One of the friends having dinner with us yesterday was a lawyer that used to be a Public Defender in NY. Of all the many interesting stories she had to tell, one struck me as the perfect example of all that is wrong with The System.
Once she had to defend a homeless man who was accused of stealing a candy bar from a drugstore. Since he had breached a non-trespass order from a previous similar incident, the prosecutor was asking for a 3 year prison sentence.
A few weeks ago, as part of an unusual birthday gift, my fiancé and I signed up to get our genetic test.
So we ordered the test kit online, and when we entered the state (NY), a big warning told us that according to state laws, we could not produce or mail the samples back to their labs from New York. WTF?! OK, whatever. As if a nonsensical law did not have many ways around it.
In the TV show Britain`s Got Talent, Hungarian shadow-theatre company Attraction shows with beauty the horror of war.
Carna botnet offers us this amazing 24 hour visualization of relative IPv4 utilization observed using ICMP Ping requests.
Look at the data, just look at it! Dont you see peoples sleeping patterns, internet usage patterns, eating schedule habit, cultural differences, urban influence, regional inequalities…?
Business took me again to Panama on Monday, for a quick trip (two days).
Tin roofed huts with satellite TV next to high rise office buildings, riding on an official (with sirens) tinted window SUV with driver and no license plates, and staying in a nice hotel that was not extraordinary but had all and everything that I look for in a hotel (except indoors swimming pool). But it belongs to the friend (former Treasury Secretary) of a friend.
Day 4 started with a corporate presentation (we got to choose, and I attended the one by Pfizer) at 7:30am, in which Pfizer`s Senior Vice President of Research and Development talked about the rapidly shifting way in which big pharma is working, and mentioned an unacceptable fact that should make us all reflect on how much the patent system is broken:
Pfizer has 98,000 employees… and 31,000 lawyers!
The rest of the day I attended classes by Catherine Tucker, Brian Halligan, and a speech by Dean David Schmittlein.
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December 2nd I flew to Montevideo. I stayed at the Radisson Hotel, Plaza de la Independencia. Very conveniently located with some impressive views from the top floor. Good thing it had a pool, because it is not easy to keep my exercise regime when traveling so much.
Besides very productive meetings with IBM (very nice, professional, and friendly executives, by the way) and presentation to several hospital groups (one of the meetings at the Presidential Building, another one at the country`s largest hospital, and a presentation at the Solis Theater), I enjoyed the promenade by the river which seems like a sea, the old town, and a weird Ice Bar.
