2011 in pictures

So, there goes another year, and this one was certainly full of important historical events. Here is a quick recap with pictures.

The Arab spring protests and riots rise on to full blown revolutions, aimed to depose the life-long dictatorships in many Arab countries.

An earthquake followed by a tsunami hits Japan and causes devastation, compromising vital infrastructure, most famously the Fukushima nuclear power plant.

President Barack Obama announces that the most wanted man in the world, Osama Bin Laden, fugitive since 2001, has been found and killed by a special forces team in Pakistan.

The world wide economic crisis worsens, but all attentions are turned to the situation in Europe, where countries like Greece, Portugal and then Spain and Italy seem to be struggling to balance their accounts.

The first ever synthetic organ transplant takes place in London when a cancer patient receives a new lab grown windpipe. The operation is a success.

Shuttle Atlantis lands at Cape Canaveral marking the end of the Space Shuttle program after 20 years of service.

Two bombs are set off in Norway along with an attack in the island of Utøya by a christian extremist, leaving 77 dead and many more wounded.

Another terrorist attack, this time in Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, leaving some 70 dead.

Rebels capture capital Tripoli as part of the Libyan civil war, ending Muammar Gaddafi's long control over the country. Later the dictator would be found and killed in his home city of Sirte.

Riots break out around the United Kingdom, mostly concentrated in London and the surrounding areas. Commerces are looted, buildings and cars burnt down, in response of the increasingly worrying economic situation spreading to the region.

The Curiosity rover is launched and headed for Mars. It is the most advanced probe sent so far to the red planet and will be landing there in late 2012.

The world's human population surpasses 7,000,000, people.

United States announces the end of their operations in occupied Iraq, leaving the country to run itself after almost 9 years of military presence and 5 thousand killed, times six wounded.

As you can see, it's mostly negative things. Here's to hoping I will be writing here in one year's time, with more good news than bad.

Happy 2012, everybody!

The world in shades of bastards.

cor·rup·tion noun \kə-ˈrəp-shən\
  a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : depravity
  b : decay, decomposition
  c : inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery)
  d : a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct

This is a word most of us are familiar with, and when applied to government or the ruling class of a country or state, it refers to the deviation of public funds for private enrichment, as well as the acceptance of bribes or generally speaking, forgetting about the greater good for personal gain.

It has always been a huge problem in human societies because, like it or not, we are many times driven by greed. It is not a good basis to function on, and it shows.

Is it possible to measure corruption? Well, with some surveys and studies, people certainly have tried. The folks at Transparency International compiled all the results into a simple graphical media where we can appreciate the severity of the problem, the Corruption Perceptions Index 2010 Results.

The countries are given a rating from 0 to 10, with lower numbers indicating more corruption and higher numbers indicating more transparency, based on several surveys conducted (at least 3 or 4, with as many as 10 for some).

I hope there is two without three

This month I've covered a lot of motorsport and car related subjects on the blog. Some have enjoyed it while others want me to go back to writing about random interesting stuff, and I will, but bear with me on this one.

It is with a saddened heart that I write about the untimely departure of two talented racers, which lost their lives a week apart, these past two Sundays.

Dan Wheldon

Dan Wheldon was born in England in 1978. He started karting at the very early age of 4 and continued racing throughout his youth and teens, even crossing paths with Jenson Button, before moving to America to compete in the lower ranks of open wheeled racing, but it wasn't too long before his talent was noticed and, eventually, earned him a seat at the pinnacle of competition, the Indy Racing League, in which he won Rookie of the Year award in his first full season. A year later he was 2nd overall, and the next year, champion.

In 2011 he was replaced at Panther Racing by rookie J.R. Hildebrand, and was without a drive for most of the year. Ironically, he did enter the mythic Indy 500 with Bryan Herta Autosport, and beat Hildebrand to the finish, after a mistake by the rookie saw him crashing into the wall in the last corner of the race.

What a crazy week

So it's the middle of the summer and everyone, including me, is taking their breaks from routines and going in vacations. However that didn't stop this week from being one of the most action packed one this year so far.

