Synaptic Sugar

There’s finally a new reality show in the Netherlands, the one everyone was waiting for. In “De Grote Donorshow”, produced by Dutch entertainment giant Endemol (which gifted us with “Big Brother” and a large number of other formats, and is now owned by the Italian group Mediaset), a 37-year old woman suffering from an inoperable brain tumor will choose the recipient for one of her kidneys among three contestants, helped by votes from viewers sent by SMS text messages. Congratulations, the idea is horrible. It doesn’t really matter that the purported intention of the show is to draw attention toward the problem of the very long waiting lists for transplants (there are dozens of better ways to do so); it doesn’t come as a surprise, and at this point it doesn’t matter either, that there’s no guarantee the “winner” will be found compatible with the donated organ, and thus no guarantee that he or she will be able to receive it. But it’s all in the interest of entertainment, right?

The only piece of good news I can see in this is the statement from Education Minister Ronald Plasterk, who said that while the show is “unfitting and unethical”, it’s not up to the government to stop it, as that would constitute an act of censorship. Compare that statement to the behavior of the whole world of Italian politics and its attempts to preempt the broadcasting of the BBC documentary “Sex crimes and the Vatican” (about the Crimen Sollicitationis document, on the policies to follow in matters of child abuse) by the informational program Annozero on Italian national television (scheduled for tonight).

Edited on June 1 at 3:40 PM to add: the documentary was in the end aired during Annozero, against the will of all those who tried to censor it.

Edited on June 2 at 4:20 PM to add: the Dutch reality show turned out to be a hoax and the terminally ill woman turned out to be an actress. However, it seems the three contestants are real people who are really looking for a kidney donor, and just as real were the SMS messages sent during the show’s airtime. My opinion on the matter doesn’t change: there are much better ways to draw attention to the problem of the lack of available organs.

I’ve (re-)read A brief history of time, by physicist Stephen Hawking. While the edition I have is the first, dating back to 1988, I still find it a very compelling and stimulating read. The book tries to tackle the questions that have always been an obsession to humankind, those about the origin of the universe, about the why we’re here in addition to the how we got where we are, and the (possibly more troubling) ones about whether the universe will ever end, and how, and whether time will end with it (and thus also about the meaning of time). It starts with a historical view of the scientific progress that led us to the detailed, yet incomplete, knowledge about the universe that we possess today, while explaining the prevalent theories about the Big Bang, black holes, space-time warping and how God may fit into all of it. A complex subject matter, no doubt, but quite effectively explained and made easier to understand thanks to a real bestseller, even twenty years later.

Warning: food for thought. May decrease mental entropy, use with caution.

My fiancée Kimberly and I are getting married. The wedding will take place on June 27, in a nice and warm location near the coast of sunny California. The ceremony itself will be intimate and private, but there will be plenty of pictures taken for you all to see; we have also set up an Amazon Wedding Registry, in case anyone feels generous enough.

More and more families have problems making it to the end of the month.

Less and less couples decide to marry.

Less and less children are born.

Families are going through a crisis.

It sounds like our Italian politicians can speak of nothing else lately. It’s true that these are all things that are happening in Italy, but where’s the news? These are not problems that were born today, nor yesterday, independently of whatever scapegoat you try to blame. Repeating time and time again that these problems exist is not going to solve anything; jobs will still be scarce, salaries and pensions will still be very low, houses will still have high costs. And the resources needed to solve problems will still be gathered from those destined to citizens.

As long as these gentlemen, who want to decide for a Country they don’t belong to anymore, will enjoy rights, benefits and tax breaks without extending them to “normal” people (health care for more uxorio partners, paid-for cars with drivers, expense reimbursements, immunities); will receive very high salaries (over 20,000 Euro monthly) and will keep wasting the money that comes from taxpayers (the Quirinal Palace costs four times as much as Buckingham Palace, and contrary to its British homologue it keeps its financial records secret); will hide from justice, passing ad hoc laws and regulations, still sitting in parliament even after definitive sentences against them; as long as these conditions will remain, as long as resources won’t start coming from the inside, nothing at all will change, no matter how much they will keep talking.

On these conditions, they better not tell me there are families who have to live with only 800 Euro per month and that something needs to be done. On these conditions, we have nothing else to say to each other.

I love old computer games. I can’t forget the discovery of whole worlds through the creations of some of the greatest minds in the field of gaming: Richard Garriott, Chris Roberts, Sid Meyer, Peter Molyneux, Ron Gilbert — just to name a few. It’s a shame most of those games require MS-DOS so you can’t easily play them on modern computers… unless there was some way to virtually go back in time. That’s what emulators do, in a way. They can let you run applications on virtual machines that run on your real machine, emulating the behavior of a different machine that you don’t own. In fact, from the DOSBox website:

DOSBox emulates an Intel x86 PC, complete with sound, graphics, mouse, modem, etc., necessary for running many old DOS games that simply cannot be run on modern PCs and operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux and FreeBSD. However, it is not restricted to running only games. In theory, any DOS application should run in DOSBox, but the emphasis has been on getting DOS games to run smoothly, which means that communication, networking and printer support are still in early development.

DOSBox is just one of the many possibilities (see SCUMMVM, Exult, and others — and they’re all Free Software), but it works really well and is available on many operating systems. Now I can again play old games and go back to the past.