Papa's got a brand new bag

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.

Posted via email from Fernando's posterous

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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On the WASD being a FPS standard

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:16:23 GMT

From a reddit comment. Worth to be reproduced verbatim.

( Here: http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/8z4ug/how_did_wasd_get_to_be_standard_doesnt_esdf_make/c0awdty )

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The historic reason? Well, it has the same roots as:

the meme "pwn"
TeamFortress
Gamespy (and its spinoffs, like FilePlanet)
ShackNews
Dedicated servers (as opposed to listen servers, where the host plays)

When Quake was released 13 years ago in 1996, the default keys were very different: Up, down, left, right were on the directional keys, fire was on control, and alt was strafe, which got itself from Doom/Wolf3D, which in turn got itself from older DOS iD games like the Commander Keen series.

Quake was released just as Windows95 took off, which is significant because Quake was natively a DOS game. In fact, running Quake in Windows usually left players without any sounds, and you'd lose a ton of FPS on those 100 to 166 Mhz Pentium 1s, if you didn't crash first.

However, because Quake took off just as Windows 95 was released, it had implemented winsock support... in other words, you could play over the internet if you knew the IP of a server, which you'd know by heart because there was only about a dozen decent ones running the Linux dedicated binary. You'd only find these on static web sites, as there were no server browsers, another invention of the Quake community (in the form of Qspy).

Unlike Doom, you didn't need to mess with Kali to play Quake over the internet.

As a result, Quake's community grew, as did its mods, including a little known mod with four playable classes called TeamFortress. It might've been five, I forget now - there was a release that upped the classes to the original six and then version 2 added the spy and engineer). The crazy thing about TF1 was that it was a wonderful single player game as well, allowing you to functionally play all 4 episodes of Quake 1 with any given TF class.

Quake wasn't the only popular shooter, but because of winsock and the impeccable timing of cheap 14.4 and 28.8 kilobaud modems and the modification support iD provided, it became the first professionally competitive game ever. The community spawned Qspy (now Gamespy), Cyberathelete Professional League (and CAL), sCary's Shack (now ShackNews), and probably more than is evident (sites like Voodoo3D, FiringSquad, Tweak3D all had their roots in Quake).

Because of this and the CPL, Quake created the first for-money tournament, and its darling was a player named Thresh. He emerged as an early prodigy of Quake, winning a series of these tournaments, and receiving huge sponsorship deals. He became the first famous professional gamer, where playing Quake and promoting hardware was his full time job.

Even up to Thresh's victory, arrow keys + ctrl was often used competitively, with elaborate scripting for quick turns. However, people noticed his control scheme - he used the mouse, something that was unusual, because Quake's contemporaries, Duke3D and Heretic/Hexen, all had awful mouse support.

His dominance in CPL led to everyone copying his control scheme of WASD + mouse, which took several years before it became canon, with tutorials on PlanetQuake. I think Quake2 was the first shooter to officially use WASD, which signalled the paradigm shift in computer game control, something that wouldn't change until games were ported from PlayStation 2 and Xbox when the gamepads of pre 1995 suddenly became popular again.

Anyway, somewhere in this, QuakeWorld gets released, which invents client-side prediction and native Windows support, and the rest is FPS history, namely in a game called HalfLife, which had both QuakeWorld's client-side prediction and WASD, alongside Quake 2.

Thresh later founds the site FiringSquad. Former FiringSquad editors then ended up creating the IM program Xfire.

And where did "pwn" come from? PlanetQuake's Lowtax coined that term in his comic column, where he'd personify a newbie named "JeffK" and spew "l33t" talk. Later, he had a nasty falling out with PlanetQuake. He then founds a little website you may have heard called SomethingAwful.

As for ESDF (a far superior control scheme), I think WASD is a bad habit the industry can't kick, mostly because games don't require many keys anymore. Quake TeamFortress was what led me to switch to ESDF - I used up every single key on the left side of the keyboard and was also using IJKL for things like the scout's motion scanner. Games simply don't require 20+ keys anymore with all purpose "use" and "reload" keys. Except for sims.

For competitive FPS, ESDF is far better - unlike WASD, your fingers never leave the movement keys as your pinkie can control 6 actions (Q, A, Z, capslock, tab, and shift) while you still move in all 4 directions. When WASD players reload with R, they can't strafe right unless you bind it to capslock/tab/shift. Crouch, reload, and use are best mapped to your pinkie.

tl;dr: It's from Quake 1's competitive scene and yes ESDF is far better because you can move in all 4 directions while hitting reload.

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From Vynil to Free: (quick) history of music formats

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 21:10:26 GMT

A excerpt from here: http://amog.com/tech/vinyl-free-history-music-formats-cost/

-----------

They argue that they are losing too much money to piracy and besides that, why should these criminals be getting their product for nothing? They say that quality will suffer as labels are forced to downsize and be more selective with the bands they sign. The music industry will die because of this!

Then there’s the other side of the argument, that CDs cost far too much and that most music promoted by the record industry is vapid and soul-less. When this is the case, why should the consumer fork out for their product only to discover they’ve been sold the sonic equivalent of snake oil?

Whichever side of the argument you hold as your own personal opinion (and who wants to stand side by side with the industry that gave Fred Durst a recording contract?) we at AMOG thought it was time to have a quick look back through history at the various formats music has been sold on and pose the question: if the dollar was worth then what it is now, how much would I be paying?

