loose ends

the less you know, the more you think you know.

Why can’t I “vote” on sites in Google? I want all pages from about.com to be rated down into oblivion, and I want pages from ehow.com and wikipedia to float above the fold whenever possible. Only for my own search queries, of course.

Sergey? Larry? Pretty please?

Indifference Curve

An indifference curve is a graph showing combinations of goods for which a consumer is indifferent, that is, it has no preference for one combination versus another, as they render the same level of satisfaction (or the same amount of utility) for the consumer. Curves are a device to represent preferences and are used in choice theory.

The Economist, as eloquent as ever.

At least Lula recently admitted the need to reform further the pension system for private-sector workers. Although Brazil is still a country of young people, this has a deficit equal to 2% of GDP. But he quickly added that workers should not have to pay more. By accusing Mr Alckmin of scheming to starve the state, he suggests he is happy to feed the glutton. Both candidates, who may in fact favour a healthy diet, pandered to voters who do not. That makes it harder to cure Brazil’s Stockholm syndrome, a love for a state that holds the economy hostage.

I wonder how much money is gained (energy) vs. lost (missed flights, etc.) due to DST every time.

(Yes, this post is about a day late.)

First the suspension of Habeas Corpus, and now this?

In a stealth maneuver, President Bush has signed into law a provision which, according to Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), will actually encourage the President to declare federal martial law. It does so by revising the Insurrection Act, a set of laws that limits the President’s ability to deploy troops within the United States.

Public Law 109-364, or the “John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007″ (H.R.5122) (2), which was signed by the commander in chief on October 17th, 2006, in a private Oval Office ceremony, allows the President to declare a “public emergency” and station troops anywhere in America and take control of state-based National Guard units without the consent of the governor or local authorities, in order to “suppress public disorder.”

Am I the only one to find this very disconcerning? I mean, the PATRIOT act went through without anyone paying attention to it, and look at how it’s crushing civil liberties in the US right now (read: wiretapping, torture, arbitrary arrests). And think about it: how could the next US government, be it red or blue, possibly give up these provisions? With the state of perpetual fear and with the War On Terror® in full swing, any president who’d consider changing these laws would be labeled a god-hating unpatriotic muslim.

Watched Scoop last week and Deconstructing Harry just now. One thing is clear: Woody Allen is a conditional genious. His comedy is only brilliant when he portrays himself. Scoop fails for several reasons, but Harry is hilarious, and only really works, because of Allen’s character.

Paulinha e muitos outros estão tentando desvendar o mistério por trás do mysteriousAD. Que se trata de um projeto viral muito bem executado, para promover o Nokia Trends, já não é segredo nenhum. Basta comparar a direção de arte do site do Nokia Trends (e) com aquela do mysteriousAD (d):

Conferindo source-code, fazendo WHOIS e procurando o geo-location dos endereços: nokiatrends.com.br, mysteriousad.com e o IP 208.112.10.219 não entregam nada. Os mysteriousad.com foi devidamente registrado fora do Brasil. A única dica “sem-querer” deixada em mysteriousad.com foi chamar uma foto de um adesivo em Sydney, Australia de sidney.jpg ;)

Já as primeiras quatro partes do vídeo contém muitas dicas de que se trata de uma promoção da Nokia Trends mesmo. Confira:

1. Em dois momentos do vídeo aparece a pixação ‘NO SIN TEKARD’, que evidentemente é um anagrama de NOKIA TRENDS:

2. Diversas referências à palavras como MUSIC, MULTIMEDIA e FESTIVAL aparecem pixadas em muros e paredes. Sem falar, lógico, dos ícones utilizados pelo próprio festival em nokiatrends.com.br:

Os únicos dois mistérios que permanecem são os cartazes (LUCKE jeans & STRANGE REACTIONS) e o jogo de forca que surge numa parede:

Alguma dica do que se trata?

PS. A Paulinha sugeriu este link no officebravus.com, mas recebo uma mensagem de Bandwidth Limit Exceeded e não consigo abrir. :(

My inspiration for new posts, and interest in writing them is proportional to my physical distance to my computer. Which means that I only have good ideas about writing when I’m far from the PowerBook, and vice-versa.

Have you noticed how only years and days are truly natural means of measuring time? Months and weeks are completely arbitrary, convenient subdivisions.

