Complexes

Facebook offers great functionalities, it is easy, fun, extensible... However, it seems that like many things which are positive for many people (e.g. automobiles), they get overused with unintended consequences (e.g. traffic jams). OK, so I have 400+ friends on facebook. The problem is that I could spare like 5 minutes every other day to check the news feed. With so many people in my feed, I get what was posted 2 hours ago at most. Sure, there are ways of blocking applications, creating filters (e.g. with Better FB ), but this does not work for me. There are just too many posts I am not interested about, but I am interested in few things that most people post about. It is difficult to categorize. Where is artificial intelligence when it is needed? I believe that algorithms similar to anti-spam filters would be immensely useful on social networks. For example, I am interested about the English postings of my Iranian friends, but I cannot make much of their Farsi posts... For users, i...

2010 seems to be a promising year. Here in Mexico, we will celebrate 200 years of the beginning of the Independence (September 16th, 1810) and 100 years of the beginning of the Revolution (November 20th, 1910). By linear extrapolation, we all expect a great event to occur in 2010. But there are different opinions on what precisely will occur. The hope of the people: winning the World Cup. The fear of the people: collapse of the country. The most possible outcome: financial difficulties of historic proportions. The Guajiran dream: the refoundation of the Republic (it has been going down the drain for too long). My personal bet/conspiracy theory: druglords taking over the country followed by a foreign invasion rescue operation.

I finally was able to update my webpage. Its new location is http://turing.iimas.unam.mx/~cgg/

My brother told me a couple of palindromes he recently came up with (in Spanish). This one is a phonetic palindrome, and the middle part is a palindrome itself (could we call this a recursive palindrome?): Adan es "one" ke solo soy rebazo mínimo saber yo sólo sé ke no sé nada And this one is more interesting, as it is two dimensional: ORAR RAZA AZAR RARO

You need a technological update if... you still connect to the Internet with gopher your mobile phone weights more than 200 grams, or you can't receive SMS you still use pine to check your e-mail and lynx to surf the web you still use floppy disks you still use vi to edit your code your monitor is monochromatic or CGI you don't use Google to search the web still have a hotmail account instead of a gmail account burning a CD takes you more than twenty minutes you still use Wordstar you still listen to tapes in your walkman you have never heard of Linux you prefer documents in ps over pdf your camera is not digital your are proud of your laserdisc collection you or your children play with Intellivision or Atari 2600 your company still praises COBOL you don't know what a blog is...

JJ Merelo got me into this... memetic experiment??? 4 jobs I've been enjoying the benefits of the graduate shcolarship since 2001, so these are old... Teacher at the Fundación Arturo Rosenblueth (Introduction to Computing) Teacher at the Diplomado en Informática Médica in the Facultad de Medicina, UNAM. (Artificial Intelligence course) Development Director of Principia Informatica (coordinating graduate studies in Mexican universities, teaching...) Consulting for Tecnología, Medios y Aplicaciones (Tecnomedia) (Worked as developer for the project Astra of TELMEX) 4 movies I can watch over and over and over The Lord of the Rings (all three) Peter Greenaway films... Woody Allen films... Monty Python films... 4 places I've liked (4 is too few, so some of these are a bit random...) St. Petersburg, Rossija Siena, Italia Sydney, Australia Rio de Janeiro, Brasil 4 TV shows I like Fawlty Towers The Simpsons Monty Python's Flying Circus Futurama 4 places I've vacat...

What for to have a blog? Well, there's only one way to find out...