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Alguém perguntou sobre o "escritório"

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:22:43 GMT

E aí vai uma parte dele: a parte do trabalho.

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Quando a música dos outros te tortura (...)

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 18:38:59 GMT

De um de meus RSSs preferidos. Daqui:

http://mtv.uol.com.br/evocecomisso/blog/quando-música-dos-outros-te-tortura-o-que-é-que-política-tem-ver-com-isso

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

Qual é o limite entre música e incômodo? E o que a política tem a ver com isso?

Hoje, por mais de uma hora e meia, um carro de som de uma rádio ficou na minha rua vomitando música a todo volume. Ora, caso eu queira ouvir a rádio, eu sei ligar o rádio, botar um fone e girar o botão. Perguntei ao motorista se ele estava a fim de levar uma multa, e ele deu de ombros. Sua defesa era a mesma que os executores nazistas usaram quando julgados após a Segunda Guerra Mundial: apenas cumpria ordens.

Parti atrás de quem pudesse multar a rádio. Tava triste mesmo a coisa.

Primeiro a prefeitura, que incluiu na lei contra a poluição urbana provisões que salvaram nossos ouvidos das pamonhas de Piracicaba e dos morangos de Atibaia. Liguei pra lá (156) e tentei fazer uma denúncia. Não dava: além de o Programa de Silêncio Urbano (Psiu) só se referir à barulheira da noite, eles levam de 1 a 30 dias pra mandar um fiscal, e portanto a lei só se aplica a estabelecimentos que abusem da paciência dos vizinhos todo dia. Ou seja, a prefeitura é completamente inútil nesses casos. O que fazer? A mulher sugeriu ligar pro 190, da Polícia Militar.

Só que tem o seguinte: no Brasil existem leis municipais, estaduais e federais. Quem é encarregado de fazer cumprir uma não tem obrigação de fazer cumprir outra. Em parte por isso é que tem tanto buraco na rua: se o buraco foi feito pela empresa estadual de água, a prefeitura não aceita solicitações pra fechar. Assim, a Polícia Militar não tem entre suas atribuições ir atrás de traficantes internacionais de drogas (lei federal) nem fazer valer a lei contra poluição sonora (lei municipal).

No caso específico do carro de som, a polícia podia autuar os caras por perturbação do sossego. É o mesmo enrosco pra investigar e autuar, mas pelo menos um PM bater na janela do carro faz mais efeito do que eu chamar a atenção do motorista. E parece que deu resultado: minutos depois de eu ligar pra PM, parou o som.

Você já notou o quanto a música imposta pelos outros anda onipresente?

Música é um negócio muito legal, certamente. Mas o que pra mim é genial pode ser tortura pra você. É uma questão de respeito.

O Exército americano sacou isso há muito tempo, e usa a música em suas operações psicológicas (vulgo “psy-ops”). No filme “Apocalypse Now”, é clássica a cena em que o coronel Kilgore bota a Cavalgada das Valquírias nos helicópteros pra tocar o terror nos vietnamitas. Mais recentemente, há relatos de que acusados de terrorismo presos em Guantánamo foram forçados a ouvir a todo volume, por horas a fio, as mesmas músicas do Rage Against the Machine e do dinossauro roxo Barney. O Trent Reznor, do Nine Inch Nails, já protestou contra o uso de músicas da banda pra torturar gente.

Mesmo sua música favorita pode virar tortura se for imposta a você por outros, durante horas a fio. Mas quando é a dos outros é ainda pior. Há alguns anos, morei numa pensão ao lado de um bar cujo dono se apaixonou pela música “Morango no Nordeste”. Todo sábado ele punha pra tocar no repeat, a todo volume. Um conhecido meu certa vez constrangeu sua ex-mulher e a mulher atual ao tocar num churrasco, no repeat e a todo volume, um pagode que diz “tô fazendo amor com outra pessoa, mas meu coração vai ser pra sempre seu”.

No supermercado, tem a seleção da casa. No elevador, idem. Até pra tomar uma cerveja a gente está exposto aos mesmos sucessos de trilha de novela impostos pela Ordem Universal Acústica dos Tocadores de Violão de Boteco. (Antes de vir pra MTV, meu xará Marcelo Adnet fez uma participação no programa “Cilada” sobre as roubadas dos barzinhos. Ele dizia: “Muito bem bolado! O cara já tocou QUATRO do Jorge Vercilo!”)

No ônibus, sempre aparece um deserdado da noção com o celular tocando música no alto-falante. Aliás, o cara que inventou o alto-falante de celular bem que merecia ouvir “Morango no Nordeste” em Guantánamo. Por um tempo, andei com fones baratinhos na mochila pra dar de presente. Depois desisti: tenho barba e pança, mas não tenho saco pra fazer papel de Papai Noel.

E os políticos com isso?

Ora, são eles que permitem ou deixam de permitir qualquer coisa que interfira no espaço público. A função básica da política é criar as regras básicas de convívio entre seres humanos. Faz tanto tempo que a política pela política seqüestrou essa função que a gente até esquece dela.

O principal problema, no meu ponto de vista, é que com essa fragmentação toda a gente fica sem ter pra quem reclamar eficientemente. E aí, o pessoal faz o que quer mesmo. Assim como os políticos continuam fazendo o que bem-entendem se sabem que a gente não está de olho.

