The hidden pleasure of Zero-Sum Games

As Soccer World Cup finals are rounding up, it's this great time of the year when Uruguayans get together to suffer one more time on the hope of being able to re-enact those glorious years of 1930's and 1950's Soccer World Cup.

Living outside the country gave me the opportunity to look at the spectacle of the last Uruguay-Argentina qualifier round from a different perspective. My sister on skype described for me a country where every person was glued to the TV, nobody in the streets, no exceptions! At that time it hit me! Argentina being very similar to Uruguay, was for sure doing the same exact thing at the same exact time. I could picture the two countries following this one event that would define the country that would have an opportunity at the World Cup. It downed to me how sad it was that no matter what, that night, one of those two nations would be massively happy and the other would be massively sad. There was no way around it. Of course there was not! Soccer is a Zero-Sum Game and as the name proclaims the outcome for the total system will inevitably be Zero.

Oh well, as Argentina has approximately 11 times more population than Uruguay, I guess more people were happy than sad in the end that day ... Thinking deeper, if you tried to take away this game from either Uruguayans or Argentinians might as well kill them ... so I started realizing that even in a game where the score is definitely a Zero-Sum Game, the experience must be positive in some ways that are hard for me to understand, both because I'm ADD and can't follow the ball in a TV screen and because I'm hopelessly geek (if your definition of geek doesn't include nerd, please add nerd here).

Anyway, I really hoped that someone had explained to me this Zero-Sum Game concept when I was 4 (even when I wouldn't understand negative numbers by that time, the concept is graspable I think). It did have a great impact in my life understanding this.

Also, wanted to share some Non-Zero-Sum Games that I enjoyed lately:


[via Diana in FB]


[via Enrique in FB]


[via Andres in real life]

In addition, I found this TED video by Robert Wright (author of Non-Zero, The Logic of Human Destiny). Very interesting acid humored video with a great recount of evolution and makes a point regarding cultural evolution and the arrowed evolution of morality which I totally agree too. Even more, he states that technology has a positive role and effect in the direction of morality's evolution, a question I asked myself before and couldn't quite dig.

Conversations we have

Some time ago, I started paying attention to the conversations that I have with other people. Sort of a pattern started arising at some point. Eventually I realized there are three types of conversations people have:

1. Casual conversations. These are the conversations about the weather, local or global headline news, about things that are happening around us now, about things we've done, are doing in the present or we want to do in the future. It's a very healthy level of conversation to have with people that we don't know: street, elevator, bus, train, market. The main subject of these type of conversations are things.

2. Personal conversations. These are conversations about what is happening on my life and my close ones. It's more appropriate to have these type of conversations with people that know each other. The main subject of these type of conversations are people and things that are happening to people. There are different levels of personal conversations. There's the lower side of it where people are talking mostly about facts of what's going on their lives and going up in the pyramid there's the ones in which people are talking about how they feel about things that are happening to them and their closest ones, to finally the upper level in which people are analyzing the reasons behind things and trying to draw conclusions, mirror the other person's situation or identify patterns and relationships among those personal experiences.

3. Conceptual conversations. Conceptual conversations are about ideas, concepts. They're abstract representations or interpretations of reality or fantasy, inventions or any other type of creations. These type of conversations are more scarce and they are the basis/responsible for human advances in different areas. Some examples of this type of conversation would be when you're talking about religion, politics, science, social issues, projects, inventions, theories, laws, principles, etc.

There's not a right or wrong way to have your conversations, although there's probably a trend. There seem to be a strong correlation between these conversations pyramid and Maslow's pyramid of human needs. I believe as people go up in Maslow's pyramid they also go up on the conversations they have.

It's a great experiment to start observing what type of conversations we have and how we feel about them. I think part of what actually got me thinking on all of this was that I was starting to feel very frustrated when people I know would spend all of our encounter's time on casual conversations or barely brushing on personal ones.

I personally love casual conversations as they allow me to interact with unknown people around the world which is a very basic need for me as well as for the other party. I choose to spend most of my time with people I know talking personal or conceptual conversations. Usually when I meet a friend I like to move fairly quickly from casual to personal, cover all the basis, and if everything is pretty clear on the personal side for both me and my friend I often love to indulge myself as well into conceptual conversations.


It's probably arguable that there is more meaning going up on the pyramid, and it's also probably not really showing proportions very accurately as maybe the pyramid we should be drawing would be more like the creators, synthesizers and consumers pyramid than the one pictured here.

Don't forget health care

It's hard to believe but this was the long due and forgotten third bullet point back in 1992 during Clinton's campaign:

1. Change vs. more of the same. It looks like we got that one!
2. The economy, stupid. You've got to be really stupid not to notice this one by now ...
3. Don’t forget health care. This one doesn't seem so obvious. This is part of the right to live or how is it not part of the right to live?

I'd add a forth one: Don't forget education!! Coming from a country were the educational principles of education being free (all the way including universities), mandatory and religious-free, it looks like there's a lot to accomplish there too. Especially when the world is changing and education is big time stagnated.

It is time for Health care for all. Don't forget health care!

Twitter: "It's the search, stupid"

For all of you that are wondering, why do I need this Twitter thing? and what is the big deal about knowing what other people had for breakfast? or thinking, I'll never come back to this Twitter in a zillion years... think again!

Here's a little different perspective of why Twitter is indeed so relevant and it will just become more and more relevant overtime.

Did you think that Twitter was a life streaming service? Well ... it is! but what it is really becoming is a huge index for web content organized by time, social closeness and geographical data. So, what do you get in the end? A search engine, even when we don't see it like that for now. That's where it's going and that's what it will become for the majority of users that are not necessarily content generators but content consumers.

