After a few hours of a train ride from my inconveniently located town to Prague and the subsequent 80 minutes flight to Amsterdam, we arrived to our hostel situated just across the canal from the Red Light district in the European city of sins. I must admit I am a little surprised by the magnitude of the party nature of the city — the downtown Amsterdam has one bar adjacent to the other, with a number of famous coffee shops on each street and the ubiquitous weed smoke in the air. The city narrow streets are full of tourists, mostly of groups of American teen girls who are constantly giggling, who from time to time must jump towards the building on either side, because the omnipresent recklessly riding cyclists apparently enjoy scaring every soul, no matter how much under the influence of the “smog.”

But the town hall had realized the city life revolves around the smoke (no matter where it originates from) way too much beyond the acceptable level and it started taking actions. A regulation prohibiting smoking tobacco in public came into effect yesterday. The enforcement of the law that sets the legal age for the usage of various addictive substances got stricter, causing trouble for my brother to get his keys to his room. The issue was that a few days ago, a 17-year old girl took a puff of someone’s weed cigarette and ended up with a seizure and had to be rushed into a hospital, with police giving the hostel a fat fine and adding it to a list of misbehaving establishments. I had to argue with the receptionist to give us the keys and take all responsibility for my 16-years old brother’s action (responsibility I had agreed on as I am listed as his supervisor for the duration of the festival). Thankfully we now have a place to sleep in, however tomorrow a new round of negotiations, persuasions and begging will take place as the hostel manager will come over to have a chat with me.

As for the festival, it hasn’t started yet. The official opening will be tomorrow evening, giving me a full free day to explore the city’s museums. Just to let you know what the festival is supposed to be about: it should be a gathering of young people from all over Europe who created short videos related to current issues that are debated in the society (mainly immigration). I will refrain from commenting on the quality of the videos, mainly because I am taking part in the debating part of the event. On Friday I am about to attend a long debating workshop that should teach me basic debating skills (sic) after which an official competitive debate should follow (I am only hoping all 250 people will be watching it, I sort of miss the excitement coming from speaking to crowds).

I’ll write more about any happenings later.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the plans of Hasbro, a toy maker, to further capitalize its successful board games, most notably Monopoly. Those games, their well known stories and infamous endings that for countless times caused a family crisis in our living room, are to be made into a movie. I’m quite looking forward to the piece on Monopoly — perhaps because I have always been the one the others accused of cheating after being forced to sell their shirts and pants to pay the fine from stepping on my set of railway stations?

I don’t know who first had this idea, but he or she deserves to be punished cruelly. But even the severest punishment on the inventor won’t offset the psychological harm every public and commercial radio listener, TV viewer, or even a newspaper reader is suffering from every day.

The idea seems innocuous: the reporter asks seven years old kids questions that regard current events in politics, economics or sport, and those innocent little humans openly express their opinions on the subjects. The grownups are then supposed to laugh, for instance when a child with so far immaculate perception of the world babbles a cute-sounding condemnation of our vice-PM’s obvious yet unproven corrupted behavior.

It used to be funny — when such three minute segment appeared in the broadcasting of our national public radio once a week, on Saturday afternoons. It stopped being fun when a new CEO of the radio took over at the beginning of January (only to be transferred to a mental asylum after less than three months of work during which she managed to make a foe of anybody, because of her newly kindled über-arrogant behavior) who decided the broadcasting should appeal to masses rather than elite. Therefore little kids’ chitchats started to be on air more and more often. A few weeks after this massive incursions into normal people’s daily lives, other radios started to broadcast their little kids’ chitchats. Then the TV jumped on the bandwagon, giving no choice to the newspaper (to be fair to its Thursday magazine). A quick revolution put elementary school children under the lights of omnipresent reflectors.

I just wonder why the doctors don’t go out on a street and ask people some medical-related question, the ones general public is oblivious about (what is your stand on the ethically controversial issue on further exploration of the SGBG gene in chromosome 17?). They could then play the funniest responses on their conferences. Or the programmers (are you also infuriated by the leeks Firefox is so notorious for?), or rocket scientists, or whoever. No matter how these groups of people decide, I only hope the only radio a sane person can listen to while driving will abandon this unusually cruel tribulation.

