ramesh was here

Wikipedia:

Bullet time (often hyphenated as bullet-time) is a concept introduced in recent films and computer games whereby the passage of time is displayed as extremely slow or frozen moments in order to allow a viewer to observe imperceptibly fast events (such as flying bullets). It is often used to create a dramatic effect, as in the film The Matrix.

The concept also implies that only a 'virtual camera,' often illustrated within the confines of a computer-generated environment such as a game or virtual reality, would be capable of 'filming' bullet-time types of moments. Technical and historical variations of this effect have been referred to as time slicing, view morphing, flo mo, temps mort and virtual cinematography.

Labels: info, movies

Wikipedia:

Mise en scène [mizɑ̃sɛn] has been called film criticism's "grand undefined term," but that is not because of a lack of definitions. Rather, it's because the term has so many different meanings that there is little consensus about its definition.

The term stems from the theater where, in French, mise en scène means literally "putting into the scene" or "setting in scene." When applied to the cinema, then, mise en scène refers to everything that appears before the camera and its arrangement – sets, props, actors, costumes, and lighting. Mise en scène also includes the positioning and movement of actors on the set, which is called blocking.

This narrow definition of mise en scène is not shared by all critics. For some, it refers to all elements of visual style — that is, both elements on the set and aspects of the camera. For others, such as Andrew Sarris, it takes on mystical meanings related to the emotional tone of a film.

It has also come to represent a style of conveying the information of a scene primarily through a single shot – often accompanied by camera movement. It is to be contrasted with montage-style filmmaking – multiple angles pieced together through editing.
The distinctive mise en scene of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Enlarge
The distinctive mise en scene of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

In German filmmaking in the 1910s and 1920s one can observe tone, meaning, and narrative information conveyed through mise en scène. Perhaps the most famous example of this is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) where a character's internal state of mind is represented through set design and blocking.

The similar-sounding, but unrelated term, "metteurs en scène" (literally, "setters of the scene" or "directors") was used by the auteur theory to disparagingly label directors who did not put their personal vision into their films.

Mise-en-scene is regularly used in modern film to portray the mindset of character(s) in the film.

Only rarely is mise en scène critique used in other art forms, but it has been used effectively to analyze photography, literature and comics.

Labels: movies

Try this if u are bored!

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

Now, while doing this, draw the number "6"" in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction and there's nothing you can do about it.

Labels: info

"God is playing a comic to an audience that's afraid to laugh."
— Voltaire

Labels: food for thought

"Diplomacy is the ability to tell a person to go to hell in such a way that he looks forward to the trip." - Overheard

Labels: food for thought

I hurt myself today
To see if I still feel
I focus on the pain
The only thing that's real
The needle tears a hole
The old familiar sting
Try to kill it all away
But I remember everything

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

I wear this crown of thorns
Upon my liar's chair
Full of broken thoughts
I cannot repair
Beneath the stains of time
The feelings disappear
You are someone else
I am still right here

[Chorus:]
What have I become
My sweetest friend
Everyone I know goes away
In the end
And you could have it all
My empire of dirt
I will let you down
I will make you hurt

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

- Johnny Cash

Labels: classics, food for thought

#!/ich/bin/OOPS!

Java sucks, Objects suck,
i'm sooo sorry, my dear friend
you are out of luck!

# Ramesh Pallikara
# A Haiku on OOPS (Object Oriented Programming Systems)
# 17 Sept, 2006

Labels: language + art, programming + logistics

#!/ich/bin/Bored!

If u are sooo bored,
come over, let us both join
and weave some sweet code

# Ramesh Pallikara
# A Boring Haiku
# 17 Sept, 2006

Labels: language + art, programming + logistics

Perl, the first postmodern computer language:

The other day, I was talking to a glue person whose name is Sharon Hopkins. Among other things, she's known as the Perl Poet, because she's written more poetry in Perl than anyone else. She also writes a kind of non-Perl poetry that was dubbed by another poet as ``sharonesque''. Here's a cute example:

I'd travel to the ends of time
For you, my one, my only love.
I'd force the sun to leave its track
(If you were lost) to fetch you back.
I'd suck the juices from a lime,
I'd re-write Moby Dick in rhyme,
I'd happily commit a crime!
For you, my dearest darling dove.
I'd do it all, and more beside --

Now *would* you take the trash outside?