We got countries getting their ratings cut , markets going up and down like roller coasters, London in flames, more people dead in protests in northern Africa, all of this merely days after a nut-case shot all of those people in Norway.
Is it just me who thinks things are getting out of hand?

This was funny though:

Video games are always to blame, aren't they?

Have you ever been reading about some historical happening and wondered how living was back then? Well, open your eyes, history is in the making and we are witnessing it first hand. Some day we might be able to say "Yeah I was there in the big crisis of the 2000s".

Either that or it all goes to extreme shit, and we all start fighting each other for food and internet access becoming modern broadband eating zombies.

Goodbye to all that

Today, at about 5:57 local time, the Space Shuttle Atlantis touched down for the last time, ending the Space Shuttle program, after a 13 day mission. I watched it live; it felt  like it is the end of an era, and space exploration won't be the same.

For 30 years we have seen these black and white, goofy looking crafts going up roaring through the skies, it almost felt routine.
The International Space Station will now be serviced by reliable, yet dated, Russian Soyuz rockets, however it feels that we're giving up, sort of ignoring our spirit of adventure. With so much economic turmoil all over the globe, nobody really knows if this is the passing of the torch to another western program, or if a new space power will emerge. NASA's funding is being pulled out in favor of other, less noble, projects. There are no big missions planned; no mission to Mars or even going back to the moon. We have so much to learn out there; canceling space exploration instead of investing heavily on it shows how immature we are as a species yet again. Countries much rather keep bickering at each other instead of pulling together somewhere. Things like these make me lose hope in mankind. 40 years ago we could go to the Moon. 10 years ago we had a supersonic passenger plane. Yesterday we had Space shuttles. What can we be proud of today? Smart phones? Are we regressing?

I can go on and on for years but I'll let some of these pictures do the talking for me.

To laugh, or to cry?

The last mission badge added to the ISS

Mission control applauds the last undocking

Welcome home indeed.

 I digress. I'm sad. See you next time.

You're stardust

Don't worry, it's not the name of a song or a poem.
But do you ever stop and think that everything around you has once been inside a star?


Stars generate energy through the process of fusion, this is, the joining of two atoms with the release of energy. Initially, the mass of the star is mostly constituted of Hydrogen:

Which works as fuel - fusing two of them together will give out an atom of Helium:

Pressure nearer to the core of the star might even start forcing Helium to fuse with itself or other things, creating heavier elements. Eventually, and as hydrogen becomes scarce as a fuel source, elements will combine to form heavier stuff, such as the all important (for life) carbon atoms, oxygen, silicon, iron.

Once a star runs out of things to fuse together to produce energy, many things can happen, depending mostly on the size of the stars, but most will go out with a bang. Stars with the size of our sun will swell up to a red giant and then expel the outer layers, which will form a small nebula, leaving a small dense core called a white dwarf floating around.

More massive stars will be a lot more violent when dying, creating a supernova, the most energetic explosion man has ever witnessed, scattering these elements all over the place where they can gather together as part of a planetary disk for a future star.

You don't want to be around when this happens

So next time you look at a chair and say "it's just a chair", remember, it came from a dying star.

Trivia of the day:
An action will create an equal, opposite reaction (third law of Newton)

The nice things

Getting sick sucks, doesn't it? Going to the doctor, waiting, getting diagnosed. Maybe it's something bad and you have to stay over at the hospital. You worry if your health insurance is going to cover you, your body aches all over!


It is hard to see the good things in a bad situation most of the times, and for a chronic pessimist such as myself it's even harder. Harder than finding a blue eyed Japanese woman.

But getting sick gets you all kinds of attention, doesn't it? Suddenly everyone loves you and cares about you. If you're really really sick, you can cut in line! Or disperse a small crowd if, instead, you yell out "I'm gonna be sick!". Everyone getting off your way.

Yeah there's always something positive.
Like today I had no idea what to blog about, that was awful. Then out of this tricky situation... I decided to blog about not knowing what to blog about.