When I wrote about John McCain not succumbing into endorsing a farm bill that would increase subsidies to corn producers whose products would then turn into ethanol, I didn’t know that Republican candidate’s opposition to this alternate fuel was connected to only that specific piece of legislation and not the fuel as such (although voicing against subsidies in times where every Iowan can push you either into a seat in an Oval office or attic at a ranch in Arizona is an honorable act by itself and requires lots of bravery). This week’s The Economist looks more at the issues of ethanol, and for the second concludes with a stand I strongly oppose (the first clash between me and the writers involved a Leaders article on Bill Gates’ departure from Microsoft). The Economist supports further expansion of Brazilian sugar cane plantations, blindly believing in what Brazilian governmental agencies tell him.

Some greens say that the spread of sugar is deforesting the Amazon. That is not true. The vast majority of the sugar crop is grown thousands of miles away from the forest, in São Paulo state or the north-east. Some 65% of new planting of sugar cane has been on land that was previously pasture; the rest was previously used for other crops, according to Conab, a government agency.

Really? So why is it disappearing at such a high pace? Interesting that only last year Reuters, The Guardian or even The Economist argued against the increase of biofuels usage, citing the rainforest destruction as one of the primary reasons.

But maybe I am only biased and narrow-minded when it comes to biofuels. After all, the Brazilian rain forests and the land-extensive agriculture have cost me two debate victories — at first last year at the Worlds against Indonesia and seconly in April in the final debate of the Czech debate league. I’m sentenced by those misfortunes to be acerbic when discussing those for a very long time.

Since my graduation about a month ago, I have been wondering how to utilize all the free time I suddenly gained upon leaving school. I work a more, but the addition of workload does not fully cover those seven hours I used to spend behind a desk, taking notes and competing during tests with my classmates, who regrettably lacked the competitive spirit. The golfing lessons (and especially the commuting part which over the last month doubled the carbon footprint I created since January till May) take several hours a day; nonetheless the time spent on wild swinging of the clubs is not substantive. Therefore I read even more than used to and thanks to the Internet and its endless supply of semi-legal ebooks, I never have to wait more than few minutes before starting another piece (which brings me to an idea of the low exposure the ebooks are getting; on Amazon you can either buy a printed copy, a recorded audiobook, or a digitized Kindle edition for Amazon’s proprietary reader, however no downloadable PDF file. I’d be willing to pay up to say 70% of a price of a hard copy, just to have what I want quickly on my desktop and subsequently in my Blackberry. It’s infuriating the length of delivery of my five new Richard Dawkins’s books spans for over two weeks and the package is still not in sight. But I am digressing…)

After finishing The Selfish Gene (Dawkins), A widow for one year (Irving), Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (Kundera’s adaptation of the novel as a play), and a short paper by Dwight H. Perkinson on The Challenges of China’s Growth, I began reading another book that very often cites China’s (and India’s) and its problems and, on the other hand, also the recent accomplishments and contributions to the leveling of the world. It’s called The World is Flat and it was written by my favorite NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman back in 2004 (revised editions followed in 2005 and 2007 I believe).

I am about one third through the book and my feelings are mixed. Friedman has been so far looking at the milestone events that contributed to the flattening of the world such as the fall of the Berlin wall and a release of Microsoft Windows 3.0, the day when Netscape, the company behind the Internet browser with the same name (now Firefox), went public, or the burst of the dotcom bubble that India virtually overnight a computer superpower, thanks to the overabundance of fiber-optic that connected India’s thousands of low-cost world-class computer scientists with American companies that had to — amid the stock market downfall — slash their development costs and were thus looking for people to whom they could outsource their work. Simply, Friedman is focusing on the role of the information technology and the ways it affected the business is done today. In my opinion, the individual chapters that describe those ten factors that influenced or even fueled the current wave of flattening globalization place too much importance on computer – especially software – and related development. I think the globalization is good and at the end benefits everyone, however drawing conclusions on the consequences of globalization solely from the point of view of software developers is too narrow – I believe the main benefit comes and will come from sharing the developed views on social values, with economics serving only as a proxy. Nevertheless, the book is filled with interesting bits of interviews with the leaders of Indian and Chinese hi-tech companies and therefore enjoyable to read. But it also shows how fast the world is moving and how our perceptions of policies change from advantageous towards detrimental. Especially these lines, written back in 2004, must draw smile to anyone familiar with the matter:

Fortune magazine (Oct 4, 2004) quoted a study by Morgan Stanley estimating that since mid-1990s alone, cheap imports from china have saved U.S. consumers roughly $600 billion and have saved U.S. manufacturers untold billions in cheaper parts for their products. This savings, in turn, Fortune noted, has helped the Federal Reserve to hold down interest rates longer, giving more Americans a chance to buy homes or refinance the ones they have, and giving businesses more capital to invest in new innovations. (Emphasis mine).

