How can we make Americans respect us?

How can we teach Americans that Mexico is not just another third world country? It is sickening for some of us to open WEB sites that treat Mexico and Mexicans as if they were from a strange land, incapable of coping up with the «Great American Way».

They should be informed that the Mexican Peso is a truer currency than the American Dollar, simply because it's backed by a Government that is not playing with deficit—and charging it to the rest of world—like the US Government is doing.

I'm sick and tired of seeing web sites made by Americans, incapable of adding the Mexican currency as one more currency with which they would be able to do business with.

Is there something that I don't know about doing business with Mexico and Mexicans? We're stupid enough in Mexico to be using Windows 7 over Linux—unlike they do in Europe. So, we are more partners with American Business than with business anywhere in the world. Thousands of kilometers in common boarders make of us natural partners.

The terrible violence generated by the drug cartels in Mexico is nothing more than a consequence of the Americans needing the substance, buying it, generating a demand, which reflects in the cartels killing themselves in the streets of our cities and towns, corrupting all levels of governments.

Our president decides to combat these criminals. The American government is perfectly informed of the attitude of the Federal Government being a genuine one. Their internal intelligence knows in detail the strength and determination in the Mexican President's decision. They know it isn't only a political affair, a stage to show off; they know better than any Mexican that the so called «war on drugs» in Mexico is real. And what do they do to back it up? Nothing!

There are a bunch of anti-Mexicans among the media «big men». They love to spit out words of contempt against Mexico and the Mexican efforts to change things. Today, in 2012, Mexico is a different nation from what it was 12 years ago. Can the Americans recognize that? Yes, they can, but they don't want to recognize that they recognize it. The Media Giants continue with an attitude that does exactly the opposite of helping.

It is that lack of support from the international media that has resulted in the electoral behavior of this past July 1st. People in Mexico are confused. They don't really understand what is happening. Whatever the international media publishes, becomes the background of the Mexican national media; even if the local media contradict what is said internationally, the Mexican public would have a different frame of reference.

It's time for some intelligent Americans to speak out on behalf of the real change that has taken place in Mexico since December 1st, 2000. The process is now over and power is going back to the same political group that kept Mexico a third world country for 100 years, making it enter a process of counter-development that was completely halted and reversed during the years of real government (2000-2012). Growth? Did you say GNP growth? The worst world crises took place within these last 12 years. Take a look at the world around and see which country was able to overcome the consequences with the least harm to their people.

Yes, that country was Mexico! Viva México! This time it's for real. A renowned economist in Europe suggested that the Mexican economy looked as if it were from another planet! It was one of the few economies doing well, in spite of the destructive crisis the Mexicans suffered in 2009, due to the AH1N1 virus unexpected looming.

So, what is it that Americans don't seem to be willing to understand from Mexico? Rest assured: We aren't trying to make us or anybody else believe that Mexico is the gate to heaven. What is really important—and it's that what needs to be accounted for—is the real changes that have taken place in the daily life of the country. A lot is going on, especially now that we are a nation of free media, some of them especially conscious of what the public needs and the country deserves.

Paragraphs, please!

Paragraph, a simple concept has become a giant issue all over the Internet. Why was it such a difficult concept to understand? <p> was — and still is today — the HTML tag to indicate that a new regular text paragraph was starting. Initially, it wasn’t necessary to indicate the end of the paragraph with </p>. The beginning of the next one with <p> was enough.

However, all of that has remained in the past, because Microsoft® decided to ignore it. Then people started writing their e-mails with double enters. Today, believe it or not, Microsoft® has changed the way their programs work: they all generate an automatic empty paragraph with just one enter. That is, internally, they’re generating one simple <p> tag.

Too late! The incredible generalized public ignorance about the concept of paragraph has driven more than one code programmer crazy. Just take a look at the blogger.com site. The regular HTML language would simply ignore empty space. In other words, if you typed inside an HTML page two or three or four empty lines, they would all be ignored. If you wanted an empty line, you needed to write <br> — which later on became <br /> — and then you would get one empty line, even if you were within a <p> paragraph. That makes a lot of sense!