We have to remember that users will follow the 1:10:100 rule as far as content creation, a trend that might be changing with younger generations but is still very true as of today. This rule would basically tell us that every 100 "content consumer" users that will be out there just reading tweets, following others and searching there will be 10 that are "synthesizers" mostly doing re-tweets and hollow posts (no links to new web content or no relevant content on their own) and only 1 will be actually "creators" generating tweets that index relevant pages created on the web or have original text content of their own. Right now, twitter users are mostly in the synthesizers and creators groups (1:10) and the big consumers group (100) is usually not enticed enough to stay. Those consumers are the people that signed up, checked it out, thought useless/boring/time waste and forgot about it ... But, things will change.

Search will be refined, like it just was by adding location, and it'll become more evident and user friendly. Content will have more metadata attached, which in the end is search engine material, so search results can be more relevant. Content will continue to grow and expand. And, sooner or later, the consumers group, the 100 group, which is the mainstream group as well, will start finding utility in searching, discovering and using twitter information. The index will work for them, and they'll be the new twitter fans.

Here are the reasons why, twitter it's all about search:

1. Tweets are 140-char link indexes.
Tweets do link the web. Most everything that is being produced on the net right now such as blog posts, web site pages, other tweets, facebook updates (soon to come) are linked by tweets. Tweets are pointing to everything that is happening on the web as it happens. That's where the 140 characters limitation worked a miracle by generating new habits of synthesizing an idea and linking to the expanded content which creates the super web index that twitter is becoming.

2. Relevance by freshness, social closeness and geo-location.
The user in the present moment is or could be at the center of the search experience in twitter. I could search by freshness or time relevance and I assume with time they could be allowing me to actually search for tweets in the future or past in addition to the precious now. Also, I could search within the global twitterverse as well as I could be searching within my own network of who I decide to follow. Recently enabled was the search by physical location which brings into the picture incredible extra ways in which searchs can be profiled.

3. Social built-in.
Twitter started as a social network, a flexible one, much more open than others like Facebook, but the social component of being able to say these are the people I care for is there and that might be key in the future of how they cater search. This is a key component of the viral behavior twitter generates. Once data portability is implemented, as it most likely will be, you could post in twitter for only your group of friends or for all your followers and be much on control of how you share/stream your data.

Update: found this great article about this same subject back in Feb 09.

Twitter enables geo-location for tweets

Twitter announced couple days ago one of the smartest moves that they could have possibly done. They will be adding latitude and longitude to their tweets. The first step will be through their API so that all the applications in the twitterverse can post tweets with location. In the future they'll also allow it from their own channels.

Why is this so powerful?
This addition totally deepens the gap between traditional web search and real time geo search. There is an ongoing battle in the search world and Twitter is already beating the traditional search when it comes to real time events. If you wanted to know information about Michael Jackson, a political movement in Iran or an earthquake happening right now somewhere in the world you definitely would benefit much more from searching in twitter than doing so in Google or bing.
The geographical search will bring one more layer to our virtual world. Now, not only can you ask twitter what's happening right now around some tag words, but you could also limit the scope to some particular geographical area.

Our syncing between the real and digital world will have location connection in addition to time connection once this technology is widely adopted as it will.
I believe it actually will bring closer our digital and real worlds ...
It's like if our virtual worlds were hanging out there in a time mesh and in the short future the mesh will be attached by infinity of points to the face of Earth. Maybe I'm being to matrixy here, but that's what I think will happen ;)


As GPS enabled devices are becoming more mainstream this kind of search will become very important. This is the connection in real time and in situ. This is revolutionary! We'll open many other ways of doing things because of this new geo-layer and it makes total sense that Twitter will be at the heart of it all.

Other than navigation tools, GPS has been pretty secluded for niche applications seldom used massively. With twitter geo-location addition plus the ubiquity of mobile devices with integrated GPS we'll see an explosion of new uses for location based applications. I can see it being used for sharing during events such as concerts, congresses, conventions, exploring new friends/hangouts/dates, getting discounts/coupons/sales information as you are at stores or malls, emergency uses of all sorts, etc.

There's obviously a great business model behind this new Twitter feature, as once you have location targeted ads become a must. Foursquare actually already uses them in some capacity.

Note: This was one of the first times that I learned about this by twitter before than blogs ...

Two shooting stars

My last night's insomnia turned for the good when Google reminded me that the Perseids were peeking today around 4:00am. As a side note, I never saw the Google logo sooo nice. Too bad it was already 4:38 when I found out, plus the moon was out, Temecula was pretty bright and the sun raising orange light was starting to show up.

Still, I managed to see two pretty good shooting starts close to Orion constellation. (I didn't expect to see them there, not enough time to research though).

Orion, Hiades and Pleyades (my very favorite constellation) were aligned almost with the Moon, it was a nice night out there. Of course mosquitoes started to bother me too and it was time to say: Mission accomplished!

If you didn't catch this one, you still can give it a shot tonight and a few more nights ...

Note: stargazers, my fav website for star related matters, seems to be down, apparently they couldn't escalate after some online newspapers mentioned them.

Touchable Holography

Very cool, from University of Tokyo, Holographic image that you can feel:

Video: Airborne Ultrasound Tactile Display - fühlbare Hologramme (2:37)

Beware: Nintendo Dsi creates zombies!

As happy as I was when Santa got us the Nintendo Wii as much as I regret the moment I got the Nintendo DSi for my girls. They're just hooked. They never are ready to turn them off. They have to take them everywhere. You talk to them and they don't respond. It's crazy. They wake up and the first thing they think of is their DSi. They have been turned into zombies! I want my daughters back!!

Don't buy your kids DSis. Don't say you weren't warned ...