Engineering Schools in La Plata and Ariel

One of the few advantages of old age is perspective, so I am able to compare the Engineering School I studied in La Plata fifty years ago and the one in the University of Ariel I am teaching now. La Plata was highly politized, the walls completely covered with faction propaganda, all inciting for demonstrations and strikes. In Ariel, politics is absent. Next week there are important municipal elections here, but no mention of it in the campus. The idiotic system of "autonomia universitaria" in Argentina, where the students elected the institution's authorities, mad it difficult to govern them.

One of the features of Argentina was that study in all levels was free and subsidized, and we were entitled to two meals a day for a symbolic 5 pesos. Very good meals. There were hundreds of "students" who did not really studied nor appeared at the exams, that could enjoy the status of student forever. Many students from the provinces and the neighboring countries, Peru and Bolivia, received a monthly stipend from their parents, but never graduated. I understand that this has not changed till now. In Israel, the studies cost about 11000 sheqels per year, and there are no free meals, so there is no tendency to become "un estudiante eterno".

The population is different. In La Plata it was Spanish and Italian, a very homogeneous population, with a sprinkling of Peruvians and Japanese. Here the majority is brown of native Arabs and Oriental Jews, with about 20% Europeans (Ashkenazim and half Russians). I used to be tall an Argentina, but in Ariel the students are taller (180 cm and above) and well built. Most boys practice in the gym and  have over-developed biceps and pectorals, specially the Arabs. Most have savage black beards and look like highway robbers. On the other hand, Ashkenazi girls are skinny and fragile, while the others are fat and loud. This semester I saw few Arab girls covered in black, maybe they have adapted the Tel Aviv fashion of mini-shorts cut at half bottom. I don't know, I don't ogle female bottoms.

Engineering is a mature, slowly changing area, so the syllabus has not changed in fifty years. Maths is now much easier, as computers do the calculations. Google and wiki provide much free and accessible information. However, the students here seem more stressed, possibly because they are paying a lot of money and have less cognitive resources (in average) - I cannot compare, but judging the quality from written exams, average Engineering student in Ariel is dumber than were my colleges in La Plata.

PS: Tried to find a pic representative of the students of Ariel in the internet. Nothing. The desire to be polite and never post anything remotely  "insulting" has emasculated the public space. I'll take one by myself and post it. An old man can be allowed to be rude and to take a pic. 

Transgender Gomorrah

Gomorrah was one of the five towns allied against the Hebrew,  (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, and Bela), one of two (the other being Sodom) that was destroyed with sulfuric fire. The Hebrew spread malignant aspersions about it, slanders that persist three thousand years after. (Something to meditate on for the Hashemite Kingdom!). The fake image of these hot desert villages is that they were peopled by homosexuals of the torturing inclination.

Now, when religious people says that America is "like" Sodom and Gomorrah, they are increasingly correct. About 0.6% of the Americans have undergone sex change operations in the last ten years, and the numbers are growing. There are estimates of 1.5 million transgender individuals already. It is marginal but not so marginal.

To be PC I should never call it sex change operation. The Endocrine Society has updated its guidelines for providing gender-affirming treatment to transgender individuals...

They are not reproducing themselves. I doubt if they are economically productive, as their condition must take up most of their mental and other resources. Half of them intended suicide. Poor sad pitiable people, they are not enjoying sexual liberation at all.

Pic.: The Endocrine Society. They are making billions of gender affirming treatments.  

There is no life outside of the USA

Having worked a pair of years in Central America, I never thought of Honduras as specially poor but as specially violent. The population is a mixture of Indians, Spaniards and Africans, with a sprinkling of European pirate genes near the coast. The mixture is not harmonious, girls are fat and unattractive. Once I was walking in the Plaza, looking into the Arab shops, when there was a shot and somebody died. People crowded around, no one knew who and why, but soon they dispersed - nothing to see here. They are a race given to political disorder. These days a mass of Hondurenos has decided "que no podemos vivir en nuestro pais" - we cannot live in our country and are moving to the United States. Pic. on the Mexican frontier.  They may have taken example from the Gaza Palestinians that day after day assault the border fence with a fierce determination to get into Israel, and we have to shoot them. The same is happening in other "soft" frontiers: Mexico-America, Indonesia-Australia, Morocco-Spain, Libya-Italy. 

Einstein as he was

Einstein was photographed many times but the press uses only one or two iconic pictures of him. They never show his fine frizzled mulatto hair and his paunch. Like Marx, he was not the Nordic German type but pure Ashkenazi Jew. 

Yiddish Poets Fighting

The Yiddish poet Tino Moskovich wrote a damning critique in HaAretz about the anthology of the known Yiddish poetess Kadia Molodovsky titled Laylot Heshvan (Nights of the Month of Heshvan). The Yiddishist Amir Shomroni - who edited Kadia's book - wrote a mordant counter-criticism against Moskovich's  attack. Moskovich judges Kadia a "good poetess" but finds serious errors in Shomroni's translation: "Nothing less than a terrible mistake". Line by line, Moskovich analyses the translation's "problems" like the contrived rhymes and its pedestrian vulgarity.

Amir Shomroni does not suffer silently these insults to his opus magna (600 pages). He points out that the poem was originally translated and published by the eminent Yiddish poet Dov Stock (Sadan) in 1934, that is, 84 years ago, and that he attached a footnote explaining the archaic Hebrew used by Sadan. The Hebrew of those almost pre-historic eras cannot be compared to modern Hebrew that underwent much evolution and enrichment since then. And that Dov Sadan is among the best  researchers of Yiddish of his generation, and "further explanations are superfluous as the thing is well known".

If there is a literature presumed long dead, it is Yiddish poetry. I am surprised and happy that it is alive and able to fire such a furious dispute in October 2018. As Bashevis Singer said at his Nobel Prize ceremony: Yiddish is a long-dead language that has been dying ever since . 

Argentine Refugees

The situation in Argentina (and in Venezuela, and Brasil and the rest of the South) is so bad that the reverse transatlantic immigration is taking force. In the pic, the eight block early morning queue to the Embassy of Italia in Buenos Aires. They all want to "return" to their ancestor's country. The line in front of the Spanish Embassy is even longer. 

Eating Fruit is Bad for You

Today we made our weekly shopping in Beytan supermarket. As usual, I tried out all the fruits  but the grapes were so sweet that I passed and tried the carambola (left). It used to be an acidic fibrous tasteless thing, bought for its highly decorative star body,  but this was a very sweet meaty fruit. Cultivated fruits have been genetically modified to be much higher in sugar content than their natural, ancestral fruits. There goes the standard dietitian advice of eating MORE fruit because fruit is linked to reducing risks of heart disease, cancer and stroke. Another bad diet advice. 

But the fruit-based diet of some animals at Melbourne Zoo is posing problems for their health. Dr Senaka Ranadheera, a food scientist at the University of Melbourne said that sugar levels in some fruit, like plums, have doubled, although are still much less than those in soft drinks.