thoughts

The World Is Flat

This video is off a smart guy talking to MIT crowd about globalization. The speech is titled after the book he wrote – “The World Is Flat“. This is the most interesting speech on the subject of globalization that I’ve ever heard. It’s very widely scoped too – it touches on everything from Berlin wall and Netscape browser to 9/11 and open source. I’ll be ordering the book shortly too.

The speech is in Real Media format and is about one hour long, so you might want to install Real Player and find a large piece of time, if you plan on watching it.

After I saw it, I was somewhat tired. The speech is very thought provoking and it made my brains work hard. Packing it all into my head felt like dealing with a wardrobe of clothes and a tiny bag. Things were falling out of it all the time and I couldn’t manage the zipper to close.

Rarely I feel like this.

Cubicles and dress code

Somehow I came to realize that cubicles and dress code contradict. I can’t exactly prove this point. Yet. But this thought in my head makes all the sense there is.

Dress code is needed where people have proper offices. If you have an office, please, do weare a shirt and, possibly, a tie. But if the company is too cheap to give you your personal space, demanding proper clothing from you is, well, too much.

Of course, this can be argued backward – if you are hidden in the office why on Earth would you need to wear a tie? That’s why I said that I can’t prove it. Yet.

Three gender race

Olga was watching one of those cheap sci-fi space movies on TV. It took me only about twenty seconds of looking at before I started joking about it – immitating voices, using quotes from other movies, and doing all sorts of other fooling around.

When I satisfied myself with all the mind crap that I could produce, I took a two minute break by thinking seriously about space stuff. The choice of topic this time was – other races.

In just under two minutes I managed to come up with a three gender choice – Triorids. Sounds cool, doesn’t it? Well, in this race, they would have your regular Male and Female, and they would also have a Catalyzer.

The thing is that a Triorid Male cannot have sex with Triorid Female. Their genitals just doesn’t match. So they need a Catalyzer. It’s like a converter. It connects to both Male and Female and helps them to have proper sex.

There are good and bad things about Catalyzers. The good thing is that they are more normalized. If you think of Males as plus, and Females as minuses (you can safely reverse, if that’ll change your attitude), than you Catalyzes would be about zero – somewhere in between. They also help a mating couple to stay together by finding compromises in conflicts and complimenting both other sides all the time.

The bad thing is that Catalyzers have the character, soul, and spirit of their own. They live their own lives. In turms of sex, that means that if Male Triorid wants to have sex, he has to convince not only a Female, but a Catalyzer too. Even if both Male and Female want to have sex, they still have to make Catalyzer agree.

I’m writing this idea down, because it occupied the whole two minutes of my two minute break, but I liked it enough to want to think it over next time.

Now I am back to my usual crap of impersonating cheap movie characters and using qutoes from other films…

On life expectancy

I had a revelation this morning. It was about life expectancy.

In most countries women have higher life expectancy than men. That basically means that women live longer. The reasons may vary. But one of them got stuck in my head like a dream or something:

Women generally don’t drink ten pints of beer every Friday in a heavily smoked pub and then street race their way back home. Like their husbands do.

Purhaps it has something to do with life expectancy. Purhaps it doesn’t. I just liked how it sort of appeared in my head and got stuck there.

Pets vs. animals

Olga keeps bringing up interesting points over and over again and she’s not blogging herself, I’ll use her topics to fill up my blog.

This time we were talking about how progress changes society in so many ways that we don’t even notice so many of them. One of the examples that we do a lot of thinking now is village life vs. city life. Don’t worry just yet – we aren’t planning to move out into some distant countryside.

Maxim is growing up. We have to teach him a lot of new stuff. Some of this stuff comes from books for babies. One category of these books is about pets and animals.

You see, for our generation there was always a distinction between domestic and wild animals. We all had grandmothers, grandfathers or uncles and aunts who lived in villages and had cows, horses, goats, sheeps, pigs, chicken (hens?), ducks or gueese. It was very easy to separate domestic animals from wild ones, because everyone has seen all domestic animals in the village yard at least once. Wild animals can be seen only in the zoo or circus. Chances of actually meeting one in the wild are so slim that can be ignored.

But that was our generation. Now things are much different. More and more people have moved into cities. Economies has grown. And even villages are not the same anymore. In fact, many of the village people these days don’t even have any animals except for chicken or gueese. Livestock is now concentrated in bigger farms with bigger production numbers. Finding a domestic animal is becoming as hard as locating a wild one outside of the city borders.

Obviously, explaining the difference between domestic and wild animals to a kid becomes tougher. The only angle that I seem to come up with is that domestic animals are used for food and wool and stuff like that, while wild animals are left so few that noone can find them, not to mention use them for something.

How do I feel about it? Well, I feel glad. I never enjoyed all the animal stuff anyway. I prefer the “civilized” approach to animals. I want to see wild animals on the Discovery Channel and domestic animals on my plate. Anything else doesn’t interest me much. On the other hand – I had my time. I had the chance to experience the animal proximity, and although I didn’t enjoy it that much some of my peers did. Maxim is getting less of a chance at it. And the generation of his children will have even a smaller chance. But the world is moving forward and these things get compensated. Instead of these opportunities they’ll get some other.

Life goes on…