Back to blogger.com… Today, if you write inside the HTML section, and you enter empty space, the most horrible thing happens: it prints the empty space! That’s what I would call a total aberration! I would like to punish whoever made that decision.

Also, if you type from the rich edit editor, instead of generating <p> tagged paragraphs after an Enter, you generate empty lines! The aberration completed and rounded up.

It all comes from the error that Microsoft® started several decades ago. And they have corrected the mistake, but now others are actively resuscitating it, making of it even a more aberrant issue. Back to blogger.com, the aberration goes as far as forcing the HTML page to behave — and for this they must do something special — in such a way that you need to write without empty spaces!

What a way to rewrite the world upside-down!

It’s time for us to ask them to get their act together. All rich text editors should generate simple HTML formatting text, so that a style sheet can easily define the personality of the <p> paragraph, the <li> personality, and other very simple and useful stuff.

Thinking In Written Words

Thinking, An Exercise

If you want your muscles to get strong, you need to exercise them. That's a fact. Writing is an activity performed by your brain, an organ that needs to be treated like a muscle, and more. If you don't use your brain, it will lose its capacity to do quickly and efficiently that which it's designed to do: think, invent, imagine, create, solve, decide, write, speak, dream, and similar things. Those are actions. They're all performed by our brains. When you say I, what do you imagine you're referring to? Your brain! Of course, what else?

For some people it's simply impossible to accept the fact that our brains are the organs in our bodies that execute our actions of thinking. All of our memories exist within our brains. Nothing that we imagine, that we decide, think, dream or feel has its origins in any other part of our bodies, but our brains.

What a fantastic piece of design our brains are! They are so incredibly fantastic that we reject to believe that when we say "I", it's our brain the one that's speaking, thinking, deciding, remembering and making choices. We have not been able to design any machine even close in power, to our biological brains. Computers, and the network of them have an incredibly efficient memory system at the service of millions of brains. But they are way less powerful than one single human brain.

We've been able to teach our computers to make decisions. If they're capable of moving robots and robotic arms and robotic storage houses, then they're close, but not quite that close to mirroring what our brains do. Our brains make decisions considering a literal myriad of factors simultaneously. Computers are capable of reasoning down a gigantic hierarchy of if-then-else's at lightning speeds — probably much faster than our brains — but we don't seem to have been able to make any computer consider, simultaneously, variables chosen by the computer itself, in order to end up with a refined decision. Our brains do that all the time, and we don't even know they're doing it!

Also, the most powerful computers — as far as I know, maybe some of you know better — are ordered to consider a preset collection of conditions, including any conditions that might derive from the initial tree node, but not any conditions outside the initial node of reasoning — which is really that hierarchy of if-then-else statements.

The closer we push computers to do what our brains do, the more energy they need to fulfill their tasks. That should give us an idea of the efficiency with which our brains are capable of using energy. The energy we provide to our brains is fed into our system via the carbohydrates of the food we eat. That's all our brains need to function. The modern and most integral dietitians recommend that our calories should come from protein, fats and carbohydrates. We need only 5% of our calories to come from proteins, which leaves 95% to come from carbohydrates and fats. The myth of "high protein diets" for muscle building has been busted. (Please, investigate the details by yourself and let me know what you found out.)

This Was All About Thinking

That's it! We said that at the beginning, and there isn't a good reason — at least, one we could think of right now — to change our minds: this was supposed to have been a thinking exercise. As such, we are free to consider it concluded anytime we feel our muscle — our brain — has worked enough.

And it has! Just as I sat to write this, it occurred to me that, after all, it's our brains the ones that have generated every single piece of culture that exists today or has ever existed on the surface of our planet, The Earth.

And I have questions that were the result of this exercise, and I asked you, the readers, to proceed to finding answers to those questions. Are we getting closer, with computers, to the way our brains work? Have we chosen — randomly, of course — a line of development that will force the increments of technology in our computers to follow a line different from the line our brains followed during evolution?