Martin Varsavsky´s Ruminations

Belgacom (powered by Fon) has created an awesome campaign to advertise its fonspots. A dog called Fifi whose innate talent is to smell for wifi hotspots.  In the middle of 2011, we announced the agreement between Fon and Belgacom and two months ago we reached 100.000 hotspots. Nowadays, we have 300.000,.
 
Here you can see the video. The story would be as follows: Jean has a dog called Fifi that barks when she finds a wifi hotspot, because of Fon and its agreement with Belgacom, this virtue has turned out to be his worst nightmare as she never stops barking. In addition, Belgacom also created a game which consists of finding Fifi in one of the 300.000 hotspots Fon has in Belgium through Google Streetview.

I just heard a great presentation by American theoretical physicist Lisa Randall at DLD 2012 in Munich. It was a fantastic talk on the challenges that physics faces and how instruments like the Large Hadron Collider helps solve them.  In this talk I learned more about the inner workings of the collider and what a feat of engineering it is. There is enough material on the internet that explains this so I won’t go into detail.

But during that talk I also learned that in USA projects similar to this supercollider have been abandoned and that in general it is very hard to fund large science projects in that country. It makes me sad to see science on the defensive, especially in the USA, home of the most Nobel prizes and discoveries in the world.  At one of point in the presentation Lisa Randall compared science and religion and tried to explain without saying so, how science was superior.  To me this was unnecessary, it was as if somebody felt that it was important to argue that medicine is superior to witchcraft. It was self evident.  My view is that if religion does not need to explain why god exists nobody else needs to explain why it does not.  

In Europe most people agree with me, most want science to advance and religion remains more a tradition than a belief.   But in USA the competitor of science does seem to be religion, intelligent design vs evolution and debates like that are a good example where science competes head on with beliefs that do not lead to progress in society.  But this is not the case in all the countries that compete with USA in science.   From Japan to Russia to China to Europe religious beliefs either stand alone ore are on the decline and do not compete with science. America and the Muslim world stand at the other end of the spectrum.  American presidents mention god, mention religion and religion is part of many American lives.  This hurts science in a unique way and that is sad.  In the ideal world those who practice religion would do just that, and let the world move on with science as the way for increasing our understanding of us and the world around us.

I used to think Israel was different from its neighbors, but lately less and less so. My religion is better than yours is no formula for peace in the region. As a secular Jew I would feel so uncomfortable if I lived in Israel with a government who makes comments like this. 

It is also understandable how Europe, which is mostly secular, feels alienated from Israel now and USA which is mostly religious, identifies with the country. Israelis like to say that Europe is just anti semitic but while some of that is true, especially Spain (see my post “es dificil ser judío en España”) what is also true is that in Europe no politician speaks about God in general and least of all as if God liked Jews and not Muslims. Personally I think there is a very low probability that God exists but even if it did there is a proportionate lower probability that it belonged to any religion. I think that God in itself is an extremely unlikely entity but it did exist what would be the link between God and one particular religion? To me God inside a religion is a flag that some carry to do good but most carry as a symbol of their own tribe against others. In many cases God inside a religion is used to justify murder and that makes religion alien to me.

Long are the days of Israel being led by agnostics or atheists like Golda Meir who when asked if she believed in God she said. I believe in the Jewish people and the Jewish people believe in God. Now Israel is being led by people who think God is on their side. Pretty dangerous.

                                   Eli Yishai - Imagen via Wikipedia

This moved me. It is a make believe restaurant in Vigo in which unemployed parents in Spain take their children to “eat out”. They take turns as volunteers. It is really a charity that makes children believe that their parents can afford to take them out to a restaurant. I felt so bad about for those parents. 

If you don’t live in Spain and you come here and go around you would be surprised. Spain is actually a wealthy country in global terms and it doesn’t look poor when you travel around here. But since the construction industry collapsed unemployment grew from 8% to 21%. Basically all of those who worked in that industry are having a very hard time finding a new role in the economy for themselves. The collapse of real estate had a tremendously negative multiplier effect. It is a huge part of the population that is in such bad shape and it will probably take a decade for unemployment to go down to where it was in 2008. In the meantime initiatives like this help alleviate the pain of those who have fallen into poverty.