Merida

Mérida is the state capital of Yucatán—in paper, the Free and Sovereign State of Yucatán, magnificent, ain't it?—,one of the three states in the Península de Yucatán; the other two are Campeche and Quintana Roo. It is said that when the Spanish Conquistadores came and ask for the name of the land, the Mayas just said to themselves a simple "look, they talk funny" which sounded like "uh yu ka t'ann" and so the place was christened Yucatán. It seems like the original name was Mayab, but I'm not sure about this.

Yucatán has a rich and bloody history tied to land possession and the green gold, henequen; a fiber producing cactus good for ropes and twine, and strong alcohol that is not as good as tequila. Why green gold? I bet you can answer yourself by  imagining how big the demand for rope and twine was in the times of maritime exploration and conquest. Anyway, short story long, the Spanish came, saw, conquer (~1517) and found out about the henequen and sisal cactuses (first serious studies are from ~1700). Thus, Haciendas were established based on the labor of the indigenous population with henequen production starting around late 1700 and lasting all the way to early 1900—I really recommend the journalism essay Barbarous Mexico, it exposes the regime of Porfirio Diaz and the first chapter deals with the human slavery conditions at Yucatán circa 1910—.

Before coming back to La Blanca Mérida (Merida, the white) let me rant a little bit. I really don't know if the place got its nickname from the imperial white mansions that one can still find at Paseo Montejo—the city's main boulevard—or from the skin color of the ruling class—up to this day the term Mestizo (mixed blood) is used to refer those working as helping hands and other industrious labor, I heard it last week from an MC at an official state dinner and almost got a stroke—. Rant over.

Mérida sits at the outer rim of the Chicxulub crater, its location near the sea and archaeological sites makes it the perfect place to set base camp. A few years ago, my bro Martin and I stayed there for a week, we used to travel to an archaeological site cluster one day, wander in the city another, go to the beach and so on.

The pearl of the Mayab—I'm assuming this is another nickname of Mérida as I saw it here and there on produce from the land—,untouched by the violence that plagues the north of Mexico, has become a city of refugees; I heard that in the last three years the population increased from eight hundred thousand to one million inhabitants. The State's Governor greeted us with a speech focused on welcoming immigrants ready to invest in the state or, in our case, with experience in science and technology. There was a curious thing in that speech, the Governor exalted the peace and safety of the city; yes, only the city. I  really felt sad listening to the major state official saying that peace and safety is the main attraction of a single city. Sad but true, Mexico seems to be that fucked up.

Anyway, Mérida is a safe, peaceful and clean gateway to the natural and archaeological wonders of the Yucatan Peninsula. It is still filled with helpful people that knows they thrive with tourism, so make sure to consider it for your next vacation spot before it is taken over by the rich-enough-to-relocate-inside-Mexico-but-not-so-rich-to-relocate-to-another-country assholes that speed over water puddles just for the fun of running you down in stagnant water.

Ps. Do not leave your camera at home thinking that it will mark you as a tourist and put a bullseye in your back. It is a beautiful place to take pictures and it is still safe. I regret leaving my camera back home.

Creation

In the beginning there was a bang! The observer was there—otherwise, how could there be a bang? You know? All that quantum koan bullshit..."if there's a bang in the middle of the megaverse and there's no observer to collapse the blah blah blah."

The observer realized that a measurement was made, cursed his stupidity and left to prepare a new multiverse—in the end, that was supposed to be a test of decoherence times and, now, it was all messed up. Let thermodynamics do its thing on this one.

Damn!

A few months ago, I started writing character profiles and back-stories for something that I hoped would become a story told through short stories. I was doing so trying to deal with the violence in Mexico, hoping that in extending reality into fiction I could manage to explore my mind—mainly my fears on that subject. So The Damned started and has stayed in hiatus so far. It dealt with one of my largest fears for the future of Mexico: What if some people, common folks, start taking revenge on their own hands?

Well, it seems like my country is walking towards that road. A few weeks ago, a paramilitary group announced that they will take on a certain cartel and claimed the authorship of some thirty something corpses left one of the most important roads in Veracruz—all this while the Judicial power was having a meeting at the place, ergo the city was overflown with military, navy and federal police.

