It's Friday

this is actually Freyja the saxon goddess after whom Friday was named...but still...

...it is Friday once more. I am still as tired as yesterday but slightly more motivated to work, probably because I have all excuses not to. Computers are shut down due to maintenance and I am running stuff on my laptop while blogging, no stress, no strings attached, no one to be waiting for results or custom track updates (poor Julien, behind me is busting his eyeballs in front of a browser page...)

While listening to some early Divine Comedy that remind me of my innocent youth and waiting for my yeast chromosome 4 data, I can only think about how life would be so much more beautiful if it was full of Friday afternoons like this one, when you would only work out of strict scientific curiosity, you would not feel obliged to communicate your results with anybody and most importantly you would be safe in the knowledge that tomorrow is Saturday!

I don't know if it is the holiday getting closer, or a spring spirit that blends in the belated freezing air but somehow I think I am re-finding my good old self these last weeks. Seriously, it is not the feeling of laziness that redefines me, but mostly the fact that no matter how tired I feel I still find time for things I really like, as reading, watching films or discovering new music, things I have missed a bit since the beginning of the year.

All this makes me really happy (Friday and the Divine Comedy are also helping). And since there's no one around with whom to share my interesting results on a boring problem I decided to share my "things I like" for this week in case anyone is even slightly interested. Here are my main "tracks" for the upcoming weekend:

sound-track (top 5 in my mp3 player):
1. Arcade Fire - No Cars go
2. Kasabian - Test Transmission
3. Elis Regina - Maria, Maria
4. Rolling Stones - Torn and Frayed
5. Motorspycho - Triggerman

word-track (books I am reading):
1. Sigmund Freud "Moises y la religion monoteista", just finished this, a very interesting essay on the origins of monotheism based on some solid assumptions combined with psychoanalytic argumentation. along the lines of "Totem and Tabu" which I liked better.
2. Jean-Pierre Vernant "Mythe et pensee chez les Grecs". Just started this mostly motivated by the previous one and the fact that I am going back to Greece next week. It is a bit hard in french but seems as interesting as it sounds plus it helps me practice. More about it soon

film-track (films I saw lately):
1. "A brief encounter": An all-time romantic classic, with great acting and great soundtrack (Rach 2), which I was not able to appreciate, probably because I had to see it with spanish dubbing and portuguese subtitles, with italian people talking all the time...
2. "Blood diamonds": boring and dissapointing, went to see it mostly for Jennifer Connelly and she was the only thing worth in it.

waiting-for-track(things I am anticipating):
1. the weekend
2. Greece-Turkey for the Euro2008 qualifying round

Until Monday wakes us up from this pleasant "trip", I hope you all try and make your own "custom tracks" for this weekend.

Lay-Z boy!

It is Murphy's law, pure natural anticipation, the boss being absent, tireness combined with boredom or all of the above but the bottom line is this: The closer I get to holidays the less I am eager to work.

The joke in the lab has been that I am an ace in "pretending to work", having a PhD in "slacking off" and similar euphemisms but the truth is that I have been working far off my limits over the last weeks. On top of that I had to deal with a series of my famous (to the ones that know me that is) psycho-somatic seizures, which brought about a number of consequent panic attacks, according to which my teeth were all to be rotten and fall off, my ears would remain plugged until the end of time, my recently injected for tetanus arm would gradually lose all consciousness and end up paralyzed etc. etc. During this highly neurotic, frenetic month I managed to carry on working in three or four different projects, producing results that at least kept my boss satisfied plus give a decent seminar in front of my colleagues, some of which had a first chance to fall under the spell of my fully-convincing-pretending-to -work-hard line of arguments, before waking out of their limbo and start making fun of me again!

Nonetheless, even pretending to give a seminar about pretentious work, with pretentious results and over-pretentious conclusions can make you tired (in fact sometimes it can tire you more than actual work!)
I am now looking more and more forward to getting on that plane and head to Greece where the sun will be shining, ouzo will be on the rocks and nucleosomes will once again become a n interesting topic to philosophize about. Until next Friday when this will happen, I only want to lie on the couch and read my book, which this time is Freud's "Moses and Monotheism" that I bought last week from a second hand bench in Plaza del Tripi. A very interesting read, (if you are into anthropology, the structure of myths and deconstruction techniques in the style of Levi-Strauss).

