
(Visto en The Corner)




Un dia de laburo cualquiera. Es divertido la primera vez. A la decima vez que te empantanas y tenes que caminar quince kilometros para buscar a alguien que te tire una soga ya no. Por suerte ahora tenemos las 4x4 de la abundancia. Cuando yo era chico si llovia mucho simplemente te quedabas aislado tres o cuatro dias.



Un pentaceno (22 atomos de carbono y 14 atomos de hidrogeno), de 0.14 nanometros de largo. fue sacada por la IBM de Zurich con el microtelescopio que vemos en la foto de arriba. Para que le telescopio pueda ver la molecula, esta estaba en una camara al vacio a 268 grados bajo cero.



In Moscow, failure to pay a traffic bribe has its price
The baton comes down. It always starts like that. The traffic cop looms in the hard summer sunlight, in the semblance of a breakdown lane that runs in the middle of screaming traffic.
The stick -- and here we curse -- is pointing straight at us. "Now you'll see the real Russia," I mutter bitterly to my visiting mother. To the Russian driver, I wail: "Why? What did we do?"
"Bastards," he replies.
My husband frowns; we are almost to the airport to pick up his mother. They always get you on the way to the airport, when you are most likely to be desperate. You are about to miss a flight, or rushing to greet a visitor. Your job, your domestic peace, your nonrefundable plane ticket hang in the balance.
For Russia's army of crooked traffic cops, highways to the city airports are an excellent hunting ground. [...]

[...] The day had started with a small luncheon in the hotel suite of a visiting Argentinian legislator, where a few people of various nationalities had talked at leisurely length about the climate of Argentina, its soil, its resources, the needs of its people, the value of a dynamic, progressive attitude toward the future—and had mentioned, as the briefest topic of conversation, that Argentina would be declared a People's State within two weeks.
It had been followed by a few cocktails at the home of Orren Boyle, with only one unobtrusive gentleman from Argentina sitting silently in a corner, while two executives from Washington and a few friends of unspecified positions had talked about national resources, metallurgy, mineralogy, neighborly duties and the welfare of the globe—and had mentioned that a loan of four billion dollars would be granted within three weeks to the People's State of Argentina and the People's State of Chile. [...]
-- Atlas Shrugged, part III, chapter IV




To the right you see the the national symbol, which was the Sacred Beehive on a Stick raised in front of a corrugated metal sheet. In honor of the strong union tradition in the region, the job required two men.
