Luis Suarez

(Photo AFP)

Obviously a controversial individual. No doubt he earns the critics and that his behaviour can be less than clever on repeated occasions. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the media and some institutions do not cease to work towards worsening his public image. Aren’t we forgetting about his good side?

I think that in order to describe anything objectively one has to mention both the positive and negative sides to it. That should also be the case with Luis.

He has many flaws, as we all do. He has been known to dive, bite and complain. He is widely criticised and pointed at by many fingers. He is also an admirable human being.

He left his home being very young, following his dream. He emigrated shortly after, when he still was young and naive, but he was courageous enough to follow his dreams even further. If you look it up online, you will find out that there is also a very interesting love story behind him and his wife. He works very hard, every day, every time. Those that work with him closely describe him as a very nice guy, the first one to show up for training sessions, the one that plays on a practise game the same way one plays in the final of the world cup. He gives it all for what he believes in. Isn’t that admirable?

Inside the pitch, we can all see what he is like. Very skilled, chases every ball, every argument, every move. He wants to win. He knows he can make the difference. His attitude makes all the difference. His attitude makes him belong to the elite. His drive and perseverance is shared by those who are amongst the best at what they do.

He is not the football player that bites. He is the guy that tries his best, to be the best. He also makes mistakes.

Those that hate him, why don’t you get to know him? An interview published by The Independent would be a great starting point.

I am not a Liverpool fan. I do share his origin, I am Uruguayan. That is not the reason why I write this. I just think we are not being clever. He deserves punishment, but not an exaggerated one that only intends to set an example. That is just silly. We are driving away from the Premier League on of its best players of the moment. If you really like football, you must admit you enjoy his dribbles, the spectacular goals that he comes up with now and then, his class.

He is a good guy. Lets stop the stupidity.

Montevideo

Home. Montevideo, Uruguay.

Source: “The Big Picture” @ boston.com, picture by Mariana Suarez/AFP/Getty Images.

 

A. Einstein

Not long ago I heard a University lecturer saying “Einstein is very mediatic. He is in posters everywhere, everybody knows him. Researchers mention him and funds are easily granted. Alan Turing is just as valuable, he highly influenced computer science as we know it. He deserves more credit.”

In bronson’s post, he thought of a similar debate, in which I find a very understandable description of what I am trying to say: “poor old Turing, the forgotten genius who brought us to the information age and without which we would all be sending telegrams to each other”.

Being surrounded by Computer Science students for the past three years, I know a lot of people that share the thought.

Albert gave us a lot, he came up with the world’s most famous equation (mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc^2) in his paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon its Energy Content?”, he wrote about things like “Special relativity” and “Photoelectric effect”. He was definitively a very clever folk. He helped shape modern physics. We owe him much. No doubt.

Alan, on the other hand, was a British mathematician. His work, as Einstein’s, was very influential. He came up with things like the ‘Turing Machine’, a hypothetical device that happens to be the father and mother of digital computers as we know them today. A device that simulates the logic of any computer algorithm. With it he managed to describe, in 1936, the capabilities computers would have today. In other words, to the date, computer scientists around the globe understand what can or can not be done on a computer by referring to this “infinite tape going back and forth through a box”. That is plain genius. He was also a very clever cryptanalyst, he designed the “Bombe”, an electromechanical device that managed to decipher messages encrypted by the German “Enigma Machine” during World War II. After the war, he went ahead and designed ACE (Automatic Computing Engine) which was a computer that stored its instructions in electronic memory. In 1950 he asked, “Can Machines Think?”, leading the way to Artificial Intelligence. He came up with the “Turing Test”, which is the inspiration behind today’s “CAPTCHAS”, where he aims to find out how closely a computer can resemble human’s answers. We owe him a lot.

Alan Turing only lived forty one years. In 1952, we prosecuted a genius because of his sexual orientation. He was chemically castrated. Two years later he died of cyanide poisoning and was found next to a half bitten apple that to some people, suggested suicide. It makes sense.

We, as a society, can be very dumb.

I found a very readable paper by Matjaž Gams entitled “ALAN TURING – EINSTEIN OF COMPUTER SCIENCE”. In the discussion he wonders “why on Earth is Turing so unrecognised compared to the other world geniuses like Einstein or Mozart?”. He notices that “The fact that Turing was neglected 60 years ago does not discard the fact that he is still neglected now”.

The title of that paper would be a fairer title for this post. But Einstein sells better, Albert gets more hits.

Alan Turing made a difference. We should all remember him.

Later.

Piracy

I just read a news article quoting the author of ‘Game of Thrones’ (George R.R. Martin).

“We are the most pirated show in the world. In a strange way that’s a compliment.”

“I have nothing against piracy, majority of those people wouldn’t buy it anyway. And there are many pirates who will end up buying Blu-ray release because they want to support us.”

“I know that a lot of that piracy is taking place in Australia, where for whatever reason they delay the show six months. So people are just anxious to see it. I think we’re seeing – we’re still in the midst of a whole new template evolving for television and film entertainment. And the old template , where shows were sold to foreign broadcasters who would show them the next week, or the next month, or six months later, or six years later, or whenever they felt like it – that’s breaking down. Because it is a global marketplace”

So true.

Later.

Francesca

Earlier I went to the park. I ran for a few minutes. I have been working on a project (developing a Web Application) non-stop for the past few days and I hadn’t gone outside for a few days until then.

Weather was shit.

I decided I want to write a blog. I decided to talk about my little sister in my first post. I realised I leave the flat way too often.

Francesca has big eyes and she smiles a lot. She posts the most lovely songs on my Facebook wall. She calls me “topu” sometimes, which is not nice, but it is friendly. She is very clever. I miss her, she lives far.

I am still wondering what this blog is going to be about. Probably about whatever goes on my mind at given points in time, so random material. I should write about where I’ve lived. My next blog’s title should be “Montevideo“. Maybe.

Later.