All I would really want right now is the armchair of the picture and my book. And since it is late Thursday evening I think I ll call it a day and head home to my couch and my dear Freud.

Invisible hands

I should start with the kindest of requests. People, please stop giving boring seminars!We all agree that your work is not so why should your talks be?

What I am really complaining about is not the talks themselves but their most prominent side-effect. The things I read in the paper (and that would be the newspaper) after choosing not to pay attention to the talk anymore. And I can assure you that lately I read pieces by well-respected people that really put my normal cool under severe stress.

The last of this patience-testing articles was a piece by well-estimated Paul Kennedy in today's "El Pais". Paul Kennedy is a well known history professor at Yale, specialized in political economy and history of the 20th century. But unfortunately for him and even more for my already-suffering temper, the subject he chose to write about in today's article was one that really gets on my nerves: the piece dealt with the so-called "freedom of the markets"!

The whole article was centered around the obvious antithesis between strong state-control of the economy and the over-preached gospel of the freedom of the market, free enterprise and the such. Only to make it "catchier" Prof. Kennedy decided to personify the two poles. In place of the liberal-economical preacher he placed the famous Adam Smith and as representative of the fierce, backward state-controlers, Kennedy choose the infamous Hugo Chavez. The debate was set upon uneven grounds.

Adam Smith is the Scotch writer of the "Wealth of the Nations", who lived back in the late 1700 and was the first ever to introduce the also famous "invisible hand" of the market. No more, no less Smith is considered to be the father of political economy (that is liberal political economy) and according to his views (older than the telegraph or even the pony-express but somehow still enduring) private enterprise should remain totally un-controlled by whichever state authority in order for the prosperity of the nation to be achieved. That is on the basis that human beings are so intelligent and ingenious that they will best achieve their goals without the interference of the state.
The above -roughly and a bit un-scientifically expressed- theory has been surprisingly governing the economies of our societies ever since Smith's times. But maybe this is not so surprising since, in fact, what is really happening is that the same laws of the jungle imposed in our distant evolutionary past and retained throughout modern times until the occurrence of Smith's "genious" are STILL active. The main difference is that what in ancient Babylon was considered the right of Kings is now under scientific proof the "safest way to development", or that the visible hand of the landowners of the Roman empire or the Medieval feudarchs has been replaced by the "invisible hand" of the market.
This is the basis of Smith's theory.And keep in mind that the above over-simplification omits to address the issue of the possible implications the "wealth of a nation" may have on that of another.

Let me put it straight! I do not believe in invisible hands! Self-organization, some might say, exists in many systems. But all these systems have one common, defining attribute: they are self-cooperative. Markets on the other hand, we are taught -and this may probably be the only true thing we are taught about them- are by definition the exact opposite of co-operative. They are competitive. Thus to believe that the prosperity of the nation will be magically shaped by the self-organized combination of the cunning plans of private entrepreneurs and their even more ruthless applications is as absurd as to expect that tomorrow morning, we will ALL arrive at work earlier than usual if we just switch off all traffic lights, just because WE ALL WANT TO!

Seriously, I find it hard to believe, how an idea so naive, a theory so unfounded, an argumentation so flawed, came to form one of the most stable pillars of modern civilization, even more, one that appears to be so uncontested and non-negotiable. Moreover, I find it hard to believe that Paul Kennedy, apparently a wise and intelligent man, chose to be the advocate of Adam Smith in this "ideological confrontation" with a "populist", "leftist", "radical" leader such as Hugo Chavez. In case you have not realized it yet, the words in quotation above have nowadays a profound negative meaning.

This brings us to this "populist", "leftist" and "radical" guy, surrounded by a cabinet "getting more radical every day",that has managed to be elected in fair elections 8 times over the last seven years. Which comes as yet another proof of the fact that majorities are not to be trusted, especially when their -visible- hands cast votes in favour of "populists" who promise to try to improve their welfare and God forbid actually do so!

Chavez' "radical" policy has aimed to improve the quality of life of the average Venezuelan and has managed to do so, although not to the degree desired by himself. This, however, and according to Adam Smith and his followers, does not necessarily mean prosperity, especially when it is not reflected in the country's stock market. Thus, according to our Yale professor, Venezuela is not more prosperous and it won't be so, if the children get better health-care, or all go to school and have proper education, as long as their country does not appear appealing to foreign, international investors. Considering the benefits people all over Latin America are enjoying thanks to international investors and the profound impact the investments of the latter had in the development of these countries, allow me to sincerely doubt it!

