Papa's got a brand new bag

Uma homenagem ao Große Bär.

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:47:55 GMT

Beberei em homenagem.

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RS, melhor em tudo.

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:05:32 GMT

Pizza de Porco no BoingBoing. Até aí, tudo bem, é normal ver esse tipo de bizarrice tomar conta dos portais do mundo, anunciando as façanhas do bovinão.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/12/12/pizza-made-from-a-wh.html

Ok. Mas um comentário me chamou a atenção, por revelar exatamente o que eu penso sobre o tipo de reportagem que se veicula diariamente na RBS:

"I don't speak Portuguese, so maybe I'm off base here, but was anyone else weirded out by how they only spent about 30 seconds spotlighting the whole dead-pig crust thing, and then spent the next four minutes showing us how to put stuff on a pizza? Guys, we've seen a pizza before. We've even made a few in our time. We *know* about toppings. But how about this dead-pig crust? Perhaps we could talk more about that?"

É bem assim. Gasta-se 90% do tempo falando de redundâncias e o que é realmente interessante passa despercebido. Engraçado um anônimo sei lá de onde apontar o óbvio.

Aliás, pensando melhor, é bom que não ousem muito. Porque se ousam, pode ser que realmente revelem o que pensam:

http://rafasgj.livejournal.com/120179.html

E pensar que uns meses atrás pensava que este senhor estava dotado de plena saúde em suas faculdades mentais. O que ocorre é que um relógio quebrado acerta duas vezes por dia o horário também (o ruim é agüentar o atraso no resto do dia).

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PowerMac 9660 doing something useful.

Wed, 09 Dec 2009 02:13:23 GMT

Oh yeah.

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Chorei quando vi esse vídeo.

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:59:01 GMT

Daqui: http://thewallmemories.wordpress.com

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Eu e os Macs

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 17:35:48 GMT

Senta que vem história. Again.

Em outras oportunidades contei que tive meu primeiro contato com computadores através duma máquina UNIX. Com as máquinas Apple foram em dois momentos: um com um Apple II "feito no Brasil" (que era dum colega de aula no primeiro grau e que de vez em quando deixava fuçar) e com Macs de agência de publicidade fundo-de-quintal (geralmente Quadras e os primeiros PowerMac).

Eram máquinas pesadas, barulhentas, beges, cheias de não-me-toques. Tinham o atrativo de terem um sistema que funcionava como uma alma própria (inclusive com auto-arbítrio; quem usou por um tempo o Mac OS clássico sabe disso).

Meu primeiro Mac em termos de propriedade não foi um Mac. Foi um programa que rodava binários de MacOS 6. O programa não "existe" mais no sentido prático, mas foi o primeiro contato com alguma coisa que lembrasse o MacOS. Chamava-se Executor, feito por uma empresinha fundo-de-quintal chamada ARDI. E rodava bem certos programas, alguns jogos (principalmente os já antigos, tipo Prince of Persia), editores simples, algumas ferramentas de programação -- tudo sem precisar do Mac em si.

Lia inclusive volumes HFS, contanto que você pudesse ter um drive SCSI no seu PC. CD-ROMs para Mac também. Como o emulador rodava sobre DOS (embora tivesse versões para NeXT, Linux, etc.), bastava fazer uma "carga alta" do driver SCSI da Adaptec 15xx (a placa que eu usava) que tudo ficava bem. Pedi emprestado a um amigo um drive com alguns programas, e os 10% que rodavam chegavam para saciar a curiosidade.

Então, ao mesmo tempo em que eu fazia um duplo-boot para alguma versão de Linux, já rodava programetes antigos do System 6 e System 7. Isso foi até 1997, quando descobri o vMac, um emulador de Mac Plus/Mac 512. Depois de grandes peripécias para conseguir a ROM (hoje em dia é tudo muito fácil, uma buscada do Google te provê todas as ROMs feitas para tudo quanto é coisa), quase apelando para o método físico, consegui bootar o System 6 e rodar, daí, todos os programas que eu queria, num Pentium, com velocidade análoga ao Mac Plus.

Não demorou muito tempo depois e outros projetos de emuladores estavam surgindo. Mesmo nesse período eu desenvolvendo coisas para Windows para sobreviver, em casa o grande motivo de rodar Windows era rodar um que outro emulador. O que desempenhava melhor era o BasiliskII (que ainda existe e é utilizável), e que consegue rodar hoje em dia até o Mac OS 9 (até onde eu saiba).

Em 1997/1998 aconteceu uma sucessão de fatos que fariam minha curiosidade aumentar em torno da plataforma mais ridicularizada (e, talvez, a mais elitizada) no Brasil. Um, que a NeXT tinha comprado a Apple (nunca acreditei em boatos contrários :) ). A outra coisa é que o MacOS tradicional iria virar apenas uma camada de execução -- um "daemon" -- do NeXT. Acompanhei o NeXT desde o final dos anos 80 nas revistas especializadas; parecia tudo muito surreal e impossível, tanto do ponto de vista tecnológico como mercadológico. Sem contar que seria fácil de ter acesso ao novo sistema "híbrido", era só ter um G3.

O G3 (processador, computador, geração, chame do que quiser) foi o resgate da Apple. Era um processador que rodava em clock relativamente alto, rápido, com arquitetura de motherboard limpa, tentando eliminar aos poucos o legado "anos 80/90" do Mac. E a Apple criou um sistema de vendas diretas nos EUA, que permitia o cidadão escolher a configuração exata do equipamento (mantendo-se a placa-mãe, obviamente). Em termos de negócio de computador, a Apple continua a mesma: uma coisinha especial numa placa-mãe, com um sistema que se obtém com "venda casada" e que interage com o hardware como se fosse feito para ele e vice-versa. Meia-dúzia de configurações, com drivers conhecidos, e um sistema relativamente estável. Segredo da ressurreição.

Eis que veio o iMac. O iMac também mudou tudo, mas no sentido estético da coisa. Fora beges quadrados, entram coloridos redondos (para depois ser transparências, seguido de branco hospitalar, depois aço escovado, e agora "cara-de-tv-de-plasma"). Um computador praticamente sem legados em termos externos. Preço ridiculamente baixo, mesmo comparando com um PC. Como ainda estávamos em época de "bolha do Real", o Real estava artificialmente valorizado, ainda na faixa da paridade com o dólar. Cheguei a comentar em casa: "vamos juntar uma grana e comprar esse negócio aí".

Afinal de contas, "esse negócio aí" tinha CD, som, USB, modem, ethernet, tudo incluído. E em questão de um ou dois anos rodaria UNIX. Já se conseguia rodar Linux (como mais tarde fiz com outros PowerPCs).

1999 chegou e o dólar explodiu. Com ele veio uma crise muito pior do que esta que aconteceu (pelo menos no Brasil). Não eram só os Macs que ficaram inacessíveis: tudo ficou inacessível.

Mas eu consegui fazer um rolo no fim-do-ano e comprei de um amigo um jurássico Quadra 605 (que funciona até hoje, apesar do HD ter morrido). Foi o primeiro Mac que eu pude chamar de "meu", pra ficar no chavão. Como ele tinha uma porta serial, eu consegui fazer uma gambiarra para fazê-lo acessar a Internet (don't ask). Netscape 3 Gold nunca rolou tão bem na tela (os emuladores eram bacanas, mas a parte de gráficos ficava a desejar -- porque era emulação, e nem com JIT gráficos rodam mais rápido em software do que em hardware real, todo mundo sabe disso). Ficou uma coisa estranha: nos benchmarks os emuladores surravam o Quadra 605 em quesitos de processamento, mas apanhavam feio em gráficos.

O Quadra 605 tinha um 680LC40. Acho que é esse o nome, nem vou verificar. O LC significa "Low Cost". Que significa que "floating point" não tinha. A solução era rodar coisas que exigiam "floating point" em software, o que basicamente reduzia a velocidade dessa parte do processamento dos programas em 150%. Em 25 Mhz até sopro fazia diferença.

Em nem três meses depois comprei via MercadoLivre um PowerMac 8100, 110 Mhz, 48 de RAM, vários gigas de disco, ethernet (que tive que comprar um transceiver de R$ 50 para colocá-lo em par trançado), e um sonzinho embutido melhor do que o Quadra (já dava para colocar num aparelho de som de certa responsa). E já conseguia tocar MP3. Mas eu já tinha o meu Pentium nessa época; então um acabava ficando servidor do outro, e a minha (conhecida) pendenga de colecionar computadores meio que começa por aí.

Sabia que estava "defasado" em termos de software com essas maquinetas (o 8100 rodava até o MacOS 8.1 e só) mas não me importava muito. Ora, o UNIX é um sistema de 40 anos de idade; não há de fato muita inovação na nossa área. E a internet era bem mais neutra em termos de "barreira de entrada", ao contrário do mundinho hipster da Web 2.0, que exclui o usuário cada vez mais (e ele gosta!).

Nesse interim -- até que o Mac OS X "for consumers", a versão não-server, fosse para 1.0 -- eu aproveitei para testar, usar, adequar e crashear todo tipo de software para Mac possível. Não me interessava muito coisas estilo Photoshop ou Quark, porque meu negócio mesmo era desenvolvimento e redes, essas coisas que ninguém consegue fazer ao mesmo tempo. Nunca vi muitas graças em certas piratagens também: a maioria do pessoal que pirateava os "grandes softwares" acabava nunca usando mesmo. E espaço em disco não era o mato que é hoje, era um quintalzinho.

Daí para comprar um iMac foi um pulo. Os primeiros modelos já tinham lá seus dois (para três) anos, e já estavam surgindo upgrades de 400 Mhz. Os de 233, então, já estavam sendo "possíveis" de serem comprados por R$ 1200 (preço que era de 2008, que tristeza). A parte interessante/mais ou menos boa é que R$ 1200 de 2001 e R$ 1200 de 1998 não valiam os mesmos mil e duzentos. Em 2001 (como hoje) vale menos. Hoje é quase nada, pra todos os efeitos.

Novamente usei do MercadoLivre para comprar o iMac. Como na época o site tinha na grandiosa maioria gente séria, a transação ocorreu sem o menor dos problemas. O computador chegou inteiro via VaspEx (que está aí, agonizando devagarzinho) e, numa noite, instalei o mundo. Naquela semana, antes de vir o OS X via correio, ele rodou OS 9 muito bem. E como rodava bem. Nunca mais liguei o Pentium (exceto para limpar as coisas dele e vendê-lo).

Era outra coisa rodar os scripts do MPW (e compilar os programetes em Pascal/C) em questão de um, dois segundos e não dezenas de segundos a minutos.

Na primeira semana de Mac OS X já tinha instalado (na mão, porque não havia sistema de ports) o PHP, um novo Apache, PostgreSQL, Python, essas coisinhas com que já havia me acostumado. Java já estava lá, era só rodar. Na época do Mac OS X 10.0/10.1 as coisas eram difíceis comparadas com hoje; mas na época era bom o suficiente. Tudo via modem de 56k.

E o tal iMac tinha iTunes. E o iTunes era bom (não esse bloatware que é hoje). E rodava DivX. E todos viram que era bom.

O Mac OS X era pesado; você notava as coisas acontecendo por trás dos panos. Isso nos G3s; nos G4s a coisa tava bem mais avançada, mas como o dólar explodiu e nunca mais voltou, só consegui comprar um G4 em 2005 (quase no túmulo do PowerPC).

Logo depois veio o primeiro "grande update" (ou "serviço quase-obrigatório de proteção da máfia", se você preferir), o tal Jaguar. Eu até tinha conseguido o Jaguar pro G3, mas decidi comprar um iBook (em trocentas prestações, etc. -- lembre-se que havia uma crise permanente no Brasil e que o valor era alto). O iBook já vinha com o bicho. Passei um ano inteiro com o iBook embaixo do braço, literalmente como um caderno. Era praticamente uma extensão do corpo.

Em 2003 descobri que todos (aka. 100%) os modelos tinham defeitos na placa-mãe, e que em questão de meses iriam se desmontar. Foi o início do fim da qualidade da Apple. Qualidade marromeno que continua até hoje, mas ainda é melhor que as linhas "populares" da concorrência. Nem tão melhor, vale a pena frisar.

Foi uma desilusão grande. Não que eu tivesse sido muito afetado; apenas ganhei desapego (não foi nem de perto como outras perdas que tive na vida). Vendi o iBook por quase nada, mas o suficiente para eu montar um computador "from scratch", como há muitos anos não fazia.

Que, aliás, foi uma decepção atrás da outra. Comprei AMD, e a AMD estava nessas de usar engenheiros semi-escravizados, só pode. Ou departamentos de QA que só ganhavam milho, essa era outra possibilidade. Resultado: um combo placa-mãe+processador que aqueciam e queimavam. Pelo menos rodava FreeBSD numa máquina bem mais rápida que um Mac, o que era um certo conforto (no sentido de praticidade de uso).

Não deu certo por outros motivos também, não importam agora (é melhor esquecer). Logo depois comprei um G3 Blue&White, uma máquina já 5 anos defasada, mas que pelo menos não aquecia. Não aquecia e não fazia barulho. Eu até hoje acho que deveria ter processado a AMD por insônia causada por ventiladores de Athlon.

E o G3 300 Mhz, apesar de ultradefasado, rodava DivX bem, tocava o terror nos DVDs, e rodava Jedi Outcast porque permitia colocar uma Radeon 7000-sei-lá-quanto nele.

Depois veio outro G3 B&W, este de 450 Mhz; outro G3 Bege, este quase de graça; vários outros PowerMacs por preço de jujubas, sem contar outras maquinetas RISC com seus próprios Unices.

Mas estas são outras histórias.

Até que em 2008 cansei da "defasagem de velocidade" (vídeos HD estão aí, pô) e resolvi meter bala num Macbook sobra-de-estoque, daqueles brancos. E ainda fui com cara de bandido (roupa de usar em casa, barbudo, e pagando com cheque dobrado do ano retrasado, porque nunca uso cheque).

Deu certo. A máquina já se pagou só pelo aumento de produtividade. Aí me vi usando só o MacBook. E as outras máquinas?

Uma virou uma bicicleta; outra virou a máquina de outra pessoa; uma que outra eu doei, e o resto continua no "home office", de vez em quando sendo ligadas para uma ou outra brincadeira. Parafraseando João Lemos, "O Datacenter Acabou".

Mesmo depois de tantos anos de contato com a plataforma mais odiada do Brasil, ainda é estranho ver lojas que vendem Apple como eletrodomésticos, pessoas andando com Macbooks e iPhones por aí, podcasts sobre a religião que o mundinho Apple virou. Apesar do fanboyismo do pessoal recém-convertido (os recém-convertidos sempre são os mais fanáticos, pode notar), e da tentativa de Louis-Vouittonização da marca, vai por mim, é melhor agora. Quando era nicho-do-nicho era triste.

Poderia ser um desafio gratificante fazer um periférico não-compatível funcionar -- mas não era produtivo. Era caro. Era esmurrar em faca. Não é mais estranho usar um Mac para programar -- porque não é mais só o "computador dos artistas gráficos". Já dá até para declarar IR. Só não vamos tornar as lojas em boutiques, pelamor. Keep it real. E em Reais.

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Por que prefiro Emacs

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 12:49:18 GMT

Ou mesmo o vim:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Nuff said.

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Microsoft, ainda nos anos 90.

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:01:44 GMT

Daqui ( ) eu vi essa declaração "anos 90" do cara da Microsoft:

"Não dá para comparar com o Leopard, que é um sistema operacional que roda apenas em uma máquina e que custa mais que um PC. Se o Leopard custa mais barato, na hora que vê na máquina, esse conjunto custa mais."

