Alexey Smirnov's blog

Today I went to a dentist, the first time in Taiwan. I am quite surprised with the price/qualitty ratio once again, especially comparing to the countries in which I happened to visit dentist previously. So I decided to create a buyer’s guide to dental clinics around the world.

1) The United States. The health care is notoriously expensive. Filling a small hole in a tooth can cost about 500 USD or even more. The insurance does not cover these expenses. Due to high prices the foreign students often go back to their home countries to get their teeth fixed during a summer break. Until then you’d have to tolerate the pain. Being a graduate student is painful.
2) Finland. The situation in this country is more complicated. There are a number of state clinics which are quite good and cheap (about 20 EUR per tooth), so you really want to go there. The problem is – there are too few of them, you might need to wait for up to 1 month in a queue. I wonder what kind of pain you might have to go through in the meantime. The alternative is to go to a private clinic which is more expenseive (maybe 1/2 the rate of the US), but they are available immediately.
3) Taiwan. I don’t know how much it actually costs, but the insurance covers it. So, today I only had to pay 5 USD to get my tooth fixed. It was a private clinic with modern equipment and friendly staff, so I really liked it.

So, if you have teeth problems consider coming to Taiwan!

I have been reading mostly Communications of ACM recently. However, I also like Wired magazine and Technology Review but it so happens that if I don’t have a print edition in front of me then I am not going to read it.

In the local supermarket there is a wide selection of magazines. While waiting for the cashier to process your stuff one can choose something interesting. Even though I never intended to read those magazines but this is exactly how I bought TIME magazine and Economist. Btw., there is Newsweek available as well but I thought it was basically the same as the other two magazines.

Because I bought both magazines near New Year they were summarizing the year 2009 and of course their main concern was the global financial crisis. However, the magazines dealt with the issue in two different ways.

Time magazine has traditionally selected the Person of the Year which is Ben Bernanke. Then the magazine explained how US Federal Reserve works and interviewed Ben Bernanke. To do this Time magazine gathered its best writers and editors. Quite traditionally, the magazine attributes each article to a particular author or a number of them.

I bought The Economist magazine because earlier I learned that it is one of the favorite publications of George W. Bush. The articles in this magazine have no authors. The articles themselves are quite short which is more typical for a newspaper. However, their difference is that they do not deal with just one event but rather describe a trend or a development of a news story over the period that the magazine spans or even longer. The coverage of the topics is also quite wide – from Europe to the US to China but surprisingly no mentioning of Russia whatsoever. The Economist explained that the excess of cash that the Fed generated makes another bubble possible. But there are no immediate signs yet.

Thus, both magazines are examples of analytical reading but Time is more into people and organizations, the big players which define what is going on in the world. The Economist describes how people live in various parts of the world thus it is more like a long tail magazine. It is an open question who defines the world history, either the few top guys or ordinary people.

I have visited an exhibition of a prominent American painter originally from New York. That was the first show of Alex Katz in a museum in Nordic countries. He was never considered as a mainstream painter because he painted ordinary people, American middle class. This is why the notable intellectuals professors Randy Katz, Boris Katz, and Victor Katz did not make it to his paintings.

Traditionally, the art deals with painting notable people or interesting historical events in which ordinary people may take place. Using ordinary people in ordinary circumstances is not considered art. If nothing interesting happens then why should we paint those people? I guess the exhibition of Alex Katz gives answer to this question.

To me the people that he paints look mostly like Abraham Lincoln. I guess this is the favorite politician of Alex Katz. Or possibly people in New York City are his followers. What makes the exhibition interesting is painting technique that Alex Katz developed. At first, his paintings look a bit cartoonish, like what children like to see. But then you can discover the deep meaning encoded into seemingly simple images. With only a few strokes, Alex Katz manages to transmit complex feelings of human nature.

Painters typically consider eyes as the most important part of human’s face. They put all their efforts in painting eyes. The rest of the face does not matter. In Alex Katz painting every part of face is equally important, in part because of vivid colors that he uses to depict the nose and lips.

There are paintings of landscapes in the exhibition such as forest and brook, I guess those were made in Maine where Alex Katz resides during summers. The drawing technique is quite simple but nevertheless he conveys the fast changing mood of brook or rainy forest. Expressiveness of his paintings is what makes the exhibition interesting.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

In his book Al Gore describes huge environmental problems that humanity is facing now. In addition, he describes his family and the conditions in which he was growing up. Surprisingly, I found a lot of similarities in the latter part with a way in which a typical Soviet family was grown:

For eight months each year, my family’s home was a small apartment in Fairfax Hotel. My sister, my mother, my father, and I all shared the single bathroom that connected my parents’ bedroom to the bedroom I shared with Nancy

I am wondering now if Gores were suspected in connections with Soviets. Why were they given such a small apartment otherwise?

However, during the summer Gores were living on a countryside. This is also very similar to the Soviet way of life: everybody was trying to escape from a city to a village where their grandparents were living during the summer. Al Gore explains why he became so interested in nature issues:

Had I grown up entirely on the farm, I think I might well have taken nature much more for granted. But being deprived of it at the end of each summer allowed me to know it by its absence and to better appreciate its incompatible grace. Had I grown up entirely in big city, I might never have known what I was missing

When I was a student in the US I was often told that Russian people are too ambitious – they either do nothing or try to send a man to the outer space. I guess the reasons behind the willingness to tackle global problems is this inner happiness that is developed over the years. Only when you can appreciate the beauty do you want to achieve a high goal. And appreciation is developed through exposure to drastically different conditions.

So I think Albert might have found lots of like-minded people among ordinary Russians.

The book is very nicely written. I guess if you want to deliver the message to a large audience you have to take a lot of care of how you present it. Gore does an excellent job in attracting the reader attention with large photographs and large fonts. He uses different types of information such as diagrams, graphs, maps in his book. Often, he has before and after comparisons that make it very clear that global changes are taking place indeed.

I was surprised to find out that there was another global problem that was solved – the problem of ozone holes. When I was in school I often heard that ozone holes pose a danger to the humanity. Then I became a student and I started learning different things rather than ozone holes. After I graduated and started working full-time I discovered Al Gore’s book on environmental problems. Honestly, I thought that this was a book on ozone holes! I was so used to the thought that real progress is happening only in computer science that I was very surprised when I found out that governments have signed Montreal Protocol to address the problem of ozone holes! Since 1987 the levels of the chlorofluorocarbons have declined.

I guess it is possible to solve the problem of global warming as well given the effort that governments make in this direction. But it is very obvious now that global changes are taking place. Here is the temperature today in three different places: it is -5C in Dzerzhinsk, 300 miles east of Moscow, Russia. It is -10C in Saint James, New York, a place where snow is seen only a couple of days during a year. It is 0C in Tampere, a city in Finland which has polar nights and freezing temperatures in general. Things got mixed up.

A follow-up: here is a video that describes plans on saving Netherlands which territory is beneath sea-level, at least a big part of it:

An interesting movie as it makes it clear how different the 2004 campaign is from this one. Moore is trying to persuade the audience that war in Iraq was unjustified and that it was damaging. He presents the whole election process as a battle between Kerry and Bush whereas I think there was no doubt at all. As an insider I recall that media was blackmouthing Kerry a lot. Moore mentions this indeed but what I am saying here is that Kerry was doomed despite whether he responded to accusations on his illegal war medals or not.

Moore was trying to explain to public that Bush was dishonest but that did not matter. I guess Bush was quite popular as he was able to protect America even though his approval ratings would indicate the opposite.