So yeah that's that for today.
I apologize for my laziness.

To make this post a bit fuller I leave you with a bit of interesting trivia:

Kissing is healthier than shaking hands

But I might need it later

If you're a gamer, you might have already recognized the title and what it is.
I find no easier way to describe it but to say it is a syndrome, a psychological block that occurs when you have something expendable of great value and power, where you never think it's the right time to use it, you might be wasting it 'cos you'd need it later and not have it.
Some examples could be a very powerful potion that grants some sort of immunity, or a very special weapon that only works for a limited amount of hits. A good example off the top of my head is the Master Ball in the Pokémon games, a ball that will capture any creature thrown at (I hope I'm right about this or I'll have a horde of pokémon fans after me), there's only one of these in the whole game.
Then you save the thing and save it enough that you beat the game and the Super Immunity Potion is still in your inventory untouched.

"But I might find an even better pokaman later!!" 

I'm such a veteran

So, my blog is one week old!
Well that's actually a lie, it was a week old yesterday, but I was lazy. In fact, the feeling has not abandoned me, so today we shall celebrate by having a completely uncreative post of things I like.

First of all I'd like to say that I'm thrilled by the sudden acceptance this blog had, it surpassed every expectation I had and I'd like to thank everyone who followed, commented, and took me into the community, specially those who've been telling me I'm a good writer despite me knowing they only do so to be nice... you people, you.

Secondly I want to give a heads up to fellow blogger Dootzkie who posted this amazing video in his blog.
It's the first part out of seven, out of a movie called Baraka. It's an unusual movie to say the least; unlike your regular movie it has no story to speak of, no actors, no lines. It is a documentary shot in the most varied parts of the world that takes you in an emotional rollercoaster which should not be missed. If you read the comments in the youtube page it's not hard to see that it's nothing short of spectacular, for some, life changing.

The world wears top hats

Well it's another day, another morning, and as I sit here with my cup of tea and watch the stock markets fluctuate after huge falls the past weeks because of the Japanese disaster - I begin to wonder if our financial system works at all.

It's well known that recessions and booms follow each other but some way we always manage to not see them coming. How is this possible? How are we always not prepared for the next crisis and every single time the middle class gets taxed and stressed, the lower class gains a few new members, but the upper class is still up there sipping their cocktails in the country club not giving a fuck?

Lately I've been thinking the whole world is like a big game of Monopoly where countries keep playing and playing. Sometimes, inevitably, one of them runs out of money, and the others have to lend it some cash to keep playing - cos, you know, when you lose in Monopoly you just walk away from the table, but you can't ask a country to just go away and stop playing.

If we assume that the riches of the world are more or less constant then we will always have countries which are producing a little more and others that are spending a little more. There has to be a balance, somehow. So how is it that countries all over the globe take turns every couple of decades and fall into economic disrepair? No, wait, how is it that at any given time there's a region of the world dipping into the gutter?

 I honestly feel like the whole system is broken. It defies a number of logics and I think even economists have a hard time understanding it sometimes. But every time I bring this up to someone, they tell me "well it's all we've got, can you come up with something better?" and I honestly can't. But I have hope that there are a lot of much smarter people than me out there figuring shit out and they'll come up with something.

Keeping my fingers so crossed they'll have to pry them open with a crowbar.

Fortune cookies all around

Being a lexicographer must be one of the hardest jobs on Earth. Defining words by just using other words can be very tricky sometimes. While there are definitions that are obviously easy, let's say 'Table', others not so much.

It is often forgotten that (dictionaries) are artificial repositories, put together well after the languages they define. The roots of language are irrational and of a magical nature.

Jorge Luís Borges

It's a tall order to try and explain things like pain, modesty, pride. How do you explain to someone who's been blind all his life what 'red' or 'dark' is?

However I'm going to steer a bit away (just a bit) from definitions.
I've been thinking about the concept of luck. Before reading on, I'd like you to stop and try to define luck.