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E-mail engraçado que recebi.

Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:03:42 GMT

Veja só um trechinho (adendos meus em colchetes):

-------------
Prezado internauta [ Os anos 90 estão chamando FORTE ],

Observamos que você utilizou as redes sociais para relatar sua experiência com produtos e serviços. [ De que jeito? Stalking? ] Por conta disso, tomamos a liberdade [ SPAM ] de convidá-lo para participar do primeiro grande estudo sobre os hábitos dos internautas brasileiros. [ Que mentira. Não é o primeiro estudo. ] O estudo vai ajudar as empresas em todo o Brasil a compreender melhor a importância de se usar este canal de comunicação [ Qual? A Internet? A 'rede social' em que vocês me 'observaram'? ] para se comunicar e se relacionar com consumidores como você.

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

No rodapé, o sufixo safado:

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E-mail enviado de acordo com regras de Boas Maneiras em e-mail marketing da ABEMD: http://www.abemd.org.br/AutoRegulamentacao/BoasManeiras.aspx
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Porcaria nenhuma. É SPAM do mais grosseiro. Note as premissas safadas do documento de "boas maneiras":

--------------
Opt in.
O primeiro recebimento é muito importante, porque marca o início da relação. É preciso ter permissão para prosseguir o relacionamento, por meio do opt in do receptor, tanto quando ele procura como quando é procurado. [ Coisa que não houve ]
Quando é a pessoa quem procura a empresa, o campo onde é feita a opção pelo recebimento da mensagem deve estar visível e com descrição clara do produto ou serviço oferecido.
Quando é a empresa quem procura a pessoa, [ id est, SPAM ] tratando-se do primeiro contato deve-se informar como foi possível chegar a ela, [ não aconteceu ] explicitar o produto ou serviço oferecido [ não aconteceu ] e apresentar de forma visível a alternativa opt in. Se a pessoa não responder o e-mail com essa alternativa assinalada, deve-se entender que não deseja receber novas mensagens. [ não acontecerá ]
--------------

Se isso não é a definição perfeita (com carinha de inocente, inclusive) de SPAM não sei o que é.

Saudades do "museu do SPAM".

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Android versus iPhone Development (a comparison)

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:42:57 GMT

It's a bit biased towards Java-based Android, but it's still nice because it exposes the obvious flaws that XCode (and Mac development) has since... well, since NeXT. From here:

http://greensopinion.blogspot.com/2009/07/android-versus-iphone-development.html

A quick excerpt (because it has more things than pure text).

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

Android versus iPhone Development: A Comparison

A few months ago I ventured into the world of Mobile development and created an application (Hudson Helper) for both iPhone and Android. This article is about my experiences, comparing Android and iPhone development with a focus on tools, platform and the developer experience.

Before going much further I should note that my comparison is with considerable bias. I’ve spent the past 12+ years in Java development, having spent much of my career building developer tools. Since January of 2004 I’ve been building plug-ins for Eclipse, and before that plug-ins for NetBeans. With this background I find that I’m very critical of developer tools. Developer productivity is key — anything that takes away from the flow of a developer in the zone is a real problem.

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Oh no. No that again.

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:39:20 GMT

Just as I lost my extra weight.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090623133523.htm

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

Can A Little Extra Weight Protect People From Early Death? Underweight, Extremely Obese Die Earlier Than People Of Normal Weight

ScienceDaily (June 29, 2009) — Underweight people and those who are extremely obese die earlier than people of normal weight—but those who are overweight actually live longer than people of normal weight. Those are the findings of a new study published online in Obesity by researchers at Statistics Canada, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research, Portland State University, Oregon Health & Science University, and McGill University.

"It's not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage," said David Feeny, PhD, coauthor of the study and senior investigator for the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research.

"It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn't mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds," said Mark Kaplan, DrPH, coauthor and Professor of Community Health at Portland State University. "Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life, and there are many negative health consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes."

"Good health is more than a BMI or a number on a scale. We know that people who choose a healthy lifestyle enjoy better health: good food choices, being physically active everyday, managing stress, and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar levels in check," said Keith Bachman MD, a weight management specialist with Kaiser Permanente's Care Management Institute.

The study examined the relationship between body mass index and death among 11,326 adults in Canada over a 12-year period. (BMI uses height and weight to estimate body fat.) Researchers found that underweight people had the highest risk of dying, and the extremely obese had the second highest risk. Overweight people had a lower risk of dying than those of normal weight.

This is the first large Canadian study to show that people who are overweight may actually live longer than those of normal weight. An earlier study, conducted in the United States and published in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed similar results.

For this study, researchers used data from the National Population Health Survey conducted by Statistics Canada every two years. During the study period, from 1994/1995 through 2006/2007, underweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die. But overweight individuals were 17 percent less likely to die. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight. The authors controlled for factors such as age, sex, physical activity, and smoking.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institute on Aging, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the Canadian Embassy in Washington D.C. Authors include: Heather Orpana, PhD, Statistics Canada; JM Berthelot, Canadian Institute for Health Information and McGill University; Mark Kaplan, DrPH, Portland State University, David Feeny, PhD, Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research; Bentson H. McFarland, MD, PhD, Oregon Health & Science University and Nancy Ross, PhD, McGill University.

If you want to know more about health risks related to your weight and BMI, ask your doctor or get more information at http://kp.org/weight.