Sharon Hopkins
Winter, 1989-90

I had to write a response to that poem. Actually, two responses. I won't inflict the longer one on you, but here's the shorter one:

I've taken the trash out innumerable times,
I've taken the trash out in inclement climes,
I've taken the trash out 'cuz that's what I do,
But I *won't* take the trash out when you tell me to.

Well, anyway, most of Sharon's poetry is relational, as befits a postmodern glue person.

Labels: perl, philosophy, programming + logistics

"Cargo Cult Science" - by Richard Feynman:

All experiments in psychology are not of this type, however. For example, there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.

The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.

He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.

Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.

I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science.

Labels: info, science + technology

"Cargo Cult Science" - by Richard Feynman:

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beatiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude woman?"

I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, "I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it," he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating.

That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. I also looked into extrasensory perception, and PSI phenomena, and the latest craze there was Uri Geller, a man who is supposed to be able to bend keys by rubbing them with his finger. So I went to his hotel room, on his invitation, to see a demonstration of both mindreading and bending keys. He didn't do any mindreading that succeeded; nobody can read my mind, I guess. And my boy held a key and Geller rubbed it, and nothing happened. Then he told us it works better under water, and so you can picture all of us standing in the bathroom with the water turned on and the key under it, and him rubbing the key with his finger. Nothing happened. So I was unable to investigate that phenomenon.

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you'll see the reading scores keep going down--or hardly going up--in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There's a witch doctor remedy that doesn't work. It ought to be looked into; how do they know that their method should work? Another example is how to treat criminals. We obviously have made no progress--lots of theory, but no progress--in decreasing the amount of crime by the method that we use to handle criminals.

Yet these things are said to be scientific. We study them. And I think ordinary people with commonsense ideas are intimidated by this pseudoscience. A teacher who has some good idea of how to teach her children to read is forced by the school system to do it some other way--or is even fooled by the school system into thinking that her method is not necessarily a good one. Or a parent of bad boys, after disciplining them in one way or another, feels guilty for the rest of her life because she didn't do "the right thing," according to the experts.

So we really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.

I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

Now it behooves me, of course, to tell you what they're missing. But it would be just about as difficult to explain to the South Sea islanders how they have to arrange things so that they get some wealth in their system. It is not something simple like telling them how to improve the shapes of the earphones. But there is one feature I notice that is generally missing in cargo cult science. That is the idea that we all hope you have learned in studying science in school--we never say explicitly what this is, but just hope that you catch on by all the examples of scientific investigation. It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

The easiest way to explain this idea is to contrast it, for example, with advertising. Last night I heard that Wesson oil doesn't soak through food. Well, that's true. It's not dishonest; but the thing I'm talking about is not just a matter of not being dishonest; it's a matter of scientific integrity, which is another level. The fact that should be added to that advertising statement is that no oils soak through food, if operated at a certain temperature. If operated at another temperature, they all will--including Wesson oil. So it's the implication which has been conveyed, not the fact, which is true, and the difference is what we have to deal with.

We've learned from experience that the truth will come out. Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. Nature's phenomena will agree or they'll disagree with your theory. And, although you may gain some temporary fame and excitement, you will not gain a good reputation as a scientist if you haven't tried to be very careful in this kind of work. And it's this type of integrity, this kind of care not to fool yourself, that is missing to a large extent in much of the research in cargo cult science.

A great deal of their difficulty is, of course, the difficulty of the subject and the inapplicability of the scientific method to the subject. Nevertheless, it should be remarked that this is not the only difficulty. That's why the planes don't land--but they don't land.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.

Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this history--because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves--of having utter scientific integrity--is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself--and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Labels: food for thought, philosophy, science + technology

Just Another Perl Haiku

A haiku is a
short poem that's 17
syllables in length.

