Don Pedro Quotes

The bulls are my best friends." I translated to Brett. "You kill your friends?" she asked. "Always," he said in English, and laughed. "So they don't kill me.

Come, lady, come; you have lost the heart of Signior Benedick. BEATRICE Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it. DON PEDRO You have put him down, lady, you have put him down. BEATRICE So I would not he should do me, my lord, lest I should prove the mother of fools.

It's not man versus machine; it's man with machine versus man without. Data and intuition are like horse and rider, and you don't try to outrun a horse; you ride it.

own moral standards. It was just a pity that Major Fisher had no standards, and Don Pedro Martinez no morals.

Common sense is important not just because your mom taught you so, but because computers don’t have it.

So you think Don Pedro ended up all right,” I said. “I think he became a man who brought peace and wisdom to his world, because he knew about war and folly. I think that he loved greatly, because he had seen what lost love is. And I think he came to know, too, that he was loved greatly.” She looked at the strawberry in her hands. “But I thought you didn’t want me to tell you your future.

There is an old adage that says, "You can give a man a fish and feed him for a day. You can teach a man to fish and feed him for a life time."... "Well, I like what Pedro Noguera had to add. He says, "Don't stop there."..."Help her understand why the river is polluted so that she and her friends can organize to get the river clean and make it possible for the entire community to eat too." - Sabrina

Era tanta la consternación, don Pedro, que masticábamos la carne cruda de los animales congelados y bebíamos la orina de los caballos. De día marchábamos a paso forzado, para evitar que nos cubriera la nieve y nos paralizara el miedo. De noche dormíamos abrazados con las bestias.

I heard them name them when they were tossing me, and one was called Pedro Martinez,

Knowledge without love is worse than ignorance. Action without love is madness...

People don't talk truthfully to kids. They give them a lot of rhetoric. They think children can't handle things. They're wrong.

Don’t attempt to fight the enemy in your own strength. You will experience burnout, and you will fail. Don’t even think about it! The key is to engage in spiritual warfare God’s way. And that is by resting in him and fighting from victory, not for victory!

The mayor was also the local policeman, which meant that only one man needed to be bribed rather than two... The community was proud that he was their mayor and their policeman even though he had sold his neice to Pedro the Grocer for one hundred and twenty-two words.

It infuriates him, this killing, this death. Infuriating that this is what we’re known for now, drug cartels and slaughter. This my city of Avenida 16 Septembre, the Victoria Theater, cobblestone streets, the bullring, La Central, La Fogata, more bookstores than El Paso, the university, the ballet, garapiñados, pan dulce, the mission, the plaza, the Kentucky Bar, Fred’s—now it’s known for these idiotic thugs. And my country, Mexico—the land of writers and poets—of Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Jorge Volpi, Rosario Castellanos, Luis Urrea, Elmer Mendoza, Alfonso Reyes—the land of painters and sculptors—Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Gabriel Orozco, Pablo O’Higgins, Juan Soriano, Francisco Goitia—of dancers like Guillermina Bravo, Gloria and Nellie Campobello, Josefina Lavalle, Ana Mérida, and composers—Carlos Chávez, Silvestre Revueltas, Agustín Lara, Blas Galindo—architects—Luis Barragán, Juan O’Gorman, Tatiana Bilbao, Michel Rojkind, Pedro Vásquez—wonderful filmmakers—Fernando de Fuentes, Alejandro Iñárritu, Luis Buñuel, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro—actors like Dolores del Río, “La Doña” María Félix, Pedro Infante, Jorge Negrete, Salma Hayek—now the names are “famous” narcos—no more than sociopathic murderers whose sole contribution to the culture has been the narcocorridas sung by no-talent sycophants. Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

La Media Luna estaba sola, en silencio. Se caminaba con los pies descalzos; se hablaba en voz baja. Enterraron a Susana San Juan y pocos en Comala se enteraron. Allá había feria. Se jugaba a los gallos, se oía la música; los gritos de los borrachos y de loterías. Hasta acá llegaba la luz del pueblo, que parecía una aureola sobre el cielo gris. Porque fueron días grises, tristes para la Media Luna. Don Pedro no hablaba. No salía de su cuarto. Juró vengarse de Comala: -Me cruzaré de brazos y Comala se morirá de hambre. Y así lo hizo.

IT WAS A HOT AND MUGGY DAY AS I looked up in the powder blue sky that covered the Port of San Pedro. The Bell helicopter circled above like a dragonfly in my Grandma Cholé's rose garden. I don't know if it was the unbearable humidity or the whoop- whoop- whoop of the chopper's rotor blades as they sliced through the air, but something was affecting me.

God isn’t asking you to fight the devil. He is asking you to simply uphold or sustain the victory won by Jesus at Calvary and enforce his authority over the devil. You’re like the traffic warden who raises his hand and the vehicles stop. They don’t stop because he can physically bring the vehicles to a halt, but because he is representing and upholding the authority of the state.

36 Mas Jesús, oyendo lo que decían, dijo al jefe de la sinagoga: No temas; ten fe solamente. 37 Y no permitió que le siguiese ninguno, fuera de Pedro, y Santiago, y Juan el hermano de Santiago. 38 Llegados que fueron a casa del jefe de la sinagoga, ve la confusión, y los grandes lloros y alaridos de aquella gente. 39 Y entrando, les dice: ¿De qué se afligen tánto, y lloran? La muchacha no está muerta, sino dormida.

Every algorithm has an input and an output: the data goes into the computer, the algorithm does what it will with it, and out comes the result. Machine learning turns this around: in goes the data and the desired result and out comes the algorithm that turns one into the other. Learning algorithms—also known as learners—are algorithms that make other algorithms. With machine learning, computers write their own programs, so we don’t have to.

Los cuatro hermanos Quiñones a la lucha se aprestaron, y al correr de sus bridones como cuatro exhalaciones hasta el castillo llegaron. ¡Ah del castillo! —dijeron—. ¡Bajad presto ese rastrillo! Callaron y nada oyeron, sordos sin duda se hicieron los infantes del castillo. ¡Tended el puente, tendello! Pues de no hacello, ¡pardiez!, antes del primer destello domaremos la altivez de esa torre, habréis de vello... Entonces los infanzones contestaron: ¡Pobres locos!... Para asaltar torreones, cuatro Quiñones son pocos. ¡Hacen falta más Quiñones!

