Zwarte Piet

Sinterklaas never fails to shock Americans.

Surviving Zwarte Piet - a Black mother in the Netherlands copes with a racist institution in Dutch culture
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What's the history of the political correctness meme? When did it become forbidden for people to spread racial/ethnic/religious stereotypes in social situations?
I'm starting to think that this meme never made it to this part of the world. It's never been very strong in Brazil either.

Albert Heijn annoyance

My Albert Heijn is frequently out of soap. It can be really annoying when I don't have any left. I can't understand why they don't fix this.

I would love to see a small enterpreneur planting a booth right in front of the store, providing consumers with all the goods that the corporate giant failed to. How long would it take before the cops busted him/her? In Brazil, one might be able to get away with this, thanks to the semi-anarchical state of things. I understand that there's an issue of control (health inspection) and fair competition (tax collection), but as whole I think that this form of spontaneous & chaotic free trade is a good thing.

Sure, there might be some negative externalities (pollution, overcrowding of public spaces, disorderly traffic), but surely much of this piece is heavily biased in favour of the status quo: their (successful) agenda is to use the state's power to oppress their small competitors. An example that gets me really incensed was Recife's ban on kombi-taxis (the same thing happened in South Africa): when some creative people decide to do something about the sucky public transportation monopoly, their initiative gets oppressed. But sometimes the force comes a non-government group that is averse to progress: e.g. bus drivers in Colombia.

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Shopping in Germany is apparently even more inconvenient than here. Maybe I should move in next to the Hauptbahnhof.

Shannon language tests

A project idea I've written down on my notebooks: Shannon language tests, to automatically generate tests to measure language ability. The prediction task is similar to the way Shannon measured the entropy of English.

what do scientists find interesting, and why?

The reason scientists are interested in what they do is the same reason that people like to hear gossip about people they know: understanding one's environment. In the case of scientists, this is extended to include one's mental environment. (Is this what Keith Devlin meant by "math is like gossip"?)

I used to think that there was a Platonic realm of interesting topics, but lately I've realized that you *become* engaged in what you see, maybe as a result of the mental investment (the initial costs have already been paid). Once you've thought enough about a problem, you're hooked. As Feynman used to say, anything can be interesting if you look close enough.

The more you think about a certain topic, the more interesting it becomes to you... maybe this is similar to the way in which people fall more in love with each other once they make a commitment.

Other sources of motivation:
* tackling challenges to prove to oneself that one understands
* social: engaging in debates to defend one's view

People are also self-absorbed: I myself am fascinated about the way I think. This is especially motivating if one is in the field of AI or cogsci.