Traditionally,
its topic is an image
taken from nature

(though the Japanese
understanding of "nature"
is subtle and broad).

True haiku don't try
to make a point; they merely
convey an image.

Of course, the image
itself may make a point, but
that's not the same thing!

The form developed
in the 1600's from
the longer tanka.

In fact, a haiku
is the hokku (the "starting
verse") of a tanka.

The first adept of
the haiku format was the
Zen poet Basho.

His best known poem
captures the wonder of an
everyday event.

It's: furike ya
kawazu tabikomu
mizu no oto.

(Translation)

An old pond.
A frog jumps in.
Plop!

(Pure Evocation)

Labels: language + art

Edsger Dijkstra:

Sometimes we discover unpleasant truths. Whenever we do so, we are in difficulties: suppressing them is scientifically dishonest, so we must tell them, but telling them, however, will fire back on us. If the truths are sufficiently impalatable, our audience is psychically incapable of accepting them and we will be written off as totally unrealistic, hopelessly idealistic, dangerously revolutionary, foolishly gullible or what have you. (Besides that, telling such truths is a sure way of making oneself unpopular in many circles, and, as such, it is an act that, in general, is not without personal risks. Vide Galileo Galilei.....)

Computing Science seems to suffer severely from this conflict. On the whole, it remains silent and tries to escape this conflict by shifting its attention. (For instance: with respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist. Most Computer Science Departments have opted for the latter easy way out.) But, Brethern, I ask you: is this honest? Is not our prolonged silence fretting away Computing Science's intellectual integrity? Are we decent by remaining silent? If not, how do we speak up?

To give you some idea of the scope of the problem I have listed a number of such truths. (Nearly all computing scientists I know well will agree without hesitation to nearly all of them. Yet we allow the world to behave as if we did not know them....)

* Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure mathematicians.
* The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific computations.
* The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
* FORTRAN --"the infantile disorder"--, by now nearly 20 years old, is hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use.
* PL/I --"the fatal disease"-- belongs more to the problem set than to the solution set.
* It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.
* The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offence.
* APL is a mistake, carried through to perfection. It is the language of the future for the programming techniques of the past: it creates a new generation of coding bums.
* The problems of business administration in general and data base management in particular are much too difficult for people that think in IBMerese, compounded with sloppy English.
* About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten blunt axes instead.
* Besides a mathematical inclination, an exceptionally good mastery of one's native tongue is the most vital asset of a competent programmer.
* Many companies that have made themselves dependent on IBM-equipment (and in doing so have sold their soul to the devil) will collapse under the sheer weight of the unmastered complexity of their data processing systems.
* Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. [Handwritten annotation]
* We can found no scientific discipline, nor a hearty profession on the technical mistakes of the Department of Defense and, mainly, one computer manufacturer.
* The use of anthropomorphic terminology when dealing with computing systems is a symptom of professional immaturity.
* By claiming that they can contribute to software engineering, the soft scientists make themselves even more ridiculous. (Not less dangerous, alas!) In spite of its name, software engineering requires (cruelly) hard science for its support.
* In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.
* Projects promoting programming in "natural language" are intrinsically doomed to fail.

Isn't this list enough to make us uncomfortable? What are we going to do? Return to the order of the day, presumably.......

18th June 1975 prof.dr.Edsger W.Dijkstra
Plataanstraat 5 Burroughs Research Fellow
NUENEN - 4565
The Netherlands

PS. If the conjecture "You would rather that I had not disturbed you by sending you this." is correct, you may add it to the list of uncomfortable truths.