Panning his sunglasses across Quincy, Jamie, and LB, he spun his finger in small circles. He spoke into the mike curled at his lips. “Spinning up now.” Quincy climbed to his feet. He offered a mitt down to Jamie to lift him, then to LB. Across the pad, through waves of heat off the concrete, the rotors of Pedro 1 accelerated also. Quincy and Jamie hurried away with their packs and carbines. Jamie’s gait showed the strain; Quincy dug a big paw under the boy’s pack to help him along. LB donned his helmet and shouldered his rifle. Wally stayed seated, on the radio recalling Doc from the hospital.

Dr. Manning said he'd thought at first it might be sleeping sickness, or even narcolepsy, whatever that was, but - no, Pete was healthy enough physically. Manoel growled that the boy was bone-lazy, spending his time fishing and reading. Reading! No good could come of such things. 'In a way you're right, Manoel,' Dr. Manning said hesitantly. 'It's natural for a boy to day-dream now and then, but I think Pedro does it too much. I've let him use my library whenever he wanted, but it seems... h'm... it seems he reads the wrong things. Fairy tales are very charming, but they don't help a boy to cope with real life.' 'Com certeza,' Manoel agreed. 'You mean he has crazy ideas in the head.' 'Oh, they're rather nice ideas,' Dr. Manning said. 'But they're only fairy tales, and they're beginning to seem true to Pete. You see, Manoel, there are really two worlds, the real one, and the one you make up inside your mind. Sometimes a boy - or even a man - gets to like his dream world so much he just forgets about the real one and lives in the one he's made up.' 'I know,' Manoel said. 'I have seen some who do that. It is a bad thing.' 'It would be bad for Pete. He's a very sensitive boy. If you live too much in dreams, you can't face real life squarely.' ("Before I Wake...")

What's taking you so long in the privy, son?" "Nothing, mama." "If you stay in there much longer, a snake will come and bite you" "Yes, mama." I was thinking of you, Susana of the green hills. Of when we used to fly kites in the windy season. We could hear the sounds of life from the town below; we were high above on the hill, playing out string to the wind. "Help me, Susana." And soft hands would tighten on mine. "Let out more string." The wind made us laugh; our eyes followed the string running through our fingers after the wind until with a faint pop! it broke, as if it had been snapped by the wings of a bird. And high over head, the paper bird would tumble and somersault, trailing its rag tail, until it disappeared into the green earth. Your lips were moist, as if kissed by the dew. "I told you, son, come out of the privy now." "Yes, mama. I'm coming." I was thinking of you. Of the times you were there looking at me with your aquamarine eyes. He looked up and saw his mother in the doorway. "What's taking you so long? What are you doing in there?" "I'm thinking." "Can't you do it somewhere else? It's not good for you to stay in the privy so long. Besides, you should be doing something. Why don't you go help your grandmother shell corn?" "I'm going, mama. I'm going.

I don’t want you to leave, heartache, the last form of loving. I feel myself live when you hurt me not in yourself, or here, but further: in the earth, in the year you come from, in my love for her and everything it meant. In that sunken reality which denies itself and insists that it never existed, that it was only a pretext of mine for living. If you didn’t stay with me, heartache, irrefutably, I would believe that; but you do stay with me. Your truth assures me that nothing was a lie. And as long as I feel you, heartache, you will be the proof of another life in which you didn’t hurt me. The great proof, in the distance, that it existed, that it still exists, that she loved me, yes, that I’m still loving her. —Pedro Salinas, from “The Voice I Owe to You,” Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas (Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers, 2009)

Notice that Jesus knows exactly who he is asking to lead his community: a sinner. As all Christian leaders have been, are, and will be, Peter is imperfect. And as all good Christian leaders are, Peter is well aware of his imperfections. The disciples too know who they are getting as their leader. They will not need—or be tempted—to elevate Peter into some semi-divine figure; they have seen him at his worst. Jesus forgives Peter because he loves him, because he knows that his friend needs forgiveness to be free, and because he knows that the leader of his church will need to forgive others many times. And Jesus forgives totally, going beyond what would be expected—going so far as to establish Peter as head of the church.11 It would have made more earthly sense for Jesus to appoint another, non-betraying apostle to head his church. Why give the one who denied him this important leadership role? Why elevate the manifestly sinful one over the rest? One reason may be to show the others what forgiveness is. In this way Jesus embodies the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, who not only forgives the son, but also, to use a fishing metaphor, goes overboard. Jesus goes beyond forgiving and setting things right. A contemporary equivalent would be a tenured professor stealing money from a university, apologizing, being forgiven by the board of trustees, and then being hired as the school’s president. People would find this extraordinary—and it is. In response, Peter will ultimately offer his willingness to lay down his life for Christ. But on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he can’t know the future. He can’t understand fully what he is agreeing to. Feed your sheep? Which sheep? The Twelve? The disciples? The whole world? This is often the case for us too. Even if we accept the call we can be confused about where God is leading us. When reporters used to ask the former Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe where the Jesuit Order was going, he would say, “I don’t know!” Father Arrupe was willing to follow, even if he didn’t know precisely what God had in mind. Peter says yes to the unknowable, because the question comes from Jesus. Both Christ’s forgiveness and Peter’s response show us love. God’s love is limitless, unconditional, radical. And when we have experienced that love, we can share it. The ability to forgive and to accept forgiveness is an absolute requirement of the Christian life. Conversely, the refusal to forgive leads ineluctably to spiritual death. You may know families in which vindictiveness acts like a cancer, slowly eating away at love. You may know people whose marriages have been destroyed by a refusal to forgive. One of my friends described a couple he knew as “two scorpions in a jar,” both eagerly waiting to sting the other with barbs and hateful comments. We see the communal version of this in countries torn by sectarian violence, where a climate of mutual recrimination and mistrust leads only to increasing levels of pain. The Breakfast by the Sea shows that Jesus lived the forgiveness he preached. Jesus knew that forgiveness is a life-giving force that reconciles, unites, and empowers. The Gospel by the Sea is a gospel of forgiveness, one of the central Christian virtues. It is the radical stance of Jesus, who, when faced with the one who denied him, forgave him and appointed him head of the church, and the man who, in agony on the Cross, forgave his executioners. Forgiveness is a gift to the one who forgives, because it frees from resentment; and to the one who needs forgiveness, because it frees from guilt. Forgiveness is the liberating force that allowed Peter to cast himself into the water at the sound of Jesus’s voice, and it is the energy that gave him a voice with which to testify to his belief in Christ.