The time had passed and the talk was coming to an end and so was the article when I reached the most obscene part of it, wisely reserved for a glorious finishing. Rhetorically asking himself if Chavez had ever read the Smith's "Wealth of Nation" and once having spontaneously reached the conclusion that he wouldn't be able to understand it, Kennedy suggests that someone sent to Chavez and his cabinet one of Aesope's myths "The golden egg-laying hen" which he assures us NOT only Chavez but "even his voters in the poor neighborhoods of Caracas" would be able to understand!

There you have it then! A Yale professor of history so wise and educated to be citing Adam Smith in the 21st century, comes to mock the large majority of a whole people, explicitly stating that they are just so dumb that not only they cannot understand Smith's ideas or modern economical theories (that are actually 250 years old) but are actually unable to perceive whether or not their life has improved or if their nation is prosperous.
So fortunately for them, HE KNOWS BETTER.

The talk ends, I hear the applause, throw the paper in the garbage bin and go back in front my computer.

If such are the views of the "director of the International Security Studies Institute of Yale" let me first be worried about Yale, then worried about our "security" and then about "studies" in general.

Swastika Eyes

I read an article in "el Pais" yesterday. The Israeli embassador in Spain was seriously arguing in favour of the possibility that a law that prohibits denial of the holocaust is imposed throughout the European Union. I 've been reading a lot about such issues recenlty, mostly because of a growing intetrest in prohibition in general during the last year or two. First David Irving, a British self-taught historian that is questioning some aspects of the Shoa (that is the mass murders of Jews by the Nazis) gets arrested in Austria and charged for this exact questioning, then some Danish cartoonists gets into serious trouble for depicting the prophet Mohamed in their sketches and a performance of Mozart's "Idomeneo" is sensored in Berlin because of presenting the decapitated heads of Jesus, Budha and Mohamed. Then again, two days ago, Alen Jason an unfortunate 55-year old passenger of the Australian Quantas airlines was not allowed to board the plane for wearing a T-shirt that was mocking the president of the USA and only yesterday the Esthonian government introduced a law according to which there is penalty of imprisonment for using "symbols of opression" such as the swastika and the communist hammer & sickle....

It seems we are living in interesting times...

This whole prohibition thing is actually more rediculous than it sounds. Mostly because it is useless. Irving's views on the holocaust are un-historic in themselves, the danish sketches were seriously lacking taste, Idomeneo's performance was only meant to provoke and by the uproar it caused, its un-talented director got the publicity he wanted. I am not even going to comment about the poor guy's cancelled trip and as regarding to the Esthonian government my apologees for the picture I post here, which is actually a 1907 US postcard!!!

But jokes aside, there is a serious problem with all this rhetoric, which is slowly becoming a dangerous prospect. Millions of people died in the Nazi concentration camps (a significant part of them homosexuals, crippled, communists and gypsies, for whom somehow the term holocaust cannot be applied, since it is something like a propaganda trademark), but what their death mostly signifies is the ultimate proof of the virtues of democracy and freedom of expression, noble causes for which humanity has mourned an even greater number of martyrs throughout its history. And I really do not see how threatening any wirdo who wishes to deny historical facts with imprisonment or fines will make the truth tru-er or protect our democratic and ethical values in any manner.

All over the world there are individuals that keep denying the holocaust, as there are people that believe that slavery actually benefited the Africans and that the physical extermination of american Indians was an inescepable consequence of civilization. I bet there are people out there that consider bloody dictators like Pinochet and Videla as saviours of their countries while I personally know a few people that think that Franco's rule in Spain was the best thing that happened to this country and claim the Spanish Civil War with its 600.000 dead to have been worth it! What about all these nutbags? I say we lock them all up in the same cell with Irving!

Evenmore, I think we should keep one step ahead and prohibit NOW before it's too late, the denial of all physical laws. Assure our societies once and for all that they are safeguarded against deniers of the gravitational force, the lunatics that think there scooters may be faster than light and all the dangerous subversives that dare to object to the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics! And what about going even further in truth-abusing prevention and classify as an utter crime of sacriledge the statement that Maradona's goal against England in '86 was indeed scored by God himself! I mean, what graver example of historical distortion of facts!

