Watch out with ghosts...

Today, Friday 31st of October, it’s Halloween!

It’s not a catalan holiday, but now some people celebrate it. It started in Scotland and Ireland, with the Celtic cultures, and then it arrived to North America, becoming one of the most important festivals of the year. Now it has arrived to the whole world, and it has moved away other traditional festivals.

Some of the typical things on Halloween Night:

Children go door to door trick-or-treating wearing costumes. When somebody opens the door, they say “trick or treat”. If there is a treat, children usually receive sweets or food, but if there’s no treat, they play a trick on the homeowners or on their house.

Another thing to do is to watch a horror film. There are loads of horror films, with ghosts, vampires, zombies, etc. Some of the most recent films are SAW, Final Destination, The Exorcist, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Sleepy Hollow. But there also were horror films in 1930s, like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) or The Mummy (1932).

There are some typical symbols and objects, like the pumpkin: People hollow out a pumpkin and then it’s carved and lit with a candle inside. It was used by the Celts to frighten off the superstitions. Nowadays, homes are decorated with pumpkins, skeletons or scarecrows.

Food has got a very important role on Halloween parties and meals. There are very original dishes, from the typical toffee apples to the delicious frightening recipes. If you want some ideas look at that: Fun Halloween foods

These are some of the most common Halloween things. Of course, each country celebrates it in its way, and there are loads of differences between Texas and Haiti, for example. But, in fact, the origin of the holiday is the same, and I think it’s very interesting and curious.

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Lists...

In our life, we want to do a lot of things. Every year, a lot of persons make lists with resolutions for the New Year. We have agendas with space to write what we are going to do in one month, during one week and even one day, every hour. That’s nice, it’s good if you know what do you want to do and you are confident you’ll wake up tomorrow.

But, for example, look at Dave Freeman’s story: This writer became very famous because of his book, a best seller called '100 Things to Do Before You Die'. There, he made a list with things like to run bulls in Spain, to hang his boots in an ice hotel in Finland, or to make a voodoo pilgrimage to Haiti. He had completed about half of his list when he died... He was 47 and he fall over hitting his head, at his home...

Then, what can you do? Are you sure that you’ll be able to complete a list if there’s the possibility to die trying? Must we stop making stupid lists?

The answer is NO! I’ve found the perfect list, the list you’ll surely do because die won’t stop it: The list of things to do after you die.

So, I’ve found a lot of interesting things to do (well, some of them are interesting and some of them are... you know, when you are dead you have a lot of time...). For example:

- Prove that god exists.
- Scare people at midnight.
- Visit the hell, the heaven and other places from other religions.
- Talk with Einstein about the relativity of time.
- Reflect on how absurd the phrase “I think, therefore I am” is.
- Walk through the walls.
- Experience an exorcism in first person.
- Talk with persons who are playing with Ouija Board.
- See dead people.
- Reincarnate in an animal, like a dog or a fly...

The complete list is here: 50 Things To Do After You Die

And I would add some more, like remember where did you put that list about things to do after you die...

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SPEECH TECHNOLOGY

Hi! Today I’m going to talk you about a computer program: loquendo. Surely most of you have watched some videos made with it, but you didn’t know the name of the program. With this program you write a text and then it pronounces it. You can choose different voices from different countries, each one with a typical accent, men and women.

I think it’s a very useful tool for mute people, because it can express laughs, sadness and other emotions. Now there is a renewed version, but it still needs to advance a lot to reproduce faithfully the human voice.

But it’s got another use: People make videos and they post them in the youtube, and these videos sometimes are jokes or parodies. They make fun of some stupid things like TV serials or social topics.

Here I put a video made with loquendo. In this case, they have used a Spanish voice, simulating it’s learning English.

In the web page of the program there is a demo. You can write a text and then download the audio file.



There’s a software in Windows that wants to do the same, but it’s disastrous. It’s called Sam, and it only speaks in English, but his voice is very strange and sometimes the pronunciation is very bad.

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THE COUNTDOWN HAS ALREADY STARTED

I was thunderstruck when I saw it for first time. This is a novelty in the blog. As you can see, it’s an oil meter. While you are reading these words, thousand petroleum barrels are being consumed.

I think that the result in one hour is very high, but if I look at the year’s consumption I feel dizzy, because it means that this oil burns or becomes rubbish, destroying the environment.

This shows our dependence on petroleum. Our cars run on fossil fuels, most of the clothes are made of petroleum, food is wrapped with plastic from petroleum... If we look around, we can see that we are surrounded by petroleum. We need it, but it isn’t inexhaustible and, if we continue wasting it, it will run out.

Then, I hope this clock will make you aware of the problem we have.
If we want to conserve it, we can help turning off the engine of the car if we are going to stay stopped or using tough and reusable bags to go to the supermarket.

If you aren’t enough aware, watch again the clock, it’s in the right side of the blog.

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