Y un juego vil que no hay que jugarlo a ciegas, pues juegas cien veces, mil, y de las mil, ves febril que o te pasas o no llegas. Y el no llegar da dolor, pues indica que mal tasas y eres del otro deudor. Mas ¡ay de ti si te pasas! ¡Si te pasas es peor!

Symbolists don’t like probabilities and tell jokes like “How many Bayesians does it take to change a lightbulb? They’re not sure. Come to think of it, they’re not sure the lightbulb is burned out.

Algorithms are an exacting standard. It’s often said that you don’t really understand something until you can express it as an algorithm.

The factors that usually decide presidential elections—the economy, likability of the candidates, and so on—added up to a wash, and the outcome came down to a few key swing states. Mitt Romney’s campaign followed a conventional polling approach, grouping voters into broad categories and targeting each one or not. Neil Newhouse, Romney’s pollster, said that “if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.” Romney won them by 7 percent but still lost the state and the election. In contrast, President Obama hired Rayid Ghani, a machine-learning expert, as chief scientist of his campaign, and Ghani proceeded to put together the greatest analytics operation in the history of politics. They consolidated all voter information into a single database; combined it with what they could get from social networking, marketing, and other sources; and set about predicting four things for each individual voter: how likely he or she was to support Obama, show up at the polls, respond to the campaign’s reminders to do so, and change his or her mind about the election based on a conversation about a specific issue. Based on these voter models, every night the campaign ran 66,000 simulations of the election and used the results to direct its army of volunteers: whom to call, which doors to knock on, what to say. In politics, as in business and war, there is nothing worse than seeing your opponent make moves that you don’t understand and don’t know what to do about until it’s too late. That’s what happened to the Romney campaign. They could see the other side buying ads in particular cable stations in particular towns but couldn’t tell why; their crystal ball was too fuzzy. In the end, Obama won every battleground state save North Carolina and by larger margins than even the most accurate pollsters had predicted. The most accurate pollsters, in turn, were the ones (like Nate Silver) who used the most sophisticated prediction techniques; they were less accurate than the Obama campaign because they had fewer resources. But they were a lot more accurate than the traditional pundits, whose predictions were based on their expertise. You might think the 2012 election was a fluke: most elections are not close enough for machine learning to be the deciding factor. But machine learning will cause more elections to be close in the future. In politics, as in everything, learning is an arms race. In the days of Karl Rove, a former direct marketer and data miner, the Republicans were ahead. By 2012, they’d fallen behind, but now they’re catching up again.

There’s a further twist: once a learned program is deployed, the bad guys change their behavior to defeat it. This contrasts with the natural world, which always works the same way. The solution is to marry machine learning with game theory, something I’ve worked on in the past: don’t just learn to defeat what your opponent does now; learn to parry what he might do against your learner. Factoring in the costs and benefits of different actions, as game theory does, can also help strike the right balance between privacy and security.

Minsky was an ardent supporter of the Cyc project, the most notorious failure in the history of AI. The goal of Cyc was to solve AI by entering into a computer all the necessary knowledge. When the project began in the 1980s, its leader, Doug Lenat, confidently predicted success within a decade. Thirty years later, Cyc continues to grow without end in sight, and commonsense reasoning still eludes it. Ironically, Lenat has belatedly embraced populating Cyc by mining the web, not because Cyc can read, but because there’s no other way. Even if by some miracle we managed to finish coding up all the necessary pieces, our troubles would be just beginning. Over the years, a number of research groups have attempted to build complete intelligent agents by putting together algorithms for vision, speech recognition, language understanding, reasoning, planning, navigation, manipulation, and so on. Without a unifying framework, these attempts soon hit an insurmountable wall of complexity: too many moving parts, too many interactions, too many bugs for poor human software engineers to cope with. Knowledge engineers believe AI is just an engineering problem, but we have not yet reached the point where engineering can take us the rest of the way. In 1962, when Kennedy gave his famous moon-shot speech, going to the moon was an engineering problem. In 1662, it wasn’t, and that’s closer to where AI is today. In industry, there’s no sign that knowledge engineering will ever be able to compete with machine learning outside of a few niche areas. Why pay experts to slowly and painfully encode knowledge into a form computers can understand, when you can extract it from data at a fraction of the cost? What about all the things the experts don’t know but you can discover from data? And when data is not available, the cost of knowledge engineering seldom exceeds the benefit. Imagine if farmers had to engineer each cornstalk in turn, instead of sowing the seeds and letting them grow: we would all starve.

Rather, you take the data you have and randomly divide it into a training set, which you give to the learner, and a test set, which you hide from it and use to verify its accuracy. Accuracy on held-out data is the gold standard in machine learning. You can write a paper about a great new learning algorithm you’ve invented, but if your algorithm is not significantly more accurate than previous ones on held-out data, the paper is not publishable. Accuracy on previously unseen data is a pretty stringent test; so much so, in fact, that a lot of science fails it. That does not make it useless, because science is not just about prediction; it’s also about explanation and understanding. But ultimately, if your models don’t make accurate predictions on new data, you can’t be sure you’ve truly understood or explained the underlying phenomena. And for machine learning, testing on unseen data is indispensable because it’s the only way to tell whether the learner has overfit or not.

This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions.

In reality, a doctor doesn’t diagnose the flu just based on whether you have a fever; she takes a whole bunch of symptoms into account, including whether you have a cough, a sore throat, a runny nose, a headache, chills, and so on. So what we really need to compute is P(flu | fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, headache, chills, … ). By Bayes’ theorem, we know that this is proportional to P(fever, cough, sore throat, runny nose, headache, chills, …| flu). But now we run into a problem. How are we supposed to estimate this probability? If each symptom is a Boolean variable (you either have it or you don’t) and the doctor takes n symptoms into account, a patient could have 2n possible combinations of symptoms.