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What do Programmers Feel About their Software?

Tue, 30 Jun 2009 12:30:41 GMT

From here:

http://www.natpryce.com/articles/000748.html

It has some pictures. Go there to see and understand them.

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Why your voice differs from inside to outside

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 20:09:08 GMT

I kinda knew that, but, anyway, it's nice to confirm one's suspicions.

(From here: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-06/why-your-voice-sounds-different-recordings
)

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

It sounds different because it is different. "When you speak, the
vocal folds in your throat vibrate, which causes your skin, skull and
oral cavities to also vibrate, and we perceive this as sound,"
explains Ben Hornsby, a professor of audiology at Vanderbilt
University. The vibrations mix with the sound waves traveling from
your mouth to your eardrum, giving your voice a quality — generally a
deeper, more dignified sound — that no one else hears.

Through a loudspeaker or recording device, you pick up sound only
through air conduction. "The sound we're used to hearing has a lower
frequency from the bone vibrations," Hornsby says. "We like that
because it sounds rich and full." Many people cringe at the playback
sound because our brain struggles to accept that this foreign voice is
our own.

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Silêncio

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:39:40 GMT

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Distrações infinitas

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 12:15:50 GMT

Peguei daqui (não vi permalinks que satisfizessem):

http://talktohimselfshow.zip.net/

Por incrível que pareça, consegui ler até o final sem me distrair. Deve ser porque dou prioridade total a artigos sobre eliminação de distrações.

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

Como se concentrar em meio a tantas distrações

Abra mão do mito do "multitasking" para levar uma "vida focada"

Imagine que você deixou seu laptop de lado e desligou seu celular. Você está fora do alcance do YouTube, do Facebook, do e-mail e das mensagens de texto. Está sentado num táxi com um exemplar de "Rapt" (Extasiado), um guia de Winifred Gallagher à ciência do prestar atenção.
O tema do livro, que Gallagher escolheu depois de descobrir que sofria de um tumor maligno, é inspirado no psicólogo William James: "Minha experiência é aquilo ao qual concordo em prestar atenção". Você pode levar uma vida infeliz, focando sua atenção nos problemas. Pode se levar à loucura, tentando realizar tarefas múltiplas ao mesmo tempo e responder a todos os e-mails imediatamente.
Ou, então, pode reconhecer a capacidade finita de processar informações que tem seu cérebro e conquistar as satisfações do que Gallagher descreve como a vida focada. Soa atraente, só que, enquanto você está sentado no táxi, lendo sobre a ciência do prestar atenção, você percebe que não está prestando atenção a uma única palavra do que está na página.
A TV do táxi, que não pode ser desligada, está mostrando um comercial sobre um sujeito num táxi trabalhando num laptop -e, enquanto ele conta como seu novo cartão wireless tornou mais produtivo o percurso no táxi, você não consegue fazer nada de produtivo durante o seu próprio trajeto.
Será que ainda há, em algum lugar, um refúgio realista da idade da distração? Fiz essas perguntas a Gallagher e a um dos especialistas citados em seu livro, o neurocientista Robert Desimone, do Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Desimone vem rastreando as ondas cerebrais de símios do gênero macacus e de humanos, enquanto olham para telas de vídeo, à procura de determinados padrões que vão e vêm em flash.
Quando uma coisa iluminada ou nova pisca, ela tende a automaticamente vencer a disputa pela atenção do cérebro, mas esse impulso involuntário pode ser superado voluntariamente por meio de um processo que Desimone chama de "competição enviesada".
Ele e alguns de seus colegas descobriram que neurônios no córtex pré-frontal -o centro de planejamento do cérebro- começam a oscilar em uníssono, criando ondas gama, e enviam sinais direcionando o córtex visual a prestar atenção a outra coisa.
Para Desimone, uma terapia desse tipo pode ajudar pessoas que sofrem de esquizofrenia ou déficit de atenção, com menos efeitos colaterais que medicamentos. Se pudesse ser feita com uma luz de baixo comprimento de onda, que penetrasse o crânio, seria possível simplesmente colocar (ou tirar) um minúsculo aparelho sem fios.
Depois que descobriu como é difícil para o cérebro deixar de prestar atenção a sons, Gallagher começou a levar tampões de ouvidos em sua bolsa. Quando você está preso num metrô barulhento, disse, precisa construir seu próprio "abrigo" contra os estímulos. Gallagher recomenda às pessoas iniciar o dia de trabalho concentrando-se sobre a tarefa mais importante do dia durante 90 minutos. Depois disso, seu córtex pré-frontal provavelmente precisará de um descanso. É o momento em que você pode responder e-mails, retornar telefonemas e tomar uma bebida com cafeína (que de fato auxilia a atenção), antes de voltar a focar no trabalho. Mas, até esse primeiro "recreio", não se deixe distrair, porque depois de uma interrupção o cérebro pode levar 20 minutos para ser "reiniciado".
"O multitasking é um mito", disse Gallagher. "Não é possível fazer duas coisas ao mesmo tempo. O mecanismo da atenção é a seleção: ou uma coisa ou outra." E prossegue: "A atenção é um recurso finito, como o dinheiro. Você quer investir seu dinheiro cognitivo mandando mensagens pelo Twitter, navegando na internet ou assistindo à TV? Fazemos escolhas constantes, e nossas escolhas determinam nossa experiência".
Gallagher contou que quando se tratou do câncer, há alguns anos, conseguiu se manter relativamente bem humorada, guardando em mente o mantra de William James e também um verso de John Milton: "A mente é seu próprio lugar, e, sozinha / é capaz de converter o céu em inferno ou o inferno em céu".
"Dizia a mim mesma: 'Você quer ficar deitada aqui, prestando atenção às grandes chances de que você vá morrer e deixar seus filhos sem mãe, ou quer se levantar, lavar o rosto e prestar atenção a seu trabalho, sua família e seus amigos?'. Céu ou inferno -a escolha é sua", disse.