Labels: programming + logistics

The Encyclopedia of Computer Languages

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. In the first stage of life the mind is frivolous and easily distracted, it misses progress by failing in consecutiveness and persistence. This is the condition of children and barbarians, in which instinct has learned nothing from experience.
- George Santayana, The Life of Reason, Volume 1, 1905

Labels: food for thought, linguistics, programming + logistics

Rene Guenon:

On the basis of this universality, which is often known as religio perennis, it was also Guénon's function to remind us that the great religions of the world are not only the means of man's salvation, but that they offer him beyond that, even in this life, two esoteric possibilities which correspond to what were known in Graeco-Roman Antiquity as mysteria pava and mysteria magna, the 'Greater Mysteries' and the 'Lesser Mysteries'. The first of these is the way of return to the primordial perfection which was lost in the fall. The second, which presupposes the first, is the way to gnosis, the fulfillment of the precept, 'know thyself'. This one ultimate end is termed in Christianity deificatio, in Hinduism, yoga, union, and moksha, deliverance, in Buddhism, nirvana, that is, extinction of all that is illusory. And in Islamic mysticism, that is Sufism, tahaqquq, which means realization and which was glossed by a Sufi sheikh as self-realization in God. The Mysteries and especially the Greater Mysteries are explicitly or implicitly the main theme of Guénon's writing, even in The Crisis of the Modern World and The Reign of Quantity. The troubles in question are shown to have sprung ultimately from loss of the mysterial dimension, that is, the dimension of the mysteries of esoterism. He traces all the troubles in the modern world to the forgetting of the higher aspects of religion. He was conscious of being a pioneer, and I will end simply by quoting something he wrote of himself, "All that we shall do or say will amount to giving those who come afterwards facilities which we ourselves were not given. Here as everywhere else it is the beginning of the work that is hardest.

Labels: philosophy, religion

How to Know When Numbers Deceive You:

In the tradition of Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, German scientist Gerd Gigerenzer offers his own take on numerical illiteracy. "In Western countries, most children learn to read and write, but even in adulthood, many people do not know how to think with numbers," he writes. "I focus on the most important form of innumeracy in everyday life, statistical innumeracy--that is, the inability to reason about uncertainties and risk." The author wisely uses concrete examples from the real world to make his points, and he shows the devastating impact of this problem. In one example, he describes a surgeon who advised many of his patients to accept prophylactic mastectomies in order to dodge breast cancer. In a two-year period, this doctor convinced 90 "high-risk" women without cancer to sacrifice their breasts "in a heroic exchange for the certainty of saving their lives and protecting their loved ones from suffering and loss." But Gigerenzer shows that the vast majority of these women (84 of them, to be exact) would not have developed breast cancer at all. If the doctor or his patients had a better understanding of probabilities, they might have chosen a different course. Fans of Innumeracy will enjoy Calculated Risks, as will anyone who appreciates a good puzzle over numbers. --John Miller

If a woman aged 40 to 50 has breast cancer, nine times out of 10 it will show up on a mammogram. On the other hand, nine out of 10 suspicious mammograms turn out not to be cancer. Confused? So are many people who seek certainty through numbers, says Gigerenzer, a statistician and behavioral scientist. His book is a successful attempt to help innumerates (those who don't understand statistics), offering case studies of people who desperately need to understand statistics, including those working in AIDS counseling, DNA fingerprinting and domestic violence cases. Gigerenzer deftly intersperses math lessons explaining concepts like frequency and risk in layperson's terms with real-life stories involving doctors and detectives. One of his main themes is that even well-meaning, statistically astute professionals may be unable to communicate concepts such as statistical risk to innumerates. (He tells the true story of a psychiatrist who prescribes Prozac to a patient and warns him about potential side effects, saying, You have a 30 to 50 percent chance of developing a sexual problem. The patient worries that in anywhere from 30% to 50% of all his sexual encounters, he is going to have performance problems. But what the doctor really meant is that for every 10 people who take Prozac, three to five may experience sexual side effects, and many have no sexual side effects at all.) All innumerates buyers, sellers, students, professors, doctors, patients, lawyers and their clients, politicians, voters, writers and readers have something to learn from Gigerenzer's quirky yet understandable book. Cahners Business Information

Labels: food for thought

Language & Words Trivia:

The combination 'ough' can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: 'A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.'