I will agree with most of you that comparing Maradona's handed revenge with the death of millions in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen may even be offending, but that is not what is at stake here. What the real point is, is one of our societies main difference with the Nazi, Weimar society of the late 1930s. And that is the freedom of thought and expression. In our societies -at least until now- history is written by historians and not politicians, it is shaped by the collective memory of the people and not some propaganda-pushing lobbies and there are NO historical truths imposed by law! This is a right our grand-fathers earned by fighting fascism, our fathers preserved by fighting military dictators and we have the responsibility to safeguard with our word.

As for the Israeli embassador in Spain -whose name I am glad to be forgetting- I just hope he keeps in mind that "universal lawfull truths" are very likely to eventually demand "final solutions". And if he is so un-historical to be willing to allow this, we surely aren't.

My two left feet

Sometimes it feels a bit uncomfortable just to be around, going through your everyday routine. At the movies, all films look the same, at the gym you don't feel sore but numb, you don't really care if things go right or wrong, you actually don't give a crap if anything goes.

You don't pay attention to what people tell you neither you care about what they think of it. You have no appetite but still feel hungry, you go on with the next beer although you already feel dizzy. It seems as nothing makes really sense.

As if you were trying to walk around with two left feet.

We often think about things that will put our lives in perspective, that will make us open our eyes to what really matters. Then, when these things suddenly happen, when the bad news leave you numb, sinking in your sofa under waves of irony, you see no perspective. You just close your eyes and hope it goes away, you wish there was no perspective and that you still considered a new pair of pants smutted with oil, the rain you face from your window on a Saturday morning, or your moody flatmate's outbreaks of wining to be the real problems.

But you can't.

You just curse all new year's wishes that seem to have been pointless, then you go into denial and think nothing's really worth it. And then you sit back and realize all you can do is let the time pass, leave enough space between you and the uncomfortable truths that lie ahead of you, not because you want to avoid them, but because you need enough room to run when you 'll finally have to jump over them. Until then you can only try to keep balance on two left feet.

Just another "guiri"

Last Saturday I went out shopping. It's true that I needed a new coat. I still do, since I did not buy it. The winter sales frenzy had taken over my fellow "Barceloneses", (tourists included) and I was soon fed up with trying to enter stores packed with people, sweating just to manage to grab the item I had spotted and then queue all the way to the dressing room and to the cashier's. And though there are people that still find this an amusing way to spend their Saturday mornings, I don't.

I soon found myself, wondering around the crowded streets around the old port. I saw the flocks of British tourists -the "guiris" as the locals call them-, stretching out their tummies to face the sun, having their beers with shrimps instead of the traditional fish and chips, casting their lazy shadows all around the Rambla del Mar. I went on, up the Rambla, on a winter afternoon that felt like spring, with the sun showering the poplars with its coppery light, watched the kids passing by, adoring their huge cotton candies, the street-theater heroes, some performing restlessly, other still, motionless human statues covered with body paint.

I stopped at a second-hand bookseller's bench and bought a collection of Julio Cortazar's novels for 2 euros, put it under my armpit and strolled by Plaza Reial like the fake boheme intellectual I would like to be, stopped and read the opening part of "Rayuela" at my favourite Plaza del Rei, had a cup of coffee and headed towards Passeig de Gracia.

It was getting dark when I arrived at Plaza Catalunya. The shoppers, beaten and exhausted, were flooding the streets outside Corte Ingles and around Portal del Angel. The shoplifters and the pickpockets were calling it a day, while the tourists were just getting ready for Saturday night and as the last light of the day was brushing off the golden rooftops of Casa Rocamora, I felt ridiculously happy, satisfied and complete, silently amazed by the city I am -sometimes uselessly- spending my days and eventually realized, that although almost a year has passed, I am still, just another guiri.

Intelligently resigned

Strange things can happen in this world of science, where boundaries between scientific rigor and individual perception are constantly blurred. So, I was sitting at my desk this morning thinking about some way to skip this afternoon's meeting with my boss (an effort which as you might expect finally proved fruitless), when Tyler brought me one of this little pieces of paper every egotistic scientist loves to receive. A reprint request of one of his papers. To be honest it looked a bit a strange for a guy in the US (and not some backward country where internet access is still non-existent) to be asking for prints of two papers published in free access journals. And by surface mail no less.