Friedman is lauding a study by Morgan Stanley lauding a fact the cheap Chinese imports saved the Americans almost negligible amount of money (note just this year’s stimulus was worth over $100 billion) and therefore allowed the interest rates to stay low, consequences of which are now felt by those crunched in the credit crisis. Interesting how things change during only four years, isn’t it?

Because of my work I often have to spend hours looking through databases of photobanks. From a man’s perspective, this shouldn’t be a boring work, because one is usually searching for photos that with a high marketing potential — our despicably sexists society is unfortunately more incline to buy anything if a photo of a nicely smiling woman is somewhere near the product. Sometimes I stumble upon the right picture right away, sometimes it takes longer. Far longer.

Last year I was doing a work for a client who was opening a clinic that specialized, among other, in botoxing lips. For some reason, the young women living in Florida decided last summer that only full lips with a strong red lipstick on are sexy. Thankfully, the photobanks were aware of the full-lips phenomenon and amassed a large number of macro shots that focused almost exclusively on the lips and snow-white teeth of women with perfectly smooth skin. What the photobanks didn’t know, though, was an alternation in the phenomenon — symmetrically full lips were no longer 100% sexy; a slightly (only slightly!) larger top lip was the new hit. Until this day I can recall dozens of pictures of mouths I have sent in for reviews and that, until this day, occasionally scare me.

I am doing a similar work now. The client wants to have a smiling woman (full woman, not only lips) in the header image of his website. I found a great shot five months ago when I was designing the initial draft, but unfortunately the photo was taken down during the hiatus between accepting the draft and requesting recoding it into a website. So once again I was tied to looking at dozens (or hundreds, more likely thousands) of women. I found the following points interesting:

- there are no “women” in photobanks anymore. Every woman now is a businesswoman.

- not only that, every businesswoman is a successful businesswoman, always smiling and gesticulating at a frustrated male employee, signaling to get back to work. A search for “happy businesswoman” yielded over 13,000 results; when I replaced happy with “unhappy”, the number dropped to only 150.

- every successful businesswoman must wear glasses. No glasses = no success. The “unhappy businesswomen” rarely wore glasses, contrary to their happy counterparts.

- there is no diversity among the happy and successful businesswomen. Every such person is young, brunette, and Caucasian (I once read a quote that disliked Columbia’s mandatory Literary Humanities syllabus, because it consisted of works of dead white men).

- I now, at 1.37 am, see smiling women everywhere.

After going through the first 37 episodes of Seinfeld and a firm determination to finish viewing all nine seasons before the summer is over, I find myself subconsciously imitating certain gestures so typical for the Seinfeld characters. Take the reactions to surprising findings: when Jerry or George learn something appalling (usually connected to their cars that someone just bumped into, or women they broke up with them), they start throwing their hands into the air and repeating the just-learned surprising fact with a jovial and unbelieving tone in their voice.

This is exactly how I reacted after learning the train this morning is 36 minutes late. 36 minutes? 36 minutes?! Did you here that, Jerry? Unbelievable! Unbelievable! It takes the train 20 minutes to get from its initial departing station to get to me! Why can’t it at least once be on time?

Also, I noticed I am starting to find an increasing number of striking parallels between the events in my life and the ones in the books of Franz Kafka. My least favorite book of his (frankly, the only novel I read; the short stories are bearable because they’re short), The Castle, tells a story of a land surveyor K. who’s throughout the book attempting to schedule a meeting with a nobleman from the castle. Unsuccessfully, of course. I have such a desire to officially complain about the problems these delays are causing me, but why do I feel I’d share the fate of K.?