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Now here's a reddit comment that made my day.

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 11:22:28 GMT

From here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8v80l/as_obama_talked_about_the_power_of_the_neda_video/c0ajhyc

----------

> Maybe I'm wrong here, but wouldn't she just be an average journalist if this was say, anytime before 1970?

This is a surprisingly common belief that there was a "good ol' days." There wasn't. What happens is we look back through rose-colored glasses and we only see the reporting which was notable and remembered.

40 years from now, people are going to look back at our time and they're only going to see stories of Helen Thomas sticking up for responsible journalism and they're going to think "why aren't reporters today like those of the early 2000's when there were lots of journalists like Helen Thomas who asked uncomfortable questions to the President?"

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The Philosophy of Computer Science

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:21:02 GMT

If you need philosophy, please break the glass with an axe.

Excerpt from here ( http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computer-science/ ):

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

2.1 The Dual Nature of Programs

Many authors (Moor 1978; Rapaport 2005b; Colburn 2004) discuss the so-called dual nature of programs. On the face of it, a program appears to have both a textual and a mechanical or process-like guise. As text, a program can be edited. But its manifestation on a machine-readable disk seems to have quite different properties. In particular, it can be executed on a physical machine. So according to the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (§3.3), the two guises cannot be the same entity. Of course, anyone persuaded by this duality is under an obligation to say something about the relationship between these two apparent forms of existence.

One immediate suggestion is that one manifestation of a program is an implementation of the other i.e., the physical manifestation is an implementation of the textual one. However, even within the confines of computer science, it is not immediately clear that the word implementation refers to just one notion. Often it is used to refer to the result of a compilation process where a program in a high-level language (the source code) is transformed into machine language (the object code). But equally often it is used to refer to the process where the source code is somehow directly realized in hardware (e.g. a concrete implementation in semiconductors). And presumably, this is the relevant notion. But without a more detailed philosophical analysis of the notion of implementation (§3.2) itself (Rapaport 2005b), it is unclear how this advances the discussion; we seem only to have named the relationship between the two apparent forms of existence. In a similar vein, others have described the relationship between the program-text and the program-process as being similar to that between a plan and its manifestation as a series of physical actions. But this does not seem to be quite analogous to the program-process pairing: we are not tempted to refer to the plan and the physical process as being different manifestations of the same thing. For example, are we tempted to think of a plan to go for a walk and the actual walk as different facets of the same thing?

Perhaps matters are best described by saying that programs, as textual objects, cause mechanical processes? The idea seems to be that somehow the textual object physically causes the mechanical process. But this would seem to demand some rather careful analysis of the nature of such a causal relation. Colburn (2004) denies that the symbolic text has the causal effect; it is its physical manifestation (the thing on the disk) that has such an effect. Software is a concrete abstraction that has a medium of description (the text, the abstraction) and a medium of execution (e.g., a concrete implementation in semiconductors).

A slightly different perspective on these issues starts from the question of program identity. When are two programs taken to be the same? Such issues arise for example in attempts to determine the legal identity of a piece of software. If we identify a program with its textual manifestation then the identity of a program is sensitive to changes in its appearance (e.g. changing the font). Evidently, it is not the text alone that provides us with any philosophically interesting notion of program identity. Rather, to reach an informed criterion of identity we need to take more account of semantics and implementation. We shall return to this subject in §3 and §6.

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Python bizarre integer equality

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:51:56 GMT

Of course it works perfectly with ==, but that's not "object equality" in Python anyway:

(From http://distilledb.com/blog/archives/date/2009/06/18/python-gotcha-integer-equality.page )

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

Python gotcha: Bizarre integer equality

John
Thursday, June 18, 2009 @ 20:00

Summary Python implementations can throw you a curveball when comparing integer identity.

In Python, everything is an object. These semantics are predictable for the most part -- until they aren't. Here's a short but confusing snippet of Python 3 code, running from Ubuntu 9.04. Can you surmise why this inconsistency happens?

>>> a = 500
>>> b = 500
>>> a is b
False

>>> c = 200
>>> d = 200
>>> c is d
True

In Python, is tests for identity, not equality. x is y if and only if x and y reference the same thing. Although a and b have the same value, they are distinct objects, and so comparing the two yields False, as one might expect.

But then we're confronted with the second case. It's precisely identical to the first, just with a different assigned value. Yet it produces the opposite result. How can this be?

The key to this puzzle lies in a peculiar implementation detail of CPython, the de facto Python implementation. As we said earlier, in Python, everything is an object, even literals. Logically, that means that two different instances should be distinct from each other, as in the first case above.

But in CPython, when you create an integer literal in the range [-5, ..., 256], it's actually cached for performance reasons. Further references to the same literal are identical references to the existing literal, not new references. Thus c and d refer to the same cached instance, and the result is True.