That was a just hint, that there was something interesting in this request and the name of the institution ("Liberty" University of Lynchburg Virginia) made me curious to find out more about this. Soon I came up with details about his controversial founder, Jerry Lamon Falwell, pastor and tele-evangelist, the guy to whom the famous quote "I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them" is attributed. It was then that I let out my first "oh no!".

I carried on with the Liberty University itself, an educational institution whose 9600 students have to pay fines for attending dances, viewing R-rated movies or drinking, should restrict intercourse with the opposite (check that! strictly the opposite) sex to holding hands and abiding by a dress code which prohibits hair covering the ears or eyebrows for guys, piercing in any place else than the ears for girls and shorts for both sexes. Being just a bit prepared I thought "hmmmm..."

But then I went on to check the Biology Department. After all that was what interested me the most since the request was coming from there. I was a bit prepared from noticing certificate programs such as "Liberty Bible Program" but when I saw the list of classes being taught, I could not say neither "oh no!" nor "hmmmmm...". Looking at courses such as "Evangelism and Christian Life" (3rd year) or "New Testament Survey" (4th year) just left me speechless. So, apart from having to miss all that constitutes college life or being obliged to remain sexually inactive until they reach the age of 22 (unless they get married before they graduate) the biology students of this institution have to read the Bible not as leisure reading but as part of the process of getting their degree...Oh, and by the way. They 'll probably be informed about something called evolution as an alternative theory to God creating everything within 7 days!

I now had serious doubts about where I was sending the reprints of my papers (which by the way were juuuuuuuust a little bit more in favour of neo-darwinian evolution against creationism and intelligent or un-intelligent design). Nonetheless I thought that dialogue and interchange of opinion is the only way for the progress of science and in this case perhaps my sending the reprints could contribute, only slightly but still contribute to this dialogue, whose outmost goal should be redefining the borderline between provable scientific hypotheses and hand-waving-argumented, emotionally-charged perceptions, that are seeking not to comfort or relieve but to oppose and infuriate. Because deep down I think that people preaching intelligent design maybe should be intelligent enough to resign...

Or then perhaps, maybe if we don't get to have this dialogue after all, maybe WE should resign from trying.

Damnatio memoriae

Last weekend has been as interesting as it has been tiring. A three-day excursion to Donostia in the Basque country left me with the usual lack of sleep and slight excess of alcohol levels. It seems I am old enough to have noticed the first of the side effects of such abuses. My otherwise strong long-term memory attenuates. I am not talking about memory lapses regarding the previous night but slight long-term memory failures, resembling more a "slow disk access" (to speak like the geak I am supposed to be). To cut a long story short I cannot remember things, names of songs or writers, books or films or dates I would normally remember. The whole things is a bit disturbing but gets resolved with a bit of sleep and a little bigger effort to keep the disks running.

Some names though, cannot be easilly forgotten. Augusto Pinochet's is one of these names. It is funny that my trip with its consequent memory lapses and the dictator's death coincided. And although my initial thought was "at last!" I think it would be better for me and probably for the rest of the world if Pinochet's name did not ring any bell anymore, if it had retreated at the back rooms of our collective memory, condemned by history to utter oblivion. The Romans used to force this oblivion as the worst punishment for men of state having failed them. The process involved taking their names out of the archives of history, bringing down their statues and destroying all road signs that carried a reference to them.

They called that Damnatio memoriae and it was considered the ultimate humiliation.

On the other hand, maybe what worked for the Romans, is not fit for our case. Probably because the Romans did not entirely lack the sense of duty as opposed to their people, as dear Augusto or his friends like Maggy Thatcher did and still do. I sincerely doubt that the fear of oblivion, the fact that he might not be remembered, would have been able to stop Pinochet from "dissapearing" thousands of his people or sending to swiss banks the millions he stole from the country he had sworn to protect and was supposed to be saving from the "communists". In that sense maybe it is better for us to vividly remember him than punishing him through forgetting his crimes, because even if history does not spontaneoulsy repeat itself it is actually us that let our errors repat themselves.
And in this case it will be probably wiser never to get any tired so that we forget the life and works of Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.

A world gone crazy

All right it is December and I am walking around in my T-shirt! Whatever people may tell me, this cannot be normal, not for this hemisphere at least. Global warming is a fact and there are multiple proofs besides my sweat.

