Manja and Bartek in San Francisco

Last weekend Bartek and Manja came to San Francisco to visit the city and to join my 30th B-day party. It was so nice to have them over at my place for those few days. Also thanks to them, I got another chance to visit Exploratorium, one of my favorite museums in the world. I've been there twice before and I still did not manage to fully explore what it has to offer. If you are ever in SF, it's a must!

And now few pics from Manja's and Bartek's visit:

Lovers' photo-corner at Union Square:


At the gate to Chinatown:


Playing with a balancing stick at the Exploratorium:


On the floor of Exploratorim I found a sentence that well describes part of my attitude towards life:


And now in practice - follow your curiosity, explore your limits:


And last but not least, SF classic - Manja, Bartek and immortal Golden Gate Bridge:

it was autumn

- Who are you actually?
- I wish I knew it myself.
- You talk sometimes like a poet, without sense, but it is so beautiful.
- Please tell me what you are doing in your life?
- I look for positive values.
- What does it mean?
- Nothing, I just said that like this.
- What's the point in saying things just like this?
- Aren't we here just for pleasure?
- That's true.

about the previous post

Temporarily I am hiding the previous post. It will come back one day with more explanation, however at this moment I feel like it is unnecessarily adding more confusion to anyway difficult situation.

The Long Now Foundation

I just got the following email from The Long Now Foundation. I found it amazing, so I thought that I will share it with you here:

Reflecting on his 25 years as a forecaster, Paul Saffo pointed out that a forecaster's job is not to predict outcomes, but to map the "cone of uncertainty" on a subject. Where are the edges of what might happen? (Uncertainty is cone-shaped because it expands as you project further into the future--- next decade has more surprises in store than next week.)

Rule: Wild cards sensitize us to surprise, and they push the edges of the cone out further. You can call weird imaginings a wild card and not be ridiculed. Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

Rule: Change is never linear. Our expectations are linear, but new technologies come in "S" curves, so we routinely overestimate short-term change and underestimate long-term change. "Never mistake a clear view for a short distance."

"Inflection points are tiptoeing past us all the time." He saw one at the DARPA Grand Challenge race for robot cars in the Mojave Desert in 2004 and 2005. In 2004 no cars finished the race, and only four got off the starting line. In 2005, all 23 cars started and five finished.

Rule: Look for indicators- things that don't fit. At the same time the robot cars were triumphing in the desert, 108 human-driven cars piled into one another in the fog on a nearby freeway. A survey of owners of Roomba robot vacuum cleaners showed that 2/3 of owners give the machine a personal name, and 1/3 take it with them on vacations.

Rule: Look back twice as far. Every decade lately there's a new technology that sets the landscape. In the 1980s, microprocessors made a processing decade that culminated in personal computers. In the 1990s it was the laser that made for communication bandwidth and an access decade culminating in the World Wide Web. In the 2000s cheap sensors are making an interaction decade culminating in a robot takeoff. The Web will soon be made largely of machines communicating with each other.

Rule: Cherish failure. Preferably other people's. We fail our way into the future. Silicon Valley is brilliant at this. Since new technologies take 20 years to have an overnight success, for an easy win look for a field that has been failing for 20 years and build on that.

Rule: Be indifferent. Don't confuse the desired with the likely. Christian end-time enthusiasts have been wrong for 2,000 years.

Rule: Assume you are wrong. And forecast often.

Rule: Embrace uncertainty.

Saffo ended with a photo he took of a jar by the cash register in a coffee shop in San Francisco. The handwritten note on the jar read, "If you fear change, leave it in here."

More in Harvard Business Review

today I finished my 30th trip around the sun :)

and I plan on many more!

Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd, Blue Monika

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?

I wish I could.



We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year...

It will never stop surprising me that nobody else can hurt us as much as we can hurt ourselves.

our class - story continues

I nearly fell off my chair. I just found one of my dearest friends (my best friend from the primary school) in Buenos Aires, where she is "learning Spanish and tango". Well, I am going to repeat myself: the most interesting ones have their own lives...
(Of course in meantime I also checked that a return ticket from SF to Divine Buenos is under 1000$...)

the one with obsessive-compulsive father

Look closely at photos below and try to guess what is wrong with them (the answer is at the bottom of this post).


My parents' house as seen from the street:


Living room:


Guest bedroom:


Study room:


Dinning room:


Kitchen:


Master bedroom:


Master bathroom:






Wardrobe room:





And? Did you manage to spot anything extraordinary about my parents' place?


The correct answer (in case you did not get it): the house of my parents shows hardly any signs of human habitation.