PageRank, the algorithm that gave rise to Google, is itself a Markov chain. Larry Page’s idea was that web pages with many incoming links are probably more important than pages with few, and links from important pages should themselves count for more. This sets up an infinite regress, but we can handle it with a Markov chain. Imagine a web surfer going from page to page by randomly following links: the states of this Markov chain are web pages instead of characters, making it a vastly larger problem, but the math is the same. A page’s score is then the fraction of the time the surfer spends on it, or equivalently, his probability of landing on the page after wandering around for a long time. Markov chains turn up everywhere and are one of the most intensively studied topics in mathematics, but they’re still a very limited kind of probabilistic model. We can go one step further with a model like this: The states form a Markov chain, as before, but we don’t get to see them; we have to infer them from the observations. This is called a hidden Markov model, or HMM for short. (Slightly misleading, because it’s the states that are hidden, not the model.)

The breakthrough came in the early 1980s, when Judea Pearl, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, invented a new representation: Bayesian networks. Pearl is one of the most distinguished computer scientists in the world, his methods having swept through machine learning, AI, and many other fields. He won the Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of computer science, in 2012. Pearl realized that it’s OK to have a complex network of dependencies among random variables, provided each variable depends directly on only a few others. We can represent these dependencies with a graph like the ones we saw for Markov chains and HMMs, except now the graph can have any structure (as long as the arrows don’t form closed loops). One of Pearl’s favorite examples is burglar alarms. The alarm at your house should go off if a burglar attempts to break in, but it could also be triggered by an earthquake. (In Los Angeles, where Pearl lives, earthquakes are almost as frequent as burglaries.) If you’re working late one night and your neighbor Bob calls to say he just heard your alarm go off, but your neighbor Claire doesn’t, should you call the police? Here’s the graph of dependencies: If there’s an arrow from one node to another in the graph, we say that the first node is a parent of the second. So Alarm’s parents are Burglary and Earthquake, and Alarm is the sole parent of Bob calls and Claire calls. A Bayesian network is a graph of dependencies like this, together with a table for each variable, giving its probability for each combination of values of its parents. For Burglary and Earthquake we only need one probability each, since they have no parents. For Alarm we need four: the probability that it goes off even if there’s no burglary or earthquake, the probability that it goes off if there’s a burglary and no earthquake, and so on. For Bob calls we need two probabilities (given alarm and given no alarm), and similarly for Claire. Here’s the crucial point: Bob calling depends on Burglary and Earthquake, but only through Alarm. Bob’s call is conditionally independent of Burglary and Earthquake given Alarm, and so is Claire’s. If the alarm doesn’t go off, your neighbors sleep soundly, and the burglar proceeds undisturbed. Also, Bob and Claire are independent given Alarm. Without this independence structure, you’d need to learn 25 = 32 probabilities, one for each possible state of the five variables. (Or 31, if you’re a stickler for details, since the last one can be left implicit.) With the conditional independencies, all you need is 1 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 2 = 10, a savings of 68 percent. And that’s just in this tiny example; with hundreds or thousands of variables, the savings would be very close to 100 percent.

The Devil is present everywhere that evil things happen within the normal laws of nature. In anyone who says: I don’t accept love, the love of my brothers and sisters, the love of God. And in many places, in all massacres, in every murder, in physical catastrophes, in every concentration camp, in all evil. Sometimes he shows himself, strangely, but also in cases of possession. But he’s much more dangerous where he doesn’t let himself be seen, where he can’t be done away with through exorcism. —Father Pedro Barrajon, excerpt from interview in Die Welt, December 2, 2005

Don Pedro Luis de Borja-Pierluigi Borgia to the Italians—was still in his mid-twenties when he became the first member of his family to be the most hated man in Rome. He did so not by behaving badly in any way of which a credible record has survived, but by carrying out an assignment that made him the enemy of some of the most badly behaved Romans of his time.

But machine learning is the art of making false assumptions and getting away with it. As the statistician George Box famously put it: “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” An oversimplified model that you have enough data to estimate is better than a perfect one that you don’t.

Don Miguel Bosch, Don Maximo Laguna, Don Augustin Pascual, and other illustrious naturalists.

Only kings and queens know the reasons behind their designs. Commoners don’t question them, they comply with them,” Egil recited.

With the judges waiting anxiously nearby, the emperor struck up a conversation with the young teacher. When Bell told him that he had come to the fair hoping to show an invention, but would have to leave early in the morning, Don Pedro reacted with characteristic vigor. "Ah. He exclaimed. Then we must have a look at it now!" Taking Bell's arm in his own, he strolled toward the stairs. A long line of judges shuffling resignedly behind. After the group had crossed the long hall and climbed to the remote gallery, Bell led them to his table, around which, he had optimistically arranged a few chairs.

asked them not to. It was the one condition I made when I left you with them. I made them swear they’d never reveal your origin. They gave me their word as Norriel. And they kept it.” “But why? I don’t understand.” “Because your life was in great danger. The best way to save you was to keep your origin and whereabouts a secret. Nobody was to know where you were or else you’d die; there was a latent risk we couldn’t ignore. And Mirta and Ulis kept their word, and with it they saved your life. For the next eighteen years you were in no danger, since nobody knew where you were hidden. I visited your parents secretly on several occasions, making sure it was a time when you were not there. Their happiness at having you could not have been greater. Your parents were very proud of you, Komir, and they loved you more than their own lives. I know because they told me so. That you must know.” Komir’s eyes moistened. “If you knew I was in danger, if you brought me to my parents fleeing from danger, then you know who was after me. Not only that, you know who was trying to kill me, and so you know who killed my parents. Who, Haradin?” The Mage bowed his head. “I don’t have the answer you want, Komir.” “Yes you do, Haradin, I know you do! Tell me!” Komir insisted. “I never succeeded in finding out who wanted you dead. What I can tell you is that the assassins I fought were from somewhere very distant, from another continent, if my guess is correct. Hence I guess that their master, the one who ordered your death, must also have been. The assassins I defeated to save your life had slanted eyes. They belong to no known race of Tremia, and that I can tell you for sure as I’ve traveled the whole continent in

De igual manera, ustedes esposos, sean comprensivos en su vida conyugal, tratando cada uno a su esposa con respeto, ya que como mujer es más delicada, y ambos son herederos del grato don de la vida. Así nada estorbará las oraciones de ustedes” (1 Pedro 3:7, NVI).

