara^WP was to use local mapmaker Guia Roji’s crappy—and I mean crappy—interface. Google, Yahoo, and the like had the nice satellite imagery but that isn’t nearly as useful to give directions. Street names are a whole lot more useful than trees to find your way around.

Englishman Gwyn once stepped in to teach a local (or was a local teaching an English man?) about MapQuest, which has a better interface than Guia Roji but still isn’t draggable.

But that’s all in the past. An unknown while ago Google Maps updated its database and now includes pretty, draggable street maps of Guadalajara (and a lot of other Mexican cities). This is major people.

Unfortunately, while you can search for businesses (in a so-so fashion, there isn’t yet much online info for Google to mine) you can’t yet search for particular addresses. This shouldn’t be much of a problem, Google Maps is the poster child of the new web for a reason—ah, the beauty of true interactivity!

Another unfortunately: the street map is oddly not yet available trough a Blackberry.