Felipe Contreras

Until a few years I have lived all my life in Mexico, then about one year in USA and now six months in Finland. After these experiences I have the felling that most people don’t really know much about it, some almost nothing.

Today is Mexico’s independence day, so I figured it would be a good idea to write about my country.

I guess the stereotype of Mexican people is that we like tequila, dance a salsa, we are lazy and our best beer is Corona.

Most people get surprised by this one: Corona is far from being the best beer, they just did good marketing. To my understanding it is one of the cheapest and it’s popular in “beach cities” or small towns, but otherwise it’s just another beer, and definitively not the best. My friends would buy Indio, Sol, Tecate Light, XX Lager, Heineken, Casta, anything but Corona.

For a complete list of international ratings you can check FEMSA list, Grupo Modelo list and there’s more

Now, Mexico is drastically different from one place to another. We have deserts, amazing beaches, forests and jungles. Huge cities, towns and indigenous communities. Filthy rich people (like Carlos Slim, the richest person in the world) and very poor. It’s really difficult to say that Mexico is some way, because it really depends a lot.

What is worst. We Mexicans don’t know each other so well. It’s not unusual to leave a Mexican wondering about some fact of the country. There are 31 states, and each state is totally different.

So if you think Mexican drink tequila you should think again. Some Mexicans call themselves “tequilero” (they like it), some are more beer people, and some like other liquors. In my city (Monterrey) we mostly drink beer and tequila just in special occasions or mixed with something else.

The same goes for dancing Salsa. A lot of people from “beach cities” dance it, but it’s not so popular anywhere else. Each zone has its own distinct type of dancing. There’s Cumbia Tejana, Cumbia Norteña, Quebradita, Pacito Duranguense, Banda, etc.

The one that I find most amusing is that we are lazy. In some way that’s true; we like to take shortcuts. We like to think about ourselves as “creative” people that often do things the “wrong” way. Some classic example is to quickly “fix” a car’s broken front light with some plastic and scotch tape, sometimes for the lack of money, but other times it’s for the lack of time. We don’t spend so much time finding the proper solution. That has advantages and drawbacks but that’s how we are.

We usually work more than 8 hours a day, a lot of people work on Saturdays and even Sundays, the concept of extra time is almost inexistent, we don’t get any vacation days on the first year of work, and after that is about 10 days per year.

On the contrary, we are very hard-working people, and specially the people on the north.

Something that most people fail to see is our sense of humour. We make fun about everything all the time, but usually in a way of puns which heavily rely on our own Mexican variant of Spanish.

Language and humor are intensely correlated. For example: a very common word is chingada (fuck/screw), which comes from La Malinche the mistress of Hernan Cortes which is considered a traitor who screwed us. Nowadays most Mexicans don’t know where “chingada” comes from, it probably started as a joke which eventually made into the common language, and now it’s still used as a word that can be used almost anywhere and makes the comment more funny.

There’s also albur. Which I don’t want to try to explain, but it’s some very specific kind of pun joke which is persistent in the whole country and even among different social classes.

We even make fun about the death. We have a special Day of the Dead in which we remember our lost beloved ones and think about them as if they came back this day to live with the living. The tradition says that we should put some altar with offerings; things they liked in life. In some towns they even make parties. Also some people write “calaveras” (skulls), which are mocking epitaphs for friends (living friends), as a story about how the death takes them away, with rhymes and puns, but most importantly something quintessential about the person.

Almost everything is allowed: death, corruption, racism, sexism, wifes, sisters, even Mexican people… but not mothers, that’s really touchy.

It’s not a big surprise that Mexican humor is not very well known: it’s too local, and maybe offensive. But lately there have been a few Mexican comedians that have been able to succeed in USA, and they are quite good: George Lopez, Pablo Francisco and Paul Rodriguez.

Funny enough the Mexican-American comedians almost unknown in Mexico.

The food? There’s no Mexican food outside of Mexico. What is supposed to be “Mexican cousine” is actually Tex-Mex at best. Nachos and Fajitas are purely Tex-Mex; Fajitas are almost unknown in Mexico.