Because I asked them not to. It was the one condition I made when I left you with them. I made them swear they’d never reveal your origin. They gave me their word as Norriel. And they kept it.” “But why? I don’t understand.” “Because your life was in great danger. The best way to save you was to keep your origin and whereabouts a secret. Nobody was to know where you were or else you’d die; there was a latent risk we couldn’t ignore. And Mirta and Ulis kept their word, and with it they saved your life. For the next eighteen years you were in no danger, since nobody knew where you were hidden. I visited your parents secretly on several occasions, making sure it was a time when you were not there. Their happiness at having you could not have been greater. Your parents were very proud of you, Komir, and they loved you more than their own lives. I know because they told me so. That you must know.” Komir’s eyes moistened. “If you knew I was in danger, if you brought me to my parents fleeing from danger, then you know who was after me. Not only that, you know who was trying to kill me, and so you know who killed my parents. Who, Haradin?” The Mage bowed his head. “I don’t have the answer you want, Komir.” “Yes you do, Haradin, I know you do! Tell me!” Komir insisted. “I never succeeded in finding out who wanted you dead. What I can tell you is that the assassins I fought were from somewhere very distant, from another continent, if my guess is correct. Hence I guess that their master, the one who ordered your death, must also have been. The assassins I defeated to save your life had slanted eyes. They belong to no known race of Tremia, and that I can tell you for sure as I’ve traveled the whole continent in

Then help us, old man. I don’t have much time.” “I see you’re more straightforward and down-to-earth than your brother…” “You know my brother?” “Yes, I know him. Our paths have crossed several times.” “So, will you help us, then?” “I’ll make you a proposition, young Hero, as I did to your brother before he set off to rescue you from the Eternal City. I’ll help you in exchange for your help in the difficult days which are coming. Unfortunately that’s the way things work in this ungrateful world…” “What do you want of me?” Kyra asked. There was distrust in her narrowed eyes. “The message of freedom already flies high, like an eagle: unstoppable, majestic, over fields, villages and cities of the Six Counties. It’s a message of hope, of a dream the Senoca had lost and are now regaining little by little. It’s been a long hard effort organizing ourselves so that this rumor can reach the peasant, the farmer, the woodcutter, the miner, the shepherd, the apothecary, the craftsman, the people, every one of the Senoca. And we’re succeeding.” “What does that have to do with me?” “What’s enabled the message to spread so quickly and reach so many is the appearance of the Heroes who have defied the Gods in their own dwelling and emerged victorious. You are a symbol for the people. You represent what they wish to be, but which their defeated and fearful spirits will not let them be. At night they dream of being Heroes, but fear overcomes them by day.” “I still don’t know why you need me.” The stranger gave a bitter laugh. “Youth gives us energy, courage,

What you are, who you serve, and what you’ve come to do. I know it all very well. The evil you bring to our land. Uthar brings us death and destruction with his great bloodthirsty army of pale men with sun-colored hair and beards. With their murderous axes and their round shields, with their greed for conquest and pillage hidden behind them. But we don’t fear them, we’ll fight for our land. We’ll defend it to the last of our own people, because it is sacred and our cause is fair. We will kill all who soil this frozen ground.” Lasgol realized that he could not deceive him. That they would not get out of there alive. “We’ll kill you all, you cursed barbarian Norghanians.” The Shaman made a sign to the beast, which fell on them.

remember today’s lesson well. Not everything here is visible, not everything is known. There’s a hidden world around us: powers we don’t understand and which we must always respect.

head to glare at him. “You don’t need me to fight your battles,

Don’t torture yourself with the past. That can no longer be changed. Focus on the future, which is unwritten, and work to reach your goals there.

Magdalena... ¡esa escala en una almena...!

We don’t believe in luck. We believe in training.

The rationalist likes to plan everything in advance before making the first move. The empiricist prefers to try things and see how they turn out. I don’t know if there’s a gene for rationalism or one for empiricism, but looking at my computer scientist colleagues, I’ve observed time and again that they are almost like personality traits: some people are rationalistic to the core and could never have been otherwise; and others are empiricist through and through, and that’s what they’ll always be. The two sides can converse with each other and sometimes draw on each other’s results, but they can understand each other only so much. Deep down each believes that what the other does is secondary, and not very interesting.

Cuando yo nací (en El Porvenir), bueno, ya que crecíamos, nos trajeron caminando por aquí, por este caminito, con mi abuelo Aldegundo. Fuimos a su casa, fuimos a conocer a Pedro Reyes que allí vivía con doña Juana, pobrecito, pobrecito, comiendo frijolitos. A mí también me dieron. ¿Cuántos años hará de eso? Hace como 20 ó 25 años. Regresamos, están igual y ¿quiénes están iguales? Igual está doña Delfina de pobre, igual está mi tía Juana, igual está Felipe, igual está Emilio y aquí su hijo, igual está Tibe, igual están todos. ¿Por qué? Porque no progresamos los pobres, ¿A dónde va a dar tanto que sembramos café, tanto que sembramos maíz, tanto que sembramos chile, tanto que nos alquilamos, a dónde va a parar eso? A manos de los ricos, es el gran robo, es la explotación que han hecho los hombres ricos a los hombres pobres, es la explotación del hombre 'por el hombre, es la explotación por el hombre rico al hombre pobre. Los pobres están siendo explotados, los pobres están siendo robados, por más que le siembren maíz a las faldas de los cerros. Todo ese maíz no nos produce nada porque cuando tenemos mucho maíz no vale; cuando tenemos poquito el maíz, vale tan tito. Y ¿por qué? ¿Seremos los pobres los tarugos, los que nos reunimos y una vez reunidos los pobres tarugos le ponemos un precio muy bajo al café? No. ¿O le ponemos nosotros un alto precio al café? Tampoco. Nosotros los pobres no tenemos la libertad de mandar en el café. ¿Cuánto café está en este carro? ¿Quién le puso el precio? ¿El dueño? No. ¿Quién es el dueño?, perdonando. ¿Cómo se llama? ¿Don Aurelio Rodríguez le puso el precio al café? Se lo pusieron los ricos. Al café de ustedes, al café de Ventura...

machine-learning algorithms, also known as learners, are different: they figure it out on their own, by making inferences from data. And the more data they have, the better they get. Now we don’t have to program computers; they program themselves.