There are many questions that circle my head: why, how, who, etc., but these question will remain unanswered. Something is clear to me, this is the second paramilitary group that surfaces in Mexico so far—the first one was the squad of San Pedro rounded up by their own Mayor, if I remember well— and paramilitary, guerrilla and cartels cost Colombia thousands of lives—something over the one hundred thousand—and thousands of displaced civilians and fighters—the armistice brought back into society some fifty thousand paramilitary.

Lex talionis is not an answer to our problems as a country. The jus gladdi belongs to Mexico's Justice and their enforcers in the streets and courts. Only through strong honest and transparent institutions people will trust in the institutions and not take revenge in their hands. It is not an easy path but there should be a way to reach that goal. There should be a way to get together society and government to build up stability, justice, honesty and, as ultimate goal, the rule of the law with dignity.

There are many examples to learn from as society and government, say Colombia to mention just one close to the country. Now, the question is can I learn and do something? Is there a sense in trying? As always, I only have questions... answers seem to elude me, all I can do is write and hope the squares will fall into place.

Last weekend movies...

I'm gonna try my best to keep this theme up to date. It has been months that Lyx and I do not watch a film together. Also, the past weeks was a work-harder week and I just manage to watch a movie and few episodes... 

1. The Adjustment Bureau, **
   The film is very loosely based on Adjustment Team by Phillip K. Dick—one of the most fabulous sci-fi writer ever, if you ask me—. Although the short story seems to belong to the public domain I was not able to find it and I only vaguely remember the guy being married and brought to the one. Anyway, the film was not bad and it is good for a no-brain-allowed Sunday.

Interesting times keep flowing and I really need to keep my mind away from over-worrying. I have started writing short ideas and try to watch at least one episode of Supernatural when I get home; I've just finished the fourth season and in the end I liked it a lot—in the beginning, I thought they would just fuck things up but, gee thanks, it was not the case.

Getting a high quality eps from your data

In all these years plotting data, I have tried many methods. The one I am most satisfied with is gnuplot. This free program can generate anything one has ever dream of from data. In the past, I used to have basic scripts for my favourite types of graphs; problem is, I'm not that patient any more. Still, I'm not ready to pay the big bucks needed to buy a fancy point and click plotting software and, above all, I'm not interested in illegal software.

This is my situation I usually generate my final data from FORTRAN. Usually, universities and research centres provide Matlab or Mathematica licences for us. I have tried doing figures with Matlab, but I found it quite primitive and, typically, I ended up investing as much time as it took to modify one of my old gnuplot scripts. So, I started using Mathematica to load my data from text files and generate my figures.

Important things to have in mind:

• A typical one column figure has a size of 3 3/8 inches; say Phys. Rev., J. Opt. Soc. Am. or J. Phys. journals.
• Typical figure sizes are one, one and a half, and two columns.
• Usually, journals ask for high resolution graphics, say 300, 600 or 1200dpi.

Things to remember when preparing figures in Mathematica:

• Standard image resolution value is 72dpi. One can set this to any value by using the command ImageResolution -> 300, for example.
• If you are saving in svg file format resolution doesn't matter at all but for determining the size of the image. 
• Always set your image size according to the resolution you are using, ImageSize->{(3+3/8)*300, Automatic}, for example.

Now, the simplest way to produce a figure is just exporting your figure to eps with the command Export["FigureName.eps", PlotName, ImageResolution->300]. Sometimes this is the best and fastest way to produce an eps. Always keep your fonts around the 12pt size. Do not mind how the image looks in the notebook, always check the final eps to see the figure in its real scale.

For those times when the result is crappy, I would export the figure to svg with the command Export["FigureName.svg", PlotName], for example. Then, I would modify the axis labels, legends, and other text in the figure with Inkscape. Inkscape is free, light, and easy to use and can save your graphics to eps format; it can also generate pure latex or eps+latex output. In the case that the text in the figure is formulas, I would use psfrag to replace dummy strings inserted with Inkscape.

Warning: As of today, if  you use psfrag, download Inkscape v0.46 and do not forget to de-select the convert text to path option in the dialogue for save as eps. The point behind using Inkscape v0.46 is that this is the last version that doesn't use Cairo to convert to eps and still writes text as text in the eps.

Edit: Janus told me today about a plugin for Inkscape that renders latex input into a graphic layer, it is called textext. Thing is, it works almost immediatly with Inkscape v0.46 and delivers wonderful results but I haven't been able to make it work with v0.49 so far. Nevertheless, good bye psfrag!