Because of another implementation detail, two literals with the same value that are in the same compilation unit will reference the same object. Comparing literals directly results in True in both cases, as we see here:

>>> 200 is 200
True

>>> 500 is 500
True

More importantly, however, this illustrates the danger when is is mistakenly used to compare value equality instead of reference equality. Had you used == instead, the results are precisely what you'd expect:

>>> a = 500
>>> b = 500
>>> a == b
True

>>> c = 200
>>> d = 200
>>> c == d
True

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Introduction to decompilation

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:36:37 GMT

Yeah, that's what it is. Right here: http://www.debugmode.com/dcompile/

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"Find my iPhone" actually works

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 11:19:58 GMT

From here ( http://happywaffle.livejournal.com/5890.html ):

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

(...) Now, put yourself in the shoes of the iPhone thiever who will momentarily be entering the story. You might have told yourself, "Hey, free iPhone!" the night before. You might have seen the gently-threatening messages and ignored them, maybe even scoffed. Then the phone told you it was on Medill St. It talked to you in Spanish. And you saw three skinny white guys prowling in the street with a laptop computer open.

So you take off down the road, and to your shock and horror, the honkeys follow you. You stand at your local bus stop, expecting to lose them. And they converge on your location from across the intersection, the bald one with the laptop yelling and pointing at you. You probably think the angels of death have found you. (...)

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Os novos ascensoristas

Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:49:01 GMT

Trechinho daqui ( http://www.rafael.galvao.org/2009/06/de-jornalistas-e-ascensoristas/ ):

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

Mas, aparentemente, a grande maioria dos jornalistas não consegue se enxergar fora de uma estrutura que se consolidou ao longo dos últimos 150 anos. Cada vez mais, lembram ascensoristas desconsolados diante do surgimento de elevadores automáticos, em pânico diante da superação dos elevadores com alavancas e portas pantográficas.

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Zoning out

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 23:01:56 GMT

I'll actually post the entire content here, 'cause paging in and out
means no fun at all.

And "no zoning out", by the way.

From here: http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jul-aug/15-brain-stop-paying-attention-zoning-out-crucial-mental-state

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

The Brain Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State
Researchers say a wandering mind may be important to setting goals,
making discoveries, and living a balanced life.

by Carl Zimmer

I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last
word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your
mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can
console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind
wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring
column. It’s just one of the things that make us human.

Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for
a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It
seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the
past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is.
The answer is very.

Some of the most striking evidence comes from Jonathan Schooler, a
psychologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara who is
one of the leading researchers on mind wandering. In 2005 he and his
colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opening chapters
of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever
they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On
average, the students reported that their minds wandered 5.4 times in
a 45-minute session. Other researchers have gotten similar results
with simpler tasks, such as pronouncing words or pressing a button in
response to seeing particular letters and numbers. Depending on the
experiment, people spend up to half their time not thinking about the
task at hand—even when they’ve been told explicitly to pay attention.

Psychologists have also discovered ways to increase and decrease mind
wandering. Jonathan Smallwood, a colleague of Schooler’s at UC Santa
Barbara, instructed subjects to tap a key every time they saw a new
number appear on a computer screen but to hold off tapping if the
number was three. The more quickly the numbers came, the less often
the subjects’ minds wandered. But as people practiced the task and
became more familiar with it, their mind wandering increased.
Smallwood has also found that mood affects mind wandering: If he
showed people a short video about a sick dog before they performed the
task, for example, they spent more time mind wandering than did a
separate group that had watched a comedy clip.

Alcohol tweaks mind wandering in a particularly interesting way, as
Schooler and his colleagues report in a new paper entitled “Lost in
the Sauce,” published in Psychological Science. The psychologists ran
the War and Peace experiment again, but this time after serving their
subjects some vodka with cranberry juice. Drunk readers actually
reported less mind wandering than sober people did. That does not mean
that you should swill vodka if you want a laser focus on Tolstoy’s
deathless prose, though. Schooler has shown that there are, in fact,
two kinds of mind wandering: mind wandering when you are aware that
you’re thinking about something else and mind wandering without
awareness. He calls this second kind “zoning out.”

To determine which kind of mind wandering people experience, Schooler
and his collaborators told the participants in the War and Peace
experiment to report their own drifting but also asked them every few
minutes if they were thinking of something else. If people responded
to those questions with a yes, that meant they weren’t aware enough of
their own minds to report their mind wandering on their own. These
experiments show that we spend about 13 percent of our time zoning
out. But when we are drunk, that figure doubles. In other words,
inebriated subjects report less mind wandering only because they are
less aware of their own minds.

When our minds wander, we lose touch with the outside world. We don’t
actually black out, of course, but we are more likely to make
mistakes, fail to encode memories, or miss a connection. Zoning out
makes us particularly prone to these errors. Schooler and Smallwood,
along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia,
tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock
Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were
reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked
their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were
zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym,
while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments
succeeded.

These results are shocking when you stop to think about them. Each of
us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head, joined
to each other by trillions of connections. The human brain is arguably
the most complex organ in the natural world. And yet studies on mind
wandering are showing that we find it difficult to stay focused for
more than a few minutes on even the easiest tasks, despite the fact
that we make mistakes whenever we drift away.

