Music in Kill Bill and Once upon a time in America (Things you don’t know about Romania)

In the movies Once Upon a Time in America (with Robert de Niro) and Kill Bill (by Quentin Tarantino) part of the musical theme is played by the Romanian pan flute grand master Gheorghe Zamfir. His master skills in playing the pan flute are appreciated worldwide. Something that is very little known is that Gheorghe Zamfir was a member of the Romanian Parliament (without any remarkable activity). Another thing…. He lives very close to where I lived in Bucharest.
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Enjoy his wonderful music (thanks to youtube anyone can enjoy his music).
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This is the music from the movies:
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This is a Romanian traditional song played by Gheorghe Zamfir and Trust me that's not easy to play on the pan flute...

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Romania’s Crown of Steel (Things you don't know about Romania)

Since I realized that there are many things about my home-country - Romania - that are not known, I decided to initiate a series of blog posts to promote some Romania's particularities. Here's the first story:
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After the Independence War in 1877 – 1878 against the Ottoman Empire, in 1881 Romania became a kingdom and Carol I was crowned King Of Romania.

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The Story says that the leaders of the political parties and other Romanian leaders of the time came to Carol I (who was of German origin) with a golden crown with precious stones. They offered him the crown saying that he should have this great symbol (the crown) of his power as the king of an independent country.

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At that moment Carol I got really mad and said that the country needs money to recover from the war and continue its development as a modern European country. He didn’t accept the golden crown, told the political leaders to melt it, sell the gold and use the money for the country’s development.

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Carol I told the political leaders that if they want to offer him a crown they should take one of the cannons captured during the war, melt it and make a crown out of it.

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And so they did. Carol I, the first King of Romania as an independent country was crowned with a steel crown. And all of Romania’s kings that followed Carol I were crowned with the same steel crown.

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This Steel Crown is exhibited at the Romanian National History Museum in Bucharest.

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I believe that all political people, business people and social and religious leaders should learn from King Carol I.

Sculpture and Education

The novice, rather unskilled and not very talented sculptor takes a block of stone and tries to transform it in what he or she wants to sculpt. Michelangelo said that he reveals what the piece of stone really is by removing the unnecessary parts.
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Why is it in education that most teachers and overall educational programs try to transform the student in something that they want? Nobody really knows if the student wants to be transformed because education doesn’t come with a comprehensive product description so that it would be possible to say that the student made an informed conscious choice.
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On the other hand in almost 20 years of school I haven’t seen a program which focuses on what a student really is and teachers and educators to focus on revealing the true potential of the student.
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Dear educators please go and see Michelangelo’s works and hopefully you’ll get the point.

What would you do with a million dollars (euros) ?

In Romania from time to time the National Lottery prize exceeds 1 million euros (or 2 or 3 million, I just take the psychological value into account) and when it does, in most of the times, there is a lot of media coverage especially in the news programs. It’s like all of a sudden everybody in the country is aware that there is a National Lottery (not that the lottery is every week or even twice a week).
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In this media coverage, in certain times, there are street polls where a reporter goes on a street (usually in Bucharest – the capital city) and asks random people (as if people who are on the street at noon are totally random selected) what would they do if they won the lottery? What would they do if they had a million euros (or two or three etc.). What’s really interesting is that all the people that are interviewed (or at least the ones that are shown on TV) somehow manage to give a pretty reasonable answer. Most of them say that they would buy a nice house (and trust me housing is not cheap in Romania’s big cities), they would buy a nice car (oh we have a thing for expensive “show off” cars) or, the older respondents, that they would help their children.
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Taking into account most of the social and economic factors of the Romanian reality all of these are reasonable answers. After all, who would not help their children if they had a lot of money on their hands? Or who would not like to have a nice house and an “image” car to drive on a crappy road?
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What’s really puzzling is that I’ve never seen a street interview session on the topic “What would you do to earn one million euros?”. I guess that’s not a very appealing topic for most of the TV audience, but also I think that the huge majority of respondents would have a big problem in answering the question.
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Let’s take into account that (hypothetically) having one million euros is more valuable than gaining one million euros (that you don’t have) due to lose aversion. Let’s suppose that we have to take into account a discount factor of 50%. But even so, I haven’t seen a street interview on the topic “What would you do to earn 500.000 euros?”.
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The answer is quite simple and is related to cognitive effort. Rank on a scale from 1 to 5 how easy is for you to think (1 really easy and 5 very difficult) about how to spend one million euros. Now rank how easy is to think of how to earn the same sum (or half of it). If you are a normal person you would need a lot less (or significantly less at a p-value < .001 – researchers know why) cognitive effort (aka. Thinking) to conceive how to spend one million euros than how to earn it. .
Thinking (imagining) how to earn half a million euros simply requires too much (intellectual) effort. Many people can’t even come up with one reasonable idea that doesn’t imply robbing a bank or something similar and soon give up with the legendary “I can’t”. On the other hand thinking how to spend one (half a) million euros is much easier. I have a saying that “when you have money to spend, for sure someone will volunteer to help you”. It’s infinitely easier to dream on spending a million euros than it is to conceive a plan to earn that sum of money.
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Now… what can be done? The lottery in any country wants the media attention because if the prize is large so is the number of players which can only mean larger profits for the lottery. What we can do is to try and imagine (think about) how to earn 100.000 euros (1/10 million euros) in the next 3 years. Of course it’s not as glamorous as dreaming of spending 1 million in 1 month and hallucinate that money will last forever. On the other hand it’s much more realistic. What we can do even further is to imagine how to spend 11.000 euros next year in staid of 12.000 and in the same time put 3000 in our savings account. If you do so, for sure you’ll not be on TV the next time the lottery hits the 1 million value, but it’s much more likely that you’ll get more peace.