You’ve got to always remember that the devil is a defeated foe. The battle has been won. You don’t need to fight him. So what do you do? You simply stand and exercise your authority. All you’ve got to do is exercise your authority.

15 Acabada la comida, dice Jesús a Simón Pedro: Simón hijo de Juan, ¿me amas tú más que éstos? Le dice: Sí, Señor, tú sabes que te amo. Le dice: Apacienta mis corderos. 16 Segunda vez le dice: Simón hijo de Juan, ¿me amas? Le responde: Sí, Señor, tú sabes que te amo. Le dice: Apacienta mis corderos. 17 Le dice tercera vez: Simón hijo de Juan, ¿me amas? Pedro se contristó de que por tercera vez le preguntase si lo amaba, y así respondió: Señor, tú lo sabes todo: tú conoces bien que yo te amo. Le dijo Jesús: Apacienta mis ovejas. 18 En verdad, en verdad te digo, que cuando eras más mozo, tú mismo te ceñías el vestido, e ibas a donde querías; mas en siendo viejo, extenderás tus manos en una cruz, y otro te ceñirá, y te conducirá a donde tú no gustes. 19 Esto lo dijo para indicar con qué género de muerte había Pedro de glorificar a Dios. Y después de esto, añadió: Sígueme. 20

69 Mientras tanto Pedro estaba sentado fuera en el atrio, y arrimándose a él una criada, le dijo: También tú andabas con Jesús el Galileo. 70 Pero él negó en presencia de todos, diciendo: Yo no sé de qué hablas. 71 Y saliendo él al pórtico, lo miró otra criada, y dijo a los que allí estaban: Este también se hallaba con Jesús Nazareno. 72 Y negó por segunda vez afirmando con juramento: No conozco a tal hombre. 73 Poco después se acercaron los circunstantes, y dijeron a Pedro: Seguramente eres tú también de ellos, porque tu misma habla de galileo te descubre. 74 Entonces empezó a echarse sobre sí imprecaciones y a jurar que no había conocido a tal hombre. Y al momento cantó el gallo. 75 Con lo que se acordó Pedro de la proposición que Jesús le había dicho: Antes de cantar el gallo, renegarás de mi tres veces. Y saliéndose fuera, lloró amargamente. 27

40 Entonces Pedro habiendo hecho salir a toda la gente, poniéndose de rodillas, hizo oración; y vuelto al cadáver, dijo: Tabita, levántate. Al instante abrió ella los ojos: y viendo a Pedro, se incorporó. 41

The racial separation we see in schools might also be seen as an element of the “hidden curriculum,” an unspoken set of rules that “teaches” certain students what they can and cannot do because of who they are. There are aspects of this hidden curriculum that are not being taught by the adults. It may well be that students are the ones teaching it to each other. No adult goes onto the playground and says, “I don’t want the boys and girls to play together.” The girls and boys do that themselves, and it’s a rare child who crosses over. Why? Because

(Relacion del descubrimiento y conquista de los reinos del Perú.) Don

For the soul, understand, is itself the whole world.

It would’ve been easier and less risky with the two of us,” said Hartz. Komir smiled. “We’ll kill the next one we come across together, don’t worry.” “Awesome!” cried Hartz happily, flexing his muscles. “Men…” Kayti said, shaking her head. Kendas

Al terminar la ceremonia, don Marcos se volvió hacia mí y dijo: —Porfirio, quiero que conozcas al licenciado Juárez, gobernador de Oaxaca. Y saludé, por primera vez, al zapoteco.

Quisiera que cada uno de vosotros sintiera la alegría de ser cristiano. En una bella oración para recitar a diario por la mañana se dice: «Te adoro, Dios mío, y te amo con todo el corazón. Te doy gracias porque me has creado, hecho cristiano...». Sí, alegrémonos por el don de la fe; es el bien más precioso que nadie nos puede arrebatar. Por ello demos gracias al Señor cada día, con la oración y con una vida cristiana coherente. Dios nos ama, pero espera que también nosotros lo amemos. Pero no es solo a Dios a quien quiero dar las gracias en este momento. Un papa no guía él solo la barca de Pedro, aunque sea esta su principal responsabilidad. Yo nunca me he sentido solo al llevar la alegría y el peso del ministerio petrino; el Señor me ha puesto cerca a muchas personas que, con generosidad y amor a Dios y a la Iglesia, me han ayudado y han estado cerca de mí. Ante todo, vosotros, queridos hermanos cardenales:

Dreams and goals are there so that we can try to reach them,” Egil told her. “If we don’t manage to, it doesn’t mean we’ve failed, because what’s important isn’t reaching the finishing line but the struggle and the effort we put into trying to get there.

the theory is almost more important than the practice, although I prefer the practice.” “It is?” Nilsa asked, surprised. “Absolutely,” Ingrid said, nodding. “Practice improves with more practice. You either have knowledge or you don’t, and if you don’t have it you won’t obtain the specialty.

Don Pedro: I think this is your daughter Leonato: Her mother hath many times told me so. Benedick: Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her? Leonato: Signior Benedick, no; for then were you a child.

Perhaps now you’ll see them,” he told Edwina. “Let’s try.” Edwina concentrated and placed her hands on Gerd’s head. She began to imbue him with her healing energy. A moment later, she announced, “I see them, twelve radiant points.” “Fantastic!” Lasgol cried. “Edwina, can you mark them somehow so you don’t lose them?” Annika asked. “Lasgol looks exhausted. I don’t think he can continue marking them for you much longer.” Edwina sent more healing energy. “There’s no need for you to continue showing them to me, Lasgol, Now that I see them, I can locate them. Stop pinpointing them so I can check.

Only a fool attempts the same madness twice, having failed the first time,” Egil instructed them. “We will wait for a chance to present itself. We’ll prepare and be ready when the time of the West arrives. Don’t despair. We need silence and tenacity. We must work in the shadows together. The day will come, I swear it.

If I don’t make it out of this...” “Viggo!” Ingrid hastened to his side. “Don’t leave me!” “I want you... to know...” “Viggo!” “That I love you...

