The Engine

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No coyote

    ++Dude, what you looking at?

    I was holding a lantern, pointing it towards the scarce canopy through the little hill and the college dorms yonder.

    --You see that window over there? It was my room. I was about to get lost in there.

    ++So what?

    --There was a night dark and with many odors sweat and beer and bare feet, and it was bright the moon had never been that close to the earth in 9 years! I was so about to lose myself that night. I reckon drinking Mezcal is like chewing a handful of this brown earth down here, it dries and itches all over your mouth just the same.

    ++That's you looking at?

    --Yeah, also. I saw a shadow. At that time I was driven back and forth from Tesuque sitting in the back. The car headlights would run fast reflecting here and there. They trick me. Made me think there were coyotes. I would be quiet most of the time just peering into the shadow, into the lights.

    **Do you fear the moment we stop talking to you? If we get lost in a forest what is there in the darkness?

    I smiled at that one, but no one could see my face.

    --Then I drove all the way to El Paso. I keep repeating to myself I saw a dead coyote by the road. It was worn out. The road I mean. By the sun. Like one of those horse skulls in the cowboy movies, just like that. A white bone under the sun half buried in the desert connecting Santa Fe and El Paso. Some unfortunate busted wheels at its sides, ripped open like rubber skins.

    **Do you think I'm gonna read that?

    ++You ever wanted to be a woman, squeeze a lemon between your legs? Ain't helping you aiming at the sky. Not even if there were snow up there. If the universe is expanding there is a limits equivalent to a black holes, you learned that this summer. Now, bend over, easy, drop that lamp, open up, easy. Chew some earth, that help me a lot.

    --Now it ain't no sun, no more of that psychedelic warmth. I get to drive my own car, back and forth to Tesuque. It rains now, so the deceptive reflections on the road run faster as I sweep my lights over some dirty puddle. They run as scared animals or as scared coyotes. But they aren't, and thus I decided there are no coyote. They don't exist. Coyote is the pitiful light we shed on the road.

    ++That's right chew more sand. Thank the rain, dude, it's wetter this way.

Knowledge is a fractal, just-percolating path between nihilism and totalitarianism

This is a tale of finding complexity and coming to terms with the world, partially. Better said, coming to terms with a little role of ours in the world, and how hard playing that role will inevitably be.

I recall my early times in Berlin when my motto was 'everything is a lie'. Even now from time to time I can't help that sentence slipping out my tongue. I was coming from a media delusion, a politics delusion, and I was confronting a University-scale scam and (once again) delusion; so I used to get drunk with friends, howl at the full moon -- which in Berlin is a bare tree laden with snow amid a desert parking lot, and repeat all over again 'this is a lie, my self is a lie, the rotting lungs of the city are a lie'. And I would doze off on a freezing concrete street until that yellow vodka would carry me home. I once lived on a 13th floor and I have memories of flying in through the window. I had abandoned myself to a hopeless nihilism.

The other extreme is being blindly sure of a truth impossible to grasp and is the essence of fascism, I have no doubt. How totalitarian this sentence was!

My little revelation was that neither position is true. It might seem small, but all of a sudden loads of dilemmas appear clear to me:

• (Wo)men is born neither evil nor good: it is a complex thing in between. 
• Evil (or good) in (wo)men is neither born nor fostered: it is a complex thing in between. 
• Media do neither lie nor tell the truth: it is a very complex thing in between. 
• There is definitively some truth and use in politics, as obvious as it is that all politicians lie. We must wring them out and out as a wet cloth to extract some of that use to the world. 
• Things are neither relative nor have they got an absolute existence of their own. Relativism is relative and difficult to size. Things exist just on a glimpse, always there and always about to vanish as if the world were quantum in nature. 

Summing up: things are complex, very complex!! And I largely recognize the defeat against this Nature in the younger, more frustrated drunkard playing chess with the shadows of the Berlin wall. A fawn hidden in the woods, its heart a nest for a dove flapping with fear. So easy to abandon ourselves to either nihilism or totalitarianism. But acknowledging that the world is complex paves a tiny, little way in front of us. The reality is complex and we must work hard to extract truth and knowledge, to make serve our work. Reality is not pointless, it is very difficult to grasp. 