The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

The English word with the most consonants in a row is latchstring.

The word "robot" was created by Karel Capek. It came from Czech/Slovak "robotovat," which means to work very hard.

The only word that consists of two letters, each used three times is the word "deeded."

The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate.

A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

The word "girl" appears only once in the Bible.

Switching letters is called spoonerism. For example, saying jag of Flapan, instead of flag of Japan.

A H I M O T U V W X Y are the symmetric capital letters in the Roman alphabet. i l o t u v w x are the symmetric lower case letters in the Roman alphabet.

All Hebrew orignating names that end with the letters "el" have something to do with God.

The term, honeymoon, is derived from the Babylonians who declared mead, a honey-flavored wine, the official wedding drink, stipulating that the bride's parents be required to keep the groom supplied with the drink for the month following the wedding; that month became known as the honeymonth, hence our honeymoon.

"Rhythm" and "syzygy" are the longest English words without vowels.

The two longest one-syllable words in the English language are "screeched" and "strengths."

'Strengths' is the longest word in the English language with just one vowel.

The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. It is a a pneumoconiosis caused by the inhalation of very fine silicate or quartz dust. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural.

The second longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary is "floccinaucinihilipilification," which means "the act of estimating as worthless."

The third longest word in the English language is "antidisestablishmenterianism".

The longest muscle name is the "levator labiisuperioris alaeque nasi" and Elvis popularized it with his lip motions.

'Stewardesses' and 'reverberated' are the two longest words (12 letters each) that can be typed using on the left hand.

The longest word that can be typed using on the right hand is 'lollipop'.

'Skepticisms' is the longest word that can be typed using alternate hands.

One of the longest English words that can be typed using the top row of a typewriter (allowing multiple uses of letters) is 'typewriter.'

No words in the English language rhyme with orange, silver or purple.

The language Malayalam, spoken in parts of India, is the only language whose name is a palindrome.

No word in the English language rhymes with month.

"Evian" spelled backwards is naive.

Scottish is the language called Gaelic, whereas Irish is actually called Gaeilge.

"Freelance" comes from a knight whose lance was free for hire, i.e. not pledged to one master.

The term "devil's advocate"comes from the Roman Catholic church. When deciding if someone should become a saint, a devil's advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.

When two words are combined to form a single word (e.g., motor + hotel = motel, breakfast + lunch = brunch) the new word is called a "portmanteau."

Avocado is derived from the Spanish word 'aguacate' which is derived from 'ahuacatl' meaning testicle.

AM and PM stand for "Ante-Meridian" and "Post-Meridian," respectively, and A.D. actually stands for "Anno Domini" rather than "After Death."

The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.

Lucifer is latin for "Light Bringer". It is a translation of the Hebrew name for Satan, Halael. Satan Means "adversary", devil means "liar".

The "D" in D-day means "Day". The French term for "D-Day" is "J-jour".

The only Dutch word to contain eight consecutive consonants is 'angstschreeuw'.

There is a word in the English language with only one vowel, which occurs six times: Indivisibility.

The letters H I O X in the latin alphabet is the only ones that look the same if you turn them upside down or see them from behind.

There are only 12 letters in the Hawaiian alphabet.

The youngest letters in the English language are "j," "v" and "w."

The only capital letter in the Roman alphabet with exactly one end point is P.

The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.

The letter W is the only letter in the alphabet that doesn't have 1 syllable... it has three.

"Bookkeeper" and "bookkeeping" are the only words in the English language with three consecutive double letters.

There is a seven letter word in the English language that contains ten words without rearranging any of its letters, "therein": the, there, he, in, rein, her, here, here, ere therein, herein.

"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".

"Underground" is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters "und."

The first letters of the names of the Great Lakes spell HOMES.

There are only three words in the English language with the letter combination "uu." Muumuu, vacuum and continuum.

The first letters of the months July through November, in order, spell the name JASON.

The oldest word in the English language is "town"

There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous.