Neuroscientists are investigating this paradox by searching for the
signatures of mind wandering in the brain. To that end, Schooler and
Smallwood recently ran yet another experiment—this one in
collaboration with Alan Gordon of Stanford University, University of
British Columbia neuroscientist Kalina Christoff, and Christoff’s
graduate student Rachelle Smith. The researchers put people in a
functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner and gave them the
standard press-a-key-unless-you-see-three test. From time to time they
asked the subjects if they were paying attention to the task; if they
hadn’t been, the researchers asked if they had been aware that their
mind had wandered. The subjects reported mind wandering 43 percent of
the time they were asked. In nearly half those cases, they said they
hadn’t been aware of their inattentiveness until the scientists asked.

Later, the scientists pored over the scans, looking closely at the
activity in people’s brains right before they were asked about their
state of mind. Overall, people who said they were mind wandering had a
pattern of brain activity quite different from those who were focused
on the task.

The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering
belong to two important networks. One is known as the executive
control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these
regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious
thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals. The
other regions belong to another network called the default network. In
2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington
University discovered that this network was more active when people
were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked
to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active
during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting
on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future.

The fact that both of these important brain networks become active
together suggests that mind wandering is not useless mental static.
Instead, Schooler proposes, mind wandering allows us to work through
some important thinking. Our brains process information to reach
goals, but some of those goals are immediate while others are distant.
Somehow we have evolved a way to switch between handling the here and
now and contemplating long-term objectives. It may be no coincidence
that most of the thoughts that people have during mind wandering have
to do with the future.

Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head.
Yet we find it difficult to stay focused for more than a few minutes
on even the easiest tasks.

Even more telling is the discovery that zoning out may be the most
fruitful type of mind wandering. In their fMRI study, Schooler and his
colleagues found that the default network and executive control
systems are even more active during zoning out than they are during
the less extreme mind wandering with awareness. When we are no longer
even aware that our minds are wandering, we may be able to think most
deeply about the big picture.

Because a fair amount of mind wandering happens without our ever
noticing, the solutions it lets us reach may come as a surprise. There
are many stories in the history of science of great discoveries
occurring to people out of the blue. The French mathematician Henri
Poincaré once wrote about how he struggled for two weeks with a
difficult mathematical proof. He set it aside to take a bus to a
geology conference, and the moment he stepped on the bus, the solution
came to him. It is possible that mind wandering led him to the
solution. John Kounios of Drexel University and his colleagues have
done brain scans that capture the moment when people have a sudden
insight that lets them solve a word puzzle. Many of the regions that
become active during those creative flashes belong to the default
network and the executive control system as well.

Of course, being permanently zoned out has its downside. It is one
thing to drift away for a few lines of War and Peace. But if you’re
pondering where you’ll be in five years as you drive through a busy
intersection, you may not be around in five years to find out. Our
brains delicately navigate between near-term and long-term thinking,
monitoring our own awareness to make sure that we are not missing
something vital. Perhaps, Schooler and Smallwood argue, the secret to
a good life is finding the balance between the two, the rhythm that
brings harmony to the different timescales at which we live.

And if you are staring at that last sentence and wondering what on
earth I’m talking about, you might want to scan back a few paragraphs
to find the spot where you zoned out. Honestly, I won’t mind.

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I needed a job, and Xenu was hiring

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:56:06 GMT

Quick excerpt from funny (yet kinda-shocking) article from here:

http://unreasonablefaith.com/2009/06/22/i-needed-a-job-and-xenu-was-hiring/

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

by Shéa Bennett

I recently had a job interview for an IT position with the Church of Scientology.

Let me explain. I wasn’t aware of my potential employer going in. The company in the advertisement was Narconon, who bill themselves as “the world’s most successful drug rehab,” and apparently have been in the business of narcotic rehabilitation since 1966.

I know, I know – some of you are screaming, “What!? How could you not have known that Narconon was a Scientology front?” Well, I didn’t. I have no real excuse – I simply did not know. You probably don’t know, for example, that there are four different models of the IG-88 assassin droid in the Star Wars universe.

Oh, you did? Ah.

I should have done more research. I did some research, but I didn’t look up Narconon on Wikipedia. My mistake — it won’t happen again.

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Google is Great, or It Will Ruin Us All

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 19:24:48 GMT

Here's thoughtful discussion on why Google may do evil in the future.

(Oh-oh, they got me.)

(From here, by the way: http://perpetualpost.com/?p=1728)

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

Google is Great! OR Google Will Ruin Us All
By Ted Berg and Jillian Lovejoy Lowery

TED: There was a time when I thought a Goo-ocracy sounded delicious, some heretofore unknown form of government entirely based on Twinkie filling. But in 2009, I know better. The coming Goo-ocracy will not be nearly so sweet or creamy, though it may be just as bad for us. Soon, the world will be run by Google. They’ll start with information control; check out the Google Books project, for example. Put every book up online, and all of a sudden we don’t need print copies anymore. Then, once the print copies are gone, Google can rock some Fahrenheit 451 shit. You only get the books Google deems appropriate. And that’s just the beginning. Jill, try to convince me that putting so much power and so mucn information in the hands of a private company can be a good thing.

