“reviews”
57 posts under this tag.
Oh, the beauty!
I’m on the verge of screaming. The thing I’m going to tell you about is that good.
Even though I’ve got 9,165 songs in my library—my collection exploded some months ago when I started donwloading entire discographies (which is a brave new way of listening to music)—I find myself falling into the same old ruts, much to my chagrin, with only the occasional shuffle surprise showing me something unexpectedly good.
Enter Predixis MusicMagic Mixer, a new function of the just launched Winamp 5.21. There are detailed instructions of how to use it here, but it’s all incredibly simple. Basically, after letting MusicMagic acoustically analyze all your library, you can now select any song and ask MusicMagic to generate a list of best-acoustic-match recommendations. It’ll surprise you. This thing is so sufficiently advanced it’s indistinguishable from magic (there’s a beautiful relevant eemadge on the statistical process behind this). I can’t stop using it, I’m looking at my music library as I’d never been able to and, my god, it’s full of wonderful songs!
That Business: A Changing World textbook has been a lot of fun. It is still a textbook—overly commercial (specially at the beginning), tiresome, and repetitive (a needless box here, a redundant summary there, summaries of redundant summaries)—but it is interesting nonetheless.
Near the beginning, economic systems are dealed in a few pages and there were two things I noticed. The first one was that ubiquitous communism catchphrase:
[In Commnism] everyone contributes according to ability and receives benefits according to need.
I thought it was about time Capitalism (here ’s a wonderful definition) got it’s own catch-phrase. Here’s my stab at it:
In Capitalism everyone contributes according to need and receives benefits according to talent.
“What is honored in a country will be cultivated there,” is a quote frequently attributed to Plato, and I find it useful to compare both catch-phrases. It’s quite a dangerous thing to honor need in your country, to honor effort might sound as a step forward, but it’s still foolish—a farmer pulling the plough himself certainly puts more effort into his crop than a modern farmer with a tractor, is that to be rewarded? Rewarding talent may sound harsh or insensitive but it is the only truly humane thing to do.
The second thing is a simple question. For the life of me, I can’t understand the following sentence:
Socialists believe their system permits a higher standard of living than other economic systems, but the difference often applies to the nation as a whole rather than to its individual citizens.
How do you define the standard of living of a nation and how can it be different from that of its citizens? Can someone help me give this a coherent meaning?
Jorge Wagensberg tiene un libro delgado y delicioso (119 paginas) que me fascina. Se llama Si la naturaleza es la respuesta, ¿Cuál era la pregunta? y consiste de alrededor de quinientos aforismos sobre la incertidumbre (y su definición de incertidumbre es una de las muchas joyas de este libro). Para mi, que tanto me gustan las definiciones y La Forma, este libro es un manjar. Vaya, le sale tan bien eso de hilvanar aforismos que hasta pareciera que se ha inventado un nuevo género literario.
Pienso transcribir el libro entero e irlo subiendo, poco a poco, en este post. Iba a empezar hoy con 20 frases pero me avorace y ya casi me echo medio libro.
Actualización 27/Octubre/2006: ¡Termine por fin de transcribir el libro!
SpielbergWP, IMDB’s MunichAM, IMDB, WP is a great film; there’s not a scene I would change in this 164-minute movie. On the other hand, the man’s starting to scare me, I mean, how can he be so talented? Every film of his I’ve seen is a masterpiece, to the point that it seems almost unfair that someone should hoard so much talent. He embodies that Gap Paul Graham talked about in much of Hackers and Painters:
When people care enough about something to do it well, those who do it best tend to be far better than everyone else. There’s a huge gap between Leonardo and second-rate contemporaries like Borgognone. You see the same gap between Raymond Chandler and the average writer of detective novels. A top-ranked professional chess player could play ten thousand games against an ordinary club player without losing once.
More to the point, Eric BanaWP, IMDB and Ayelet ZorerIMDB (sometimes called Ayelet Zu’rer or Ayelet Zurer) were the two Munich actors that impressed me most, and my favorite scene from the movie was the sex scene between their characters, Avner and Daphna. It is remarkable both for the long-during, extreme closeup on Daphna, and for the fact that she’s visibly pregnant all along. Closeups are one of the wonders of film, something unthinkable in theater, and this is one of the best ones I’ve seen: for over 30 seconds there’s only Daphna—beautiful and breathy and rhythmic and smelly and sweaty and lusty and doe-eyed and blushing and nubile. As for the visible pregnancy… well, I’m somewhat disturbed to find that very arousing, but I guess it’s all part of being a male homo sapiens at a reproductive age.
I couldn’t find any screenshots of this particular scene on the web—I seem to have very refined tastes—so I had to download the movie and take screenshots myself. Here they are:
This is fantastic: a cool website that specializes in selling royalty-free stock photos, iStockPhoto, has created a new way to search through their whole catalog: by arrangement. They call it ColorSpace, and is wonderfully simple, yet powerful. It consists of a 3×3 grid of squares. You change the color of each square to indicate what you want in that area: green, if you want it clear; red, if you want it occupied; grey, if it’s the same to you.
It works. If, for instance, you search for “flower” with this colorspace,  , you get:
Or if you search for “sky” with this colorspace,  , you get:
The star here is not only the algorithm but the clever, information-design interface.
Overall, it’s a very impressive site, its web developers really do care about it, and that’s always refreshing. The weirdest thing is that they’ve convinced me that selling royalty-free stock photos on the web makes perfect sense…
In which I confess to be reading a blog in its entirety, reminisce about one of the first blogs I read, and use “Anyone lived in a pretty how town” as a tool to understand what’s so great about blogs.
I’m a fan of DHH (that’s David Heinemeier Hansson, but since no one, not me for sure, can type his name correctly, he’s usually called DHH). He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, a very smart programmer, and an even smarter manager. How can you not like someone with this in his about page?
I believe in change, ignorance (my own), love, and the power of motivation.
Anyway, out of a childish infatuation with his persona I’ve taken upon myself to read his blog, Loud Thinking, back to front, all 4 years of it. I’ve just read the first 24 posts from July 2001, and it has been a lot of fun.
For one thing, I feel like a scholar, tracing all the antecedents that lead to someone’s achievements, savoring the obscure details, going straight to the source, nosing around on the archives. It’s fascinating to see his development.
It also feels like if I were talking to his ghost of days gone by. Blogs are truly a new state of being (see the next post for more of that techno-boosterism). What’s surprising is how similar that ghost is to myself. How he also struggled with procrastination, also likes the same music that I like, also learned VIM, also loves to argue, also fears growing old, also has sleep disorders, also likes to pontificate once in a while.
Of course, there are also lots of differences. But I knew that already. What is amazing is how much you can have in common with someone apparently so different. One of the first bloggers I read—back in the day when reading a blog was something weird and shameful (”You read people’s diaries? What for?”)—put e.e.cummings’ Anyone lived in a pretty how town in her about page, and interpreted it as a love story between “anyone” and “noone” (here’s an interpretation in that vein). What she found tragic was how oblivious the townsfolk were to their love and grief:
Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain
So what she treasured in blogs (this is all from memory, I’ve never been able to find her blog again) was their ability to let you see behind “anyone” and “noone”. They put you in contact with people you’d probably never even meet, let alone talk to, and show you that, in the end, they’re not so different from yourself—they also struggle, love, fear, and fail, just like you do.
My favorite from those 24 first posts? Refusing to let an identity mask run my life, hands down.
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