The Drought in New Mexico

    I arrived here... what? 5 weeks ago already? This is above 7000 feet high, meaning 2000 meters. The lands around Santa Fe are arid. There is this huge rocky canyon northwest from here that I went visit with my mate Max and I swear you can feel the last molecules of water evaporating off the river, off your breath. Off the no-river: it's dry. The vegetation forms patches in the sand, a sand I don't believe anything can root in. Animals are rattlesnakes, black bears, coyotes... I never get to see a coyote alive. I saw many death by the road when I drove down to El Paso and I came back all thirsty.

    The first week I got kind of sick. The altitude, they say. I went mad with maths and physics and didn't really sleep. I drank a lot. The second week I didn't drink that much, so my skin got flaky. I would scratch my hand and leave white traces on the table. Then things got worst. One morning my knuckles broke up bleeding as tiny, stretched red flowers. It didn't hurt much, though. I got myself a moisturizing cream I use often, but those flowers ran round my fingers and colonized my palms: I can see them bleeding right underneath my skin, itching like hell I'd love to rip them off sometime. They erode my flesh, call my nail on a suicide scrape, and wrinkle my hands.

    Then I met all these people. Then my mind got blown up. This pack coming from all over the world to think about complex systems, whatever this is. They brought these ideas along, their discussions and their few, well chosen silences. I still try to get this thing off my hands at night, I can't help it. Also off my feet: it's itchy there as well. It's itchy as nothing I've known of before. It is, I guess, the closest I'll ever get to yielding new life, so it must hurt in a way. Also my dried lips. And these girls and guys around, so marvelous I just wish to cry out to the world that they exist, that an another Earth might just happen if we give them voice. And I turn to my hands darkened by the sun, my squeezed skin, and see Them growing and I understand. Now these new lines that weren't there before, shaping a new destiny that could not have happened otherwise. Those mates crossing my life, those new shapes for a future that is to come, all those things that--now--will happen.

Trees have roots, men have legs.

    When I first went to Germany in 2006 I didn't pack very much besides my clothes. I had a notebook where I wrote some loose impressions... it's lost now; I had exactly a pair of books that changed my mind for ever; and few things more. I can remember that I didn't pack anything like shampoo, shower gel, or toothpaste. The first night I used my flat mate's and on the second day I bought those fancy products that I had never heard of: Antischuppen Schauma, blend-a-med for my teeth (although old good Colgate existed as well), whatever. Damn, I loved Germany so much by that time!! A country I didn't know and that I was so eager to discover! Missing my usual toilet stuff was part of it, of letting me go into that strangeness. Why should I carry along such a piece of a homeland?
 
    Now I see with wonder some Erasmus students coming to Barcelona. Many of them (everyone I've met) bring along their creams and brews; hair lotions with odd names, unspeakable languages. I saw this same thing with many foreigners coming to Granada when I was living there. This seems to me like an aseptic travel abroad, don't you break that umbilical cord, don't you blur out into that expanding universe of ours... I know this is not really about that, but it's an impression that I get with such little details. Say I'm silly.
 
    However, I'm not completely rootless as yet. I didn't fucking lost my origins, they call me in the night and they still make me suffer for fucking nothing. For fucking anywhere shall be the same. I still have got some background to fucking give up. That's why I won't pack any shower stuff this time either. As I collect my clothes next Mai, as I jump into that plane. That's why I won't have a drop of nothing to clean my teeth when I arrive to the USA for the first time, and I shall rely on passersby anew. And I shall take those sands from the ground and rub them on my skin if necessary, but I don't fucking want anything from this desperately self centered culture to chase me there. I wanna breath, or discover there isn't any air worth breathing if that turns out to be.

There I go: http://www.santafe.edu/

Write and Link

Two advises that I myself don't take as serious as I should. This is definitely what we must do if we really want to taylor the new global consciousness we wish. If this new consciousness is really to be born it will be an emergent one, far from individualities and in fight, at least in its first terms, against most of the structures we know nowadays.

Therefore:

Write a lot!

'Good an evil', 'artistic value' or the ’importance’ of an idea are not objective; but they aren't subjective either, in the way 'subjectiveness' is known nowadays. Rather, not completely. Evaluation of these concepts lays on a emergent, social level; exactly where this new form of consciousness is to arise; and this and no any other means is to approve or deny these subjective values. One's intelligence could serve to be ready, to have a hint and play with some vantage; but it'll be the great emergent goddess which will speak the last words.

