Who and what got you into The Beatles

It was a magic night. 
I was in Rio. This in itself was a great thing for a guy from Belo Horizonte. I went to see Tom Jones, an adorable movie. (Spoiler: he sleeps with his mother but she is not really his mother...). In the interval, I met Helio, my cousin with his first wife. A nice meeting, I loved them. 

And then I went home (Tia Sula's home). Avenida Atlantica, Rio. In a time when Rio was Rio and Avenida Atlantica was the place. And there they were: Beatlemania the poster said accompanied by a photo of four guys jumping. It was impossible to go thought without stopping to see the store window. They were different: nice guys with long hair (for the time) in a haircut style never seen before. Who are them? I never saw anything about them in Belo Horizonte. I went by but, as I said it was a magic night, I met José Carlos, one of my best friends in the middle of Avenida Atlantica and we went for pizza. The poster stayed with me and we started to hear about The Beatles. Even in Belo Horizonte. I was really into movies at the time. In fact, till today. I used to go to the cinema eight time a week average. 
I have seen all the movies screening at the time. It rested only two movies that I didn’t want to see: One a musical called West Side Story and the other was called Help! with those four Elvis Presleys (remember – I was an intellectual much into jazz and I also had a lot of bad movie experiences from my Rock and Roll time). 
I went to see the Presleys. 
I entered Cinema Acaiaca in the middle of the movie. It was continuous sessions so you could enter in the middle of the movie and stay for another session. I would not do it in an Agatha Christie movie but for a movie that I probably will forget five minutes after I left the cinema… I sat down and they were playing cards in the screen, they started to sing, instruments appeared in their hands and I sat there and my life was never the same again.

Who and what got you into the Beatles

Shanghai - The BUND at night

Shanghai - The BUND at night

The Danger of AI

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking are warning us that AI will be the end of humanity. Others argue that machines lack emotions, therefore they are not dangerous.

Now, for the facts:

·       Machines already are more intelligent and effective than any human in a lot of fields and they will steal all our jobs in a short period.

·       Singularity and other forms of intelligent machines are science fiction. At least for now. November 2017. Next month I am not sure.

·       AI is not emotions even not intuition – it is just statistics. If the price of the apartments in this area is x dollars, then this apartment probably can be sold for x dollars. That’s it. It doesn’t matter if the methods are – classification or regression, supervised, unsupervised or reinforced – we are talking about knowledge and probabilities. The whole thing is based on analysis of a lot of data and parameters. A lot, that’s what makes them super intelligent.

Machines are not dangerous to the humanity they are dangerous to people.

Because machines don’t possess emotions, because of the fact it is just statistics and data they are dangerous. Those statistics are based on the reality as we know it. And the reality is racist, homophobe and discriminates women. The machines will augment it. Exponentially.

That is the danger.

When I was in jail in Israel there were a majority of Arabs, a lot of Oriental Jews and some Ashkenakies.

Put this in an AI machine and the result will be immediate: Arabs are bad, Oriental Jews are suspicious and Ashkenazies are good.

The Israelis will put this kind of logic in a drone and the drone will start killing a lot of Arabs.

Machines will be biased by our reality and will serve the dominant classes.

I don’t see machines destroying the humanity but I see a very dark near future reality.

Walking New York in VR

On April 26, 2015 Elmar received his fifteen minutes.

He received a lot more than fifteen minutes. He is the star of The New York Times Magazine for this date but more than that he participated in the virtual reality video telling the story of how the French artist JR put this 20 years old waiter in the cover of the magazine dedicated to the immigrants of the city.

The video is called Walking New York and is a breakthrough in documentaries, in how to relate to the VR video media and creates a new kind of art.

The story is simple: New York Times decided to dedicate a number of its magazine to the immigrants of New York. As JR himself explains in the video: everybody in New York is an immigrant or a son of an immigrant or a grandson of an immigrant.

For the cover of the magazine they contracted JR for a large-scale street photography.

JR is a French artist known mainly by its huge photographies that he applies to street walls.  

JR is a French artist known mainly by its huge photographies that he applies to street walls. 

He chooses Elmar because he likes the way the young waiter walks. JR with a group of friends take some photos of Elmar walking, print it, apply it to the floor of a central place in New York.

Then on the afternoon “when the lights were right” JR get up with an helicopter and took the picture of the picture of Elmar walking in New York.

All this was filmed using the virtual reality technologies creating an incredible work of art.

By far the best VR video ever made.

About JR
WIRED: How The NY Times Is Sparking the VR Journalism Revolution
Face2Face: JR on the Israeli Palestinian Wall

Paradise Itself

We were in Treviso for two weeks studying Italian with Dvora and Rubi. Every day, after classes, we travelled to a different place – Venetia, Padua, weekend in Capri, and others. One day we decided that we were travelling everywhere but it was time to visit Treviso itself.
At Treviso we split and I went with Debby getting around the city. At a certain point I told Debby I wanted a coffee and she pointed to two coffee places and asked me where I wanted to drink coffee (I am a bit problematic with my coffee). I told her that it really didn’t matter. After all in Italy the coffee is good everywhere.
“Let’s enter here”, I said, pointing to a place called Nascimbem. We entered, asked for coffee and San Pelegrino. Waiting for it, we noticed that everybody – I mean it: everybody - was asking for tiramisu. It was very strange. Debby asked me if I wanted a tiramisu fifty-fifty. I told her yes, why not?
We asked for a tiramisu and when it arrived we took each a teaspoon and we grabbed a piece of tiramisu. And we put it in the mouth.

And time stopped.
Everything became colourful, the flowers bloomed, the birds sang, the gates of glory opened.
We called the waiter and asked him how the tiramisu can be so good. He explained that in Nascimbem they are making tiramisu one hundred and fifty years, that, in fact, they were the first place in the World to make a tiramisu.
Without knowing it, we just have entered paradise itself.
In the photo you can see the waiter and Debby.

320,000 people in the demonstrations of yesterday

Yesterday there were almost 300,000 people in the demonstration in Tel Aviv, 30,000 in Jerusalem and thousands in demonstrations all over the country. Once I was in a demonstration of a million and half in London. It was different – they were more organized, the demand was clear: NO WAR in Irak and if I love it or not I don’t live there.
And yes 300 thousand in Tel Aviv is like almost three million in London or Paris, it is similar to 9,000,000 people in Brazil!
Brazilians, can you imagine 9 million people in one big demo? That’s what happened yesterday.

The demands were various: against the concentration of capital in the hands of few, against privatization, for better public health care, for public housing, for more budgets to education, against the taxes, against the cost of living and hundreds of particular demands.

Mostly the demonstrations were against the disdain of the government towards the people.

In the meantime the stocks were already down by six percent at the opening of the market. Tel Aviv is the first market to open after the downgrade of US to AA+.

Interesting days before us.