Review

I wanted to recommend a couple of funny books for Sunday afternoons or sleepless nights. The first one, "The Deeper Meaning of Liff" written by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in 1983, is a dictionary for things that have no name (yet)". In "Liff", for instance, a "Fring" is defined as "the noise made by a light bulb that has just shone its last", and "Ahenny" is "the way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves": The second is about"101 Unuseless Japanese Inventions, written in 1998 by Kenki Kawakami, and it is devoted to the Japanese art of Chindogu. It describes invented gadgets that seem to solve a problem perfectly, but that turn out to be absurd and unusable. One of these devices is this knife with markings at different angles to obtain a high precision when dividing a cake or pie: If you have any suggestion about a similar book, please leave a comment. ¡Thank you!

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a musical from 1998 and a film that opened in 2001. Both were written, directed and starred by John Cameron Mitchell. The history is about a German transgender, Hedwig who tours the USA with his Glam Rock band The Angry Inch. The band plays a series of concerts in low-profile venues, trailing Tommy Gnosis, whom them accuse of stealing all their songs.

"¿How did some slip of a girlyboy from Communist East Berlin become the internationally ignored song stylist barely standing before you?" begins Hedwig. And then tells how during the Cold War he fell in love with an american soldier, and to be able to marry him, he underwent a sex change operation that didn't work as planned:

My sex operation got botched // my guardian angel fell sleep on the watch // now all I've got is a Barbie doll crotch // ¡I have an Angry Inch!

There are funny situations during the movie, mostly caused by the type of show of Hedwig's band, which is rock with very explicit lyrics that clash with the prosaic patrons of the ice cream shops and restaurants where they perform. There are also deeply touching moments, such as a history about the origin of love based on a tale by Aristophanes.

The music of the film is excellent and the songs are made right for the voice of the main character. If you liked "Transamerica", "Priscilla, queen of the desert", and in general gay and bizarre films, you can' t miss this art piece.

See also: Wikipedia: Hedwig and the Angry Inch

Bicing is a new component of the public transportation system in Barcelona. The system consists in a series of over 100 stations all over the city, each one with approximately 15-20 bicycles that you can borrow automatically using a card. To obtain this "bicing card", you must register through the Web and pay an anual fee of 24 euros ($33 USD).

The system is very simple. By approaching the card to the station's base, one of the bicycles is freed and the screen shows the number of that bicycle. Then the user can use the bicycle for 1/2 hour and return it to any of the stations. Each extra hour costs 0.30 euro ($0.40 USD). This extra is paid through the credit card that you must use to obtain your bicing card.

In practice, bicing is excellent. It is more comfortable than having a bicycle as you don't have to worry about leaving chained in the street or having to take you bicycle upstairs to your flat or office, and there are always many bicycles available. It is very good as a complement to metro or bus, or to move faster through the city than by foot.

The WWW is an important part of the system, as all the process for registering and obtaining the bicing card is done via web, and you can also block the card and request a duplicate if you loose it. The credit card that you must use when registering is an effective way of making people take care of the bicycles and keep them in good conditions.

In the novel from Mark Haddon "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" the main character is a 15 years-old autistic child that discovers the corpse of his neighbors' dog in the frontyard. ¿Who could have committed this horrible crime?

This book is fascinating, and its chapters, labeled with prime numbers, alternate between the main plot and a description of the image of the world the main character has.

A brief extract, translating from chapter 67 (that is number 19):

Talking to strangers is not something I usually do. I do not like talking to strangers. This is not because of the Stranger Danger which they tell us about at school, which is where a strange man offers you sweets or a ride in his car because he wants to do sex with you. I am not worried about that. If a strange man touched me I would hit him, and I can hi people very hard. For example, when I punched Sarah because she had pulled my hair I knocked her unconcious and she had a concussion and they had to take her to the Accident and Emergency Department at the hospital. And also I always have my Swiss Army Knife in my pocket and it has a saw blade which could cut a man's finger off.

The main character of the book is a kid that has a strong interest in physics and mathematics. For the same reason it includes, parallel to the main plot, the description of some classic math problems. One example is the following: you are in a contest in television and there are three doors: A, B, and C. Behind one of the doors there is a car. Behind the other two doors there is a goat. You have to pick one door to open, and we will assume you prefer the car.

You pick door A, but before opening it, the presenter of the program opens door C and shows that there is a goat behind it. He offers you the possibility of keeping door A that you chose originally, or change to door B. ¿What should you do?. Most people, including people that has studied a lot of mathematics, thinks that it's equal to stay in A or to change to B.