Therefore: write a lot! Expose yourself to a public avid of failure. The matter is not anymore if you find an idea great or not; but that the actual, uppermost value of a text will only materialize in the interactions it prompts. But also be aware that this is not only the value of your work which is being squeezed out of these interactions: also the value of the You which lies in the intersection of your being with the being of the social goddess will be.


Link a lot!

And this comes as a hint that the nature has laid down for us when the brain appeared. We aren't anymore condemned to the rigid margins of a book. Chapters and sections seem to fight their last battle in the author's mind, but readers come along and break them down as they jump from one hyperlink to the next one.

I shall even think that blogs are a last chance before we assume non-linearity of the written world to come. And so I tell myself: link a lot! Let's embrace the new tools we have, for the first one mastering them has already walked quite a stretch towards winning the ephemeral eternity that awaits us.

Democracy 2.0

There is a #SpanishRevolution going on!!! Of course, it is directly inspired in the icelandic movement, but I'd say that the closest inspiration are the arab ones. Key feature --which I didn't find so important in the icelandic case-- are web 2.0: facebook and twitter. They brought together a bunch of very different people just because they we are upset with our corrupted politicians and the system they support.

A main claim against this movement is that the politicians say we don't know what we want. We organized independently of any political party or syndicate. We discovered that we don't need any underlying structure to express our claims. The politician power fears this enlightenment. The easiest thing is to say we don't know what we want.

I do know exactly what I want: I want a public social network over which I can interact with another people discussing initiatives which will democratically rise or fall. A public social network over which I can configure my vote about the many different issues of importance to my country, in real time, without the corrupt sense of delegating my will each 4 years in a party working for international enterprises. A public social network which would allow me to link my vote to a determined party or think tank or person if I desired to do so because I consider that I am not an expert on a topic, or because I considered that the topic is not so important to me, or because I just don't want to review the color of my opinion each and every minute and I trust enough a certain party or think tank or person. But also, if the people on which I delegate plans some dirty move, I want a public social network to remove my endorsement at the moment I desired, on real time and not just each 4 years.

This I call it a real (or at least more real) democracy.

A foreseeable claim against this is that we are not prepared for such a thing, or that the thing couldn't be kept under control... Just wait until you hear that. Doesn't this remind you of a fellow Mubarak talking to the Egyptian folks? O a gay --yeah, this one is on purpose-- called Franco preparing Spain for over 40 years for the simulacrum of a democracy? Don't let them play any tricks on us when they are scared and try to spread their fear. We have the technology to implement it, now we only need the will.

So up to here my point. I do know exactly what I want: not only regarding the 'how', but also have some thoughs on the 'what later'. And better on: each girl and boy, and elder and middle aged and whoever you can find tonight camping on the Spanish's squares does know what they want. Maybe they don't want the same as me, but they do know what. And we shall speak out loud and frighten the night.

Meeting on Tuesday the 19, at 15:30 in front of the Spanish embassy. Further meetings for Friday and Saturday! Keep looking at the hashtags:

#SpanishRevolution
#acampadasol
#acampadaberlin
#nolesvotes
#notenemosmiedo
#yeswecamp

Luíño 2.0

I'm uploading my CV in the web: http://lf-seoane.wikidot.com/

This is gonna be fun :D

Trap for Mosquitos

Thanks to my friend Javi, currently researching somewhere in the middle of Finland.

I forgot to close the windows when I went out today, so when I came back my house was filled with mosquitos among other light-chasers. Ever happened to you? Now I can't sleep in the whole night because of them.. shit. So here's the trick. You put switch off the lights on your room, switch them on on the hall or whatever is next to your room and left the door open. You go back to the laptop and watch a movie for a while. Then close the door and switch the other light off. You've gotten a room free of mosquitos for a night...

Yeah, trivial... It took me 19 years before Javi told me... I didn't get to figure it out on my own...

The value of a work

A piece of work is an abstract concept which we handle with more or less expertise. It's kind of driven by the supply and demand law, as any other object (concrete or abstract), and speculation might have a turn in its value as well. So, how do you appraise it??

Well before I graduated as a physicist, I had a casual chat with a friend and colleague at the University of Santiago de Compostela. The talk was on mathematical models for locust scourges and I digressed up to raise and fall apart of languages. This chat became, one and a half years latter, my thesis degree on the coexistence and competition among languages in a same region. Great!!