É, não dá mesmo. Digamos que uma máquina minimamente aceitável custe R$ 2k para rodar o Windows 7 (minimamente aceitável -- esqueça Celerons, GMAs, AC97s e afins). Daí coloque a versão mais cara do Windows nela (que deve custar mil reais).

Depois compare: dá para levar um Macbook.

E o Windows 7 não vem com nada. Nem meia-dúzia de joguinhos. Nada, nada nada. Nem um compiladorzinho de nada. É só um Vista melhorado. Só.

"Ah, mas dá para baixar". É? Também dá para comprar uma máquina por R$ 1k e colocar Linux nela. E daí? S Estamos comparando o "produto final"; então dá para concluir sim que o Windows 7 não sai mais barato não.

Sem contar que o tempo de pesquisar uma máquina nova, "pechincha", custa dinheiro. Tempo é dinheiro, a não ser para quem não tem as duas coisas (dinheiro e falta de tempo).

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Da minha saudade recorrente dos 8 bits

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:32:54 GMT

Senta de novo que vem história.

Era o final dos anos 80. Eu já sabia usar (razoavelmente) bem computadores, mesmo quase nunca tendo contato com nenhum (lembre-se, naquela época era artigo de luxo e, quando de tecnologia estrangeira, sob importação "alternativa"). Nessa época os PCs (e os primeiros Macs) já eram populares nos EUA, com arquiteturas completamente estranhas na Inglaterra e os "genéricos" nacionais. Poucos anos depois o Collor abriu o mercado e os computadores se multiplicaram feito ratos.

Mesmo com as dificuldades financeiras tínhamos planos para comprar um computador. Pra minha infelicidade (e posterior vantagem, daquelas que você só percebe anos depois, e acontecem por acaso) não era um modelo de 16 ou 32 bits: era um de 8 (MSX, já bem usado, na época comprado contrabandeado, mas agora passando de mão em mão). Tinha a vantagem de ligar na TV, então economizava-se o que hoje equivaleria R$ 1.200.

Também tinha outras vantagens: dava para usar fitas cassette, que já eram baratas e eu podia comprar com meu próprio esforço (nos "bicos" e nos primeiros empregos informais). Continuo achando fitas K7 superiores à disquetes, que hoje falham muito mais do que antigamente porque se usa menos material e a mão-de-obra é semi-escrava. Vale lembrar que quase todo computador (ou componente) fabricado hoje vem de mão-de-obra semi-escrava. O computador onde escrevo também é. Ninguém é mais santo, e não existem, a rigor, "indústrias nacionais".

Se o gravador controlado pelo MSX falhasse e um "ajuste no azimute" (IIRC) fosse necessário, eu nem perdia tempo: colocava a fita num microsystem "anos 80" e colocava o cabo P2 computador nele, que lia perfeitamente. E ainda dava para ouvir o som mais alto. É um som parecido com os de modem, e as lembranças do som são agradáveis (mesmo que eu tivesse que, às vezes, esperar 20 minutos para um programa carregar).

O intuito de comprar o computador era óbvio: é o que hoje chama-se de "inclusão digital" -- familializar-se com a digitação no computador, criar programas, dominar os meandros da máquina, melhorar o uso da lógica, etc. (ah, "inclusão digital" hoje é orkut, fotolog, msn, e baixar sacanagem? Foi mal, pensei que era uma coisa séria).

Deu certo. Acabei aí ganhando uma profissão. Não era a profissão que eu esperava, subestimamos demais a coisa (estávamos numa crise braba, pré-Real, e eu almejava no máximo um cargo de "operador de computador" em algum lugar, porque era um trabalho que não se sujava as mãos, não precisava fazer esforço e dava para sobreviver -- mas só sobreviver). Sem contar que o contato com o computador me aproximou do Latim da nossa época, o Inglês. Foi um benefício duplo.

Ou múltiplo: o Inglês é uma "gateway drug" (para ficar no anglicismo) que te leva para um mundo de literatura mais universalizada, ampla, onde sempre há tradução de títulos, e onde há possibilidade de se aprender outras línguas através dele como "pedra de Rosetta".

Aliás, também subestimei os danos que a profissão ia me trazer. LER, insônia, problemas posturais, lapsos bobos de memória... boa parte disso foi corrigido a tempo. Mas na época era normal eu ficar transcrevendo/debugando programetes em BASIC até as duas, três da manhã; raras eram as vezes em que eu virava a noite, mas acontecia e a alegria de ter um programa funcional superava a ressaca do dia seguinte (que era o mesmo dia).

Foi largamente através de imitação (macaco vê, macaco faz) que aprendi a programar. Tanto no assembly (hoje primitivo) do Z80 como no BASIC. No assembly eu ainda imitava bastante até o final da minha época de MSX, mas no BASIC eu já conseguia ousar mais.

Ousar mais e enxergar logo os limites: na minha primeira tentativa de fazer um programa interpretador de comandos (um DOS da vida) eu alcancei rapidinho os 22k de RAM, todos consumidos pelo programa. Foi engraçado, embora tivesse me preocupado na hora: o prompt não aceitava mais uma linha do programa, e dizia que estava "out of memory". Custei a acreditar. Foi quando dei um LIST (IIRC) e vi que tinha programado demais. Como tinha que sacrificar a legibilidade para ganhar alguns bytes, tentei eliminar os espaços primeiro (dá para programar em BASIC no MSX sem usar espaços. Fiz isso por alguns meses, o que me preparou anos depois para o Perl e o PHP). Não adiantou muito. Tive que otimizar e -- gasp! -- criar um sistema de código que poderia se auto-gerar.

As revistas da época (e de épocas passadas) como INPUT, MicroSistemas, etc. era o que me pautava. Ganhei algumas com o próprio computador; comprei outros fascículos da INPUT (na época dificílimos de se achar) para ir acompanhando os programas. De INPUT, ao todo, foram 20 fascículos. Nem imaginava que tinha muito mais, e que anos depois eu conseguiria achar boa parte deles (senão a totalidade) na biblioteca da Unisinos. Se eu soubesse eu teria pego o ônibus para São Leopoldo semanalmente ainda criança!

Ao trabalhar com um computador com sérios limites você é obrigado a otimizar o programa. Tanto porque uma instrução a mais pode fazer o programa demorar cinco minutos a mais, como a memória era uma parede rígida num quarto pequeno. Ouvia falar em expansões, em modelos de MSX que possuíam muito mais RAM, inclusive já tinha visto modelos com disquetes de 5 1/2 e 3 1/4, mas era tudo muito caro e inacessível. E os PCs já estavam aí, e às vezes eram tão inacessíveis quanto.

Acabei descobrindo o conceito de currying, macros, linguagem de domínio restrito, e, talvez, lambda calculus -- sem querer, por necessidade, e sem saber direito o nome da técnica que achava que tinha "inventado". Eram idéias antigas com implementações moderníssimas de 40 anos atrás. Bummer.

Também, por não estranha razão, comecei a gostar de Promenade, do Mussorgsky. Tinha descoberto a música via computador, mas, em retrospecto, até que foi bom que não enveredei por este lado -- é um passatempo caro este de fazer música (sim, é uma desculpa).

Me ocorreu de fazer compactação do código, mas na primeira tentativa (após ler sobre o assunto, e, já que eu usava lha/pkzip/etc.) a RAM se provou limitada demais para construir o próprio programa de compactação. Na verdade estava imitando o estilo de programação contemporâneo, que já usava de máquinas sem limitações toscas na casa dos 20 kbytes.

Mesmo assim, consegui achar um que tinha uma ROM 1.2 (melhorada se comparada com a 1.1 que eu tinha) e tinha um drive de disquetes que podia ser acoplado a um dos cartuchos! Foi uma revolução pessoal, mais ou menos quando eu consegui comprar um gravador de CDs. Finalmente os dados e os programas poderiam ser criados em muito menos tempo, e ter uma "mortalidade" menor (portanto, serem mais próximos da "imortalidade").

Converti todos os programas, o mais rápido possível, para o 'modus operandi' do disquete. Já tinha uma GUI primitiva rodando, que imitava o System 7 do Mac em look (mas nada do feel, porque eu sequer tinha mouse, operava com um joystick). E de repente descobri alguns conceitos de double-buffering (mesmo não conseguindo implementar por completo), bitmapping (sofrendo horrores no assembly), sprites compostos -- tudo por acaso e por necessidade. Tempos depois, quando vi o X, conseguia entender (ou imaginar) como que era implementado (inclusive as desvantagens).

Comecei a implementar um banco de dados. Nada relacional, como se tem hoje prontinho para usar, mas mais uma espécie de DBase. Era fã da idéia do DBase, mas odiava (ainda odeio) com profundeza a linguagem totalmente enjambrada, e o jeito de construir programas (e as limitações do DOS, que pareciam ainda mais arcanas num hardware muito mais potente que o PC do que os programetes do tosco MSX).

Aliás, faço um parêntese para inferir que a cultura baseada em DOS/automação de empresinhas/Clipper/DBase/pirataria desmensurada ajudou muita gente a sobreviver mas destruiu a necessidade de vários dos aprendizados da ciência da computação no dia-a-dia dos informatas. Destruiu e criou preconceitos, inclusive um clima de anti-intelectualismo forte. Mas essa é outra história, para outro dia.

Nas primeiras versões do programa -- quando estava criando uma automação para criar a GUI automaticamente através do que havia no banco de dados -- o drive de disquetes pifou.

Decidi arquivar tudo em um lugar à prova de luz, mas que se revelou absorvente de umidade -- e assim perdi todos os programas que tinha construído. O bolor destruiu os disquetes. Como as fitas tinham sido usadas para música (eram baratas, mas ainda custavam dinheiro), então não havia backups. Nasceu aí o Fernando neurótico e obcecado por backups.

Mas esta é outra história.

Às vezes fico pensando -- e não consigo ter uma opinião 100% formada a respeito -- sobre o estado da computação hoje, onde todos os computadores são facilmente programáveis, e todas linguagens (as importantes e interessantes, pelo menos) disponíveis sem custo, com farto material em todas as línguas principais. Ao mesmo tempo vejo gente fazendo tarefas que são, de um ponto de vista, programação -- mas ao mesmo tempo percebo que a evolução no software tende a ser só aparente, já que só se faz mais do mesmo.

Caio às vezes no pensamento fácil de que "antigamente que era bom", que invariavelmente cai na premissa "se os computadores tivessem certos limites seria melhor". Aí depois eu me toco da bobagem e volto a movimentar meus castelos-de-carta digitais, que só existem na minha cabeça, e são como se fossem minha própria Matrix. Não troco esse tempo por outro passado, não. Essa falta de evolução aparente vai passar, deixa só o legado do PCzismo dos anos 80 acabar.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

Os profissionais mais importantes

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:48:59 GMT

Costumo brincar quando vejo um daqueles adesivos "agradeça um professor se consegue ler" (ou algo assim) porque aprendi a ler e fazer contas sozinho. Também não aprendi a ter senso crítico na escola (como boa parte das coisas que aprendi), mesmo porque era escola pública (e senso crítico em escola pública é concordar com o professor sempre; portanto ter senso crítico era pecado mortal). Só anos depois percebi que poderia ter sido completamente diferente, bem melhor, e destinando quase os mesmos recursos: não valorizavam quem capitaneava a sala de aula.

Hoje é um daqueles dias do calendário em que se lembra de uma classe de profissionais, ou uma classificação entre as pessoas. Não gosto de datas especiais nem dias fixos para lembrar de pessoas, porque no resto do ano elas não são lembradas. É o caso do dia do professor que, por óbvio, deveria ser feriado em todas as escolas (mas não é). Amanhã já vai ser esquecido, e tudo volta como era. Então vai um textinho.

Discuto em meus próximos educação e ensino diariamente. De longe o ensino é a área mais negligenciada no país; a razão de todos os problemas que acontecem, apesar das peneiras multibilionárias que se usam para tapar o sol ou fazer chover boas intenções. Na minha visão de aluno (por mais de quinze anos) e por ver de perto como a coisa toda acontece creio que tudo deveria mudar. Tanto no ensino público como o particular.

O ensino público primeiro, por ser o mais precário e por não ser auto-suficiente. Por ser deficitário. Sobre o particular eu tenho outras visões, que não cabem aqui.

Se tem uma obra de "welfare" que realmente traz benefício é escola. Já encontrei gente que não é a favor das escolas públicas, mas sem elas estaríamos bem, bem, bem pior. Provavelmente seríamos uma ditadura das bananas. Não que a lei seja extremamente respeitada por aqui, mas imagine uma situação de guerra permanente, com gente morrendo nas ruas de fome, golpes infinitos, imprensa oficial estatal que só poucos conseguem ler ou onde se aprende a ler só para isso, etc.; seria por aí. Então nem passa pela minha cabeça privatizar o ensino básico e o nível médio. Não resolveria o problema, nem mesmo se toda a população tivesse condições de pagar.

Algumas coisas mudaram no ensino público que o tornaram (ou tornarão) pior. O enjambre de "passar" o aluno adiante, para o próximo ano, a qualquer custo (para maquiar as estatísticas); a tentativa de reintrodução do ensino religioso (mesmo que seja facultativo); planos de carreira que a princípio parecem vantajosos para os professores mas ao longo prazo diminuem o valor real do salário; a criação de duas redes independentes de ensino público (uma controlada pelos estados, e outra pelos municípios, fazendo com que a corrupção e o pleno roubo fiquem mais difíceis de sofrer escrutínio), etc.

O despreparo dos professores é evidente. A culpa não é unicamente dos professores, mas do próprio sistema de ensino que os gerou; a coisa toda vem de longe. Às vezes ajudam a perpetuar a situação, agindo como seus próprios algozes. Um exemplo seria o fato de que muitos professores se associam a movimentos visivelmente anti-intelectuais, como sindicatos partidarizados; aliás não vi até hoje nenhum sindicato que seja a favor de pessoas inteligentes. Coisa que não aconteceria se a educação 'a priori' não tivesse falhado. Mas essa é outra história, a ser lembrada em dia adequado.

Também há um processo de auto-depreciação automático quando o professor, por falta de conhecimento, escolhe e segue metodologias/conceitos que não são científicos. Acreditem, essas coisas acontecem também fora da área das exatas. Neste caso não é o professor que é prejudicado, mas o aluno. Porque cedo ou tarde o aluno enfrentará a realidade. Não raro encontro professores que não questionam o status quo -- não só da sua área, mas da sua vida.

Uma coisa curiosa (e recente) é que estamos em uma era onde as pessoas fogem da responsabilidade como um funkeiro foge do dicionário; e é um fenômeno global. Nessa onda de "eu faço minha parte, e SÓ a minha parte" entra a questão dos pais. Educação é coisa que começa em casa, mas os pais preferem terceirizar a obrigação biológico-moral para as escolas. Isso é de uma maldade atroz, um comportamento que não segue nenhuma lógica. Bom, talvez seja até uma conseqüência óbvia: o que esperar de pais irresponsáveis e imorais, que "deixam a vida levar", vivendo tal qual animais?

Tem um argumento em que se diz que não seria bom que os professores do ensino público ganhassem mais do que ganham; geralmente é parte de um pacote ideológico onde figuram estatísticas de países como a Coréia do Sul -- onde figura uma realidade completamente diferente da brasileira --, que comprovariam a tese. Estão de brincadeira os que proferem essa tese. Como pode um cidadão que vai alfabetizar crianças ganhar perto de um salário mínimo por 20 horas de trabalho? Que tipo de educação fora da sala (como, por exemplo, freqüentar livrarias e participar de eventos culturais pagos) um professor consegue se isso mal serve para se alimentar?