"Speak of the Devil" is short for "Speak of the Devil and he shall come". It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That's why when your talking about someone and they show up people say "Speak of the Devil"

The word "samba" means "to rub navels together."

The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language.

The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows."

The ampersand (&) is actually a stylised version of the Latin word "et," meaning and."

The word 'byte' is a contraction of 'by eight.'

The word 'pixel' is a contraction of either 'picture cell' or 'picture element.'

No modern language has a true concept of "I am." It is always used linked with are in reference of another verb.

In Chinese, the words for crisis and opportunity are the same.

German has a word for the peace offerings brought to your mate when you've committed some conceived slight. This is "drachenfutter" or dragon's food.

The Chinese ideogram for "trouble" symbolizes "two women living under one roof".

The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."

The native tribe of Tierradel Fuego has a language so guttural it cannot have an alphabet.

Sheriff came from Shire Reeve. During early years of monarchial rule in England, each shire had a reeve who was the law for that shire. When the term was brought to the United States it was shortned to Sheriff.

The word "modem" is a contraction of the words "modulate, demodulate." (MOdulateDEModulate)

The shortest French word with all five vowels is "oiseau" meaning bird.

Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."

The infinity sign is called a lemniscate.

The only word in the English language with all five vowels in reverse order is "subcontinental."

Labels: linguistics

Another friendly spam: i dont believe the claims, but interesting proof that the human mind works with patterns rather than sequences.

if yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Labels: food for thought, friendly spam, info, philosophy

from Orkut

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next

Labels: food for thought

Taste for Makers - Paul Graham: "
I think it's because humor is related to strength. To have a sense of humor is to be strong: to keep one's sense of humor is to shrug off misfortunes, and to lose one's sense of humor is to be wounded by them. And so the mark-- or at least the prerogative-- of strength is not to take oneself too seriously. The confident will often, like swallows, seem to be making fun of the whole process slightly, as Hitchcock does in his films or Bruegel in his paintings-- or Shakespeare, for that matter."

Labels: design, food for thought

Paul Graham:

How do you avoid copying the wrong things? Copy only what you genuinely like. That would have saved me in all three cases. I didn't enjoy the short stories we had to read in English classes; I didn't learn anything from philosophy papers; I didn't use expert systems myself. I believed these things were good because they were admired.

It can be hard to separate the things you like from the things you're impressed with. One trick is to ignore presentation. Whenever I see a painting impressively hung in a museum, I ask myself: how much would I pay for this if I found it at a garage sale, dirty and frameless, and with no idea who painted it? If you walk around a museum trying this experiment, you'll find you get some truly startling results. Don't ignore this data point just because it's an outlier.

Another way to figure out what you like is to look at what you enjoy as guilty pleasures. Many things people like, especially if they're young and ambitious, they like largely for the feeling of virtue in liking them. 99% of people reading Ulysses are thinking "I'm reading Ulysses" as they do it. A guilty pleasure is at least a pure one. What do you read when you don't feel up to being virtuous? What kind of book do you read and feel sad that there's only half of it left, instead of being impressed that you're half way through? That's what you really like.

Even when you find genuinely good things to copy, there's another pitfall to be avoided. Be careful to copy what makes them good, rather than their flaws. It's easy to be drawn into imitating flaws, because they're easier to see, and of course easier to copy too. For example, most painters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries used brownish colors. They were imitating the great painters of the Renaissance, whose paintings by that time were brown with dirt. Those paintings have since been cleaned, revealing brilliant colors; their imitators are of course still brown.

It was painting, incidentally, that cured me of copying the wrong things. Halfway through grad school I decided I wanted to try being a painter, and the art world was so manifestly corrupt that it snapped the leash of credulity. These people made philosophy professors seem as scrupulous as mathematicians. It was so clearly a choice of doing good work xor being an insider that I was forced to see the distinction. It's there to some degree in almost every field, but I had till then managed to avoid facing it.

That was one of the most valuable things I learned from painting: you have to figure out for yourself what's good. You can't trust authorities. They'll lie to you on this one.