JILLIAN: Clearly, Google is benevolent, Ted. Are you scared of Amazon.com suggesting other books you might dig, based on previous purchases? Are you skeptical of your TiVo helpfully recording shows that it so considerately chose for you? Google is not to be feared, they’re just making life easier for us. Need a quick answer? Google. Want a free email account with a ginormous inbox? Gmail. Are you older than 17 and totally over AOL Instant Messenger? Gmail Chat. In fact, how are we corresponding? Via the aforementioned Google services. Google is not to be feared. Stop your conspiracy theories, take a sip of this Kool Aid and join me in Goo-topia.

TED: Here’s the thing, though: Amazon.com is just recommending some books and TiVo is just monitoring my TV-watching habits. Both are reasonably ominous, to be sure, but Google is ubiquitous. Yeah, they give me a free email account with a ginormous inbox. And what price do I pay for that? The cost of giving Google the right to read my emails for targeted advertising. But who’s to say it stops there? If Google can monitor my emails and my search habits and what I’m chatting about, Google can pretty easily know just about all there is to know about me. Yeah, maybe it’s not happening right now, but as our society becomes more and more of a panopticon — with all of us plugged into our cells — Google will increasingly represent the central overseer, peering out at our behavior whenever it sees fit. Color me creeped out.

JILLIAN: You might be right, but I simply cannot believe that Google actually cares what I’m doing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m fascinating — but I can’t imagine that the Google Gods care about my chats or the content of my email. And, besides, what does it matter if they do know everything about me? I’m a narcissist; I love having people interested in my musings, comings and goings. I suppose, when you really think about it, it’s a little intrusive. But where do you draw the line? Are any search engines/email providers safe? Will you renounce your cell phone, because your location can be tracked? Will you not purchase your Metro Card (or your city’s equivalent of a public transportation pass) with anything but cash for the same reason? And think about how many people use Google. Do you really think they’ve got their eye on you?

TED: Well of course I don’t. Not yet. But what about once our government inevitably crumbles, and has no option but to contract out its police force to the highest bidder, and the highest bidder just happens to be the company with the most money and the one that just so happens to be best set up for policework — your friendly e-mail provider? It sounds absurd, I know, but think of how efficient they’d be: This guy just searched Google for tips on hackey sack tricks, then Gchatted with his friend about how great Pink Floyd is, then Google-mapped his nearest Taco Bell. Book ‘em! I kid, but do you know how many people probably Google the illegal shit they’re about to undertake? Give it ten years, the term “G-Men” will have a whole new connotation.
JILLIAN: But isn’t that a kind of internet Darwinism? If you’re dumb enough to Google illegal shit from your home computer, you kind of deserve to be caught. Isn’t that what the computers at public libraries are for?

TED: Well of course, but I don’t know what public library you rely on for planning your heists — mine makes me swipe my card first.

We’re joking around, and rightfully so: It’s a bit ridiculous, as it currently stands, to assume sweet-and-happy Google has any nefarious intentions. But as we become more and more reliant on computers for everything, and as Google becomes more and more dominant in just about every electronic realm, I wonder how long it will remain funny. Information control isn’t exactly a laughing matter, nor is the way Google can — and to some extent already does — exert its will on the various aspects of our economy that now solely rely on the Internet.

A brilliant former professor of mine, Siva Vaidhyanathan, has focused his recent efforts on the notion, and for a much more in-depth and better thought-out study of the subject, I recommend his blog at www.googlizationofeverything.com. But before you head there, consider this: Google’s corporate motto is Don’t Be Evil. Just a little bit ominous, don’t you think? Yeah, they’re saying they’re not out to be evil, but just the fact that they’ve made it their mission means they’ve at least considered being evil. Slogans should be things like, “What can Brown do for you?” and “The quicker picker-upper.” Don’t Be Evil? I’ll give it 20 years before someone down at Google is reaching for a jar of white-out to rid the company of that inconvenient conjunction.

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The Life of a Lockpicker

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 00:58:19 GMT

Here:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-06/ff_keymaster?currentPage=all

Highly recommended.

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Enfim, algo interessante no UOL.

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:16:58 GMT

É sobre as tentativas de transposição de censura em países com democracias fajutas. Aqui no Brasil caiu uma (a exigência de canudo para jornalistas). Aqui:

http://noticias.uol.com.br/midiaglobal/nytimes/2009/06/18/ult574u9443.jhtm

Se puder leia em inglês. As traduções dos grandes portais sempre são sofríveis.

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How Michael Osinski Helped Build The Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:43:12 GMT

A quick excerpt from here ( http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/ ). Worth the read.

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

My first assignment was to write a “machine-to-machine interrupt handler.” That was not exactly sexy in the world of finance, or in any world, and I won’t bore you by trying to explain. It was plumbing. As was all the programming, which, on the firm’s hierarchy, ranked somewhere above the secretarial pool but well below, literally and figuratively, the trading floor. I didn’t mind. To me, it was good, well-paying work. My manager, a former mathematics professor named Leszek Gesiak, an immigrant from Poland, became a friend. Neither one of us was on track, but we both enjoyed the challenges and pace of the job. We lunched at either Yip’s, a Chinese culinary cul-de-sac, or on Front Street, in the seaport, where you could get fresh fish cafeteria style across the street from the market. It was a different New York, still picking itself up from the seventies. Drug dealers loitered at the door of the brokerages, and taxis often smelled of pot from their previous occupants. Just a few years before, Michael Bloomberg had been fired from Salomon. He had the crazy idea that the data was as valuable as the firm’s capital.

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