Typical examples of Mexican cuisine include: pozole, tamales, carnitas and mole. If there isn’t any typical drink as horchata, jamaica or tamarindo then it’s probably not Mexican cuisine.

Tortillas must be warm, that’s why they are kept inside “tortilleros” (tortilla warmers), and food is usually served without tortillas so when you are ready to use one you take it out of the tortillero. Typical tortillas are about 15 cm.

Again, the typical food varies drastically from region to region. For a list of more Mexican food check here.

And finally there’s music. Again, a lot of different kinds:

Café Tacuba – Ojalá que llueva Café

El Gran Silencio – Cumbia Lunera (live from Japan)

Celso Piña – Cumbia sobre el Rio

Kinky – Coqueta (with cowbell!)

(I’m listing examples of the ones I like that I think are typical but there are many many more).

Our race and our culture is metiza; a mixture from European and indigenous which is very rich and diverse. Drastically different from one place to another is a living example that different cultures can live together peacefully. It’s far from being a paradise; there are huge problems as corruption, poverty and ignorance, but Mexican people are positive, and although slowly, there’s improvement.

Sometimes I browse the Interweb in search for something that is interesting, quick and enlightening and it often seems an impossible task. It’s easy to find lolcatz and stupid kids in YouTube, but not something with more essence.

I’m still not sure how but I found my fountain of interesting videos in TED. I think I found them in Google Video.

These are the ones I like the most so far:

David Bolinsky: Fantastic voyage inside a cell.
An amazing CG work that shows the mini-world of a cell, and how complicated and beautiful it is.

Hans Rosling: No more boring data.
This is what people mean when information is power.

Malcolm Gladwell: What we can learn from spaghetti sauce.
Food leads to happyness and Malcom shows us the way to happiness on the future.

Emily Oster: What do we know about the spread of AIDS?.
A different point of view on the problems in Africa that makes complete sense.

Cameron Sinclair: Open-source architecture to house the world.
Another step for OpenSource to world domination.

Ken Robinson: Do schools today kill creativity?
A funny talk that shows us what we already know; schools are doing a poor job.

Eva Vertes: My dream about the future of medicine.
The future is in the next generation, and this girl proves that we really need to forget what we think we know.

Richard Dawkins: An atheist’s call to arms.
Let’s all stop being so damn respectfull.

Nick Bostrom: Humanity’s biggest problems aren’t what you think they are.
We are so near the wall that we don’t see what you real problems are as humanity.

Kevin Kelly: How does technology evolve? Like we did.
Is technology a new way of life?

Seth Godin: Sliced bread and other marketing delights.
We are in a new era of communications; marketing should adapt accordingly.

Phew, I have quite a lot of links to post this time.

• Map: Welcome to the Blogosphere
  A very interesting map of the blogosphere, with a nice analysis. I just hope I could find myself
  (tags: article blogosphere web2.0 interesting)
• Mathematician suggests extra dimensions are time-like
  George Sparling says “My approach is bottom up: take the existing four-dimensional theory seriously and try to build up from it. This is very tough to do. Hopefully my ideas work. Note that my work only constitutes a possible beginning at a more inclusive theory.”
  This makes much more sense to me.
  (tags: interesting article science physics)
• SPACE.com: Out-of-This-World Hypothesis: Cosmic Forces Control Life on Earth
  I hope we are not near that 64 million cycle where we are no the cosmic north receiving those bow shock waves… weird.
  (tags: article evolution interesting science space)
• xkcd: Conspiracy Theories
  Great one!
  (tags: comics funny humor)
• Nanoscale ‘Coaxial Cables’ for Solar Energy Harvesting
  (tags: research nanotechnology environment article
  interesting)
• Next-generation, high-performance processor unveiled | Science Blog
  These babies process 16 instructions per cycle with up to 1,024 instructions in flight simultaneously.
  (tags: article future technology hardware)
• New project: Empathy
  Go Telepathy clients!
  (tags: gnome desktop instant.messaging)
• Axl Library (Another XML Library), XML Library, XML, XML Software, XML Parser
  Competition is good, specially since I have not found an XML Library that I really like.
  (tags: xml open.source library software.development)
• Computerworld – AI will surpass human intelligence after 2020
  Interesting article about the future. A little far-fetched, but great ideas.
  (tags: ai article future world web2.0 technology fiction)
• Conduit 0.3.0
  Sync/Export/Backup Flickr, Tomboy, iPod, gnomevfs, FSpot. Very interesting project.
• buzztard 0.2 sunrise is out
  The buzztard team has release version 0.2 “sunrise” of its buzz-alike music composer.
• A Guided Tour of Hotwire 0.333
  Hotwire is an innovative way of working with the “command line”, bash is so passé.
• xkcd: Online Communities
  Another great one from xkcd! A very funny map of the Internet.
• What If Iran Had Invaded Mexico?
  Noam Chomsky on “the Iran Effect”. Interesting points.
  (tags: politics war society article)