Mesmo se conseguisse sobreviver (note a palavra "sobreviver"), e o resto? Não seria o professor -- por mérito -- um cidadão exclusivo, que deveria ser premiado pela sociedade diferenciadamente *exatamente* por ser mais importante e servir como fundação mais básica da civilização?

Seria e é. Eu, que sou autodidata por teimosia, reconheço que sem a massificação da educação não seria possível o avanço que tivemos nos últimos dois séculos em termos de ciência e organização da sociedade (inclusive com todos os defeitos associados). Então porque não darmos o passo adiante e valorizarmos os maiores responsáveis pela civilização como conhecemos?

Nessa parte alguém pensaria "ah, os que estão no PUDÊ não querem fazer isso". Vamos imaginar por um instante que não seja este o problema. Pode ser que seja a) o despreparo ou b) motivos ideológicos, por exemplo.

Se a) a maior parte dos que estão "no comando" também não tem preparo. Nem tinham antes, senão a situação não chegava onde chegou. Não se sabe para onde se quer chegar, o que fazer; que seria o mais adequado. O ensino dá o resultado décadas depois, então não é atrativo.

Pior é o b), onde imaginam que sabem o correto porque seguem a cartilha duma ideologia sem nenhum respaldo científico. Quando o resultado obviamente não aparece, chega a hora de maquiar o resultado: seja aumentando a nota do aluno, seja diminuir os scores mínimos para que as estatísticas se igualem a outros países, pra ficar nesses dois exemplos. Neste caso não se valoriza o professor porque o mais importante é o método em voga, etc. e o professor que se dane para se adequar aos novos "achismos" pedagógicos.

Quanto aos que desconfiam que "é que ELLES preferem que a população seja burra", às vezes tenho sérias dificuldades em aceitar que os políticos saibam o que estão fazendo; que tenham um projeto, por exemplo, para "perpetuar o mal". Ou que tenham um projeto, mas que de fato entenderam o que o próprio significa. Mais coisas se explicam pela incompetência (ignorância?) do que pela maldade, não é mesmo?

Talvez seja o caso; a nossa democracia, no final das contas, seria realmente representativa. Por indução, ELLES são os melhores exemplares de nós, a população que acabou educada assim: hedonista, anti-intelectual, com ódio do mérito e asco do conhecimento.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

Nice opinion on Google Wave

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 10:29:56 GMT

A sober opinion to counteract the current wave of Google fanboyism.

From here: http://www.slate.com/id/2232311/pagenum/all

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It's Just Fancy TalkThe Google Wave chatting tool is too complicated for its own good.By Farhad ManjooPosted Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009, at 6:42 PM ET
Here's a little story to show just how thoroughly Google's long-awaited chatting tool, called Google Wave, can kill your mood to chat: The other day, I was "waving" with Zach Frechette, the editor of GOOD magazine. Naturally, we were talking about the new site's merits and flaws. As we went back and forth, I had a tiny epiphany. I wanted to tell Zach that I thought Wave would have a much tougher time catching on than Twitter, because it was asking so much more of its users. The trouble is, everything you type into Wave is transmitted live, in real time—every keystroke was getting sent to Zach just as I hit it. This made me too self-conscious to get my thoughts across.

Like Wave, Twitter was also "trying to teach people a new way to communicate," I wrote to Zach. "But its main"—and here I paused, searching my brain for the right word. I wanted to say that Twitter took off because it was drop-dead simple. So did I want to say, "but its main function was simplicity"? No, that was wrong. How about goal—"its main goal was simplicity"? Hmm, better, but still not quite right. The pause grew; the word that I wanted—in retrospect, feature—wasn't coming to me, and I began to reconsider the sentence entirely. Maybe I should just delete what I'd written and say, "Twitter works because it's simple." But I couldn't do that, because Zach was watching me. He could see me struggling right now—he could see that I'd gotten myself stuck in a textual cul-de-sac and that I was desperately searching for a way out without looking foolish. Now I saw Zach beginning to type: "Don't let the live-typing get you down!" The game was up; what was the point of making a point now? I ended my thought clumsily and then resolved never to attempt to say anything very deep on Wave.
Chatting on Wave is like talking to an overcurious mind reader. On a conventional IM, you only see what other people say once they hit Enter. (True, the IM program will tell your partner whether or not you're typing, but this is too little information to get embarrassed about.) On Wave, every misspelling, half-formed sentence, and ill-advised stab at sarcasm is transmitted instantly to the other person. This behavior is so corrosive to normal conversation that you'd think it was some kind of bug. In fact, it's a feature—indeed, it's one of the Wave team's proudest accomplishments. When Google first unveiled Wave this spring, the program's inventors hailed real-time typing as a way to mimic real-life conversations online. Because you can see what your chat partner is trying to say before she's finished saying it, you can start replying immediately, making conversations much faster, Wave's proponents argue. In practice, though, live typing either slows conversations to a crawl or renders them anodyne. Because you've got to second-guess every word you put down, you find yourself agonizing over the keyboard. It's hell—and, so far, Wave has offered no way to turn it off. (The program is still in an invitation-only preview mode, so it's possible they'll fix this soon.)

Live-typing illustrates Wave's bigger problem: In many cases, the software creates new headaches by attempting to fix aspects of online communication that don't need fixing. What is Wave? Its designers say that it's an effort to modernize e-mail by adding features from IM, wikis, and other tools for collaborating in the Web age. Improving e-mail is a worthy goal: There's too much of it, a lot of the mail we get is useless (even the stuff that's not spam), and threads involving more than two or three people can get wildly, incomprehensibly out of hand.

But Wave tries to fix these problems by replacing e-mail with an entirely alien interface that isn't very intuitive and that introduces new problems of its own. You pretty much have to watch one of the Wave team's instructional videos in order to learn how to do the simplest things—send a message, reply to a message, add more people to your message, etc. You've even got to learn a new nomenclature: In Wave, messages are called waves, which are themselves composed of smaller elements called blips. There's also another class of message called pings, which are meant to be more urgent than waves—though once you're done with a ping, it turns into a wave. Got that?

And that doesn't even get to Wave's more celebrated bells and whistles: You can add widgets—videos, maps, polls, Sudoku, and a lot more—to your conversations. You can hold threaded conversations (so your responses to someone's particular point are nested under just that message) and also go back and edit or correct other people's messages. You can "play back" an entire conversation, seeing each message appear in sequence—kind of like watching a recording of the screen as you were chatting. But that's not all—not by a long shot! Indeed, Wave is so packed with features of marginal utility it's easy to forget it was invented by Google. Here was a company that once prided itself on simplicity; Wave is so bloated it could have come from Microsoft.

Even worse, it's not immediately clear why you should take the time to learn all this stuff. In my few days using Wave, I came across a few cases in which the software might come in handy. If I wanted to brainstorm an idea with a half-dozen or so coworkers, it's possible that collaborating on Wave might be more fruitful than working through e-mail, IM, or a conference call. (In Wave, everyone could add to and amend lists synchronously—though, of course, you can also do that using Google Docs, too.) But waves with multiple people can get just as messy as a wild e-mail threads—more than a few I took part in devolved into chaos. This might have been predicted, considering that there's nothing about the software that can prevent people's inherent tendency to go off-topic. In the same way, Wave does nothing for e-mail overload. In just the few days I've had an account, I've already started getting roped into long chains of messages with people I didn't know. Were Wave to become as popular as e-mail, it would surely succumb to the same noise that now crowds our inboxes.

However inscrutable it is, I'll grant that Wave is a feat of Web engineering. Google has produced the most desktop-app-like Web program I've ever used: It loads quickly, is pretty responsive to user commands, and hardly ever crashes. (The few hiccups I noticed were excusable, considering that it's still in the early development phase.) The Wave team is certainly ambitious. Alas, their efforts too often seem to have no other purpose than ambition itself.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

Minha mania com as duas rodas.

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 14:52:35 GMT

Senta que vem história.

Geralmente toda coisa em que se desenvolve uma obsessão não é saudável. Aliás, prefiro dizer que não é, mesmo que seja. Sendo assim, estou sofrendo de uma compulsão nada saudável sobre bicicletas.

Até agora tem sido saudável: não sinto aquela dor pós-exercício que dura alguns dias; não tenho mais hematomas em diversas partes do corpo; não há tanto suor nem desconforto em subidas; principalmente, consigo realizar subidas que não conseguia fazer de jeito nenhum.

O ruim é que eu não consigo manter só um "equipamento" para realizar as "corridas". Comprei uma bicicleta, depois outra, depois outra. Troquei peças. Torrei um dinheiro bonito (ainda que pouco perto dum modelo qualquer dito profissional) trocando peças e consertando pneus, aros, câmbios. Mas é uma coisa que dá um prazer inigualável (dentro do que se refere a esporte individual, que fique bem claro).

A obsessão toda começou uns dois anos atrás. Tinha uma bicicleta daquelas que se compra em mercado hoje em dia por menos de R$ 200 (mas que na época, 1996, custou bem mais; uns R$ 450, quando R$ 450 valia dinheiro. Não é que o dinheiro agora compra mais coisas: é que os materiais ficaram tão baratos que míseros R$ 200 (que não valem nada) conseguem comprar uma bicicleta). Era uma mountain bike. Usei ela extensivamente de 1996 a 2000.

Em 1999/2000 eu usava para a comuta trabalho casa. Era chato, caro, demorado, desconfortável demais pegar ônibus. A distância de casa até o trabalho era 3 km, sendo que no meio havia um morro de inclinação considerável (o "pesadelo da volta"). Mesmo sendo mountain bike eu não conseguia subir o tal morro. Em 1996 eu pesava 67 kg; em 1998 já pesava 75; depois duma breve incursão em um hospital pulei para 85; e, quanto mais o peso aumentava, pior ficava para subir o tal morro.

Mas o fôlego (para o resto) eu mantive. Até 2000. Aí eu já estava na universidade, e vida de universitário não é saudável. Não pode ser saudável, senão não tem graça.

Corta para 2007, e me vejo me mudando para uma cidade onde todo mundo tinha pelo menos uma bicicleta (mais de uma bicicleta per capita). Então eu ressuscitei a maldita mountain bike genérica e, bem de vez em quando, saía com ela nos fins-de-semana. Nada sério.

Explico o "maldita". Nos anos 90 (final dos 80, na verdade), o Brasil sofreu a invasão das "mountain bikes": bicicletas pesadas, que supostamente serviriam para andar nas montanhas, em terrenos inóspitos, etc.; ocorre que a tropicalização da bicicleta não deu muito certo para a manutenção do conceito "montanha": as bicicletas eram toscas, quebravam só de deixar sob o sol, e se você se arriscasse nas montanhas, era acidente certo.

Em suma, eram boas para trafegar nas cidades sem nenhum planejamento que o Brasil tem. E eram baratas o suficiente para que (quase) todo mundo pudesse comprar. Então se convencionou assim: jovens usam as MTBs, pessoal mais velho e "operário" usava variantes de Barra Forte (aquela bicicleta desconfortável e insegura, mas que dura bastante e não deve custar mais de R$ 40 para fabricar).

Houve mini-tendências ao longo dos anos 90 em termos de acessórios; todas as tendências passaram. Hoje essas MTB têm cara de Transformers (o filme novo), e um quê de cultura emo. Pode notar.

Nada disso impediu que as MTBs se popularizassem. Nem a destruição do conceito de bicicleta de montanha e a necessidade de ter um modelo mais adequado às cidades (que acabou acontecendo, mas são caras que só vendo). E agora começam a pipocar variações "chopper" baseadas em MTBs. Terrível; é um negócio que já nasce com data para terminar (assim espero).

Mesmo sendo (aparentemente) mais confortáveis que outros modelos, acessíveis e ganhando todas as inovações do ramo (freios a disco, suspensão, câmbios práticos, etc.) eu não conseguia me sentir confortável pedalando com elas. No início eu pensei que era a altura do selim ou coisa assim. Não era. Eu é que era incompatível com as bicicletas.

Me lembro de ter, de empréstimo, uma Caloi 10 dos anos 70 por alguns minutos; isso no meio dos anos 90. Eu quase tinha minha altura atual, mas mesmo assim era difícil de manobrá-la, era rígida, precisa; muita curvatura e eu quase caía; não dava para andar devagar; as correia caía fora se eu ousava muito na troca de marchas. O que me fascinava era o guidão "multiuso" (umas quatro posições diferentes podiam ser usadas ali) e as dimensões magricelas do quadro e pneus.

Essa fascinação ia me "procurar" depois.

Em 2008 eu decidi viajar para um lugar onde se poderia pedalar com o auxílio da lei (porque o trânsito daqui é assassino com a complacência da lei; o efeito oposto). Então fui lá e comprei uma bicicleta que até hoje não sei a marca nem o modelo, mas era uma "speed" adaptada. Foi amor à primeira curva (pra não dizer "vista"). Rodava tão confortavelmente quanto as "omafietsen", com a diferença de ser rápida a ponto de alcançar os trams.

Praticamente destruí a bicicleta de tanto andar. Tive que deixar lá; imaginei que, ao chegar por aqui, a Gol ia querer me cobrar praticamente o valor da bicicleta para transportá-la (eu não estava muito fora da expectativa não; parece que custa uns R$ 200).

Poucas semanas depois vi uma Caloi 10, novo modelo, numa loja de bicicletas. Na real estava interessado naquelas scooters elétricas, mas a visão da bicicleta ocupando toda a vitrine -- montada, pronta para usar -- fez eu desistir da scooter na hora. Perguntei quanto era e nem pensei: fui no banco, quebrei o porquinho, comprei à vista. Acabou não sendo a da vitrine; foram duas horas longuíssimas até que outra, direto da caixa, estivesse pronta. Ao chegar em casa começou a chover; mas no outro dia eu tirei a desforra.

Uma das melhores compras que eu já fiz. Pelo benefício, não necessariamente pelo produto. E como a desgraçada anda. Noto que os motoristas não gostam nem um pouco da competição.

Depois de alguns meses de uso diário, o desgaste foi inevitável. A ponto de trocar o cubo traseiro, várias câmaras, e pelo menos uma roda.

Eis que um amigo (Ari Jr., que agora deve estar em Portugal) revelou que tinha, paradinha, uma Caloi 10. Fui ver, e era o modelo antigo. Dei um jeito de levá-la alguns dias depois, e, ao voltar de noite de Gramado, fui pedalar madrugada adentro. Minha surpresa: o modelo antigo era realmente muito melhor que o novo. Parecia que tinham adivinhado o tamanho exato do quadro.

Um ano passa, e eu deixo de andar diariamente, para apenas andar nos fins-de-semana (corrija-se: praticamente todo fim-de-semana, quase que religiosamente). Para compensar os 14 km diários, a cada fim-de-semana faz-se uma corrida maior (geralmente cruzando cidades, ou as rodeando). As chuvas aparecem junto com o inverno, e há vezes em que eu vou andar mesmo chovendo.

Poucos meses depois, me vejo andando por São Paulo, e na rua da FNAC Pinheiros vi uma Caloi 10 (1984, com adesivos Mondrianescos) por apenas R$ 300. "Pechincha", pensei. Era. Desbravei horrores no trânsito horroroso de São Paulo por alguns dias. Era a liberação do táxi, do ônibus e do metrô. E nem achei os motoristas tão agressivos como dizem (talvez estejam se acostumando com as 300 mil bicicletas em circulação na capital de facto do Brasil).

Consegui trazê-la para casa, depois de manobra logística de certa complexidade. É o novo cavalo-de-batalha: já quebrei o câmbio original (em "lance de bola parada"), modernizei os aros e rodas, entre outros reparos menores. E neste fim-de-semana foram dezenas de km com ela.

Abaixo (se o Posterous colaborar) o modelo antigo e o novo. Não necessariamente na mesma ordem.

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Não sei se eu as trocaria por modelos speed mais novos (e mais caros). Acho que não. Por alguma estranha razão, a sensação de liberdade que essas "magrelas" rígidas e aparentemente burocráticas dos anos 70 trazem não se igualam nos modelos de hoje; pelo menos não nos nacionais. Talvez haja uma marca estrangeira que me agrade, mas não estou disposto a pagar para ver.

Percebi de uns tempos pra cá que esse amontoado de ferro e alumínio (com pequenas porções de inox) é o que está me mantendo vivo; dando motivos para eu continuar seguindo os próximos objetivos, sejam quais forem. Pensei que era o contrário: que eu estava sustentando o "vício" das horas vagas, mas não, é a obsessão que tomou conta. E me sinto o próprio Robert Pirsig quando saio por aí meditando em duas rodas.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

"Tio da Internet"

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:21:24 GMT

Ontem estava saindo para cumprir alguns quilômetros com a minha Caloi 10 novinha (1984) e que tinha arrebentado o câmbio original de manhã. Foi quando um menino de uns 5 anos vem em minha direção com outros da sua idade:

- Olha, mãe, é o 'tio' da Internet!

Como sou de cromossomo XY, costumo colocar a primeira coisa que vejo na pilha. Era uma camiseta do Firefox (que não desbota nunca, nem solta as tiras, feito as Havaianas).

E assim foi o resto da tarde: todo mundo conhece o Firefox, de um jeito ou de outro. Me perguntaram até onde tinha comprado a camiseta :D.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

Uma vitória da ficção.

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:39:18 GMT

Certo está Juca Kfouri. Pequeno trecho que saiu na Folha Online (http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/podcasts/ult10065u632502.shtml):

"Nós vamos cobrar todas as promessas e vamos ficar chupando o dedo enquanto eles não cumprem como não cumpriram no Pan em 2007. Daqui a pouco vai começar a realidade e aí muitos dos que estão festejando vão começar a chiar" [...]

Consta que o projeto olímpico brasileiro é o mais caro: 13 bião. Mas vamos arredondar para baixo, para dar 25 bilhões, para fazer umas continhas. Me corrijam nas contas por favor -- não quero parecer ser do contra, porque no fundo não sou contra a decisão de ter jogos olímpicos em Pindorama. Só sou contra em 2009, quando estamos ensaiando uma saída do atoleiro (não saímos, não temos saída em vista e o povo ainda é majoritariamente pobre e semi-alfabetizado).

Reitero: me corrijam se minhas contas estiverem erradas:

- Uma cirurgia de ponte de safena, calculo, deva custar 20 mil reais. Então temos 1.250.000 cirurgias a menos. Hoje em dia, problemas do coração são o que mais mata no país, junto com o trânsito.
- Saca aquele computador XO, que queriam dar para todos os alunos? A R$ 500 cada, dá para comprar 50 milhões.
- Uma escola (sem contar custos de manutenção, que aumentam ao longo do tempo) custaria uns 30 milhões, assim, por baixo. Penso em escolas municipais, na periferia, que é onde o povo precisa. 30 milhões cada, e temos 833 escolas a menos. Faz falta.
- Uns tempos atrás, aquele coquetel para conter o HIV custava uns 300 reais. Seriam 83.333.333 (vixe, Python) tratamentos a menos. Tragédia humanitária, se pensarmos na dengue, na febre amarela, gripes, essas coisas que na hora todo mundo sente o aperto.
- Calculam em nove bilhões o trem São Leopoldo - NH. Imagino que esteja superfaturado. Por isso, daria então para fazer todo o trajeto de trem até quase Gramado, o que retornaria para os cofres -- em alguns anos, em desenvolvimento das regiões -- bem mais que 25 bilhões.
- O salário de um professor varia bastante. Digamos então que ganhe 1000 reais por mês (é, eles ganham pouco, sabe como é, nunca tem dinheiro para pagar os professores. Pro carnaval, festas, viagens presidenciais, paradas em feriados, pans e afins sempre tem). Então, daria para pagar 1.923.076 anos-professor (salários por ano, bruto). Pagando a vida inteira (inclusive a aposentadoria) dum professor, daria uns 38.461 professores a menos na rede pública.
- 83.333.333 porções de 300 reais, que é suficiente para comer o básico num mês (minha experiência numa família de 4 pessoas). Comida acaba logo, não resolve o problema da pobreza abjeta, então "cestas básicas" não parecem um bom investimento.
- Não consigo imaginar quantos km de ciclovias e ciclofaixas poderiam ser criadas, desafogando o trânsito assassino do Brasil.

Eu preferiria gastar esse dinheiro com welfare. E isso que não sou 100% a favor a welfare. Pode ser que isso traga um boom de desenvolvimento -- por causa do turismo, por causa de um novo Rio de Janeiro, todas essas coisas. Olhando a história recente, não vai acontecer. Vai ficar na conversa.

Imagino que, como o Pan (que ultrapassou mais de 500% o valor original) a aventura olímpica seja superfaturada. Então multiplique pelo fator que quiser e tire suas conclusões.

O erário brasileiro arrecada, obviamente, muito mais dinheiro que isso. Muito, mas muito mais. Muito mais mesmo. É um pingo na arrecadação, se formos parar para pensar. Não é um pingo se observarmos o que o governo gastou para abafar essa crise (que veio, influenciou o Brasil mas ninguém notou porque estamos basicamente 'queimando gordura' e apostando no fim da crise).

A arrecadação diminui a cada ano (porque o cenário não está tão bom quanto se prega, entre outros fatores) segundo os últimos anos, então o dinheiro fará falta. Dinheiro sempre faz falta, principalmente porque sai do bolso de todo mundo, todos os dias, independente do que fizermos.

Quanto aos jogos em si, me pergunto a relevância. Não consigo encontrá-la; mas isso é porque nunca gostei muito de circo, então nesse caso o problema sou eu.

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Sonho realizado.

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:43:42 GMT

Fascinado. Inclusive com as críticas a discos que eu não concordo.

Mas como tudo que a Penguin publica, é bom.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

Como dirigem os habitantes do Vale (e arredores)

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 11:35:25 GMT

Tentarei em poucas palavras descrever como os "motoristas" (ênfase dupla nas aspas) do Vale dos Sinos e arredores dirigem. Pesquisa empírica, viu?

- Porto Alegre: movimentos bruscos, a lei é como se não existisse para eles. Não existe pisca-alerta. Muita pressa para chegar a lugar nenhum.
- Canoas: Fittipaldis, Sennas e Piquets, tentam sempre o próximo recorde.
- Sapucaia: os carros velhos atrapalham. Muito.
- São Leopoldo: sempre descobrem uma pista a mais na pista atual. Se não descobrem apelam pro acostamento. São vingativos. Alguns andam armados.
- Campo Bom: se percebem que estão sendo seguidos, tentam te atrapalhar ao máximo. Cortadas, freadas bruscas, má educação em geral. Quando ultrapassados, tomam como ofensa à honra e tentam recuperar o posto a todo custo.
- Sapiranga: não reconhecem os limites da estrada, já que quase não há ruas regulares na própria cidade onde vivem. Mestres em cortar e "chegar primeiro".
- Ivoti: parecem sob efeito de algum alucinógeno. Totalmente imprevisíveis.
- Gramado: querem te atropelar com os carro$, porque consideram todos os outros motoristas inferiores sócio, econômica e moralmente. Só olham para a frente, ignoram os lados. Fazem "carão".
- Taquara: delinqüentes ao volante. Uma mistura de capilés com canoenses. Não andam armados, mas têm arma em casa e são "entusiastas".
- Dois Irmãos: como Ivoti, mas costumam frear bruscamente com mais freqüência. Juro que ainda tento entender por quê.
- Nova Hartz: se não for um trator ou coisa assim, parabéns! Encontraste um "motorista" de Nova Hartz. Ligeirinhos esses.
- Três Coroas: nem parece que têm na cidade um templo budista. Apressadinhos.
- Novo Hamburgo: dublês do JackAss, sempre tentando fazer uma coisa impossível com o carro. Muitas vezes conseguem.
- Estância Velha: estão sempre indo para Estância Velha.

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"não caiam nessa de que a eleição eletrônica é passível de fraude"

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 15:37:25 GMT

No BR-Linux (que eu ainda insisto em ler de vez em quando, embora não
deveria) vi um comentário bem chapa-branca sobre a votação eletrônica.
Leia o comentário aqui, nem vou linkar ao original porque a NUVEM pode
desaparecer com ele.

------------------------------------------

Alguns fatos para ajudar a amenizar a paranóia das pessoas:

1 – A urna não tem conexão NENHUMA com nada além de um teclado com
visor colocado para o mesário liberar a urna para aquele título
eleitoral (o eleitor) votar. A “exportação” dos dados para apuração é
feita através de meio magnético, gravado com criptografia. Uma estação
recebe os meios magnéticos e repassa o arquivo (sem remover a
criptografia) para o TRE mais próximo;

2 – Os programas da urna são assinados digitalmente na presença de
fiscais de partidos e outros interessados. Se desconfiar de algo, peça
para conferir a assinatura digital dos programas;

3 – Interceptar os dados transmitidos não ajudará muito se você não
tiver o certificado digital privativo (e a sua senha) que é necessário
para descriptografar o pacote exportado da urna (que é apenas o mesmo
boletim eletrônico emitido em papel, em forma pronta para ser
abosrvido pela apuração, criptografado com o certificado público
daquela eleição). É efeito de usar PKI gente, se você conseguir
quebrar os certificados digitais da Verisign, ICP Brasil e outros,
está no bom caminho para conseguir tentar quebrar o do TSE (não, o
ataque de personificação de certificado por conta de colisão de MD5
não funciona, a chave criptográfica não pode ser atacada assim).
Imagino que esse certificado e sua senha devem ficar MUITO bem
guardados;

4 – Se você tentar trocar o cartão que contém os programas da urna,
violará o lacre (daqueles que se fragmentam) e a urna não será
contabilizada. E, claro, você será preso por ter violado a urna;

5 – Os programas das urnas são os mesmos, independentemente do local.
O que mudam são os dados de candidatos que podem ser votados (e suas
fotos) e eleitores autorizados a votar. Se achar que estão tentando
algo, peça para comparar os programas de alguma cidade do interior de
um estado (onde seja possível apurar com mais facilidade se houve
alguma distorção) com os de alguma capital de outro estado onde seria
mais fácil diluir mudanças de votos entre muitas urnas. Se os
programas forem diferentes, com certeza anularão TODA a eleição;

Então, face ao exposto acima, não caiam nessa de que a eleição
eletrônica é passível de fraude. Papel é muito mais fácil de fraudar.
Não digo que é impossível, mas absurdamente difícil, a ponto de não
ser viável técnica e economicamente.

Flávio

------------------------------------------

Note bem essas frases:

"Os programas das urnas são os mesmos, independentemente do local."
"Se achar que estão tentando algo, peça para comparar os programas de
alguma cidade do interior de um estado (onde seja possível apurar com
mais facilidade se houve alguma distorção) com os de alguma capital de
outro estado" direito em certos rincõe$ do paí$.
"com certeza anularão TODA a eleição;" de certas pessoas no controle da situação.
"não caiam nessa de que a eleição eletrônica é passível de fraude" "Não digo que é impossível, mas absurdamente difícil," "weasel phrase", bem naquelas estilo "não sou racista mas...".

Mas tudo bem, não se preocupem com o cara atrás da cortina. Nem com o
dinheiro para comprar aviões, submarinos, etc. -- afinal, já somos uma
potência e não precisamos desse dinheiro para coisas mais essenciais e
urgentes.

Não se preocupem, o Grande Sindicalista cuida de ti.

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The Dude Abides

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:44:42 GMT

The Dude abides. Just read it and found it entertaining.

From here: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/22694342/the_decade_of_the_dude/print

----------------------------------------------------------------

The Decade of the Dude

How The Big Lebowski — the Coen brothers' 1998 stoner caper starring Jeff Bridges as an L.A. slacker called the Dude — became the most worshipped comedy of its generation
ANDY GREENE

Posted Sep 04, 2008 12:35 PM

This whole room is kind of dude-like," Jeff Bridges says. It's a summer afternoon at Bridges' Santa Barbara, California, estate, and the 58-year-old actor is digging around his dusty garage, looking for memorabilia from The Big Lebowski. Artifacts from the movie are strewn about his Spanish-tiled house. In Bridges' recording studio — where he once cut an album with Michael McDonald — sits one of the bowling-pin hats used in the trippy dream sequence with Bridges and co-star Julianne Moore. In his office are the grimy jelly sandals that Bridges' character, a slacker called the Dude, wore for most of the film. When we walk up to the ocean-view bluff where Bridges likes to hike every day, there's the remains of a cocktail in a dirty cup. It's a Black Russian. As far as I can tell, this seems like the biggest difference between Bridges and his most enduring character, who prefers his Russians white.

Now Bridges, a four-time Oscar nominee, is rooting through a giant stack of cardboard boxes in his garage. After a while, he clutches something and pulls it out.

"Ahhh," he says. "Here it is."

It's the Sweater. As in, the beige and brown zigzag cable-knit sweater that the Dude wears through much of Lebowski. For a die-hard fan, it's like seeing Harrison Ford dig out Indiana Jones' fedora.

Bridges sees me smiling and laughs hysterically. "Here, try it on," he says.

"I can't," I say. It would be wrong.

"C'mon," he says.

I put the Sweater on. It's heavy, and way too big. Bridges grabs my cellphone camera. "Move your right shoulder a little bit to the side," he says. "Head up a little bit, perfect, right there."

To think this is all about a strange movie that bombed when it came out in 1998. But in the 10 years since its woeful release, The Big Lebowski — a tangled Desert Storm-era comedic caper directed by Ethan and Joel Coen (Fargo, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men) — has become the most beloved movie of its generation. Young comic stars like Seth Rogen (the co-writer and star of the current hit Pineapple Express) and Jonah Hill (Superbad) worship the film. The Internet teems with Lebowski tributes and videos (like "The Mii Lebowski," a homage done entirely using Wii video-game characters), and the film has inspired dozens of academic papers, with titles like "Logjammin' and Gutterballs: Masculinities in The Big Lebowski." Several times a year, thousands of costume-wearing fans flock to conventions called Lebowski Fest. Bridges attended a Southern California Fest a few years ago — "My Beatles moment," he says. To date, The Big Lebowski has made $40 million on DVD — more than twice what it made in theaters — and in September, Universal is releasing a 10th-anniversary limited-edition DVD of the film, which will come (of course) in a bowling-ball case.

"No movie is quoted more often amongst [our] friends," says Jim James, the lead singer of Louisville, Kentucky, band My Morning Jacket, who performed at their hometown Lebowski Fest in costume (James dressed as the Dude). "We often hear stories about how it has changed people's lives."

Why has Lebowski become an early- 21st-century phenomenon? The answer may be as complicated as the film's labyrinthine plot, which the Coen brothers loosely based on the L.A.-noir novels of Raymond Chandler. Part of Lebowski mania can surely be attributed to the fact that it's just a very funny premise for a film. Bridges' Dude (real name: Jeffrey Lebowski) is a listless L.A. pothead wiling away the early 1990s playing in a recreational bowling league with friends Walter Sobchak (a mercurial Vietnam vet played by John Goodman) and Donny Kerabatsos (a mild-mannered sidekick played by Steve Buscemi). When a pair of clumsy thugs confuse the Dude with another, wealthier Jeffrey Lebowski — peeing on his prized rug in the process — the Dude is thrown into a screwball escapade that involves a family feud, a gang of nihilists, the avant-garde art world, the SoCal porn scene, lost homework, Tara Reid and a missing toe.

But that's just the start of it. Early in Lebowski, the narrator (a cowboy named the Stranger, played by Sam Elliott) intones, "Sometimes there's a man, who, well, he's the man for his time 'n place." The odd truth is this man — the Dude — may have been a decade ahead of his time. Today, as technology increasingly handcuffs us to schedules and appointments — in the time it takes you to read this, you've missed three e-mails — there's something comforting about a fortysomething character who will blow an evening lying in the bathtub, getting high and listening to an audiotape of whale songs. He's not a 21st-century man. Nor is he Iron Man — and he's certainly not Batman. The Dude doesn't care about a job, a salary, a 401(k), and definitely not an iPhone. The Dude just is, and he's happy.

"There's a freedom to The Big Lebowski," theorizes Philip Seymour Hoffman, who played Brandt, the wealthy Lebowski's obsequious personal assistant. "The Dude abides, and I think that's something people really yearn for, to be able to live their life like that. You can see why young people would enjoy that."

"Lebowski is one of those rare magnets of the universe that has the power to change time and space, to draw people and events together," says James.

"The Dude is like Dirty Harry," says the brash conservative screenwriter John Milius (Apocalypse Now, Dirty Harry), one of the Coen brothers' inspirations for Goodman's manic vet, Walter Sobchak. "Dirty Harry became a movement. And the Dude became a movement. It's symbolic of a whole way of life."

No one is more surprised by the extended life of Lebowski than the people who made it. When I meet him one afternoon in L.A., Goodman immediately tells me it's his "favorite thing [he's] ever worked on," and he laughs uproariously when I quote him some of Walter's best lines (a favorite: "Say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos"). Moore, who played Maude, the estranged artist daughter of the wealthy Jeffrey Lebowski, says it's "one of the movies people mention most to me. I keep saying that one of these days I'm going to go to a Lebowski Fest." Adds Buscemi, who has appeared in nearly 100 films, including a few Oscar winners, "I'll pass three guys on the street, and they may just give me a nod. They don't even have to say a line from the movie. I know what movie they're thinking about."

Bridges, too, says that he never really saw The Big Lebowski's second life coming. An actor's actor, he has played rowdy townies (The Last Picture Show), quiet aliens (Starman), louche piano players (The Fabulous Baker Boys) — but none have had the impact of the Dude. And while some actors have difficulty accepting the indelibility of a well-loved character, that is not the case with Bridges. He is at peace with the Dude. When asked if he would be upset if The Big Lebowski is the movie he's most remembered for, Bridges doesn't hesitate. "No," he says. "Not at all."

When Joel and Ethan Coen began writing The Big Lebowski, they were at a low point in their careers. After starting with a pair of hits, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, the Minneapolis-suburb-raised brothers had churned out a string of critically worshipped box-office disasters: Barton Fink, Miller's Crossing and The Hudsucker Proxy. Reeling from Hudsucker (a big-industry spoof that cost $25 million and made less than $3 million back), the Coens began work on two separate scripts. The first was Lebowski. The second was a much darker film about a desperate car salesman who hires two thugs to kidnap his wife. Called Fargo, the film became a touchstone of the mid-1990s independent-film explosion — and it made money. It was nominated for seven Oscars, winning Best Actress (Frances McDormand) and Best Original Screenplay, with the Coens sharing the latter award.

But the wild success of Fargo left the Coens confused. "If a movie like Fargo succeeds, then clearly nothing makes much sense," Ethan said at the time. "You might as well make whatever kind of movie you want and hope for the best." Taking that to heart, they returned to finish The Big Lebowski, a film that had been in the back of their minds for years. To form the plot, they drew inspiration from Chandler as well as from the real-life exploits of their eccentric L.A. friends. "A couple of the characters in The Big Lebowski are, very loosely, inspired by real people," Ethan said in 1998. "We know a guy who's a middle-aged hippie pothead, and another who's a Vietnam vet who's totally defined by, and obsessed with, the time he spent in Vietnam. We find it interesting for our characters to be products of the Sixties in some way, but set in the Nineties." (The Coens — as is their frequent position regarding Lebowski in recent years — declined to be interviewed for this story.)

Besides Milius, the main inspiration for Lebowski's Vietnam vet was Peter Exline, a script doctor the Coens met while making Blood Simple, whom they called "Uncle Pete, the philosopher king of Hollywood." A thin, gray-haired man who bears a faint resemblance to Beatles producer George Martin, Exline, with his outsize personality and his lifetime of insane stories, formed the backbone of the film. "At one point, I couldn't go 10 minutes without mentioning Vietnam," admits Exline. He also played in a Hollywood softball league in the mid-1980s — Exline recalls an angry Tony Danza once walking off the field during a game — which the Coens used as fodder for Lebowski's wild bowling league.

Then there's the rug. The famous Lebowski rug has its origins from a party at Exline's house in the late 1980s, which the Coens attended. Exline had just laid down a fake Persian rug in his living room, picked up from neighbors who had moved out. "As I'm barbecuing, every 15 minutes or so I'd look down and say, 'Doesn't this rug tie the room together?' " Exline says. "I keep milking this joke, and everyone's really laughing."

At the same party, Exline says, he told the Coens and his guests a bizarre story about the time his Mazda was stolen and wound up in an impound lot. Inside the recovered car, Exline found a kid's math homework assignment, which led Exline and his friend and fellow vet Lew Abernathy to the home of a 14-year-old kid named Jaik Freeman. "We sit down, and Lew got out the homework. He's walking around the living room like Perry Mason. He sticks it in Jaik's face and goes, 'We know you stole the car, Jaik.' " The homework incident, too, was written into The Big Lebowski.

"I remember when Pete told us that [homework] story and thinking there was something quintessentially L.A. about it," Joel Coen once said. "But L.A. in a very Chandler-ian way."

Chandler, of course, famously wrote about a gritty nighttime L.A. in which his protagonist, detective Philip Marlowe, encounters a series of increasingly weird characters the closer he gets to solving a crime. The Coens drew inspiration from classic Chandler novels such as The Big Sleep, which features a wheelchair-bound millionaire, a beautiful wild child, pornographers and an angry heiress who attempts to seduce the hero. The Lebowski plot also mirrors Farewell, My Lovely, in which Marlowe is a passenger in a ridiculously complicated plot, and is beaten up and knocked unconscious throughout the story.

The Coens decided the central premise of Lebowski would be the replacing of the canny Marlowe with a person almost incapable of solving a caper. Their thoughts immediately turned to Jeff "the Dude" Dowd, a former 1960s activist (and member of the Seattle 7) who helped them find distribution for their first film, Blood Simple. A bear of a man with an unbelievable penchant for talking (during the course of a two-hour phone interview, I managed to ask about three questions), Dowd spent many of his post-activist years in the mid-1970s carousing in the Seattle bar scene, waiting for the heat on his troublemaking past to die down. "Yes, we drank White Russians," Dowd confirms. "They took that period of the Dude, froze him in time and moved him up to 1991. On a fundamental level, Jeff Bridges got my body language down entirely . . . the semi-mumbling talking, going off on tangents and stuff like that. I'm an easy mimic. Redford used to do one of me at Sundance when it first started."

When they wrote the script, the Coens didn't have any particular actor in mind for the Dude. But one name came up early: Mel Gibson, then one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Ethan and Joel ran the possibility past Ethan's old college buddy Bill Robertson, who would go on to write a book called "The Big Lebowski": The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. "I told them, 'Maybe it's time for you to grow up, get the star and be done with it,' " Robertson says. But Gibson didn't take the pitch too seriously, and the Coens moved on with their Dude search, inviting Jeff Bridges to a meeting at the Broadway Deli in Santa Monica.

There, Ethan laid out the story of Lebowski and described the character of the Dude as someone who just lounges around all day, hangs out with his buddies and smokes weed.

A light went on above Bridges' head. "I'm one of those guys," he said.

Filming of Lebowski began on January 27th, 1997, and lasted three months. As on all of their movies before 2004's The Ladykillers, Joel got sole directing credit and Ethan was listed as the producer. In actuality, both men split the duties right down the center. "It was unheard of back then," says Universal executive Rick Finkelstein, who worked on Lebowski. "We had to get a waiver from the Directors Guild in order to do that, because they have a rule against it." Goodman, who also starred in Barton Fink and Raising Arizona, remains fascinated by the brothers' unique relationship. "They share a uni-mind," he says.

Bridges can recall seeing the duo argue only once on the set. "It was while filming the dream sequence and my head was going to hit the bowling pins," he says. "Joel said, 'When you hit the pins, kind of grimace because it's going to hurt.' Ethan replied, 'Really? I always thought he would kind of smile when he hits the pins.' I'm looking back and forth like, 'Oh, no, here it comes.' Finally, they just said, 'Aw, let's just shoot it both ways and deal with it in the editors' room.' " (Ethan ultimately won.)

Curiously, Bridges had vowed to abstain from smoking weed until the movie was in the can. "I wanted to have a clear head," he tells me. Bridges says he only occasionally smokes now: "Usually around Christmastime is when the harvest comes in, and somebody will say, 'Hey! Look what I got!' "

Anyone who's worked on a Coens set marvels at the attention to detail. Every camera angle is drawn out on a storyboard months before filming begins, first in extremely crude thumbnail sketches Ethan creates and later in more fleshed-out drawings by the Coens' longtime storyboard artist, J. Todd Anderson. Looking at them now, you see that a sketch of a relatively insignificant shot — like a close-up of Jesus, a rival bowler and sex offender, ringing the doorbell as he goes door-to-door telling his neighbors about his criminal history — matches the finished scene with perfect precision. "The Coens are the most fiscally responsible filmmakers that I've come across," says Finkelstein. "Whatever they tell you, you know you can take it to the bank. They're so precise in their vision and execution that it's just astounding."

The Coens are also willing to make less money on a movie if it means they have more control. When Bridges got his initial offer for the $15 million Lebowski, he was shocked. "It was a split between John [Goodman], me and the Coen brothers," he says. "I got the initial offer, and I said, 'Jesus, this is the best you guys can do? You won the Academy Award, and this is the kind of offer you're making me, man? Come on, we can do better than that.' And they said, 'No, we really don't want to make it any bigger deal than this, because we want the financiers to be beholden to us. We don't want to be beholden to them.' They were getting a great deal having these Academy Award winners for very little. Therefore, the atmosphere on the set was so relaxed, no pressure."

As for the script, the cast of The Big Lebowski still talk about it as if it were a holy document passed down from the heavens, with no room for deviation. Consider the line the Coens wrote for the Dude to say to the wealthy Lebowski in the back of a limousine:

"I — the royal we, you know, the editorial — I dropped off the money, exactly as per — look, I've got certain information, certain things have come to light, and uh,"

"[I did] my best to follow this script, word, by ellipses, by 'fuck,' by 'man,' every little thing," Bridges says. "I tried to put an extra 'man' in or an extra 'fuck,' or a pause or something, and it didn't feel as right. It felt undone. It was just written so perfectly." (Goodman remembers the only nonscripted lines to hit the screen come at the very end, when the Dude calls the wealthy Lebowski a "human paraquat.")

"Everything in the script has intention to the point that it's rhythmic," Moore says. "I remember Ethan just coming up and giving a direction where he asked me to remove [a word]. Those are the kind of directions they would give because they have that much specificity."

When The Big Lebowski hit theaters on March 6th, 1998, critical reaction was mixed. Most declared it an overindulgent, too-quirky departure from the comparatively sparse Fargo; a few found it hilarious. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert's argument over the movie perfectly encapsulated the debate. Ebert: "Few movies could equal [Fargo], and this one doesn't — though it is weirdly engaging." Siskel was much harsher. "I just think that the humor is uninspired," he said. "Isn't kidnapping for ransom a tired plot these days? Kingpin was a much funnier movie set in the world of bowling. The Jeff Bridges character wasn't worth my time. There's no heart to him. The Big Lebowski? A big disappointment."

At the box office, America was still in the midst of Titanic mania. That March weekend, the three-hour James Cameron epic would win its 12th straight weekend box-office battle with a $17.6 million haul. The Big Lebowski opened in sixth place that weekend with a tepid $5.5 million, placing it just $300,000 above Good Will Hunting, which had come out three and a half months earlier. The shine of Fargo was all but forgotten: The Coens were back to making overpriced disasters.

"I thought it was hysterical, and I thought that Jeff and John were geniuses and they both deserved Academy Awards," says Moore. "Nobody saw it, and I was like, 'What?!'"

"After this incredibly controlled minimalist gem that Fargo was perceived to be, The Big Lebowski was like this Tourette's outburst in the limo on the way home from the Academy Awards," says Robertson. He gives another analogy: "It's like they were opera stars who sang a perfect aria — and farted as they walked offstage."

The rise of The Big Lebowski from bomb to late-blooming cult sensation was gradual. Many of its biggest fans had the same initial reaction as Gene Siskel. "I was indifferent to it [at first]," says Lebowski Fest co-founder Will Russell, 32, who runs a T-shirt shop in Louisville. "It's very convoluted. I think everyone comes to it the same way they come to any other movie — expecting the plot to carry the [film]. What you find is that the plot is ultimately unsatisfying. [The plot] is just the framework they used to build these great characters and this amazing experience." Russell says he's watched Lebowski more than 100 times: "It's just two hours of bliss."

Indeed, as audiences started revisiting Lebowski, momentum began to build. By 2001, movie theaters were showing it at midnight, alongside cult classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Lebowski quotes ("Shut the fuck up, Donny!" "Over the line!") became a new form of communication on college campuses. Cable stations began showing the movie regularly (Goodman's line "This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass" was changed — rumor has it by the Coens — to the friendlier "This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps"). Record stores started selling Lebowski posters next to the one of Bob Marley smoking a joint, and YouTube started filling up with countless tribute videos — ranging from teenagers re-creating scenes to Fred and Barney from The Flintstones mouthing lines from the Dude and Walter.
Cast members, initially crushed by the movie's poor performance, began seeing evidence of this groundswell about five years ago. "I noticed more and more that the [fans] were younger and younger," Goodman says. "Sometimes they'll throw out a 'Shut the fuck up, Donny.' " Buscemi, who lives in New York, says he'll get Lebowski lines said to him all the time on the street.

Meanwhile, John Turturro — who has a riveting three minutes of screen time as Jesus, the purple-jumpsuit-wearing bowler/sex offender — says autograph-seekers ask him to sign his most famous line, "You don't fuck with the Jesus," constantly. "The tragedy of [Lebowski] is that whoever owned the movie gave away my jumpsuit to a thrift store," Turturro says. "That could have gone for a fortune to charity."

Recently, Turturro has been discussing the possibility of a Lebowski sequel with the Coens, starring Jesus. "We've been talking about it for a while," Turturro says. "Even if they wouldn't do it, they could just write it, and then I'll do it." The story is simple: Jesus gets out of jail and lands a job as a bus driver for a girls' high school volleyball team. "The movie will be about him dealing with his demons," Turturro says. "It will be like a combination of Rocky and The Bad News Bears. At the very least we'd have to have a Dude cameo."

Goodman — who appears to have gained a good 50 pounds since Lebowski was filmed — also hopes to work with the Coen brothers again one day, but he doesn't think the call will come any time soon. "After a while, [my] characters got too similar," he says. "Their names were even similar, so we had to part company. I kind of miss those days. There's a lot of things I'd do differently, but you can't do that. It's against the laws of nature. Time travels on."

If Lebowski ever gets a sequel, it will have a rabid audience among the growing legion of Lebowski Fest conventioneers. It was six years ago when Will Russell and his friend Scott Shuffitt put up fliers around their hometown of Louisville, inviting fans to a Lebowski party at a local bowling alley. "We thought 20 of our friends would show up," Russell says. "It ended up with 150 people — some even from out of state." The Lebowski Fest is now a five-times-a-year event that attracts thousands of "achievers" (the preferred nomenclature of Lebowski fans) who dress up in themed costumes (a Creedence cassette tape, little Larry's homework) while pounding White Russians. Actors with bit parts like Robin Jones (the Ralph's supermarket checkout girl who sells the Dude half-and-half at the start of the movie) regularly attend, but in 2005, pandemonium broke out when Bridges came out onstage at an L.A. Fest and performed "The Man in Me" — the long-forgotten Dylan classic that is basically The Big Lebowski's theme song — with his band. "I came out, and I was playing to a sea of Dudes," says Bridges. "I was laughing my ass off."

It may make Bridges laugh, but it's clear the Dude has struck a generational chord, like Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider or John Belushi in Animal House. "He's sort of a weird role model," says Robertson. "Young people today are pressured to perform and perform so that their grade-point averages will be incredible. And the whole time they're watching society spend away their future and realize their standard of living is going to be much lower than their parents'." That's why younger fans gravitate toward the Dude, Robertson says, "a character who is reasonably smart, though doobie-addled and by anyone's standards a failure, but who is still an incredibly good-hearted person with a sense of loyalty to his friends. At the end of the movie, what you're left with is that [it's OK] if you are a loser so long as you're a good person." Robertson has discussed this theory at Lebowski Fest. Listeners "seemed to tear up at that," he says.

Eating brunch in the Four Seasons-Biltmore Santa Barbara, Bridges contemplates how close the Dude is to his own self. "In the movie, life keeps saying to him, 'Oh, you're pretty mellow, Dude — check this out!' I can relate to that."

I've noticed the line between Bridges and the Dude is pretty blurry. "I think our basic philosophies are the same," he says. Bridges exudes a chilled-out vibe, and he doesn't flinch when a woman appears at our table and, acting like a long-lost friend, congratulates him on the success of Iron Man, in which Bridges plays Obadiah Stane, Iron Man's financier rival.

"I can't remember where I know that woman from," he says as she walks away.

When I ask Bridges how he's different than the Dude, he struggles to find the words. "Maybe the difference between us is . . . I'm more . . . is 'ambitious' the right word? Or 'driven'? I can't think of too many ways. . . . Every time I think of a way I'm different, my mind counters it that way and says, 'No, the Dude would do that.' My mind swims when you ask me that question."

A month later, Bridges calls me and confesses he's still thinking about the question. "As an actor, I like to be able to slip in and out of character," he says. "In a way, I'm all my characters, but I was thinking about our last conversation this morning and what Robert Downey does at the end of Iron Man. At that press conference, he's denying who he is in front of the camera, then he turns and says, 'I am Iron Man. . . .' I could look right at the camera and say, 'I am the Dude.'"

[From Issue 1060 — September 4, 2008]

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Going Dutch, and Saying It Right

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:21:02 GMT

"Breuckelen" shocked me the most.

From here: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/dutch-pronounciations/?pagemode=print

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September 4, 2009, 7:30 am Going Dutch, and Saying It Right By Jennifer 8. Lee

Updated, Sept. 7 | These days New York is a (mostly) English-speaking locale, but Dutch influence is all over the city. It pops up in the majority of our boroughs (Brooklyn, Staten Island and the Bronx), neighborhoods from north to south (Harlem, Coney Island, Flushing, Bushwick) and in famed street names (Bowery, Broadway).
Reminders of the deep connections between the Netherlands and our city have been a constant chime this year, with the 400th anniversary celebration of Henry Hudson’s journey to what is now New York. (Some people have used guerrilla tactics in the subway to remind us of the Dutch origins of some names.)

But while City Room had read endlessly about the Dutch origins of the names (what schoolchild doesn’t learn about Harlem and Amsterdam), we had no idea how to pronounce many of them. Dutch — unlike French, Spanish or German — is not a language heard all that often in American movies, nor is it a common high school language offering. So the consonant combinations and puckered vowels are startling to an American eye and ear. Does “Flushing” really sound like “Vlissingen,” the Dutch city for which it is named?

Luckily, City Room had a chance on Thursday afternoon to ask pre-eminent Dutch experts in America: the Dutch ambassador, Renée Jones-Bos, and the consul general, Hugo Gajus Scheltema. They were announcing the kickoff of NY400 Week, a series of anniversary events that take place from Tuesday to Sept. 13.

We offered to say the current name of a place in New York City, and they offered to help us pronounce it in the original Dutch.

City Room started with an easy one: Harlem, which is named after Haarlem, a municipality and a city in the northern part of the Netherlands.

“Haahr-lem,” Ms. Jones-Bos said. “You just make the A longer.” She nodded in approval at our attempts.

What about Brooklyn, named after the Dutch town of Breuckelen, now spelled as Breukelen, between Amsterdam and Utrecht. (Fun fact: In 1959, when Queen Beatrix was still a princess, she became an honorary citizen of Brooklyn.)

“Bro-ke-lyn,” she said with a puckered lilt we found difficult to mimic. “It has an extra syllable.”

City Room copied her sounds as best we could, and we were rolling along.

Then things started going downhill.

Coney Island, which came from the Dutch Conyne Eylandt?

She brightened up at the word “conyne.” “It’s ‘rabbit,’ ” she said.

There were a lot of rabbits on the island when the Dutch arrived, she said. But the pronunciation is where things got hairy. It sounded like Ms. Jones-Bos said “Ko-nay-nen” and then a clipped version of “island.”

And what about Flushing, which is named for the aforementioned Vlissingen? Was V pronounced like F in Dutch? (Who knows? After all, W is pronounced like V in Polish, and J is pronounced like H in Spanish.)

“Ve-le-is-sing-nen.” (Or so it sounded to us.) That was definitely a V sound in the beginning, but then it got lost in a slosh of vowels and S’s.

City Room asked, if it really begins with a V sound, where did the F sound come from?

“The English turned the V more into an F sound,” said Mr. Scheltema, who is overseeing a travel guide of New York’s Dutch aspects. He offered another example: Flatbush in the original Dutch was “Vlakke bos.” He wrote it down in the City Room notebook so we would not have to struggle with spelling it out.

Bowery? In the original Dutch, it was was “bouwerij,” which had an intimidating ending for an English speaker.

“Bow-er-ay,” Ms. Jones-Bos said. (Where did that J go, City Room wondered. Was she hiding it from us? Or maybe a J is like a Y in the beginning of words and at the end. Indeed, at least IJ is.) “Means farm.”

She said, “It’s a 17th-century word.” There is a modern word for farm she said, pronouncing something like “bo-er-der-y,” or Bowery with an extra D thrown in.

Gansevoort?

“Han-se-vort,” Ms. Jones-Bos said. The G became an H (or something like it). Ah-ha! We knew there would be some transposition of consonants in Dutch. ” ‘Hans’ means goose,” she said (though if she were writing this she would write, ” ‘Gans’ means goose.”)

That Dutch G/H was beyond City Room’s vocal muscles. ” ‘H’ is a very Dutch sound,” she said sympathetically. “It is a very guttural sound. It’s a very difficult thing to pronounce for other people.”

Mr. Scheltema then offered one that we didn’t have on our list: Yankees.

Yankee comes from “Jan-Kees,” he said. “It’s a very common name for a Dutch man. They used to call these New Yorkers, most of whom were Dutchmen, ‘Jankees.’ ”

So Yankee became synonymous for New Yorker, he said. (Though, apparently, there is some debate over the linguistic origin of the name).

(If you want to listen to these pronunciations, a Dutch native speaker has compiled audio clips of himself saying the names from old New York).

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Desmonte

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:01:37 GMT

Assim fica melhor. É porque daqui a alguns dias chega a terceira (gasp!) bicicleta.

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Sobre a guerra da Record x Globo

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:04:21 GMT

Não vou falar nada. Pra variar, porque todo mundo tem opinião para tudo.

Principalmente quando é opinião paga.

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O downtime do twitter prova que

Thu, 06 Aug 2009 17:23:01 GMT

Não se deve jogar os ovos na mesma cesta. Ou depender de um único serviço, sem múltiplos pontos onde pode falhar.

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Uma que outra foto de SP.

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 14:42:00 GMT

Visitei o mundo em SP. Algumas fotos para quem possa interessar.

Eis a primeira palavra que aprendi a ler. Viva a semiótica.

Abaixo, a Rua Proibida mais freqüentada da capital. Prejudicou meu sono, mas o apart-hotel era excelente. Senti falta de trazer meu joystick de PS2/PC, porque tinha um disco de Tie Fighter no CD-ROM do laptop que eu levei! Assim as noites teriam parecido menos barulhentas.

Luxo e o$tentação. Roupas que na real são fabricadas a R$ 15 mas vêm com dois zeros depois.

O mais fantástico (IMHO) de se ir na Liberdade é achar imprensa com línguas que não se entende, por não utilizarem o alfabeto latino ou cirílico. Talvez foi a única vez que me senti fora do país, porque a arquitetura "apartamento-impossivelmente-caro" e "geometria-mais-cara-por-metro-quadrado" (talvez também o inconfundível estilo "centro-abandonado-cheio-de-mendigos") já está espalhada pelo país; não há nada de muito original.

Ironia das ironias, comprei um dicionário de alemão por ali, numa Saraiva qualquer.

Provavelmente o lugar mais tranqüilo da cidade (Idichienópolis). O legal é que o guardinha não sabia explicar o que era (no, really). O taxista, então, achou que eu iria encontrar "muitos da minha religião por ali" (sic).

Street art (mais conhecido por desenfeiamento, ou vagabundagem, ou arte-de-rua, whatever) em abundância. No caso de estruturas cinzas e sem-graça, apoio veementemente o uso de figurinhas sem sentido. Se o prédio é bonito é bandidagem.

Trânsito amigo. Nem é tão irônico: bateram no nosso carro em Torres (RS).

Um dos meus sonhos era visitar o Largo do Arouche e entrar nas AROUCHE TOWERS. Não aconteceu.

Na volta, uma parada por Joinville (aka "Chuville"). Embora essa foto seja a da "ida", a volta estava igual. Precisava de um descanso do extremo geometrismo da capital de facto do Brasil. E eu adoro moinhos.

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Programming Can Ruin Your Life

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:57:28 GMT

Yes it can. Oh how it's true.

From 2007 but that's how it is.

From here: ( http://devizen.com/blog/2007/09/11/ruin/ )

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Programming Can Ruin Your Life
There are many essays and articles extolling the virtues of becoming a great programmer. You’ll have a sharp mind, great abstract reasoning skills, and a chance to become wealthy by working mere hours a day. This is what you’ve heard, right?

Sadly, no one ever tells you about the ways in which it will adversely affect your life. The physical effects are obvious. You’ll spend most of your time sitting, probably in an uncomfortable chair that doesn’t promote good posture. You’ll fuel yourself with food that is readily available, meaning it’s more than likely processed and full of sugar and you’ll likely choose either coffee or soda to stave off the drowsiness. A coworker once remarked, “If it doesn’t come out of a vending machine, programmers don’t eat it.”

But I’m not particularly interested in the health risks, as I said, they’re obvious. So what am I talking about? Programming changes more than your body. Programming changes the way you think. You might hear a programmer say, “I like python because it matches the way I think.” Or is it really that they’ve learned to think in python? Regardless of the language employed, you think differently when you program. No decent programmer will deny that. This is why it’s often so hard to explain to someone “how you do that” because, as clear as your explanation may be, you simply think differently. It is this change in thinking that can ruin your life.

The application of programming specific processes and habits to the everyday is where peril lies. The same traits that make you a great programmer can make you an awkward, misunderstood and miserable human being.

Programming presents you with a problem and allows you to eventually solve it provided you don’t quit. A solution is out there somewhere. Make enough attempts and chances are you’ll eventually prevail. Aren’t computers great? They afford a large degree of freedom in problem solving. If nothing else, you are able to make as may attempts as you please and it will happily execute each one. This instills in you a sense that failure is not final. Any obstacle can be hurdled. This is not true in the real world. While you may find second chances now and again, the wheels that turn in the big blue room are largely unforgiving. Time marches on in one direction.

When faced with an interesting programming problem your mind will chew it over in the background. Maybe it’s an algorithm you need to develop, maybe it’s a tricky architecture problem, maybe it’s data that needs to be modeled. It doesn’t matter. Your mind will quietly work the problem over in search of a solution. The “ah-ha!” moment will come when you’re in the shower, or playing Tetris. This practice of constant churning will slowly work its way into the rest of your life. Each problem or puzzle you encounter will start it’s own thread; the toughest and most troubling of which will be blocking.

A program is highly malleable. You can make a nearly unlimited number of changes. You can re-implement. You can optimize. You can run the compile-test-debug cycle ad infinitum. Make a change, see a result. Life is not like this. Every action you take is followed by a commit and the transaction cannot be rolled back. You can continue to make changes and optimizations as you move forward but the effects of these will not be immediately apparent. The instant feedback of development is sorely lacking in real life. Furthermore, your changes might simply be ignored. Data will be skipped. Blocks will not be executed. Optimizations will go unnoticed. The world is resistant to your tinkering.

Programmers become obsessed with perfection. This is why they are constantly talking about rewrites. They cannot resist optimum solutions. Perfection requires tossing aside mediocre ideas in search of great ones. A good programmer would rather leave a problem temporarily unsolved than solve it poorly. A good solution takes into account all predictable outcomes and solves the largest number of them in the most efficient way. This mindset prevents you from writing code with limited utility and life span. While it’s a wonderful trait to have in programming, the demons of scope and efficiency will start to assert themselves on your ordinary life. You will avoid taking care of simple things because the solution is inelegant or simply feels wrong. Time to think will no doubt yield a better result, you’ll say.

The obsession with perfection develops a forward-thinking mindset. The ability to anticipate provides a huge advantage because you won’t waste your time implementing solutions that ultimately fail due to short-sightedness or lack of imagination. You will constantly be mapping out flows and running the permutations through your head. Back in the real world, you will find yourself piecing together plans of breath-taking size and beauty that simultaneously resolve multiple problems and fulfill numerous dreams. You will attempt to kill every bird with one stone. The impossibility of actualizing these plans will be agonizing, yet your mind will continue to pour over every detail as it seeks to anticipate every possible outcome and construct the perfect solution.

Everything is now data. Every bit is worthy of attention. Every interaction is worthy of analysis. Your mind has been trained to do this since it is usually the insignificant or subtle bits that have to be rooted out when debugging. You will find it frustrating that everyone else does not collect and analyze data. You will notice details that others simply gloss over. Your penchant for detail and over-analysis will earn you strange glances and confused shrugs. Your decision making process will resemble that of your peers less and less.

The frantic pace of the software world will instill in you a sense of panic and urgency. You must do everything now. Tomorrow is too late. The thought of working constantly will no longer seem foreign or ridiculous. You will spend your free time feeling guilty about not working. But you will be working. Your hands may not be at the keyboard, but your mind will be.

The romanticized story of young upstarts toiling away in a garage to build the world’s next great company is alluring. It’s easy to convince yourself that the dream is there for the taking. But understand that there are many factors you cannot control. Luck and timing being but two. Don’t miss the life you have in the search for the one you think you want. To quote John Lennon, “Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.” But perhaps Pascal said it best, “We never keep to the present. We … anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is… [We] think of how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching… Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.”

Is programming the road to ruin? Or is it that those with a predilection for detail and mental gymnastics find themselves drawn to it. Perhaps it simply exacerbates a pre-existing mindset. There are certainly other traits (stereotypical or not) that most programmers seem to share. I have focused mainly on the negative impacts, but there are certainly positive ones as well. All things listed as bad can be good if simply kept in check. Obsession is dangerous, and anything great requires obsession. Programming is no exception.

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The Height Gap (New Yorker)

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:43:04 GMT

From New Yorker magazine, "over lange mensen".

( here: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/04/05/040405fa_fact?printable=true )

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The Height Gap

Why Europeans are getting taller and taller-and Americans aren’t.

by Burkhard Bilger April 5, 2004

When Vincent van Gogh was thirty-one years old, in the fall of 1883, he travelled to the bleak moors of northern Holland and stayed at a tavern in the village of Stuifzand. The local countryside was hardly inhabited then—“Locus Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia,” an old map called it: “A deserted and impenetrable place of many swamps”—but a few farmers and former convicts had managed to carve a living from it. They dug peat, brewed illegal gin, and placed poles across the marshes to navigate by. Any squatter who could keep his chimney smoking for a full year earned title to the land he cleared.

There is little record of what happened to van Gogh in Stuifzand—whether he got lost in the marshes or traded sketches for shots at the bar. When I visited the village, the locals mentioned him merely to illustrate an even greater national obsession: height. At the old tavern, which is now a private home, I was shown the tiny alcove where the painter probably slept. “It looks like it would fit only a child,” J. W. Drukker, the current owner, told me. Then he and his wife, Joke (a common Dutch name, they explained, pronounced “Yoh-keh”), led me down the hall, to a sequence of pencil marks on a doorjamb. “My son, he is two metres,” Joke told me, pointing to the topmost mark, six and a half feet from the floor. “His feet”—she held her hands about eighteen inches apart—“for waterskiing.” Joke herself is six feet one, with blond tresses and shoulders like a Valkyrie. Drukker is six feet two.

The Netherlands, as any European can tell you, has become a land of giants. In a century’s time, the Dutch have gone from being among the smallest people in Europe to the largest in the world. The men now average six feet one—seven inches taller than in van Gogh’s day—and the women five feet eight. The national organization of tall people, Klub Lange Mensen, has considerable lobbying power. From Rotterdam to Eindhoven, ceilings have had to be lifted, furniture redesigned, lintels raised to keep foreheads from smacking them. Many hotels now offer twenty-centimetre bed extensions, and ambulances on occasion must keep their back doors open, to allow for patients’ legs. “We will not go through the ceiling,” the pediatrician Hans van Wieringen assured me, after summarizing national height surveys that he had coördinated. “But it is possible that we will grow another ten centimetres.”

Walking along the canals of Amsterdam and Delft, I had an odd sensation of drowning—not because the crowds were so thick but because I couldn’t lift my head above them. I’m five feet ten and a half—about an inch taller than the average in the United States—but, like most men I know, I tend to round the number up. Tall men, a series of studies has shown, benefit from a significant bias. They get married sooner, get promoted quicker, and earn higher wages. According to one recent study, the average six-foot worker earns a hundred and sixty-six thousand dollars more, over a thirty-year period, than his five-foot-five-inch counterpart—about eight hundred dollars more per inch per year. Short men are unlucky in politics (only five of forty-three Presidents have been shorter than average) and unluckier in love. A survey of some six thousand adolescents in the nineteen-sixties showed that the tallest boys were the first to get dates. The only ones more successful were those who got to choose their own clothes.

Like many biases, this one has a certain basis in fact. Over the past thirty years, a new breed of “anthropometric historians” has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health-care coverage. In our height lies our history.

Ifirst heard of anthropometric history from John Komlos—the pope of the field, as one of his colleagues described him. Komlos, who is a professor at the University of Munich, has the look of an Old World tailor—sharp eyes, receding hairline, bottlebrush mustache—and the scholarly instincts of a born scavenger. For twenty years, he has rummaged through archives on both sides of the Atlantic, gathering hundreds of thousands of height records in search of trends that others may have missed.

In his way, Komlos was born to do such research. He stands five inches shy of six feet, and he blames much of the gap on history. His parents were Hungarian Jews who lived in Budapest during the Second World War. In 1944, when his mother was pregnant with him, the Nazis took control of the city and the Russians were poised for a counterattack. “The bombardment started almost simultaneously with my birth,” Komlos told me. (His English is perfect, aside from a few oddly flattened vowels, but he speaks with an exaggerated drawl, as if he had learned the language by watching old Westerns.) His parents managed to get to a bombed-out hospital, using fake identity papers, and to take the baby back safely to the family hideout. But there was little food, and Komlos cried incessantly. One relative told his mother to throw the baby outside, since he wasn’t going to make it anyway.

The Hungarian Communists took over the city in 1948, but Komlos’s diet improved only slightly. During the war, his father, Herbert, had spent months in a Hungarian forced-labor battalion outside Stalingrad, returning on foot when the Russians broke the German siege, in the winter of 1943. After the war, Herbert Komlos was imprisoned again, this time by the Communists. “They trumped up some charges because they said he was middle-class,” Komlos said. “He was working odd jobs at the time and had only a fourth-grade education.” When the Hungarian revolution came, in 1956, Herbert supported it. A month later, when it failed, he packed up his family and fled for America.

Biologists say that we achieve our stature in three spurts: the first in infancy, the second between the ages of six and eight, the last in adolescence. Any decent diet can send us sprouting at these ages, but take away any one of forty-five or fifty essential nutrients and the body stops growing. (“Iodine deficiency alone can knock off ten centimetres and fifteen I.Q. points,” one nutritionist told me.) Komlos was twelve years old when he left Hungary, and he had been malnourished most of his life. His first growth spurt had been cut short; his second was hardly more successful. But if heights have obsessed him over the last twenty years it’s because of what happened next, in his adolescence.

When Komlos and his parents arrived in Chicago, in the winter of 1956, America was a land of almost mythical abundance. For more than two centuries, its people had been so healthy and so prosperous that they towered above the rest of the world—about four inches above the Dutch, for example, for most of the nineteenth century. To Komlos, raised on the black bread and thin broth of Communist Hungary, Chicago’s all-you-can-eat restaurants were astonishing. “I was just amazed that these things existed,” he says. But he found the restaurants not nearly as impressive as the giants who fed there.

There is a rueful tone to his nostalgia. His father arrived with no money, no English, and no marketable skills, Komlos says. For a year, he worked in a factory, making belts, for a dollar an hour. When it was clear that he would never be promoted, he quit and started his own business, making leather watchbands at home. In Hungary, there had always been a market for handmade goods, but Chicago stores were full of cheap imports. To compete with Hong Kong, Herbert Komlos had to work sixteen hours a day while his wife worked ten, and John put in twenty-five hours on the weekend. They ate better than in the old country, but only a little. “Everyone has a story like mine, if they were born with my religion in my part of the world,” Komlos says. And those experiences are spelled out in their bodies.

Komlos now knows that he arrived in America at a pivotal point in its history. Over the next fifty years, by most indicators dear to economists, the country remained the richest in the world. But by another set of numbers—longevity and income inequality—it began to lag behind Northern Europe and Japan. It’s this shift that fascinates Komlos, and that emerges so vividly in his height data.

One evening last winter, Komlos and I were walking by the U.S.O. office at the Philadelphia airport, when he stopped to watch a batch of Coast Guard recruits who were shipping out to Cape May, New Jersey. “Look at that,” he said. “Hardly any of them is six feet tall.” Komlos had to catch an 8 p.m. red-eye to Munich, but he couldn’t resist taking this group’s measure. Standing at a discreet distance, he slowly sized up each man as if with a pair of calipers. “Amazing,” he said. “The average German soldier is a hundred and seventy-nine centimetres—about five foot ten and a half. These guys are more like me.”

For centuries, he explained, governments have kept careful records of their soldiers’ heights, providing a baseline against which modern populations are compared. (Records for women are much more scarce, but they tend to follow the same trends.) Looking down these rows of men, four abreast, Komlos could see the shadowy ranks of their ancestors lined up behind them, from West Point cadets and Citadel graduates to Union soldiers, Revolutionary War soldiers, and fighters in the French and Indian War.

If you were to stretch a string from the head of the earliest soldier in that row to the head of the most recent recruit, you might expect it to trace an ascending line. Humans are an ever-improving species, the old evolution charts tell us; each generation is smarter, sleeker, and taller than the last. Yet in Northern Europe over the past twelve hundred years human stature has followed a U-shaped curve: from a high around 800 A.D., to a low sometime in the seventeenth century, and back up again. Charlemagne was well over six feet; the soldiers who stormed the Bastille a millennium later averaged five feet and weighed a hundred pounds. “They didn’t look like Errol Flynn and Alan Hale,” the economist Robert Fogel told me. “They looked like thirteen-year-old girls.”

Fogel, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1993, is the man most responsible for Komlos’s interest in height. In the fall of 1982, when Komlos was working on a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago (he had earlier earned a Ph.D. in history there), Fogel gave a lecture on stature that Komlos attended. Most historians, if they thought about height at all, tended to assume that it was tied to income. The more people earn, the better they eat; the better they eat, the taller they grow. “Men grow taller and faster the wealthier their country,” the French hygienist and statistician Louis-René Villermé wrote in 1829. “In other words, misery . . . produces short people.”

Fogel knew it wasn’t that simple. In 1974, he and Stanley Engerman published an exhaustive study of slave economics entitled “Time on the Cross.” Historians had long insisted that slavery was not only inhuman; it was bad business—hungry, brutalized workers made the poorest of farmers. Fogel and Engerman found nearly the opposite to be true: Southern plantations were almost thirty-five per cent more efficient than Northern farms, their analysis showed. Slavery was a cruel and inhuman system, but more so psychologically than physically: to get the most work from their slaves, planters fed and housed them nearly as well as free Northern farmers could feed and house themselves.

“Time on the Cross” was greeted with uncommon fury in academia—one reviewer consigned it “to the outermost ring of the scholar’s hell.” Yet each point that critics blew apart left a scattering of uncomfortable facts behind it. The most dramatic example came from a graduate student of Fogel’s, Richard Steckel, who is now at Ohio State. Steckel decided to verify his mentor’s claims by looking at the slaves’ body measurements. He went through more than ten thousand slave manifests—shipboard records kept by traders in the colonies—until he had the heights of some fifty thousand slaves; then he averaged them out by age and sex. The results were startling: adult slaves, Steckel found, were nearly as tall as free whites, and three to five inches taller than the average Africans of the time.

The height study both redeemed and rebuked “Time on the Cross.” Although the adult slaves were clearly well fed, the children were extremely small and malnourished. (To eat, apparently, they had to be old enough to work.) But Fogel was more than willing to stand corrected. This wasn’t just another data set, he realized. Height records offered a new angle on history, and they were readily available. Measurements of French military conscripts date back to 1716, and anthropologists have collected much older skeletal measurements. “There are millions of these data lying around and nobody is looking at them,” Komlos remembers Fogel suggesting at the lecture. All that was needed was a few good graduate students to gather them up.

"It sounded hopeless,” Komlos told me. “To study the history of human height with no funding and no real support in the field. It sounded very hopeless.” Anthropometric historians need tens of thousands of measurements to gauge height trends—enough to factor out the effects of age, sex, and, above all, DNA. Finding and tabulating those heights requires grants, research assistants, and—ideally—tenure. Yet to most economists the whole endeavor sounded suspiciously like quackery, if not something worse: phrenologists and Nazi scientists, too, had laid great store in body measurements.

“There were belly laughs at first,” Richard Steckel remembers. “The economists hadn’t worked in developing countries and they hadn’t studied the historical data on height. Most of them came from privileged backgrounds, where most differences in height are genetic. So the knee-jerk reaction was ‘This is ridiculous. It’s a monumental waste of resources.’ ” Among some social scientists, height research was well established. In the early nineteen-fifties, Nevin Scrimshaw, who set up the International Nutrition Foundation, in Boston, had studied child development throughout the Third World. Every bout of diarrhea or measles, he found, can bump a child off his growth curve. Every period of good nutrition can nudge him back on track. Most economists and historians ignored these short-term trends, however, while public-health workers ignored the long term. “And the two sides didn’t talk to each other,” Steckel says.

Anthropometric history was largely a field of two in those years: Steckel and Komlos, with other graduate students conducting studies here and there and Fogel orchestrating from the wings. Steckel, after his work on slaves, went on to Union soldiers and Native Americans. (The men of the northern Cheyenne, he found, were the tallest people in the world in the late nineteenth century: well nourished on bison and berries, and wandering clear of disease on the high plains, they averaged nearly five feet ten.) Then he enlisted anthropologists to gather bone measurements dating back ten thousand years. In both Europe and the Americas, he discovered, humans grew shorter as their cities grew larger. The more people clustered together, the more pest-ridden and poorly fed they became. Heights also fell in synch with global temperatures, which reached a nadir during the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century.

While Steckel worked backward in time, Komlos worked forward, tracing American and European heights from the seventeenth century on. He was a “modern-day gypsy” at first, he says, moving from archive to archive without tenure or steady funding, wheedling librarians and hiring indifferent research assistants. At the University of Vienna, he tabulated the heights of a hundred and forty thousand Austrian soldiers and their children. At the National Archives in Washington, he studied forty-one hundred and eighty West Point graduates. For thirteen years, he gathered and analyzed the heights of thirty-eight thousand French soldiers from the late seventeen-hundreds. Peasant conscripts were nearly three inches shorter than their well-bred officers—reason enough for a revolution.

"See this?” Komlos said one afternoon, sliding a sheet of paper toward me. “This one graph took me nine years.” We were sitting at his desk at the University of Munich, following his results from century to century and from continent to continent. To either side of us, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held bound volumes of statistics. High curtainless windows looked out on the triumphal arch of the Siegestor and flooded the room in pale golden light.

It was an odd setting, Komlos admitted, for a Jewish scholar who once nearly starved under the Nazis, but hardly unpleasant. Economic historians with his training are a rarity in Germany, and much valued. As a full professor, Komlos has the equivalent of an endowed chair, with state-sponsored grants for his research. He teaches his courses in English, sends his two sons to an international school, and edits his field’s only journal, Economics and Human Biology, also in English. “We live in a little American enclave,” his wife, Lillian, told me. But they depend on Europe for their livelihood.

The graph in question showed the heights of American slaves, servants, soldiers, and apprentices in the early seventeen-hundreds. To produce it, Komlos searched through Colonial newspapers for descriptions of runaways and deserters, until he had gathered ten thousand seven hundred and forty-two heights. “You can drown in these data,” he said. “But they also allow you to get closer to these guys.” He showed me an ad from the Pennsylvania Gazette, dated September 26, 1771. An Irish servant named Nathaniel Anster had run away for the third time. He was thirty years old, with a sandy complexion and short bushy hair. He had on a felt hat and a striped blanket coat, was “much inclined to strong drink,” and had “a natural propensity to steal.” He was also five feet seven inches tall. When Komlos had gathered enough heights, he averaged them out and plotted them on this graph.

The immediate point was clear: America was a good place to live in the eighteenth century. Game was abundant, land free for the clearing, settlement sparse enough to prevent epidemics. On Komlos’s graph, even the runaway slaves are five feet eight, and white colonists are five feet nine—a full three inches taller than the average European of the time. “So this is the eighteenth century,” Komlos said, slapping the files. “This is not problematic. It shows that Americans are well nourished. Terrific.” He reached into a cardboard folder and pulled out another series of graphs. “What is problematic is what comes next.”

Around the time of the Civil War, Americans’ heights predictably decreased: Union soldiers dropped from sixty-eight to sixty-seven inches in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, and similar patterns held for West Point cadets, Amherst students, and free blacks in Maryland and Virginia. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the country seemed set to regain its eminence. The economy was expanding at a dramatic rate, and public-hygiene campaigns were sweeping the cities clean at last: for the first time in American history, urbanites began to outgrow farmers.

Then something strange happened. While heights in Europe continued to climb, Komlos said, “the U.S. just went flat.” In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.

The average American man is only five feet nine and a half—less than an inch taller than the average soldier during the Revolutionary War. Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.

Just in case I still thought this a trivial trend, Komlos put a final bar graph in front of me. It was entitled “Life Expectancy 2000.” Compared with people in thirty-six other industrialized countries, it showed, Americans rank twenty-eighth in average longevity—just above the Irish and the Cypriots (the Japanese top the rankings). “Ask yourself this,” Komlos said, peering at me above his reading glasses. “What is the difference between Western Europe and the U.S. that would work in this direction? It’s not income, since Americans, at least on paper, have been wealthier for more than a century. So what is it?”

The obvious answer would seem to be immigration. The more Mexicans and Chinese there are in the United States, the shorter the American population becomes. But the height statistics that Komlos cites include only native-born Americans who speak English at home, and he is careful to screen out people of Asian and Hispanic descent. In any case, according to Richard Steckel, who has also analyzed American heights, the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity with Northern Europe.

In the nineteenth century, when Americans were the tallest people in the world, the country took in floods of immigrants. And those Europeans, too, were small compared with native-born Americans. Malnourishment in a mother can cause a child not to grow as tall as it would otherwise. But after three generations or so the immigrants catch up. Around the world, well-fed children differ in height by less than half an inch. In a few, rare cases, an entire people may share the same growth disorder. African Pygmies, for instance, produce too few growth hormones and the proteins that bind them to tissues, so they can’t break five feet even on the best of diets. By and large, though, any population can grow as tall as any other.

This last point may sound counterintuitive. Height, like skin color, seems to vary with geography: we think of squat Peruvians, slender Masai, stocky Inuit, and lanky Brazilians. According to Bergmann’s Rule and Allen’s Rule, animals in cold climates tend to have larger bodies and shorter limbs than those in warm climates. But though climate still shapes musk oxen and giraffes—and a willowy Inuit is hard to find—its effect on industrialized people has almost disappeared. Swedes ought to be short and stocky, yet they’ve had good clothing and shelter for so long that they’re some of the tallest people in the world. Mexicans ought to be tall and slender. Yet they’re so often stunted by poor diet and diseases that we assume they were born to be small.

In the early nineteen-seventies, when the anthropologist Barry Bogin first visited Guatemala, the country’s two main ethnic groups seemed to live on different social planes. The Ladinos, who claimed primarily Spanish ancestry, were of average height. The Maya Indians were so short that some scholars called them the pygmies of Central America: the men averaged only five feet two, the women four feet eight. The Ladinos and the Maya shared the same small country, so their differences were assumed to be genetic. But when Bogin, who now teaches at the University of Michigan, began taking measurements he soon found another cause. “There was an undeclared war going on,” he says. The Ladinos, who controlled the government, had systematically forced the Maya into poverty. Whether they lived in the city or in the countryside, the Maya had less food and medicine, and they had much higher rates of disease.

A decade and a half later, after civil war had erupted and up to a million Guatemalans had fled to the United States, Bogin took another series of measurements. This time, his subjects were Mayan refugees, between six and twelve years old, in Florida and Los Angeles. “Lo and behold, they were much taller than the Maya in Guatemala,” Bogin says. By 2000, the American Maya were four inches taller than Guatemalan Maya of the same age, and about as tall as Guatemalan Ladinos. “As far as I know, it’s the biggest increase of its kind ever measured,” Bogin says. “It shows that they weren’t genetically small. They weren’t pygmies. They were suffering.”

Much the same transformation has occurred in the Mexican-American population. Since the nineteen-twenties, the median height of Mexican-American teen-agers has nearly reached the United States’ norm. It’s that norm, and not the immigrants, that has failed to rise.

If there is an answer to the riddle of American height, it probably lies in Holland, where everyone has a theory about stature. When I spoke to Hans van Wieringen, the pediatrician, he credited his people’s growth to child care: the Dutch have the world’s best prenatal and postpartum clinics, free for every citizen. Others pointed to the landscape (flatlanders are naturally tall, they said, just as mountain people are naturally short), to the Calvinist religion (Protestants are taller than Catholics because their families have fewer mouths to feed), or to the Dutch love of milk (a study in Bavaria found a direct correlation between height and the number of cows per capita). The Dutch are taller than the Italians, one man suggested, because they go to bed at a reasonable hour.

The most convincing argument was one made by J. W. Drukker, the owner of the old inn at Stuifzand where van Gogh had stayed. Drukker is a professor of economic history at the University of Groningen, and he has made his own study of Dutch height. He looks like an oversized Phil Donahue, with shaggy white locks and wide-rimmed glasses, but he has a more worldly air. His office is hung with mildly erotic prints, and he wears paste-on fingernails on his right hand, for playing classical guitar. “A nineteenth-century virtuoso couldn’t have played this instrument,” he told me, pointing to the guitar leaning against his desk, beside a sheaf of études. “His hands would have been too small.”

Drukker’s research on stature began as something of a boondoggle. In the late nineteen-seventies, when Dutch universities were particularly well funded, he had the luxury of two student assistants. “Sometimes they had nothing to do,” he remembers. “So we thought, This is weird, we can reconstruct the heights of soldiers and correlate them with income. We love it.” Over the next few months, he put his assistants to work gathering heights from 1800 to 1950, then plotting them on a graph. In the end, the curve they produced took so much work that one of the students gave it the acronym yassis—Dutch for “yuck.” But the results were striking.

Holland’s growth spurt began only in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, Drukker found, when its first liberal democracy was established. Before 1850, the country grew rich off its colonies, but the wealth stayed in the hands of the wealthy, and the average citizen shrank. After 1850, height and income suddenly fell into lockstep: when incomes went up, heights went up (after a predictable lag time), and always to the same degree. “I thought I must have made an error,” Drukker said. “I must have correlated one of the variables with itself.” He hadn’t. Holland, like the rest of Northern Europe, had simply managed to spread its prosperity around. These days, Dutch heights no longer keep pace with the economy. (“We can’t grow to four metres just because our income quadruples,” Drukker says.) But the essential equation is the same: when the G.N.P. grows, everyone grows.

As America’s rich and poor drift further apart, its growth curve may be headed in the opposite direction, Komlos and others say. The eight million Americans without a job, the forty million without health insurance, the thirty-five million who live below the poverty line are surely having trouble measuring up. And they’re not alone. As more and more Americans turn to a fast-food diet, its effects may be creeping up the social ladder, so that even the wealthy are growing wider rather than taller. “I’ve seen a similar thing in Guatemala,” Bogin says. “The rich kids are taken care of by poor maids, so they catch the same diseases. When they go out on the street, they eat the same street food. They may get antibiotics, but they’re still going to get exposed.”

Steckel has found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teen-age eating habits. “If these snack foods are crowding out fruits and vegetables, then we may not be getting the micronutrients we need,” he says. In a recent British study, one group of schoolchildren was given hamburgers, French fries, and other familiar lunch foods; the other was fed nineteen-forties-style wartime rations such as boiled cabbage and corned beef. Within eight weeks, the children on the rations were both taller and slimmer than the ones on a regular diet.

Inequality may be at the root of America’s height problem, but it’s too soon to be certain. If the poor are pulling all of us down with them, some economists say, why didn’t Americans shoot up after the war on poverty, in the nineteen-sixties? Komlos isn’t sure. But recently he has scoured his data for people who’ve bucked the national trend. He has subdivided the country’s heights by race, sex, income, and education. He has looked at whites alone, at blacks alone, at people with advanced degrees and those in the highest income bracket. Somewhere in the United States, he thinks, there must be a group that’s both so privileged and so socially insulated that it’s growing taller. He has yet to find one.

"The best measure of a just society is whether you’d be willing to be thrown into it at random,” Komlos told me one day over lunch at an Italian restaurant in Munich. He was paraphrasing the American philosopher John Rawls. The United States earns mixed marks by that standard, he said. The country still gives refugees like his family a home, but it also leaves them stranded. His father spent ten years making watchbands at sweatshop wages and was no better off than before. In Hungary, at least, there had been companionship in poverty. In America, his family was surrounded by wealth.

Yet his father’s story, like that of the Maya in Florida, had a second act. Herbert Komlos eventually figured out the American system. He borrowed two thousand dollars from a friend, opened a storefront in Logan Square, and began importing watchbands from Hong Kong. Within ten years, he had saved enough money to move to a house off Lakeshore Drive. By the time he died, last winter, at the age of eighty-six, he was living in a condominium near Palm Beach.

“There were twenty-five thousand of us Hungarian refugees, and not one of them I knew didn’t make it,” Komlos told me. “Not one of us didn’t aspire to and reach the middle class. This was the generation of George Soros. This was the generation of the guy who founded Intel. I had cousins and second cousins—everybody became lawyers, accountants, professors.” He’d been back to Chicago recently, he said, and the poverty and urban decay had come as a shock after Germany’s tidy inner cities. “But, if you look at the Turks in Germany or the Algerians in France, there aren’t that many who can advance up the social ladder.” He shrugged. “America is still a land of opportunity.”

The last time I saw him, we were in downtown Munich. The sun was out and shoppers thronged the Marienplatz, sporting midwinter tans from Majorca and the Canary Islands. As Komlos headed for the subway, I watched the crowd sweep over him until only the top of his head was visible, bobbing contentedly beneath the tide. I remembered a joke he’d made earlier, when I’d mentioned that my parents are immigrants, too: “If they’d stayed in Europe, you might be four centimetres taller.” Then I squared my shoulders and waded in behind him.

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Does god hate women?

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:21:00 GMT

Nice article, showing how misogynistic ancient people were. Well, some people still are.

From here: ( http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/07/women-god-stangroom-benson )

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Does God Hate Women?
By Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom

Reviewed by Johann Hari - 02 July 2009

Authors Benson and Stangroom dismantle the logic of those who cite religion to justify the perpetuation of misogynistic abuses around the globe

A directory of divine misogyny

After all the arguments for subordinating women have been shown to be self-serving lies, what are misogynists left with? They have only one feeble argument that is still deferred to and shown undeserving respect across the world, even by people who should know better: “God told me to. I have to treat women as lesser beings, because it is inscribed in my Holy Book.”

Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom are the editors of Butterflies and Wheels, the best atheist site on the web. In Does God Hate Women? they forensically dismantle the last respectable misogyny. They argue: “What would otherwise look like stark bullying is very often made respectable and holy by a putative religious law or aphorism or scriptural quotation . . . They worship a God who is a male who gangs up with other males against women. They worship a thug.”

Every major religion’s texts were written at a time when women were regarded as little better than talking cattle. Their words and commands reflect this, plainly and bluntly. This book starts with a panoramic sweep across the world, showing – with archetypal cases – how every religion has groups today thumping women down with its Holy Book.

In Zamfara State in northern Nigeria, a pregnant 13-year-old girl called Bariya Ibrahim received 180 lashes of the cane in 2001 after being pimped by her father. The state’s attorney general said: “It is the law of Allah, so we don’t have anything to worry about.” In Jerusalem, ultra-Orthodox Jews have set up “modesty police” who terrorise young women who talk to men or show ordinary parts of their bodies. They break into their homes if they are seen with men; they force them to sit at the back of the bus, away from the men; and they even, in one recent instance, sprayed acid in the face of a 14-year-old girl.

In the areas of India still dominated by orthodox Hinduism, a widow is still expected to commit suicide when her husband dies, or go into isolation in an ashram. One – a septuagenarian woman named Radha Rani Biswas – fled and now begs on the streets of Vrindavan. She said: “My son tells me: ‘You have grown old. Now who is going to feed you? Go away.’ What do I do? My pain has no limit.” And on the directory of divine misogyny goes, running through Catholicism, Mormonism and more. Benson and Stangroom note: “Religion doesn’t necessarily originate ideas about female subordination, but it lends them a penumbra of righteousness, and it makes them ‘sacred’ and thus a matter for outrage if anyone disputes them.”

Methodically, they go through the excuses offered for these raw abuses of human rights by the religious, and their apologists.

The first – especially beloved of the Vatican and Islamists – is that women are not being treated worse, just “differently”. They claim that it accords a woman special “dignity” to trap her in the home. But this is an abuse of language. As the authors note: “Permanent consignment to a limited and lesser role in the world is not what ‘dignity’ is generally understood to mean . . . The smallness and intimacy and relatedness of home are fine things, but not if one is confined to them permanently.”

The religio-misogynists then claim that it is “racist” or “imperialist” to oppose such abuses. This merrily ignores how women within these cultures protest against their treatment – very loudly. They aren’t objecting to being imprisoned in their homes, or having their genitalia cut, or being stoned for having sex, because a white person told them to. Benson and Stangroom put it well: “Multiculturalism by definition makes a fetish of cultures, and it is almost impossible to do that without treating them as monolithic. As soon as you admit that all cultures have internal dissent and nonconformity, the whole idea of protecting or deferring to particular cultures breaks down into incoherence.”

Then the gentler, nicer apologists for religion arrive. They say that misogynists are simply misinterpreting the holy texts, which are in fact about love and compassion and kindness. But the authors point out this is certainly not the God of the texts who orders his followers to commit mass murder, including of women and children, and explicitly says women are inferior beings.

So, in order to defend their God, the apologists often have to lie about what He and His Prophets “say” in the texts. Cherie Blair, for example, claimed in a lecture: “It is not laid down in the Quran that women can be beaten by their husbands.” But it quite plainly is. The Quran says: “If you fear high-handedness from your wives, remind them [of the teachings of God], then ignore them when you go to bed, then hit them.”

Karen Armstrong – one of the most egregious defenders of superstition – repeatedly claims that Muhammad was an emancipator of women. Yet it is explained in the Hadith (the sayings and traditions of the Prophet) that he married a prepubescent child, and that when he was given two slave girls he gave the ugly one away to a friend and kept the beautiful one, Maryam, to use sexually. It is a strange model of female emancipation, to sleep with children and slaves.

There are people in all religions who have – through theological contortions – managed to leave behind literal readings of the text and invent a less foul God to believe in. It is not for atheists to say that one group of believers is right and the other is wrong, as we think they’re all wrong. We can note that the less literalist a believer is, the easier he is to live beside, but we will only discredit literalism and force reform if we are honest about the words of the texts, rather than trying to soft-soap believers.

By the end of this book-length blast, Benson and Stangroom have left religious hatred of women in rubble. Anybody not addled by superstition will have to conclude that such bigotry deserves neither respect nor deference. It does not deserve the taboos that today surround it. It deserves the opposite: contempt – and relentless, unyielding opposition.

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