Once in a while I like to listen to dotcomradio. Not only because it is a creation of a friend back from Portugal, but also because if features mostly simple and soothing vibes that go very well with work and certain states of mind. The music there is mostly new stuff, but always outside the main stream, making it even the more interesting. But this week the unexpected happened, out of the blue came this song that forced me to leave everything else I was doing and search relentlessly for its title and author. The offending track is below the fold.
Last week some very interesting news surfaced in the UK. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the government member responsible for the budget, whom in the continent we call Finance Minister, has presented some alternative ideas for the financing of his government. George Osborne of his name, seems to be interested in issuing government debt instruments, called gilts in Britain, of 100 years maturity. Rare, though nothing unheard of. But Mr. Osborne seems willing to go even further and commanded his staff to study the issuing of infinite maturity gilts. This simply means that such instruments cannot ever be redeemed, they perpetually pay interest to their holder. The media both in Britain and the continent reacted with bewilderment to the news, showing their usual struggle to cope with out of the ordinary news.
Paul Krugman was in Lisbon last week to receive three honoris causa PhD and openly advise Greece to leave the Economic and Monetary Union, something taken as a smooth advice to Portugal in the same direction. This is something that can only be accomplished by using the Lisbon Treaty mechanism to leave the EU. One must simply acknowledge this reality: many people would like to see the shattering of the Eurozone and the EU. Some of them wish it for pure xenophobic reasons; others would take it as the ultimate proof that the social state doesn't work. Others simply do not want what they see as a direct concurrent to the US dollar ever to succeed. And others still, simply do not understand the EU, and particularly the Eurozone. I like to think that Krugman, someone who contributed so much to Complexity Science, one of the fields on which I do research, falls in the latter class.
Google has been my web search engine of choice for some 15 years. The first time I used it I was overwhelmed by the cleanness of the interface, the lack of advertisements and the quality of the results. Up until then I had a list of 3 or 4 search engines that I used for different purposes, sometimes with not at all satisfactory results, even when combining them together. Google proved to be an able search engine, no mater what thematics, and I joined the ranks of its followers. Ever since I have been consuming many of its other products: I was an early adopter of GoogleMail, of GoogleCalendar (back in the day when it would spread the panic with random service down events) and of Chromium. Though I'm pretty happy with these newer services, it is interesting to note how those characteristics that made me adopt Google unconditionally as a search engine are mostly gone today.