Actually, the best strategy is to change to B. The argument goes as follows. Let's suppose the goats are called goat 1 and goat 2. At the beginning you choose a door at random. With probability 1/3 you picked the car, with probability 1/3 goat 1, and with probability 1/3 goat 2.

• If you originally picked the car, then changing is bad.
• If you originally picked goat 1, then the presenter showed you goat 2, and changing is good.
• If you originally picked goat 2, then the presenter showed you goat 1, and changing is good.

So, 2 out of 3 times it is better to change, so changing door is better than staying in the current door. There is more information about the puzzles in this book in a review at the Mathematical Association of America.

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In general, the history speaks about a weird kid, in this case an autistic child, and the distance between the world of adults and that of kids. The book has received several awards, is fun to read and it reads pretty fast, so much that you want to make it last :-)

En el libro "The winner-take-all society", sus autores Robert H. Frank y Philip J. Cook estudian los motivos detrás del aumento de la disparidad de ingresos en ciertas profesiones. La explicación que sugieren los autores, es que en muchos campos opera un mercado en que la compensación está dada por la posición relativa, no por el rendimiento absoluto.

Por ejemplo, el corredor que gana la medalla de oro en los 100m planos en las olimpíadas recibe una cantidad de dinero (en contratos publicitarios) que es muchísimo mayor que la que recibe el segundo mejor, incluso cuando la diferencia en tiempo haya sido de centésimas de segundo. Este fenómeno también es frecuente en el mundo del espectáculo, en que cientos de miles personas sueñan con ser estrellas millonarias, y sólo unas pocos lo son en realidad.

Otras profesiones recientemente se han unido a esta tendencia, incluídos abogados, ingenieros, médicos y científicos. Lamentablemente, uno de los problemas de este tipo de mercado es que la asignación de recursos que se produce en muchos casos es ineficiente, porque hay demasiada gente con ilusiones exageradamente altas que intenta alcanzar lo que para ellos es inalcanzable — y que sería más útil para la sociedad y para sí mismo haciendo otra cosa.

Por supuesto, mientras más competidores haya, mejor será el resultado de una selección competitiva, pero todo tiene un límite, y hay un punto en que comienzan a entrar muchos competidores que no tienen ninguna posibilidad, que sólo aumentan marginalmente la calidad del resultado, pero que a cambio malgastan su tiempo, sus recursos, y los recursos de otros.

Todos creemos ser mejores que el promedio

Una de las causas de que tanta gente entre en competencias que no puede ganar, es que los humanos tendemos a sobreestimar profundamente nuestras capacidades. Los autores citan varios casos:

• Una noticia reciente reportaba que más del 60% de los jugadores de básquetbal de la primera división universitaria pensaba que llegaría a entrar a la NBA. Sólo el 5% lo consigue.
• La mayoría de las personas piensa que son más inteligentes y que conducen mejor que el promedio.
• Más del 70% de los encuestados entre estudiantes de liceo se consideró mejor que el promedio, y sólo el 2% debajo del promedio.
• El 94% de los profesores universitarios piensan que son mejores que el promedio de sus colegas.

La explicación es el conocido "Efecto Lago Wobegon", nombrado en honor a un lugar ficticio donde "todas las mujeres son fuertes, todos los hombres son apuestos, y todos los niños están por sobre el promedio".

La explicación desde la siquiatría es aplastantemente simple: pensar que uno es peor que el promedio no nos gusta, por lo tanto, una solución barata es pensar que uno es mejor que el promedio, total, no es tan fácil probar que uno está equivocado.

Consistente con esto, los autores citan un estudio en que se encontró que los pacientes con depresión clínica eran notablemente certeros a la hora de evaluar sus propias capacidades, mientras que la gente sana del grupo de control tendía a tener una proporción significativamente inflada de sus capacidades objetivas.

Este problema se ve exacerbado en nuestra generación, la "Generation Me", que fue educada con máximas como "cree en tí mismo y todo te resultará bien" y con una educación donde la auto-estima ciega (sin importar el rendimiento) se consideraba como un valor importantísimo, mucho más que el auto-control, por ejemplo. Para peor, y como notaba Adam Smith:

El desprecio del riesgo y la presuntuosa esperanza de éxito, no están en ningún período de la vida más activos que en la época en que la gente escoge sus profesiones.

Una gota de realidad en un océano de sueños, creo que no nos vendría nada de mal a algunos. Por otra parte, lo de que todos pueden lograr lo que se propongan es una idea profundamente arraigada en nuestra generación, y no creo que de la noche a la mañana todos la abandonemos. Al menos yo no lo he hecho aún.

The Winner-take-all Society por Robert H. Frank y Philip J. Cook. Penguin Books, 1996.