Labels: design, food for thought

Konrad Kujau:

Konrad Kujau (June 27, 1938, Löbau, Saxony - September 12, 2000, Stuttgart, Germany) was most noted for being a well-known forger, who faked artwork, and later made a name for himself when he forged 62 volumes of Adolf Hitler's supposed diary. He later sold this to the German magazine Stern in 1983. He was convicted of fraud in 1985, and served three years in prison.

In 2006, in a coincidental twist, his grand niece, Petra Kujau, was charged with selling 'fake forgeries', cheap Asian-made copies of famous paintings with forged signatures of Konrad Kujau.

Labels: food for thought

Emeritus:

Emeritus (IPA pronunciation: [əˈmɛrɪtəs] or [ɪˈmɛrɪtəs]) is an adjective that is used in the title of a retired professor, bishop or other professional. Emerita (IPA pronunciation: [ɪˈmɛrɪtə]) was used for women, but is rarely used today. The term is used when a person of importance in a given profession retires, so that his or her former rank can still be used in his or her title. This is particularly useful when establishing the authority a person might have to comment, lecture or write on a particular subject.

It is said that media baron Rupert Murdoch once told one of his editors exactly how they should understand their new emeritus status, in the wake of the Hitler dijavascript:void(0);
Publish Post aries fiasco: "'E' means you're out and 'meritus' means you bloody deserve it!

Labels: info

Three Mile Island accident:

The accident at the plant occurred a few days after the release of the movie The China Syndrome, which featured Jane Fonda as a newsanchor at a California TV station. In the film, a nuclear accident almost happens while Fonda's character and her cameraman are at a plant doing a series on nuclear power. She goes on to raise awareness of how unsafe the plant was. Coincidentally, there is a scene in which Fonda's character speaks with a nuclear safety expert who says that a meltdown could force an area 'the size of Pennsylvania' to be evacuated. Also, the fictional near-accident in the movie stems from plant operators misunderstanding the amount of water within the core.

Soon after the release of the film, Fonda began lobbying against nuclear power — the only actor in the film to do so. In an attempt to counter her efforts, the nuclear physicist Edward Teller, 'father of the hydrogen bomb' and long-time government science advisor, himself lobbied in favor of nuclear power, and eventually the 71-year-old scientist suffered a heart attack, which he later blamed on Fonda: 'You might say that I was the only one whose health was affected by that reactor near Harrisburg. No, that would be wrong. It was not the reactor. It was Jane Fonda. Reactors are not dangerous.' Rhetoric based on the movie is still used to debate for and against nuclear power.

Labels: info

Potrzebie :

In issue 33, Mad published a partial table of the 'Potrzebie System of Weights and Measures', developed by 19-year-old Donald E. Knuth, later a famed computer scientist. According to Knuth, the basis of this new revolutionary system is the potrzebie, which equals the thickness of Mad issue 26, or 2.263348517438173216473 mm. Volume was measured in ngogn (equal to 1000 cubic potrzebies), mass in blintz (equal to the mass of 1 ngogn of halavah, which is 'a form of pie [with] a specific gravity of 3.1416 and a specific heat of .31416'), and time in seven named units (decimal powers of the average earth rotation, equal to 1 'clark'). The system also features such units as whatmeworry (unit of force), cowznofski, vreeble, hoo and hah.

Labels: humour, info, programming + logistics

Donald E Knuth:

The Complexity of Songs' was an article published by Donald Knuth, an example of an in-joke in computer science, namely, in computational complexity theory. The article capitalizes on the tendency of popular songs to evolve from long and content-rich ballads to highly repetitive texts with little or no meaningful content.

With a grain of truth, Knuth writes that '...our ancient ancestors invented the concept of refrain', to reduce the space complexity of songs, which becomes crucial when a large number of songs is to be committed to one's memory. Knuth's Lemma 1 states that if N is the length of a song, then the refrain decreases the song complexity to cN, where c < 1.

