Continents are generally defined as large masses of land, all of them are… but Europe and Asia. Africa is a clearly defined continent, so are the Americas, Antartica, but are Europe and Asia a Continent in a geographic sense or in a cultural/ethnic sense? The more I look at the concept of Asia for example, the more flawed I think it is. As you can see from the Wikipedia, Asia is really part of the same land mass as Europe so they should be one continent: Eurasia. Why do we then have two continents made of one land mass? Probably because in this case it is not geography that prevailed in the definition but a cultural construct in which Europeans who were drawing the maps decided that Europe ended wherever people did not look like Europeans or did not practice the same religion as the cartographers.
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In FON we are having some serious problems attracting people to come from the United States to work in Spain. The same is happening in reverse as well, when we want to bring Europeans to the United States to work. The situation of closed borders is absurd, considering that even if the United States and Europe were to mutually open their borders, there would be no massive migration in either direction.

I think that it is time that the US and the EU make an agreement to allow for people to move freely from one continent to the other. Balanced immigration enriches countries that embrace it. Europe created the European Union, among other things, to facilitate the free movement of its citizens throughout the labor markets. The US created NAFTA so that Mexicans would have more jobs in assembly plants and would stay in Mexico.

I am a trustee of President Clinton´s foundation. Since last year the foundation organizes the Clinton Global Initiative. This conference, other than being one of the most important conferences in the world in terms of attendees, has one feature that makes it stand out from all the other gatherings of global leaders. At the Clinton Global Initiative conference participants are asked to make committments with the objective to address specific problems of the world.
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On Aug 5th I wrote a post called the Molecular Biology of Memory in which I argued that there must be specific molecules that are responsible for storing memories. I am extremely excited today to see this post that tells the discovery of scientists at SUNY of the role of Protein Kinase Mzeta and its role in storing memories.

Today I was lying in Menorca, reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer, and I came accross a line that went like this “there are more humans alive today than have died in all of human history”.
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Some choices are easy. Do you prefer democracy or dictatorship? Clean air or polluted air? Education or Ignorance? Some however are not. Here´s one. What do you prefer, oil at $30 per barrel or at $100 per barrel? If you own a car you may prefer oil at $30 per barrel. But if you think further you can see the benefits of oil at $100 per barrel: more investment in renewable energy, less traffic congestion, lower carbon emissions, higher sales of fuel efficient cars and higher use of public transportation. Now one of the problems we have in this planet is that when oil goes to $100 per barrel, there are a lot of doubtful characters who get very, very rich. Would you like to see King Abdullah earn more billions? And how about Putin? Hugo Chavez? Qaddafi? Mahmoud Ahmadinejah? So before you start giving these leaders more of your hard earned money here´s another model of preventive warfare. It´s simple. It´s been done before and it works. Let´s tax ourselves in Europe and America to the tune of 50 cents of euro and dollar per liter. Let´s do it gradually to be able to adjust to the pain say at 10 cents per liter every 6 months and let´s have the EU and USA drive the price of gasoline at the pump. In this way what we will accomplish is that we will reduce consumption, we will bring oil price down and WE will keep the difference and use it for what WE believe is right. With a policy like this we will accomplish all the good things of higher oil prices and avoid our money going to dictators and dubious characters. To me this is preventive warfare that works.

I was looking at how Yahoo Launch (music) works and thinking that it would be ideal to have the same slogan, the radio station that listens to you, to news reading, the news channel that listens to you. I would appreciate if Yahoo could see which news I click on and instead of giving me the Reuters vs the AP it would listen to me and start giving me a news layout that is derived from my choices.

Google is an investor in my company, Fon, but I don´t work for Google nor have I spoken with anyone at Google about what I am going to say (am I getting good at American style disclosures or what?). Anyway, here it goes. I think Google should ask the Chinese to vote. It would be a simple vote. Would you Chinese citizen like us, Google, to stay in China while accepting censorship or leave? And see what happens. In this way Google would start a democratic process and let the Chinese people decide who are the ones at stake here.