There's no place to sleep," I said. Don't worry about that. You must be tired from your journey, and weariness makes a good mattress.

—Puedo llevarla toda yo solo —alardeó Pedro. —Bueno, sí, lo sé. Pero no es necesario. A ver toma esta... y esta... Y aunque don José le daba troncos no muy grandes, Pedro sentía que los brazos se le doblaban. ¡Para qué habría hablado! Ahora ya era demasiado tarde para decir que le pesaba. Sólo le quedaba apretar los dientes y hacer fuerza. Pedro estaba tratando de calcular cuántos troncos más iba a poder llevar, cuando escucharon a lo lejos el ruido de los aviones. —Ahí están esos otra vez —protestó don José—. Yo no sé, si siguen pasando así, las ovejas se nos van a morir del susto. —¡Mire que ruido, don José! Están volando bajo... Apure que vamos a ver —dijo Pedro, más entusiasmado por largar ahí mismo la leña que por ver pasar a los aviones. —Tranquilo, tranquilo, que si no llevamos suficiente vamos a tener que... Don José no terminó su frase. Un ruido espantoso lo calló. Un tamblor lo calló. La humareda lo calló. No llegaron a darse cuenta de nada. No tuvieron tiempo de correr ni de gritar, ni de esconderse, ni de salir, ni de asustarse, ni de llorar. No tuvieron tiempo. El galpón se derrumbó con estruendo, al mismo tiempo que la escuela, a la par que los arcos de fútbol, y que los techos de algunas casas, y las paredes de otras. Los gritos llegaron después, cuando ya todo era silencio y humo y unos buscaban a otros, sin poder encontrarse. En el televisor de don Cosme, un señor explicaba que la guera estaba siendo un éxito.

En una ocasión, don Martín me dijo que a veces es uno el que decide qué camino seguir, y que otras es el propio camino el que se precipita sobre tus pasos.

so he could have that stupid piece of land the patrón and Don Fernando were always fighting about. Pedro shouldn’t have done it. It cost him his life.” “But if he did it, why would Don Fernando try to hurt him? How do you know it wasn’t your

don’t know, but they’re among us,

Worrying about those we love is natural. Don’t let that be a burden.

I help. Ona can’t. She not so smart. Don’t say that about Ona. She’s very smart. Good, yes. Strong, yes. Smart, no.

If you don't find your happiness in God, you won't find it elsewhere.

If you see me doing harm to anyone, please point your finger in my face and tell me off. If I don't give you hearing, don't think twice and expose me to the entire community as a hypocrite who doesn't practice what he preaches. But if you see me doing what is honorable, pure, and pious for any living being, I beg you to keep it to yourself, this will be our secret. If by divine design my name acquires good fame and irreproachable reputation, remind those who speak so well of me, that the Lord rescued this miserable man from darkness, and all the good things that our God patiently has done to this sinner. If I look at someone with disdain or run the risk of thinking that I am better than my neighbor, I cry out to you, Lord, that you humble me and remind me how small I am. If the work of my hands succeeds, the credit is certainly yours alone. if there is a shameful mark in my biography, it is not your fault Lord and I do not accuse anyone else, but I assume my wrong actions, I confess my transgressions and thank you for your forgiveness that makes me clean and worthy. From the dust I came from and to dust I will return; I was nothing and I will return to nothing very soon. But your servant will live by faith alone, by faith in the cross of my redeemer who died that I might have eternal life. Thank you, God, thank you Jesus. Brother Pedro

Llegó Don Juan a las puertas de la morada celestial, y San Pedro le impidió la entrada. El seductor se sorprendió. Le dijo: –Pensé que me darías el paso. Fuiste casi tan humano como yo. Respondió el apóstol de las llaves: –No te cierran la puerta tus pecados: te la cierra tu falta de arrepentimiento. Contestó el seductor: –No puedo arrepentirme de haber amado. Pero me arrepiento de no poder arrepentirme. En eso las puertas del Cielo se abrieron, y una gran voz se oyó en el interior: –Que pase. Así supo San Pedro que el Señor perdona nuestros pecados de amor, aunque no nos arrepintamos de ellos, a condición de que sintamos arrepentimiento por no poder arrepentirnos.

Don't put your frustrations and expectations on people.

I god, Camu messaged to the Panthers. “That’s all we needed…” Viggo muttered. You’re no god, so don’t let it go to your head, Lasgol transmitted.

fight beside my friends, and if my friends are on this side, so am I. The rest is politics. Kings, dukes, counts, I don’t care whatsoever.” He bowed in turn.

Yes, they’re not out allies any longer. Now they’re enemies. Why? Good question. Because men and Wild Ones distrust one another. It’s hard to explain… they hate each other… they don’t trust each other… there’s been too much bloodshed in the past. Bad. Yes, it is. Trust. Yes, they ought to, but they don’t. Friends. I wish they were… I wish they felt like you. Not understand. Hate leads to distrust, which leads to more hate. Friends. Trust. Maybe one day, Camu, but it won’t be today. Sad. Yes, it is. Lasgol was left wondering at how perceptive and kind-hearted Camu could be. The fact that a creature without malice like him could see what Norghanians and Wild Ones were unable to see was thought-provoking. This time he was the one who was left feeling sad, thinking about the horrendous situation men and Wild Ones were in. For three more days they went on northwards without any more mishaps. Lasgol was aware that they were entering the territory of the Wild Ones of the Ice, and this made him nervous. They took

En Mazatlán, Sinaloa, en la calle Constitución número 88, existe una casa que es una de las referencias más entrañables para los lugareños. Y es que precisamente en ese domicilio, después de nueve años de matrimonio, don Delfino Infante García y doña María del Refugio Cruz Aranda, fueron los felices padres de quien, con el tiempo, habría de ser la gran figura del espectáculo en México. Como constancia de este hecho, existe una placa conmemorativa que señala: “Homenaje de sus paisanos mazatlecos al ídolo Pedro Infante Cruz, que nació el 18 de noviembre de 1917”.1 Quince días después del nacimiento, la familia Infante Cruz cambió su domicilio a la calle de Camichín número 508, ahora calle Carvajal, a tan sólo media cuadra del anterior, por lo que al registrar al recién nacido, en el acta se asentó este domicilio. Aquí cabe señalar que aunque nació en Mazatlán, él mismo pregonaba ser originario de Guamúchil.