Oh no, my infatuation (or more like an affair) with Wikinvest.com is over, here comes a website that would be accompanying the Seinfeld sitcom when I’ll have nothing better to do - WikiCapital.com

This is what I find strange about the stock market. I acknowledge the fact that with the shear exception of the moments when the quarterly results are posted, the whole trading is based on speculations and expectations created by analysts who look “thoroughly” at the company, industry, and overall market conditions and then keep issuing ever-changing verdicts about the future of the firm.

So if their made-up calculations end up expecting the results to be greater than they actually are, the shares can tumble regardless the fact this year’s profit exceeds the last year’s by 100%. This is what happened with one of my favorite companies.

Research in Motion is the manufacturer of my beloved BlackBerry. Although every single feature of the over-hyped iPhone is always covered by virtually every newspaper, the BlackBerries have been finding their new users despite the much tougher competition. I, too, have become an avid BlackBerry user (or does my morning routine, when I navigate myself through the menu to my email account before I even fully wake up, classify me as an addict?) and upon my arrival to the U.S. will probably decide to exacerbate my thumbs’ sufferings by subscribing to unlimited data plan. In total, Research in Motion added 2.3 million new subscribers over the past three months, its per-share earnings hit $0.39, missing analysts’ expectations by only a penny, this being a reason for the steep slide down.

Last summer and fall I enjoyed trading virtual stocks via Facebook. It’s a pity I didn’t have enough money to trade real stocks, because during those four months I spent glued to the monitor, alt-tabbing between The Wall Street Journal and Virtual Stock Exchange, my account indicated a 40% appreciation on assets. It’s of course questionable how I achieved such a breathtaking result. For example, some 20% of my profits came from a trade where I shorted stocks of a Chinese battery producer I had never heard of before. It’s unlikely I’d ever enter such a position with my own money. One time I bought stocks of Amazon.com. They made a fortune, but missed the expectations; I lost 12% of the investment. One other time, I bought a bunch of shares of Citibank. It was at the beginning of the credit crisis and although the “night was still young”, the pessimistic and catastrophic views already prevailed at Wall Street. Citibank had to write down some $15 billion dollars on assets tied to mortgage-backed securities. Despite the loss, my shares jumped some 15%, only because the analysts thought the disaster will be even more apocalyptic. A question arises: can anyone actually predict them? Or does the market really work like The Economist put it on its famous cover back in 1987?

The preparations for the Democratic National Convention are meticulous. There is a reason why Denver, CO, wants to have everything perfect; they must have messed something up the last time it hosted the convention, because it the city had to wait exactly a century before being honored with such privilege again. This time the mayor wants the event to be remembered as the most blue-collar American, and the greenest get-together in history. Examples?

The host committee for the Democratic National Convention wanted 15,000 fanny packs for volunteers. But they had to be made of organic cotton. By unionized labor. In the USA.

Official merchandiser Bob DeMasse scoured the country. His weary conclusion: “That just doesn’t exist.“ […]

To test whether celebratory balloons advertised as biodegradable actually will decompose, Ms. Robinson buried samples in a steaming compost heap.

Of course, the today’s featured Wall Street Journal article doesn’t mention the fact the thousands of delegates and their entourages will fly from all over the U.S., thus leaving an obvious carbon footprint as a part of their visit.

Why am I telling this? Because after submitting all the necessary forms and taking various placement tests, I was finally able to wish list my courses for the fall semester. It wasn’t very hard to do, because I selected my classes several months already, but now I had to also choose the instructors and times of meetings. Econ 101, Math 105, and German 201 were easy to decide on. But, on the other hand, choosing between two professors of PoliSci 101 turned out to be a greater conundrum than I first expected.

The class is taught by two female instructors. Ratemyprofessor.com has records about each of them and I’ve read all the reviews and comments, but still hasn’t made a decision. The problem is that one of them is supposed to be a very extremist liberal and let her opinions penetrate her teachings, while the other appears to be a feminist with a gender bias (which seems illogical to me; I’ve always thought the feminists want to prove women world are just as good as men, therefore leniency when grading girls’ tests, as described by one of the female students, is an acknowledgement of weakness).

Right now I am unsure if I want to be in either’s class, but if I really had to choose on the spot, I’d decide to go with the ultra-liberal one. I probably wouldn’t later ask the teacher for an internship recommendation, but at least the potential for heated discussions would force me to wake up early every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning.