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The Reason Of State Between Nuclear Challenges, Rogue States And Balkanization

Monday August 11, 2008 - 09:59:08
Topic: 43 permalink
Visits: 129 I may seem a funny guy indeed, but to me this Ossetia war * may mean one thing: that Iran is to be attacked soon. Very soon.

Of course, I may be wrong. Maybe it is too early to judge.
But the fact, or better my rationale, is: I doubt that Putin would risk anything, as he plays twice the same card, if he weren't sure to be in a safe-box having already purchased his immunity by granting something to his potential international oppponents.
So, what may have he granted? What had he to offer in order to continue, or what had he to trade in order to begin his magnificent little war?

For instance, his formal protests but factual inaction before an already several times vented attack on Iran, if the same is granted to him for this Georgian war between an army of 500 jet fighters against 17.
For every political analyst knows or understood that the war on Iraq was a trasversal war with Iran (and maybe Saudi components) in the same style Richelieu * attacked Germany in order to deal with Spain.

So to me it spells of a possibly imminent attack on Iran. And it spells bad news for Georgia too - No new Kosovo here, for equilibrium in the Middle East, or solving a potential nuclear issue with Iran, is necessarily a priority that weighs more than equilibrium in the Caucasus.

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Programming: Facing A String, Regexp. Facing Mr. Programming Apocalypse Now, Ignore.

Sunday August 10, 2008 - 10:38:31
Topic: 42 permalink
Visits: 136 When you program you deal with an issue (a problem to solve) and with an input. Those are your dinner companions.

Now, if the input is a string, the first think you ought to think is: may I achieve my goal with the mere use of a regular expression?
Only after that consideration, think about the rest.

It is true that regular expressions may be resource demanding on big inputs, and thus far from optimal.
Yet, as it often happens when we are adviced by "Mr. Programming Apocalypse Now", rarely strings fall in that cataclysmic scope.
You know "Mr. Programming Apocalypse Now", how s/he is and thinks: those guys who advice you not to write foo=(foo<foo2)?foo:100; because you are performing an "unnecessary assignment"; true, but do you really care about that picosecond in your precious application, when you are gaining much as far as coding clarity is concerned?
Sure, good programming rules ought to be applied at all times regardless of circumstances, just to improve the good habit: and in fact it is exactly those who don't know how and why they apply them, who are so concerned about applying them at all times. Those who know better, couldn't care less about a picosecond most of the times, and they "waste" it without particular regrets or concerns about their reputation or about the consolidation of their good habits: for they master perfectly their good and bad ones both.

At any rate, facing a string, if your goal can be achieved with a regular expression, it is always worth to put that regexp in your library too, also if you eventually decide to walk a different path and propose an eventual solution to your riddle that does not rest on that regexp.

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Believe To Be Poor

Tuesday July 22, 2008 - 21:07:06
Topic: 41 permalink
Visits: 151 «No one can serve two masters. He will hate the first master and love the second, or he will be devoted to the first and despise the second. You cannot serve God and wealth.»
GospelsIf you believe in something, you don't need money in order to do it.

More: you may even come to consider either outrageous, or a defilement, accepting money for it. You don't value it by a monetary meter, you value it by a faith meter; so you don't even want to see it evaluated by another criterion: you don't even want to talk about it.

If you believe in something, you don't need money to do it; but if you do not believe in something, you do need money to do it.
So, every wage rewards a sycophant whilst poverty punishes true believers.

Money may be necessary, but what makes it so often dysfunctional, what is the malediction of money, is precisely this: it necessarily and surreptitiously promotes an adverse selection of talents.

This may be why all rich persons are dishonest and revel in gold, and every genius or passionate person revels in a gutter.
For if you accept gold in order to do what you don't believe in, why you shouldn't abuse of it since you secretly despise it together with your job. This is why it has been so often felt that "money corrupts". If you get into that habit, it will pervade you all.
In praise of idleness: the world would need a place for believers, or a new economy where money arrives while you don't think of it. Everyone should do something very important totally for free.

However, a world without money may be a world of underdevelopment. A believer must trudge for a work s/he doesn't like, in order to find time for what s/he likes.

One needs indeed to be a saint in order to be a believer, and accept money for it, and not be corrupted by it.
A wo/man needs to be stronger than his or her money, and such a character, as the meek shall, may inherit the earth.

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A MySQL Programming Mystery? Database Updated Value Increased By More Than Expected 1

Tuesday July 15, 2008 - 09:57:12
Topic: 40 permalink
Visits: 203 You have a website.
You keep track of visits.
Each time a vistor visits a page you update your database visits for that page by 1.
Yet, alas! The field is always updated by some value higher than 1.
Is there a bug in mySql?
Nope, wrong questions.
Right question: do you have advertisments on your pages?
Oh, you do?

Cool, there may be a robot following your pageloads, summoned by the ads loaded together with the page - thence the multiple visits, particularly the first time you visit a new page or if you visit it again after a pause: the robot may visit it once and be quiet for a while; then, solicited by several pageloads (of the ads included in the webpage), suddenly it may arrive again!

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The Secret Cheap Hit Of Losers Who Could Win

Monday July 14, 2008 - 16:09:12
Topic: 39 permalink
Visits: 194 When you are engaged in a fight there is only one thing, one true cheap and secret blow that you should remember to impart and that you always forget till it's invariably too late: don't engage it.

The person who isn't afraid of being called a coward, feeling the humiliation of it, and yet react not in the face of challenge chagrin and mortification, is capable of the greatest deeds when the right occasion visits him/her.

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Overtaking And Overlooking

Monday July 14, 2008 - 16:03:08
Topic: 38 permalink
Visits: 221 It is said that Freud is surpassed. What does it mean? It is like saying that the Odissey is surpassed. You cannot overtake foundations.

Those who are busy surpassing, haven't taken enough time to understand -or even to notice- what they surpassed; then they say: see, we have gone beyond it, we have surpassed it.

But what they mean is: we went by it.

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Trial And Care

Monday July 14, 2008 - 15:57:25
Topic: 37 permalink
Visits: 204 A manifest destiny is tested by external annoyances.

The external annoyers may boast a role for themselves, believing they were protagonists; but just see how the Almighty may treat them: it uses them to impart the annoyance to those whom It cares indeed, and then it immediately throws them away as used handkerchiefs of no residual use.

The importance of a nation in the eyes of the gods is not judged by how they test it, but by what happens to the testers they employed: if the latter are soon nowhere to be seen, what mattered were the former.

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Excellence Becomes Humility

Monday July 14, 2008 - 15:54:11
Topic: 36 permalink
Visits: 225 If you lack everything else and you have time for a one-liner only to evaluate a person, remember that you can tell a good programmer, a good teacher, or a good person by this alone: s/he will never correct you. S/he helps you. S/he will never make you feel stupid.

They are beyond, because they never quit staying behind. That is, they never forget when they were the ones who could not understand; walking in a jungle of teachings most of the times written by persons who hadn't to fight their own way in that jungle because they were taught and so produced teachings redundant with lessons not understood and questions not only unanswered but simply never even asked, they fought their own way to understanding by their own hands and means. So they thought of questions no one else thought before, and in the throes of this process their intellect grew different.

So different, that they can exhibit a level of such deep an empathy with a learner, that no other teacher may ever either attain or comprehend. These are persons who, when they explain, do not complain and do not correct: they glide down to your level, on the hands of the angels of their past errors that guide them to fit the learner, and start a relationship with the learner that every professor would scorn: they are companions, brothers in arms - never professors, never saps and plodders, never hair-counters. You will never find them on newsgroups lecturing you.

No good person teaches; or, better, no decent person does it by sermons, but by living examples. They don't place burdens on the shoulders of the others that they themselves would not lift with one finger.

If you want a child to study, shut up, say nothing, forget reprimands: if you want a child to study, just show yourself studying.

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Who Wins Between Past And Present, Now And Then?

Monday July 14, 2008 - 15:35:15
Topic: 35 permalink
Visits: 206 It is at times argued that interpreting men and actions performed in the past is in vain, because we lack that coessentiality in time and space that would afford us the right perspective. This presumes that wo/men, at any given time, are perfectly clear to themselves and masters of their actions.

But as a matter of fact contingency and detachment both can be qualifications for ascertaining a situation; in any legal trial, in fact, both the expert and the inexpert may witness: the former because as expert s/he is entitled to know better, the latter because as inexpert s/he is unprejudiced precisely because s/he does not know better.

A successor doesn't necessarily see less clearly into an issue than the coeval, because what slants or twists our judgement isn't time but preconception, and preconception is by definition timeless and unbounded. You can be a stupid yesterday, today, and tomorrow; and actually most who were half wits yesterday won't be any better the day after tomorrow.

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Burden Of Proof: The Truth Everlasting

Sunday July 13, 2008 - 11:26:23
Topic: 34 permalink
Visits: 196 Certainly, it can be claimed that the burden of proof weighs as an unfair one on whatever shoulders it rests: for it is evident that what may be demonstrated as true, didn't become true after a transformation it would have underwent during the process of our demonstration, but that it was true already, it was true always, it was true also before when it was lurking, or living a mysterious life of its own, still undemonstrated. Some unfortunate circumstance, some misunderstanding, or some misleading of our reason, must have been in action in order to conceal truth from our eyes.

However, it must be said that the burden of proof is neither unbearable nor an unacceptable one: for in order to ascertain truth, it only requires our dialectical inquiry, which among so many impervious efforts that fall either within or beyond the range of a wo/man's life, this one is among the most profitable ones; in fact this ought to be of solace to us: that truth, once demonstrated or attained, cannot be reverted. For you cannot dispatch truth back to the realm of the unknown, by the agency of an assassination. No matter how long you stab it, it stays there. You may tatter it, but you just can't make it disappear anymore.

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The Meaning Of Architecture As Politics In The Arts

Wednesday July 9, 2008 - 15:49:51
Topic: 33 permalink
Visits: 256 The Works and the Days represent an occult endeavor, deployed along the misery of days without glory; and then, suddenly, out of them the light of a masterpiece, arisen from a compact of darkness. So do not scorn lesser days of ingratitude, for from the meticulous and operose cooperation of thousands of the lesser, may be yielded the matrix of one grandiose.

Nature dissipates. Millions of eggs are lost altogether with pollens and with the myriad of the humans, who get dispersed in madness and fury. And yet human industriousness explicates itself and eventually culminates, while the days of this same vast enterprise, singularly considered, tantamount to nothing and to voidness. Sweet pollens, furious aromas, inebriating alcohols, and blazing gladiolas, at noon are all dispelled already.

Yet, architecture lasts.
Matter suggests to the mind something sensorial similar to a perfume and ideally to a concept, revealing shapes that cast meaning and strength: and the meaning and the strength float around matter steadfast as a spirit that drifts in the dwellings of its temple.

A complex architectonic order may attain a more articulated meaning, and rather than emanating one feeling, it may exhibit something akin to a whole personality that, in that place, bound to that matter so arrayed, makes its glory manifest.
When we are artificers of architecture, and we attempt to dispatch within spatial dispositions a drive of the soul or our metaphysical conception of the world, we understand better also the limitations of matter, and with it ours: for architecture can rise objective and unyielding as only guilt can.

Therefore, architecture is a pathway to sorrow. It does not administer a fantastic production, indefinitely suited to be molded and modelled as a painter with canvas; but rather it deals with real objects, each sporting its own imperatives and limits, so that architecture represents either Prometheus or the politics in the arts.

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First Responders: Manipulating The Head Of A Patient Laying Prone After A Trauma

Tuesday July 8, 2008 - 19:32:19
Topic: 32 permalink
Visits: 261 When succoring a patient who had a trauma, the responder must hold his head placing his hands on the patient's temporal lobes namely, say, on both his ears. When moving the patient, the purpose can be either:
1) to put him on one side in order to let a rigid support slide under his back, then reposition him laying on the support
2) move him from a prone (stomach on floor) to a supine (back on floor) position.

The person who holds the head gives the "set ready go", and the reason the head must be held is to guarantee that while the patient is moved, the alignment of the spine with the cervical bones is preserved and perfect. The patient is moved in three rounds of about 60 degrees each, for each stage the "set ready go" must be given.

If the patient lays prone, hold his head crossing your arms: that is, as a rule of thumb keep in mind (and try to envision now) that as he lays your thumbs should always be pointing towards his forehead, not towards his neck.
In this fashion if he is prone your arms will result crossed at the beginning, and no longer crossed at the end of he procedure.

A common mistake could be to do vice versa, namely to end up with your arms crossed at the end of the procedure on a prone patient.
This however causes no harm to the patient as long as the alignment is kept perfect namely his head is kept still by your hands; the only difference would then be that at the end of the procedure the first responder's arms, being crossed, are resting in a slightly uncomfortable fashion; this may be unpractical, and it is the reason because with a prone patient your arms should be crossed at the beginning: so that they return aligned at the end of the procedure. However, the only thing that truly matters is that the head of the patient is kept aligned throughout and, of course, doesn't bump.
A protocol has reasons to be recommended, yet it is only the most important one that makes its real worth and must be apprehended.

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The Other, The same: A Secret Symmetry Between Genetics And Neurology?

Tuesday July 8, 2008 - 17:58:33
Topic: 31 permalink
Visits: 364 Immanuel Kant in a nutshell might be this: our reason (emphasizing by it its logical processes, for at Kant's times no unconscious or emotional life had ever been postulated as a major field of investigation) has a twisted life of its own.
Therefore, logic is to be distrusted rather than embraced unconditionally. Logic may escape our control, and dictate a thread of questions and deductions that encroach upon us rather than empowering the resolution of our insights.

In this respect, Kant is a forerunner of Sigmund Freud, whereas Freud in a nutshell might be: everything within a psychical apparatus has a twisted life of its own. We host an unconscious mind that may escape our control, and dictate a thread of questions and deductions that encroach upon us rather than empowering the resolution of our insights.

We have logic and a conscience, and we are proud of it.
Yet, if every cell replicates the genome of the whole, though apparently no cell uses the whole of it, why it couldn't be that every psychical instance has a conscience, a logic, and entirely autonomous processes of its own? A replica of the whole on its own, encapsulated within each item of the system that contributes to constitute the whole. Between the gene and the neuron there must be a secret symmetry, for both convey information.

In a human brain we have many insulated areas of gray matter that may well seem like brains within, arguably endowed with a level of autonomy and with autochthonous procedures and logic as well, as if they were endosymbiotic remnants of an evolution from primeval neurological instances that our predecessors may have had, at the time, as their only whole central system; and that today persist in us as relics put to the service of a major integrated systemic whole, and yet each still endorsing their own protocols.
We may be a whole inasmuch as we are legion, and every legionnaire may be holding a mirror of the whole that reflects a custom image of it.

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The Precepts That Fail

Monday July 7, 2008 - 08:35:46
Topic: 30 permalink
Visits: 189 Facing a recurring difficulty or a challenge some of us may perform poorly and, later, once the challenge is over and the debris has been collected, we rethink about it and we regret. At times, we may also recollect our past difficulty while reading some inspirational quotes on the internet, and we promise to ourselves: next time I cope again with a similar issue, I shall remember this.

Needless to say that, when dealing with the issue in point again, the inspirational sentence does not come to our mind at all; which is no shame actually, because most likely even if it would have had, it would have been of no avail to us.

The problem with this procedure is not only that when in action the action overwhelms us, but that the precept we wish we could apply, is merely a rationalized precept that has no real roots within. It is entirely supported by our superego * only; and since our personal difficulties involve also our emotional world, it is simply not enough. It bolsters the wrong pillar.

Conversely, if we have a dream and start thinking about the dream and we reason about it and we understand it could have a meaning revolving around one of such past issues, after that interpretation we may move to the next stage, namely that of deriving a morale: our own inspirational quote.

To our surprise, and particularly if we go on paying attention to our dreams and derive lessons from them, this round we do can remember the precept when waging the actual difficulty.
This may happen exactly because, being the inspirational principle derived from within our oneiric emotional life, it is a derivative rational product of it and therefore it has roots, it belongs. Not being hung on a merely rational and superegoic thread, it does works and it does stands: its footing stands no longer on the friable clad of an ineffectual intellectual vessel shaken by powerful emotional waves.

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The Logics Of The Goon

Sunday July 6, 2008 - 23:19:43
Topic: 29 permalink
Visits: 195 When the Caliph decided to destroy the Library Of Alexandria * , it has been reported he yelled:"If these books contain nothing more than that which is written in the book of God (el Koran), they are useless; if they contain anything contrary to the sacred book, they are pernicious; in either case, burn them."This notorious explanation could have been rephrased in its exact contrary, preserving plausibility: if these books contain nothing more than that which is written in the book of God, they can be saved for they say nothing against it and therefore are not pernicious; and if they contain anything contrary to the sacred book, they can be spared as well because either the reasons of our God are stronger already than any book, or they aren't the reasons of God what we are claiming.

The Caliph considered himself pious upon the same grounds that made him blasphemous.
This might happen also because, if the Gospels say "do unto others as you would have others do unto you", there ought to be an obvious integration to that dictum, namely that we cannot do unto others anything else but what we have already done unto ourselves.
So, expecting the others not being able to supply us but with what we have supplied ourselves with already, we may be able to inflict unto them only the destruction of culture and humanity we have endured already.

Of course, something altogether different than what the Caliph advocated was sufficient. A splendid silence was never written, but bad prose gets written pretty often. So, I'd prefer being silent rather than contributing something that is not crystal clear to myself in the first place.
This may not guarantee that our good prose won't be still bad, and yet it may guarantee at least that our worst one isn't be going to be seen and read; it will not rid the world of Caliphs, but it may deprive them of the excuses they needed not to be thugs.

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Debasement And Absolution

Sunday July 6, 2008 - 16:42:05
Topic: 27 permalink
Visits: 320 There is plenty of great artists that have no talent: they only have a great staff.

Also, at times good things travel on the shoulders of the stupid: it is in this manner that their stupidity makes itself useful at least once.

No meaning that explains a meaning is the meaning. Every time within an allegory you need to make the allegory explain the allegory, you have an allegory run afoul.
Every time in a novel a character, in order to reveal or to justify a trait of its nature, has to reveal or to justify it, the character either has reached the limit beyond which it is failed, or it was a never born.

And to sum the thread up, or to make it: a bad tale may be sold via the work of a great staff rather than the injection of a great missing talent; however, since it travels on the shoulders of the stupid, it may be delivered with something good altogether. So something can be good in spite of its authors and in spite of its carriers.

This is why you ought to read also the books that you do not like and listen to the music that you do not enjoy: for you, who are a good Shepherd who loves his flock of sheep and lies down his life for them, will sift the good from the bad, and will be able to draw a lesson and to make blossom the aborted potentiality buried within it, by a mere act of your deeper empathy - and of the grace of the Lord.

The stupid takes care of transporting the good and the bad, but the good Shepherd will take care of enjoying the good and of redeeming the bad it welcomes: ego te absolvo is in the array of your powers, because:"I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Son may bring glory to the Father."

St. John

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High Infidelity: Symbols As Packed Meaning

Sunday July 6, 2008 - 14:52:06
Topic: 26 permalink
Visits: 285 In computer science we have cryptography, compression, and other ways to deal with cloaked data. Several scientists, for instance Steven Pinker * , seem particularly engrossed by this, and particularly pleased too when they can say that a human mind probably hasn't inner workings too different from those of a computer. The paradigm of the blind watchmaker makes acolytes, as blind as their maker.

A human mind instead neither compresses nor crypts: it uses symbols.

The dramatic difference between a computer symbol and a mental symbol, is that the computer symbol is merely a lexicographic pointer to integral data, whereas the mental symbol tampered indeed with data. Computer symbols need to be faithful, for when a crypt or a compression gets reversed, it is exactly the fidelity of the recovered data what establishes its worth and reliability.
With mental symbols instead we elect infidelity to data, namely unreliability as the best way to store and deliver them; symbols do not compress data, they shrink it by stripping elements, they purge and deface them, they convert them to something different altogether: it's a catharsis, not a pointer.
No computer would know how to manage that, unless it would have personality.

