It had been a curious week...

Nuno, my friend and I took a flight from Heathrow Airport at 8:10 am. Inspite of being July it was a chilly Monday morning. Nuno and I had breakfast at the "Metro Cafe", what the Brits call "continental breakfast". We were quite excited about this trip. We were flying to Berlin to participate in the "Love Parade". It's something that I always wanted to see and this time was about to become real. We had a friend there waiting for us. Her name is Natalie, a very nice German girl who actually was born in Berlin. She works in this fancy hotel right in the town centre. She used to be our collegue back in London in a hotel in Knightsbridge. After a couple of hours, we were in the middle of the parade, in the "Tiergarten" to be more precise. There was a huge amount of people, over 1.2 million heads bouncing to the rythum of the music. This music was supplied from 54 trucks at the same time. It was quite amazing. "I never saw so many people togother in my life!" Nuno said. The music was quite loud and I shouted at him, trying to reply to his comment "Not even in the Metallica concert back in 1991 in Lisbon, this is great!". After all this excitement and a couple of days later we flew from Berlin to the Algarve to spend the rest of our holiday. After landing at the Faro airport, we took a train to the small and tidy city of Lagos. It's a excellent place to be. Good food, very nice weather with sunshine all day long, a very clean beach and a fantastic warm water. This time we went to camp in a good and cheap campsite and it was quite fun because we met a lot of interesting people and made a lot of friends form many parts of the world. It had been not only a curious week but also a short week for the intensity lived!

In order to present our colleagues an interesting theme to talk about in our blog, our group chose "anti americanism".

As we all know, americans have the world under their control. Some are OK with it, but the great part of us are not.

"Anti-Americanism, often anti-American sentiment, is opposition or hostility to the people, culture or policies of the United States. In practice, a broad range of attitudes an critical of or opposed to the United States have been labeled anti-Americanism. Thus, the applicability of the term is often disputed. Contemporary examples typically focus on opposition to United States policy, though historically the term has been applied to a variety of concepts.

Interpretations of anti-Americanism have often been polarised. Anti-Americanism has been described as a belief that configures the United States and the American way of life as threatening at their core—what Paul Hollander has called "a relentless critical impulse toward American social, economic, and political institutions, traditions, and values." However, it has also been suggested that Anti-Americanism cannot be isolated as a consistent phenomenon and that the term merely signifies a rough composite of stereotypes, prejudices and criticisms towards Americans or the United States.

Whether sentiment hostile to the United States reflects reasoned evaluation of specific policies and administrations, rather than a prejudiced belief system, is a further complication. Globally, increases in perceived anti-American attitudes appear to correlate with particular policies, such as the Vietnam and Iraq wars. For this reason, critics sometimes argue the label is a propaganda term that is used to dismiss any censure of the United States as irrational.

Discussions on anti-Americanism have in most cases lacked a precise definition of what the sentiment entails, which has lead to the term being used broadly and in a impressionistic manner, resulting in an incoherent nature in the many expressions described as anti-American."

From Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Americanism

Diana Teles

Option 3 - It had been a curious week

It had been a curious week. Jack left the airport with a funny feeling inside his stomach. He was tired, he had not slept much the previous night.

When his best friend Thomas told him about his intentions of studying in Barcelona for a year, Jack had only seen an opportunity to travel cheaply and have a house to stay. Looking back, he realized how childish that had been.

He had missed Thomas a little bit. He was his own company watching the Sunday night football. Thomas was the one Jack would drag to the cinema to watch movies no one else would want to see. And though it would not be manly to admiti, Jack needed that reassuring presence by his side every now and then to keep his mind clear.

But Thomas had not been there. For 3 months, the brown-eyed, pot-smoking geek had not been there and Jack had survived fairly well. That was, of course, until she came. She, with her flashy green eyes and her less than subtle clothes. Thomas would have liked her. Maybe they would have fought over her for a while, eventually remembering the "bros before hoes" commandment.

However, in the absence of Thomas, Jack had had Ana all to himself. Which basically meant that he had time to be with her in the Spanish classes where they had met, and a whole lot more time to fall in love with her. And he did fall in love. And after two months of seduction games and of "playing hard to get" moves, Jack pushed her against a wall and kissed her. With that bold gesture, began an undeclared relationship of doubts and insecurities, but with as much passion as one can take.

That series of events had been on his mind when he had been travelling from London to Barcelona. It had brought a light smile to his face. On the contrary, recallling that he had not seen Ana for a week because she was in Paris visiting her father and the he would be away when she returned, had darkened his expression.

The existence of Ana made his stay at Barcelona feel bittersweet. It had been great seeing Thomas again and the city was quite nice, with its candy stores and the loud Spanish people everywhere. But no matter how hard he tried, Jack just could not bring himself to not desire the day of his flight back to England. Somehow, the discos and the mildly attractive girls were not good enough anymore, they did not matter. That had felt weird. A week in Barcelona and all he saw was Ana all over the place? A curious week indeed.

