Thursday, May 18, 2006

There are some ridiculous things out there

And one of them is this:

Apple's new store in New York City

It certainly looks cool! And it's 24 hours! But why?

Brazil with no Orkut

I don't know what would happen if this actually ends up doing anything with the Brazilian presence on Orkut:

Google in Brazil May Face Criminal Probe Over Orkut

It is quite scary. However, it's not that they can really shut down Orkut, they can only shut down Google's Orkut office in Brazil. And this won't really affect anything, only that maybe Google might decide that it's not worth the investment any more.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

iPods and audiophiles

I found this very interesting article in Wired today:

Audiophiles Become IPodiophiles

Quite interesting what they are doing with the poor iPod...

Yes, I'll write something more interesting sometime soon.

Friday, May 05, 2006

Was bleibt? Es bleibt nur die Muttersprache

This is one of the most interesting classic articles that I've read in the last few years. It was actually an interview with the great Hannah Arendt (Wikipedia The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy by Günter Gaus. If you want to read it in German you can at Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg. For the faint of heart, you can find the tranlation to Engish in many books, such as the one I'm reading Essays in Understanding. Just for you to have an idea what you might be missing, the title in English is "What remains? The language remains". Not quite the same thing...

Anyway, it's a great discussion. It starts a little cold with many misses from the interviewer trying to pry about the interviewee's past and the Jewish persecution before WWII, when she left Germany. This part, although it is a little weak on details, gives an interesting perpective on what it was to be a thinker in the time on the assention of the Nazi party in Germany. And the shock of finding out much later about Auschwitz.

What triggered my interest in this article is the core captured in the title (something that I don't think is even the main subject of the whole talk, if there is one): what always will stay with you wherever you go is your mother tongue. Your brain was tought to think the way your mother tongue works, so you will never quite express yourself very well in any other language.

This is just too true. Not that my expressivity right now in Portuguese is very good. It's interesting how quickly you lose the fluency of a language if you don't speak it more than about once a week, but I still end up resorting to Portuguese expressions when I want to say a more complex idea.

This lead me to a more interesting line of thought (I had reading thought-provoking things): the concept of multiple overlapping sub-ontologies of the world. There is no unique way to represent things, only a unique local way. By getting away from the restriction of global logic rules, you will potentially be a little closer to what reality really is.

Not a new concept, I know... I am fully aware that the implementation of my overlapping sub-ontology world would be both very hard to scale to a reasonable size to see anything interesting and non-elegant. People are looking for things they can relate to. But if you are only one person, you are seeing the world from your sub-ontology. A lot of things can be represented, but an even larger amount just can't. And this doesn't make them less or more important.

Anyway, that's pretty much as far as I went with my thoughts. Actually I did go a little farther in writing down a schema for implementing this, but while I don't have real, exept when I riding the bus, to work on it, I'll stop this explanation here.

It's time for me to go to bed now. My eyes are closing (or have been closing for the last 45 minutes).

When posting does not happen

It's something like the 4th time that I'm trying to post since last time I actually finished it. It's either that I forget about it and close the browser, or the browser decides to crash and I can't finish it. Quite astounding!

Anyway, I'm back after a long time to say that I'm alive. Time is flying, I'm close to getting older, and I wished I could say that a lot has changed. Unfortunately life has been quite the same, only more hectic in the last weeks.

Last weekend I had a choir concert and before that I was fighting with some people in choir to get things done. I didn't have much time to devote to getting all the things for the concert done, and the people that were helping me didn't really make matters any easier. Let's say that until the last day I didn't know what was going to happen with the program for the concert.

But in the end I did find some people that were willing to help, including Amy, and everything worked out fine. It was a nice concert, sad that I was in the beginning on my cold, that still hasn't gone (most probably a side effect of all the stress to get the things for the concert done).

This cold has been quite interesting if you ask me. It started with a terrible stiff neck. This started on Saturday afternoon and is still around, but much better. On Tuesday the dry and sore throat started. On Wednesday it was the runny nose and last night the cough.

Anyway, that's not part of the interesting things I want to talk about. I'll finish this post here so that I would have at least posted something and leave the more complex posts for later. There is a good change I won't finish them tonight.