The price of a work is mainly crap and must be strongly renormalized before someone loses its head. Like a stone in go game, its value depends on the coordinates in which the stone is played, both spatial and temporal.

I was pretty proud of my thesis. It was not only the scientific job, but I'd also learnt a lot together with my mentor about how many random circumstances could devaluate a work well done (not necessarily talking about mine). Together with my thesis they followed: a participation in an international conference, prizes... a lot of stuff. I was never sure that I deserved what it was told about me, nor about my work. None of the recognitions. I went to Berlin with the idea of further researching, trying out my fitness to science and I found emptiness. Though (still do) about withdrawing from research.

Now, back in Galicia for vacation, I visited my former mentor and felt again what I enjoyed that much: the scientific chat about new problems, the maths puzzling me on the train joining the cities of Compostela and Coruña. The origins!! And when I came back home and checked on my single paper up to date, I discovered the greatest reward I could ever dream of!! I felt for first time in a while fulfilled (scientifically). Someone, without any further references to us, just by a daily reading of papers from arXiv, decided that ours was one of the bests new ideas and decided to post it in a blog. It also happens that the blog is held by people from MIT, how unexpected!!!

So I don't know yet what value a research might be worth. I worked into this project so many years ago and as a graduate student and I still get benefits from it. On the other hand, I rot in Berlin solving pointless arithmetical exercises and well far away from any real research project. Although I would devote my time to it, I don't have the feeling that this has any worth at all... Just as in Go game: each and every minute or stone so alike; played at a single space-time coordinate each of them becomes, one by one, the whole or the void.

Licentiate

Today I became Licentiate on Physics :D!!!!

I feel really happy and I look forward to starting working hard, researching and all this stuff :) We've been given the greatest puzzle ever to be solved and now I have the means to deal with it!!

Nature: there I go!!! :)

Heading North

    I write this sitting on a train with destination A Coruña, the city where I was born. I come right from Barcelona and before I've been in Granada (where I'm studying this year) for three days. The week before, I'd been in Valencia and before in Granada pre-again... And all of this is to head north! 

    I've finally been told, they accepted my solicitude to join the Berstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The next two years I'll be studying the brain from the point of view of the theories of the information. I'll live in the best city on the world!!!!!! 

    And now what? Yep, I need money... therefore I'm begging all around Spain. At interviews here and there, talking with people from many corporations, spar cashes, etc; trying to be kind to them, look well dressed, showing off my English and my German, eating some chocolate while traveling... 

    Sometimes I fall asleep on the train with my iPod music-ing me. Usually when it sounds some Radiohead stuff I kind of have some consciousness and feel the world around... but I'm so around the world that I'm unable to get through to myself anymore and forget whatwhere I'am. Sometimes, usually when some Radiohead stuff is playing I dream I'm back to there where I've never been to. 

Laboratory at Home

Have you ever seen those nice experiments with materials on the surface of water forming awesome shapes when growing? They're in some way similar to those of a colonization spreading through a land. And both of these phenomena have a associated entropy, which is related to the order of particles living in our physical space...

If you wanna test all these things taking place at once, you don't need anymore a expensive laboratory under Switzerland nor a supercomputer solving equations. It's enough if you get to live with two guys from any Mediterranean island and let them take the control over your house during several months. After that, you just go back to the kitchen and take as much mesurements as you want on the greatest phenomena of the nature. You'll can see how a colony of cockroaches grows toward the kitchen's door, how the entropy on the sink increased till unbelieveble limits with filthy dishes overboilling the room; and finally, over a pan, you'll can observe how many different kind of bacteria, protozoa or fungi have spread out over the water in it forming a thin film with fractal shape like the one discussed here.

Have a nice day :D!

A Mammoth crossing the street.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
with tangerine trees and marmalade skys.
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly:
a girl with Kaleidoscope.

And a sudden Mammoth crosses 'Broken Dreams' Boulevard hunting a Dodo with golden feathers.

A piece of Mammoth DNA's been found... well, not in the best shape, but it allows us to dream.

Yes, it was in the blood drank by a mosquito few minutes before it got sticked in fresh resin and became a millenarian dreamer. Now we are allowed to dream away together.