Not at all. Because my intentions are honorable, you see. Completely. What about yours?” “Mine?” Joanna stammered stupidly. “Yes, yours,” Butch said. “We can either go on having what they call a totally meaningless relationship—which, I have to tell you, isn’t half bad. Or we can get married. If you’ll have me, that is.” “Wait a minute. You’re asking me to marry you?” Joanna returned. “On the telephone?” “Well, I admit it’s not the best possible arrangement. But it seems like I’d better do it now. Otherwise, your mother will do it for me.” “Butch. I don’t know what to say.” On the other end of the phone, Joanna heard a doorbell chime. “Say yes,” he urged. “But you promised. You told me you wouldn’t push.” “That was before your mother rang my doorbell. So, will you or won’t you?” The doorbell chimed again. “Well?” he pressed. Joanna took a deep breath. “Yes, dammit. All right. I will.” “Good answer. Good answer,” Butch said. “Now I’ve gotta run and answer the door. Otherwise Junior will beat me to that.” Butch Dixon hung up then. Twenty miles away, across the San Pedro Valley, Joanna Brady stared at her cell phone in stunned silence.

Consideremos que hasta el gran Lope había escrito: Dura nación, que desterró Adriano, y que por nuestro mal viniendo a España, hoy tanto oprime y daña el Imperio cristiano, pues rebelde en su bárbara porfía infama la española Monarquía. O el otro grande de la comedia, don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, quien haría decir más tarde a uno de sus famosos personajes: ¡Oh, qué maldita canalla! Muchos murieron quemados, y tanto gusto me daba verlos arder, que decía, atizándoles la llama: «Perros herejes, ministro soy de la Inquisición Santa».

Don't worry about failure and you don't even have to be right once. As long as you are creating something that you care about, that you are doing something worthwhile even when you look back after many years, repeating that process will always be a fulfilling, pleasant and joyful experience no matter the outcome of it because, for a committed human being who is involved in what he's doing, there is no such thing as failure.

Don’t you worry so much about what you can’t control. It only creates more insecurity and fear. Focus on what you can change, here and now.

early twentieth-century Latin American writers with a bent for fantasy or pornography, or both, as in the case of Pedro Pereda, an obscure novelist from Valparaiso, the author of a startling story in which a woman finds vaginas and anuses growing, or rather opening, all over her anatomy, to the understandable horror of her friends and family (the story is set in the ’20s, but I don’t suppose it would have been any less shocking in the ’70s or the ’90s), and who ends up confined to a brothel for miners in northern Chile, where she remains, shut up in a room without windows, until in the end she becomes a great amorphous, uncontrollable in-and-out, finishes off the old pimp who runs the brothel along with the rest of the whores and the terrified clients, goes out onto the patio, and sets off into the desert (walking or flying, Pereda doesn’t say), finally disappearing into thin air.

No me importa si eres un mozo, un héroe, tienes el Don o eres el Rey. Para mí siempre serás Lasgol y siempre te querré.

Quiero vivir entregando el futuro cada día. Sé que es el camino. Es el poder en blanco que le entrego a María confiando en que todo será para mi bien. Es la actitud de la inscriptio, cuando le pido a Jesús que me inscriba en su corazón herido tal como soy. Para sentir como Él siente. Para mirar la vida como Él la mira. Quiero vivir confiado sin angustiarme ante los días que aún no conozco. Vivir en presente, cada día, hasta mi muerte. Sin pensar que algo puede salir mal. ¿Cuál es mi incertidumbre, mi miedo al futuro, mi temor ante lo que desconozco? Ante el futuro quiero vivir con libertad plena. Eso sólo sucede en mí como una gracia de Dios. Como un don divino. Nunca es fruto de mi esfuerzo. Pero sé que vivir así implica madurez en la fe que todavía no tengo. Me gustaría vivir siempre así. Confiando en el hoy. Sin miedo al mañana. Abrazado a Dios que siempre va conmigo y me sostiene. Me acompaña en el paso de hoy y me acompañará en el de mañana. Hoy quiero poner en las manos de Dios ese futuro que no controlo. Como Pedro esa noche que temía lo que desconocía. Como Jesús en el huerto que puso su vida en las manos de su Padre.

You can’t control what you don’t understand, and that’s why you need to understand machine learning

Data and intuition are like horse and rider, and you don’t try to outrun a horse; you ride it.

psychologist Don Norman coined the term conceptual model to refer to the rough knowledge of a technology we need to have in order to use it effectively.

Es dado al hombre, algunas veces, atacar los derechos de los otros, apoderarse de sus bienes, amenazar la vida de los que defienden su nacionalidad, hacer que las más altas virtudes parezcan crímenes y a sus propios vicios darles el lustre de la verdadera virtud. Pero existe una cosa que no puede alcanzar ni la falsedad ni la perfidia y que es la tremenda sentencia de la historia. Ella nos juzgará

Entendiste que hay diferentes tipos de fe, mas la que debe evitarse a toda cosa es la fanática irracional. Comenzaste a darte cuenta de que la Iglesia católica en México no representaba esa fe de pobreza y cuestionamiento y querías. Ellos no imitaban la vida de Cristo, poco les importaban las condiciones de las indígenas, mezclaban la religión con la política y con engaños se adueñaban de la tierra de los campesinos para hacerlos trabajar en ellas. Tú visto a los más pobres ahorrar todo el año para pagar el diezmo. Te dolía, y con justa razón, lo que estaba sucediendo en todo el país. Si te hubieras quedado en San Pablo Guelatao en lugar de bajar a Oaxaca, habrías sido víctima de la ambición de aquellos sacerdotes.

Uno no se hace mexicano de la noche a la mañana; mucho menos porque coma mole o se vista de charro. Ser mexicano no es nacer en México, es latir en verde, blanco y rojo; es respetar la patria; es entender que somos un país mestizo; es llevar en la mente las montañas de Puebla, la risa de los niños de Oaxaca y las curiosas leyendas de la Ciudad de México. Por eso yo puedo ser mexicana fuera de mi país, pero Maximiliano no puede ser mexicano aún gobernándolo.

Los aplausos que deifican son puñales para acabar con la humanidad del aplaudido...