Some trivia about weeks:

• Hindu, Babylonians, Hebrews/Christians and Chinese all developed the seven day week independently
• One of the original uses of week(days) was to coordinate markets in different villages centuries ago. A means of ensuring you took your goods to the right village on the right day. Might or might not be related to the portuguese “-feira” suffix.
• Some countries, like Iran, have only a day-long weekend (Friday).
• Most weekdays in english received their names from Norse mythology: (comparing english to swedish)
  • Monday: Måndag: Day of the moon.
  • Tuesday: Tisdag: Day of Tyr, the god of war.
  • Wednesday: Onsdag: Day of Oden, king of gods.
  • Thursday: Torsdag: Day of Thor, god of thunder.
  • Friday: Fredag: Day of Frigg or Freyja, goddess of fertility

PS: all date formats other than big -> small, such as YYMMDD-HHMM confuse the hell out of me.

See, I care greatly about the environment and global warming. I am opposed to driving, don’t use a dish washer* and take consideration about how and where I travel, prefering train over airplane travel. Which is why I bothered watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Already having watched his TED Talk, I had mostly high hopes about the film. And was thoroughly let down. It is predictable, dull and makes use of blatant appeals to the viewers compassion by showing scenes of Al & family going through hard times, etc. (All of which is irrelevant to the film’s main argument.)

The proof is convincing. We evidently have a global crisis happening, and the situation shows no signs of bettering unless serious measures are taken.

I’m not sure about the box office numbers, but the PR around the film, Gore, and global warming has been substantial. Could a more interesting movie have reached a wider audience? The way I see it, the film is only efficient if it manages to change the posture of many people. However, the people who actually watch the movie are likely to be those who already have the right attitute toward environmental responsability. Hence, very existance of the film is partly self-defeating.

But who knows: it might help bring upon a sea change in mentality.

* dish washers use a whole lot of electricity, as opposed to washing dishes by hand.

Gorgeous, huge map of northern europe from 1539. Amazing details at full resolution, not to mention the germano-latin names of places, such as Scandia, Svecia, Dania, Hollandi, Saxonia inferior.

(1) the acquisition of, and failure to discard, a large number of possessions that appear to be of useless or of limited value;

They say hoarding is a symptom of OCD. Saving everything, keeping the irrelevant, builting an archive of everything that could possibly be useful.

Without going in to autodiagnosis, I used to be a very compulsive hoarder of links, images, quotes and articles. Saving everything for the sake of saving it.

But what’s the purpose of hoarding in the age of the panoptical Google and ubiqutous connectivity? Your ability to see a link, a connection, is mostly constant. Recalling an item is still done serendipitously rather than being something elaborated.

Which means finding something on demand can be done online through a few keywords instead of being tracked down in your elaborate hierachical folders and files.

So why keep things?

Beautiful orange yellow brown red leaves covering asphalt. Autumn tricked us, but it’s still here.

(T.S. Eliot comes to mind, for some reason:)

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

Disneyland with the death penalty.

Should be fun. :)

“Programming” by trial and error.

<ol> galore.

When you close your eyes before you go to sleep, all the images that form come from the residual electric signals in your brain, in your eye. So I wanted to do that, but do it with something simple, organic, something visual.

You choose which world to belong to, at times.
Some times it’s videographer.
Or motion grapher.
Graphic designer.
Photographer.
Web developer.
Branded content person.
etc.

You dive in to it. Read the right magazines, blogs, books. Become part of it’s culture and tech and advancements for the time being. Produce some cool stuff, perhaps. Show it off.

You decide it’s what you want to do with your life.

You might even be good at it.

Then you move on to something else. Keep yourself busy. Entertained. Informed. Active.

Rinse and repeat.

I get a fair amount of people asking me what I’ve been listening to lately, but I never know what to answer. I’m awful at recalling things on cue, and naming albums is no exceptions.

So here’s a list of what’s currently spinning in iTunes:

• Jarvis [Cocker] &endash; Jarvis
• Belle and Sebastian – The Life Pursuit
• Charlotte Gainsbourg – 5 55
• The Fratellis – Costello Music
• The Knife – The Knife
• Television – Marquee Moon
• Snow Patrol – Eyes Open
• Boy Kill Boy – Civilian
• The Automatic – Not Accepted Anywhere
• Albert Hammond Jr. – Yours To Keep
• Kasabian – Empire
• Madlib – Shades of Blue
• The Sounds – Dying to Say this to You
• The Killers – Sam’s Town

hearing your smoking is bothering others is not something to enjoy!

We need a unit to measure attention. Just like dollars and hours govern our other spendings. Perhaps a function of time X proportion of attention?

Serendipitously, /. has a an askslashdot topic of If not America, Then Where?. My first thought was of course The Netherlands, and evidently it’s the first/highest rated thread of the discussion. Great insights and anectodes about other foreigners living here.

$100 Laptop
OLPC
CM1
2B1
XO