Leaving all that behind, he was finally in London again. He took the bus home, left his luggage by the door and got in his car, only stopping at the University.

He walked slowly into the building, searching carefully for Ana. She did not know he was coming. It did not take long for him to find her in her high-heeled shoe self. She had the power to make herself look more... many things she was not. And as he noticed she had spotted him, he took his sunglasses off, put them in his pocket and grinned like he had not grinned for a week.

"Hey, Sweet Pea."

Ana put her arms around his neck and kissed his lips hard, then resting her head on his should, her mouth against his ear.

"I missed you."

Jack held her tighter and instinctively knew that was how it felt to have something, someone, to return to.

Maria João Pereira

The Day It All Changed

At least a week had gone by now since the day fire rained from the skies. Aneska was curled up in a corner of what had once been her home, now reduced to ashes, concrete dust and debris.
Aneska did not know why explosions had rocked the small town of Dastanya, just thirty kilometres west of Moscow. While it had worked, her old radio spoke of an attack by the Chinese, and of declarations of a third world war. It had advised her of the dangers of radiation too. But at the tender age of nine, all that Aneska knew was that her reddened skin itched and her eyes hurt and watered up all the time.
The little girl woke up with a feeble cry, clutching the tattered remains of her teddy bear. She wiped her eyes and felt her tummy rumble. It was cold and her body was all achey. In the ruins, all she had managed to find had been a bottle of stale vodka and a basket of frostbitten fruit and vegetables.
Biting into the hard, crunchy food, Aneska looked up into the steel-gray skies. It hadn't stopped raining ash since the day of the explosions.
Cold, hungry and missing her parents, she looked into the dark skies and wondered if anyone out there was coming to save her.
Hours passed. Aneska didn't go out anymore; not since the day she saw the foreign soldiers go through the ruined city she once called home.
Instead she waited. Listening to her own troubled breath. She coughed a bit, staining her gloves with crimson phlegm.
When night fell - and Aneska knew it was night only because it got darker and colder - she closed her eyes and fell asleep, dreaming of warmth; of home; of her mother and father. It was a good dream.
A dream that little Aneska would not wake up from.

Transcript and Story by Luís Alexandre R. Bernardino

Virtual telescope opens night sky

Twirling galaxies, exotic nebulae and exploding stars are now just a mouse click away for amateur astronomers.

Microsoft has launched WorldWide Telescope, a free tool that stitches together images from some of the best ground- and space-based telescopes.

Collections include pictures from the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes, as well as the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

The web-based tool also allows users to pan and zoom around the planets, and trace their locations in the night sky.

"Users can see the X-ray view of the sky, zoom into bright radiation clouds, and then cross-fade into the visible light view and discover the cloud remnants of a supernova explosion from a thousand years ago," explained Roy Gould, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

"[It's] a beautiful platform for explaining and getting people excited about astronomy, and I think the professional astronomers will come to use it as well," said Roy Williams of the California Institute of Technology

Detailed view

To use the new system, users need to download WorldWide Telescope from the web. It only runs on Windows operating systems.

Users can explore the Moon and selected planets in more detail

The web portal gives star-gazers access to "terabytes" of data. It allows them to explore planets, moons and other celestial objects and track their precise position in the sky from any location on Earth, "at any time in the past or future".

Data from sources including the US space agency Nasa allows users to switch between views at different wavelengths and through different telescopes.

Nasa contributed imagery from its Mars Rovers, the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory.

Around 30 images from Chandra are available through the program including X-ray data and multi-wavelength composite photographs.

Other data sets include the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey, also known as the Cosmic Genome Project, which aims to capture detailed optical images of more than a quarter of the night sky.

WorldWide Telescope, launched as a beta, or test version, also features tours of the Universe by leading astronomers, as well as the ability for a user to record their own.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS 2GHz or faster processor 2GB of RAM 1-10GB of free disk space Graphics card with 128 MB RAM or 256 VRAM Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Net connection Macs must run Windows OS

A tour called Dust and Us by Alyssa Goodman, professor of astronomy at Harvard, walks through the dark regions in galaxies where stars and planets form.

"I see the WorldWide Telescope as having an important educational mission," said Robert Kirshner, professor of astronomy at Harvard University.

"[It] gives somebody a kind of freedom to follow their imagination."

Bill Gates, Microsoft's chairman, described it as a "powerful tool for education" and said he hoped it would "inspire young people to explore astronomy and science".

Stellar options

Microsoft's new application is not the only tool that allows astronomers to explore the night sky from their computers.

Stellarium is an open source alternative to Microsoft's offering

Last year, Microsoft rival Google launched Sky, an add-on to Google Earth which allows astronomers to glide through images of more than one million stars and 200 million galaxies.