Labels: language + art, programming + logistics

Evidence that Jesus never existed:

"Jesus allegedly had crowds of thousands follow him around. Once he fed 5000 people with only a few loaves of bread and a couple of fish (Mark 6:39-44). Later he repeated the miracle again feeding a crowd of 4000 people (Mark 8:1-9). Jesus cured sick people miraculously and raised people from the dead. He changed water into wine at a wedding reception. He exorcised demons. He commanded 2000 pigs to rush into a lake and drown themselves, inciting the people of the nearby town and countryside, who asked him to leave. (No mention is made of what happened to the poor pig herder whose livelihood must have been ruined. Mark 5:1-20)."

Labels: food for thought, religion

Leibniz

In 1666, at the age of 19, Leibniz wrote his Dissertio de Arte Combinatoria, from which comes a famous quote describing the way in which he believed the world could be in the future:

"If controversies were to arise," said Leibniz, "there would be no more need of disputation between two philosophers than between two accountants. For it would suffice to take their pencils in their hands, and say to each other: Let us calculate."

Labels: food for thought, programming + logistics

Friedrich Nietzsche quotes

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.”

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”

“There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.”

“I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you”

“"I have done that," says my memory. "I cannot have done that" -- says my pride, and remains adamant. At last -- memory yields.”

“Amor Fati – “Love Your Fate”, which is in fact your life.”

“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”

“The world itself is the will to power - and nothing else! And you yourself are the will to power - and nothing else!”

“The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.”

“Love is a state in which a man sees things most decidedly as they are not”

“That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much”

“To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task”

“The person lives most beautifully who does not reflect upon existence”

“When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago”

“We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.”

“It is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages.”

“A thought, even a possibility, can shatter and transform us”

“This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.”

“Love is not consolation. It is light.”

“He who has a why can endure any how”

“If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

“After coming into contact with a religious man I always feel I must wash my hands”

“All things are subject to interpretation whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.”

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster."

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking”

“One has to pay dearly for immortality; one has to die several times while one is still alive”

“Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?”

“He who cannot lie does not know what the truth is”

“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.”

“Whatever is done for love always occurs beyond good and evil.”

“Believe me! The secret of reaping the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment from life is to live dangerously!”

“Thoughts are the shadows of our feelings - always darker, emptier and simpler.”

“One ought to hold on to one's heart; for if one lets it go, one soon loses control of the head too.”

“You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.”

“The more you let yourself go, the less others let you go”

“Out of damp and gloomy days, out of solitude, out of loveless words directed at us, conclusions grow up in us like fungus: one morning they are there, we know not how, and they gaze upon us, morose and gray. Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in him.”

“To forget one's purpose is the commonest form of stupidity.”

“Great intellects are skeptical”

“I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think.”

Labels: food for thought, philosophy

Mahatma Gandhi's letters to Hitler:

"Mahatma Gandhi's admirers are not in the habit of confronting embarrassing facts about their favourite saint. His critics, by contrast, gleefully keep on reminding us of a few facts concerning the Mahatma which seem to undermine his aura of wisdom and ethical superiority. One of the decisive proofs of Gandhi's silly lack of realism, cited by both his Leftist and his Hindutva detractors, is his attempted correspondence with Adolf Hitler, undertaken with a view to persuading Germany's dictator of the value of non-violence. I will now take upon myself the ungrateful task of arguing that in this attempt, Gandhi was (1) entirely Gandhian, and (2) essentially right."

To Herr Hitler:

As at Wardha,
C. P.,
23-7-'39

Dear Friend,

Friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity. But I have resisted their request, because of the feeling that any letter from me would be an impertinence. Something tells me that I must not calculate and that I must make my appeal for whatever it may be worth.

It is quite clear that you are today the one person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state. Must you pay that price for an object however worthy it may appear to you to be? Will you listen to the appeal of one who has deliberately shunned the method of war not without considerable success? Any way I anticipate your forgiveness, if I have erred in writing to you.

I remain,
Your sincere friend,
M. K. Gandhi

Herr Hitler,
Berlin,
Germany

Labels: philosophy, politics