You see, from a proper point of view -proper to the proper people that is- everything is as normal as usually. The sun keeps shining over their heads even in December, maybe even during the evening. The perpetual antitheses of the city could not be making more sense to them. Almost homeless lonely people are there to feed the pidgeons, pidgeons are there to fly over the heads of the almost lonely homeless people sleeping on the benches. Over there a streetcleaner is throwing up, disgusted from the smell of the alley, two blocks away a hooker gets nauseous from the memories of last night. Or maybe it's the other way round. But the sun is still shining and unless you are an ever-wining, over-reacting, so-lazy-that-looks-all-around-instead-of-rushing-to-work kind of guy, everything is business as usual.

In the meanwhile, hundred-year-old dictators refuse to die, or death refuses to have anything to do with them and in Hong-Kong some hot-shot NOKIA executives talk about cellphones that will be able to capture smells. They may be missing the point here, ever since there's only music so that's there are new ringtones. Odours may be a bit more difficult to download but hey! we 'll make n-th generation computers to do that. In the meanwhile, hookers will still throw up on the streets of Barcelona, but the worst thing is that they will still be willing to die crossing the Atlantic all the way from Senegal to the Canary islands just to have the right to vomit somewhere in the Barrio Gotico. And in the exact same meanwhile, new dictators will spring up to take the place of the old-vampired ones in Fiji, Afghanistan or wherever else our "democracy exports" have not yet reached, this democracy that will presumably come from above like sacred rain, although it should be rising up from below, but then again, it's too darn hot to be thinking about such complicated things.

The world has gone crazy and it makes no sense. We have faster cars but spend more time going anyplace than actually being there, we have super-fast computers but somehow manage to work more than our fathers, we spent our days and nights reading crap (like this one) on the internet but have no time to read a book, we are healthier and wealthier than our parents, we 're sure to live longer than them but still pop up more Prozac that are kids swallow M & Ms. While the sun's still shining, migrating birds have no idea which way to go to and I am afraid neither do we.

Even time has gone crazy. It looks as if it's running backwards all the way to the times, when people were beeing persecuted because of what they would think, read or draw, we talk more religion than politics, we have slaves of a new kind but with the same, old colours. It feels as if we're back in the times of Shakespeare when "the rain it raineth everyday", only unfortunately Shakespeare is nowhere to be found and neither is the rain. It's only a matter of persistence of this madness until the clock makes the whole turn backwards, then we are back in the ice age, and then perhaps things cool down a bit.

After all maybe then, the absolute necessity of humankind for smell-capturing cellphones is not that absolute anymore.

Things to do when lonely...rediscover the masters

They have always been my greatest consolation and one of the most entertaining companies. My masters, my teachers, my idols. And by this I don't mean either my highschool professors (although some of them I still remember), nor the crude foot-balling genious of Dimitris Saravakos or the legendary figure of Che (whose posters could still decorate my bedroom). By masters, I refer to the people, whose work not only I admire but above all has always acted on my frustrating, vertiginous anxieties with an utterly recomposing effect.

In times of stress, I turn back to my favourite beacons of wisdom, which by doing nothing but having done everything already, by saying nothing but by having written all that is worth to write, by not letting out a single sigh but by having composed music to last until the end of time, they put me back into place. It is exactly then that my sense of what really matters becomes crystal clear. Feeling melancholic on a rainy Sunday morning loses any excuse on the sound of Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin" (perhaps exactly because it lifts melancholy to a level of exhilarating perfection). Getting bored with the daily routine of work, work, work gets a whole lot different meaning when you remember that a previously un-discovered collection of articles by Eduardo Galeano awaits you at home (and I thank myself for choosing this book to give to Bianca as a farewell present).

Because it is the "masters" that come to your aid in all kinds of difficult situations. You think there's nothing left to be said until you come upon a well-placed phrase by Tolstoi. You think there is no way to sort out the simplest possible model about the results you produce on your screen when you remember that Feyerabend once advised you to use exactly what you are completely forgetting about: your intuition. Evenmore, you feel that an inspiring five minutes of peace are impossible until you suddenly discover that Rachmanninov once wrote 14 songs, the last one you think only for you to listen to on this dull Tuesday afternoon (Julien, I ll be forever grateful for this).

Inspiration may remain evanescent, peacefull breaks will always be short-lived, unocmfortable silences will keep occurring and intuitive models will hardly ever work. But what remains is the feeling that we are not alone in this complicated world, full of puzzles and challenges, where we can also make a difference as long as we turn to the right people for advice and councelling.