In our memories there is a personal tone because adulterated data, namely a symbol, needs to be filled in by us ourselves. And yet, subtracting data from a datagram, removing threads from a plot, isn't misleading in the least. For every good detective knows that, facing an assassination and a manor, the culprit is the butler: s/he doesn't need the whole story.

This is why we err, and computers don't; and this is why we write poetry, and machines don't. And this why it is we who makes computers, and not computers who made us.

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Knowledge With Grace, Knowledge Fought For, And Knowledge Cheated

Sunday July 6, 2008 - 14:16:25
Topic: 25 permalink
Visits: 234 Freud postulated the existence of a resistance within mental processes. Such phenomenon may concern any healthy mental status as well: also in order to recollect, at times we have to overcome a resistance.

Conversely, it is often argued that some persons, for instance autistic * boys, may be considered "gifted" for they perform complex mental operations (particularly math) apparently without encountering any attrition.

Now, is it a chrism of genius indeed? The question revolves around this: by overcoming a built-in limit, by trampling a barrier that makes things difficult so to attain what seems a blessed setting, has the subject accrued a feature or has s/he merely achieved the condition of an automata? If one can remember every detail, if one can reckon any mathematical operation at computer speed, does it happen because one has mastered complexity or because the mind, in absence of that barrier, has taken a snapshot of a landscape that it can describe and report but that it doesn't truly understand and dominate?

If a biological resistance is in place, that may depend upon the fact that there is a difference, a substantial and important one, between learning by bypassing a barrier and learning by coping with a barrier and eventually overcome it.

Hemingway once complained that he had to learn many sad things in his life and that he was surprised when he saw that a few of them he had to learn twice. It may be that once we learn by hearsay, and another, when we face catastrophe or resistance, we learn indeed.

There must be a dramatic difference between knowledge for free, and knowledge fought for: like Job * , who could exclaim to God only after he went through his ordeal:"Before, I knew You only by hearsay; but now my eyes see you."

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I Hate You, Therefore I Serve.

Sunday July 6, 2008 - 11:00:34
Topic: 24 permalink
Visits: 492 Joseph Brodsky * is right:"If we want to play a bigger role, the role of a free man, then we should be capable of accepting - or at least imitating - the manner in which a free man fails. A free man, when he fails, blames nobody"A servant may tell his master that the latter is to be blamed. Yet a free man has no master and therefore doesn't know how to impute guilt.
As St. Paul wrote in the Epistle to the Galatians:"For it is written, Abraham had two sons, one by the bond-woman, another by the free-woman. And he of the bond-woman was born after the flesh, but he of the free-woman by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants (...)
Now we, brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as then, he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, so it is now also. But what saith the Scripture? Cast out the bond-woman and her son; for the son of the bond-woman shall not be heir with the son of the free-woman. So then, brethren, we are not children of the bond-woman, but of the free."If we reject masters only to rebuke them later about our liberty being a fact, then we are not free men but disgruntled ones: for freedom assessed as a fact, can be upheld only with the courage of our entailed responsibility.

The self-determination that lasts everyday, doesn't need to be reassured of itself everyday.
Declarations of independence are one-timers only, for they were cast for one day only, once and for all; those that need to be repeated everyday with renewed spite and fury, are not declarations of independence: betraying our failure, they are factual declarations of counter-dependence.

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"We Don't Walk By Sight, But By Faith" (St. Paul)

Sunday July 6, 2008 - 09:31:46
Topic: 23 permalink
Visits: 195 Meanings flee through interpretations like doves imprisoned in a manor that, swooping and crowding, rush around the first loophole available:"Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate"

Shakespeare, sonnet 29And then therefore quivering like sweet stardust of cotton candy vaporizing in thin air, they dart outside and, fluttering their wings, they take flight and escape; and in meandering whirls they disappear in the distance, high in the sky, freed beyond the horizons of any truth.

We don't learn by truth, but by freedom.