Expert on Stupidity

When Cornelia and I moved to Rotterdam we rented an apartment that was unfurnished. We brought from Romania an inflatable mattress which we used as a bed for a couple of weeks. We bought some furniture in the first days of our staying here, but we didn’t find a bed. Finally we found one at a second hand furniture store and we bought it, but it had no mattress, so we had to find one that was comfortable enough (I have some problems with my back so I need a good mattress) and at a price that we could afford.
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In the spring of 2010 I bought a mattress in Bucharest and I knew what to look for. Also, by having this experience I knew that it was not easy to find something good at a reasonable price. Some mattresses cost around 1000 euros. Anyhow, I had some experience in buying furniture and especially mattresses and I comforted Cornelia who was a little scared of the process of finding something that is ok and we have to use for the next 2 years (at least) and is very important for one’s overall well-being. She could rely on me. Now I confess that I was pretty much in her situation, but I just didn’t show it, not to scare her more.
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We found a mattress store really close to where we live in Rotterdam. We went there and looked around. The salesman asked us if we were interested in something particular and we said that we are looking for a mattress with the dimensions of … and a maximum price. The gentleman showed us one and invited Cornelia to try it. She said that I should try it because “I’m the expert” (I told you that I had some experience, but for sure I’m not an expert).
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The salesman replied: “Miss, we are all experts in sleep. We all do it every day for eight hours all our lives.”
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The truth is that he’s right. We all have a tremendous amount of experience and practice with sleeping.
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Then I wandered if there aren’t other things in which we are all experts in. A quick and easy answer is related to other things that we do on a daily basis and are linked to our primary biological needs. But this is not interesting. Of course we take for granted that we do some things every day and we get better at doing them, but using the toilet or showering (I hope that most of my readers shower on a daily basis) aren’t interesting fields.
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A less easy, but nonetheless true, answer is stupidity. We all do stupid things. Even the smartest people do things that are less rational, sub-optimal or plainly stupid. Doing stupid things doesn’t necessarily imply that the person who does them is stupid. The other way around we can say that not everything that a stupid person does is necessarily stupid.
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There is a lot of literature on irrational or less-rational behavior that is extremely interesting (at least for me), but to understand the fact that people generally do stupid things one only has to look around and start using the frontal-left part of his or her brain (the area responsible for reasoning). Of course, other people do stupid things on a regular basis. You and I are not doing such dumb things. Most people say: “I’m too smart to do that. It’s the others who do them.”
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Even this very line of reasoning is not that rational. Everyone thinks of his or her self being above average, being a smart person, a good driver, a good lover etc. And in most of the times it’s really good that we think like that. Who would want to think bad about him(her) self and be depressed all the time?
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But in the same time, we have to realize that it is not always so. We are not “above average” lovers, drivers, cooks etc. We have to realize that each of us does, more or less often, stupid things.
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We have to admit that we are all experts on stupidity, even if we aren’t always aware of that.
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Shout it out loud! “I’m an expert on stupidity!!!”

Chinese Clustering – Follow-up

I usually don’t write follow-ups, but this is too good not to be written. Yesterday late at night I published the post on how clustering occurs in groups with the example of the Chinese clustering in the courses that I take at ERIM.
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Today one Chinese colleague, let’s call him G, changed his usual behavior (I believe reading the post had something to do with it) and in the amphitheater changed his usual place. He was first to come into the class room and I was the third so I was able to observe. As I love experiments, well I just sat back and watched how the colleagues take their places in the room. I had about 15 minutes of observation.
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The first thing I noticed is that the first Chinese colleague that came into the classroom went directly to G and talked a little, afterword taking a sit in the row in front of him. Next the PhD students came and they all kept their usual places forming the PhD sector on the right side of the amphitheater (G was on the left side and I was in the middle). Next another Chinese colleague came in and was a little disorientated that her usual entourage wasn’t where they used to be. She decided to sit on the left side of the room two rows in front of G and one row in front of the other Asian colleague that came before her. Next one Dutch colleague that usually sits on the left side (I told you that people are coherent with their previous behavior) is confused for a second to see the Chinese there, but he takes a sit next to one of our Chinese colleagues. The Chinese PhD student was also coherent with his previous behavior and sat on the right side in the PhD sector. One Chinese student was absent.
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Up to now all of our Asian friends were coherent with their previous behavior – the PhD student was in his previous group and the master students from China kept clustering even if they changed the sector of clustering. Then the professor came into the classroom and next another Chinese colleague came in. Now let’s see what happened: she looked at the center side (where the Chinese sat before this week), then looked after them and saw them on the left side, but… she broke the cluster and sat in the center. Two minutes after the course started another Chinese colleague came. Being late she took the first seat next to the door (ironically the person next to her was the Chinese PhD student).
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Most interesting is that none of the two colleagues that were late didn’t change her place during the brake to join the cluster. Another interesting thing is that other European colleagues that sat on the left side of the room were also coherent with the previous behavior and, thus, they mixed with the Chinese cluster.