The photo showing the kitchen was taken less than 5 minutes after we finished eating breakfast. Photos of bedrooms were also taken just few minutes after we woke up. There is no book, newspaper or CD left anywhere. No dirty dishes in the sink, no wet towels in the bathroom.
Even my presence in that house for almost a week did not manage to interfere with my fathers' obsessive-compulsive love of cleanness and order.

Now, here is the photo of my room:


Hmm, dear diary, should I sing up for a therapy now, or can I wait with that another 20 years?

hello? - update

Update: Did I say that it was raining here? I was so wrong. Obviously we had a storm passing through my neighborhood - on my street, within 100 meters of my house, there are 3 trees lying with they roots out. As I am writing that firemen (and one firewoman) are cutting them into pieces and removing from a sidewalk and street. Hmm, I must sleep really well if I had not heard those trees falling (they are huge trees).

Ha, ha. Here is link to BBC news: link I knew that there is something weird about this rain.

I woke up in alternative reality - it is still raining (or I should say POURING CATS AND DOGS!!!) and there is "flood alert" in whole SF.
Moreover, my Internet connection drops all the time. Lovely. Argh. Still biting (but less, I guess I am getting used to rain).

our class

Recently a social networking site called "our class" became extremely popular in Poland. In the end I also surrendered and signed up there. I even have to admit that I have a lot of fun when I look for (and when I am found by) my class mates and other long lost friends. This site is very simple, extremely slow and provides basically no privacy protection. Not that I mind (I have no privacy issues whatsoever, though I do mind that it is so painfully slow...), but I am just astonished that even though there are so much better foreign networking sites available, still somehow several million of Polish people decided to use "our class". Very interesting phenomenon.

Another, not that astonishing to me anymore, thing is that almost all of my friends there (that are in similar age group +/- 30) are already married and have 1-2 kids by now. Moreover, in descriptions that they give about themselves they only write: "I work here and there, I am married since this year to this person and I have these lovely kids that are my whole world" (which, btw, is also quite apparent when you look at the photos they post: photo 1: my kid; photo 2: my husband; photo 3: my kid and my husband, and so on, you get the point). And all that in the field: "write something about yourself". Since when people define themselves by the kids and partners they have? Anyway, whatever, I am not judging. In the end we are all different and we have right to our own life choices (and mistakes).

BUT:
I get emails from female "friends" (or rather I should use word "acquaintances") that tell me that "I should get to work and find somebody to share my life with, because being alone has short legs". I am not kidding. An email stating exactly that prompted me to write this post. Should I write back to them "Get yourself a life, as living somebody's else life also has short legs? I do not want to worry you, but divorce rate in our country is so and so, so when you are old and ugly your husband will leave you, your kids will move to other city to go to college and you will anyway spent last years of your life alone wondering why you sacrificed the best years of your life for nothing".

I so would like to be bitchy enough to be able to send those kind of replies. But I guess I will simply send them a polite email back thanking for kind advice and wishing them all the best for the future.

PS Keep away. As you can see from the post above I'm biting today. It's raining, I'm stuck at home working all days long on the computer and I'm annoyed by Mr Temporary who apparently does not understand the importance of prompt replies to my emails (argh).

Sex appeal :)

Sex appeal - it's our female weapon:



Weaker gender, but the strongest one :)

Bodo rules. From 1937 movie "Upstairs".

another riddle

It's more powerful than God.
It's more evil than the Devil.
The poor have it.
The rich need it.
If you eat it you will die.
What is the word???

70% of elementary school children can solve this riddle, bu only 17% of college age people figured it out. The answer is in comments.

how does it work???

Follow these instructions, and answer the questions one at a time and as quickly as you can! Again, as quickly as you can but don't advance until you've done each of them.

Now, arrow down (but not too fast, you might miss something).........





What is:










1+5









2+4













3+3













4+2











5+1











Now repeat saying the number 6 to yourself as fast as you can for 15 seconds. Then scroll down.

















QUICK!!! THINK OF A VEGETABLE! !















Then arrow down.












Again arrow down.












You're thinking of a carrot, right?

If not, you're among the 2% of the population whose minds are different enough to think of something else. 98% of people will answer with carrot when given this exercise. Freaky, huh?



I was counting in Polish (szesc, szesc, szesc), but I still thought in English "carrot". But as everybody knows I like carrots and I even felt like eating one just a moment ago. What were you thinking about?

The only other explanation that comes to my mind is that it has to do something with brain conditioning during your childhood - then you were adding small numbers and you were eating mostly carrot...

itch

A return (why return actually?) ticket to New Zealand costs around 1000$. Hmmm, tempting, especially that the suitcase is already packed:


"get into a train, no matter which
do not care about luggage
do not care about a ticket
just keep a green stone in your hand
and look how everything stays behind..."

My travels

Unfortunately, this online tool marks the whole country where you traveled, but still it is the best that I found so far.



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