Toda Javier Vargas, aka El Vargitas, told me about this guitar duo.

They are from Mexico City, and they play awesome. Here some videos:

Tamacun (Live):

Capitán Casanova

Diablo Rojo: David Letterman – The Late Show

Linux Journal provides an interesting interview with Tim Bray.

I didn’t know this guy, but his interests seem pretty similar to mine ones. Ruby, XML, Atom, equal oportunity to the world.

I specially liked the quote:

The Net itself is a contribution, by humanity to humanity, the engine of future contribution and experience.

I don’t know about you but I’ll definetly add his blog to my blogroll.

Another great post from Jon Phillips.

He now talks about Hugo Chavez and his recent recommendation of Noams Chomky’s book: Hegemony or Survival. He did so last wednesday during a speech in the United Nations. In just a few days the book has reached #1 in Amazon’s most popular items.

According to Chavez:

“It’s an excellent book to help us understand what has been happening in the world throughout the 20th century, and what’s happening now, and the greatest threat looming over our planet.”

Answering Jon Phillips’ question, I have only heard bad things about Chavez, and I pictured him as an anti-american extremist, pretty much like Fidel Castro. But this is a totally undocumented perception, probably influenced by the Mexican media, which is somewhat influenced by American media.

After this post I will read more about him, and try to read the book.

Isn’t it amazing how similar minds have similar ideas?

I came up with this project which objective is to promote Free Culture through a video (main idea). I have thought exactly that too

I recommend everyone to check it, you might want to join this effort.

Again, an insightful thought from Jon Phillips.

He wants to find ways to improve USA’s government. His idea is to make a conference to put together people in the Open Source he knows have good opinions on the matter.

While I think that’s a good idea I believe putting together a bunch of Open Source people is to take too few people in consideration. Yes, the quality of the people might be great, but I still think other people’s opinions should be taken in consideration.

Actually, recently I have seen lengthy discussions about certain topics that makes me wonder: we as persons have too many drastically different opinions from one another, the idea that by elections we will have the kind of government we want is frankly silly. So how do we find what we think, or want, as a whole?

I think that’s the fundamental question. And I believe that we as an Open Source community can certainly build a system that allows us to maintain difficult discussions, and systematically arrive to conclusions that one by one define the wishes of a group of people.

Some of the things to keep in mind in my opinion are:

• We all have different backgrounds, so we all have different opinions and personal agendas.
• We all make mistakes.
• Every discussion must have limit in depth, otherwise we might end up discussing the very nature of goodness and badness.
• People are different, and some opinions have more weight than others in certain subjects.
• Each and every point must be discussed, and a consensus must be established.

Now, these are just a bunch of ideas, I certainly hope that somebody else has made a scientific study about how to arrive to useful conclusions from discussions.

I think technology now allows us to have much better communication, and probably with that help implement a good discussion system.

Isn’t it amazing how similar minds have similar ideas?

I came up with this project which objective is to promote Free Culture through a video (main idea). I have thought exactly that too

I recommend everyone to check it, you might want to join this effort.

I found this Links to free episodes of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!.

I watched a few of them and I must say I love them.

They’re simple, straight, fun, honest, and obvious.

I specially liked the one about the War on Drugs; very enlightening.

I like to respect other people’s opinions, but in this case, I will say that if somebody don’t believe what these guys are saying, that somebody is nuts.

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