Optional layers allow users to explore images from the Hubble Space Telescope as well as animations of lunar cycles.

Other applications have been available for longer.

For example, Stellarium is a free open source tool that gives people a chance to access more than 210 million stars, in addition to planets and moons.

The project was launched in 2001 by Fabien Chereau, a Research Engineer at the Paris Astronomical Observatory, and is used in many planetariums.

Like WorldWide Telescope the software allows users to record and play their own tours of the Universe.

From BBC :: Diana

Consequences

(Two men are sitting at a kitchen table, in front of each other. It is dark outside and the light in the room is dim. Jared has his face hidden behind his hands, Jake has his hands clasped and repeatedly taps his left foot.)

Jake: You said it was okay, that it didn’t matter…

(Jared remains silent.)

Jake: Didn’t you?
Jared: I know what I said.
Jake: So why are you acting like this?Jared: It was a long time ago. Before you came.
Jake (with growing impatience): You never bothered to tell me you had changed your mind...
Jared: Does that even matter?
Jake: You tell me.
Jared: I don’t care.

(Jake sighs and leans his back against the chair. A long silence follows.)

Jake: How did you find out?
Jared: Andy told me.
Jake: What he says isn’t always to be trusted. Not accurately, anyway.
Jared: Which is why I asked you. And you confirmed.

(Jared looks up and seeks Jake’s eyes.)

Jared: Were you ever gonna tell me?
Jake: Obviously.
Jared: So how long did you have to wait, really?
Jake: I... I don’t know, okay? Things were different, you had these... conditions, right?
Jared: Yeah, you can call them that.
Jake: It was kinda refreshing, although they were similar to my views on human relationships. You didn’t care what I did or who I was with.
Jared: I always told you I’m not the jealous type.
Jake: Well, I learnt that the hard way, didn’t I?
Jared: Guess so... I can’t understand jealousy. In my book, that doesn’t make sense.
Jake: It’s not about mistrust, it’s about personal insecurity.
Jared: Never gave you reason for that.
Jake: Personal insecurity comes from within. It was never about what you did or didn’t do.
Jared: You know, I don’t really have a problem with jealousy, ‘coz for me it would mean that I don’t trust you with other people. You say it’s about fearing someone else taking me away from you, which is fine. We came to an agreement. I can’t see how that would happen. You can. We live with it.
Jake: Is this about you dealing you with a never-before-felt jealousy?
Jared: With all the qualities you hold inside, Jake, you still manage to be quite dumb sometimes.
Jake: Yeah, I do that every now and then.
Jared: I always had this... thing. This unwanted feeling of needing to protect us. Not you. Us as a couple. You can mess around, I would mess around if I could, but I feel very protective when it comes to someone interfering with what we are as a whole.

(Jake sighs and lowers his head.)

Jared: See, in theory, I shouldn’t care what you did. It was a one-night flavour, you had your fun. But I do care. I never forbid you anything, but I asked you to be honest with me. Have your affairs, but let me know of them. Screw around, but really be with me when we’re together. You... You spent the weekend partying when I was away because of work and you finished it with a cosy night with that whoever-he-is cyber guy. All fine, you told me about the party. You never told me about the guy. Why?
Jake: I... I was afraid.
Jared: Of what? Did I ever put pressure on you? Did I ever prevent you from doing all the crazy stuff you like doing? Did I ever ask you to stop looking at other people?
Jake: I was afraid I’d lose you.
Jared: Now that’s unexpected news!
Jake: I never thought I’d feel like being with someone else. But I went with the flow that night, alcohol, pot... I wasn’t thinking straight. It was the first time I felt that resisting the temptation was a sacrifice, instead of an honour...
Jared: Really? Just keeps getting better.
Jake: I’m so sorry...
Jared: I’m not sure you are.
Jake (pleadingly): I am, I really am... I know I love you and you’re the person I want to be with... I just... I made a mistake.
Jared: It wasn’t a mistake. It’s fine, we agreed we could do that. I just... don’t feel good about it anymore.
Jake: Can you forgive me?

(Jared breathes in deeply and hides his face again, his voice trembling.)

Jared: I can’t promise you anything.
Jake: Will you try?
Jared: I always do. Please, go away.
Jake: What...? Where should I go?
Jared: I don’t care. I just need to be alone for a while. You’ll hear from me sometime soon.
Jake: Are you breaking up with me?
Jared: I don’t know. Go.
Jake (his voice failing him): I’m so, so sorry, Jared... It’s all my fault. I never meant to hurt you. Don’t give up on me... Please, please... I loved you even then... I... I’m just stupid.

(Jared does not reply. Jake stands up, lays a kiss on Jared’s hair and leaves the house with a barely audible sound behind his back.)

Maria João Pereira

Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk performed "a capella"

Luís Alexandre R. Bernardino