Adriano

The standard criticism of Ridley Scott's film is that normal characters do not talk as do in The Counselor. Indeed the dialogue is almost Shakespearean, for example, the telephone conversation between the Counselor and Jefe. There is also the sense of inevitable tragedy in the sense of Greek theatre. Here is my favorite excerpt from Cormac McCarthy's screenplay (which does summarize the moral content of the film)... JEFE: "The world in which you seek to undo your mistakes is not the world in which they were made. You are at a cross in the road and here you think to choose. But here there is no choosing. There is only accepting. The choosing was done long ago." - Adriano

So what about our choices into the future? Here the Diamond Dealer (played by Bruno Ganz) informs The Counselor as follows: "At our noblest, we announce to the darkness that we will not be diminished by the brevity of our lives." ... yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. The baseless fabric of our revels shall inevitably unravel in ways totally unforeseen. - Adriano

Nice graphic https://notegraphy.com/rsvp... by yours truly :-) - Adriano

SPOILER: it 's viral marketing at its best. Freakin' funny! Must. post. silly. stuff :-) - Adriano

"Doctored image depicting a giant robot assisting socialist revolutionaries in 1917 was accidentally used in a history exam. It is the second year in a row the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority has been forced to apologise following debacles in the end-of-year exams. Purnell said while some students didn't notice the robot, others wasted time trying to work it out: ''One student suggested it was a statue of Alexander Kerensky, head of the Mensheviks. Another student thought it was the battleship Aurora - it's clear several students were thrown by it.''" cf. CogSci experiment where gorilla image implanted in x-rays was not noticed by expert radiologists :-) - Adriano

photo captures the wonderful joy of the cast. - Adriano

Gödel might have cracked a smile at this :-) - Adriano

"Feu Couleur 1 était réalisée par Yves Klein quelques mois avant que l’artiste mourut d’une crise cardiaque en juin 1962, à l'âge de 34 ans. Estimée entre 23 et 30 millions d'euros, l’œuvre devrait établir un nouveau record aux enchères pour Klein - et peut-être le meilleur prix pour un artiste européen d’après-guerre. Ce panneau unique, large de trois mètres et haut de 14, reprend l'ensemble des techniques expérimentées par Klein en peinture. FC1 avait été réalisée durant une performance filmée au Centre d'essai de Gaz de France, ou deux modèles féminins, aspergés d’eau, s'étaient plaqués sur le panneau ignifugé, avant qu'Yves Klein fasse apparaître leurs silhouettes au lance-flamme. Dans une deuxième étape, les mêmes modèles, enduits de peinture bleu Klein (ce bleu électrique dont le peintre avait déposé le brevet), revenaient se plaquer sur la toile, imprimant des anthropométries, les contours de leurs corps étant vaporisés de peinture afin de souligner leurs silhouettes." - Adriano

According to William Gibson's novel _Zero History_, "Yves Klein Blue" is an example of a color that cannot be represented on a computer monitor. - Adriano

historical note... "Proust as a teenager was obsessed with masturbation. This caused problems for his family, not least his father, a professor of hygiene, who like many of the day believed that such a worrying habit could cause homosexuality if left unchecked. And so, in May of 1888, in an effort to cure him of this "problem" having recently walked in on him "on the job," Dr. Proust gave his 16-year-old son 10 francs and sent him off to a local brothel. As evidenced by the following letter to his grandfather, and possibly due to the fact that Marcel was in fact homosexual, the visit didn't go to plan." Translation included :-) - Adriano

In his Treatise (Book 1, Part 4, sec. 6) David Hume suggested that the idea of an enduring discoverable self was unfounded. Introspection revealed "nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." Many people have noticed the similarity between Hume's position here and Buddhist discussion of the self. Listen also to podcast: http://traffic.libsyn.com/philoso... Gopnik is a psychology professor at Berkeley. - Adriano

"my friends dog Bandit kept mysteriously getting out of the kitchen so he set up his laptop to see how he was doing it, the following happened..." - Adriano

just astonishing, wow! (The neck of the Fender bass is almost as tall as the bassist.) Their live performances lead me to believe that they are not a "front" band. - Adriano

almost as funny when Ali G interviewed Noam Chomsky. - Adriano

:-) - Amira

"Economics employs partial differential equations like those in a Black-Scholes account of derivatives markets, equations that look remarkably like ones familiar from physics. The trouble with economics is that it lacks the most important of science’s characteristics — a record of improvement in predictive range and accuracy. [L]ike musicians’, economists’ expertise is still a matter of craft. They must avoid the hubris of thinking their theory is perfectly suited to the task, while employing it wisely enough to produce some harmony amid the cacophony." - Adriano

"Ever had an awkward handshake with someone? Well never again once you learn these full-proof techniques... is it full-proof or fool-proof?" - Adriano

Wondered about this sometimes... - Adriano

"German prosecutors are probing how a man was able to board an empty government jet used by Chancellor Angela Merkel. Wearing only underpants and high on drugs, he danced on a wing, sprayed foam around and pushed cockpit buttons. In the annals of Germany's security services, the following event won't be recorded as their finest hour. On the night of July 25, a 24-year-old man clutching a bag full of marijuana and ecstasy pills managed with relative ease to get on board an empty government jet used frequently by Chancellor Angela Merkel, while it was parked at a closed military section of the Cologne airport. The man, a bodybuilder of Turkish descent named as Volkan T., proceeded to stage a raucous, one-man party. Reports said he stripped down to his underpants, sprayed fire extinguisher foam around the elegant cream and beige interior, pushed buttons in the cockpit, released an inflatable emergency slide and danced on the wing of the Airbus 319." - Adriano

Pretty funny story. - Eric Logan

What is something worth? A very basic question which has many complicated answers. Friedman, a Nobel prize winning economist, shares a short story without any mathematical equations which illustrates the point that valuation is an emergent property of collective beliefs. Even gold in central bank vaults is like that huge stone shown in the photograph above. - Adriano

It sounds like Bitcoin. :-) - Amira

Materials still available: "You'll learn about the tools used by scientists to understand complex systems -- topics include dynamics, chaos, fractals, information theory, self-organization, agent-based modeling, and networks. You’ll also get a sense of how these topics fit together to help explain how complexity arises and evolves in nature, society, and technology. There are no prerequisites. You don't need a science or math background to take this introductory course." - Adriano

"timer for <time>" will actually emit sound at zero. - Adriano

Actual speed on that curve was 50% over the designated limit... over 78 people were killed in the crash. - Adriano

Dafoe plays a "hikikomori" (Japanese term which refers to persons refusing to leave their home, for decades in some cases) until one day... [NO SPOILER, but here's a surprise 37 seconds for you to watch thereafter, http://www.youtube.com/watch... :-] - Adriano

"Armed with just a microphone, Thum pushes the limits of the human voice to create incredible soundtracks of impossible beats and phenomenal sounds, with scratched vinyl, the Michael Jackson back-catalogue, the didgeridoo and an entire fifties jazz band amongst his vocal repertoire." - Adriano

So cool! :-) - Amira

Nature does not need supercomputers to figure out the optimal drag and stress coefficients :-) - Adriano

"Surveiller et punir est incontournable pour déchiffrer les mécanismes moderne d'exercice du pouvoir disciplinaire. Prison, école, hôpital...toutes les institutions apparaissent progressivement comme des espaces de contrôle des corps, d'administration des âmes et de normalisation de la pensée. Plus qu'un ouvrage philosophique, Surveiller et punir se veut une généalogie, le produit d'un archéologue qui fouille dans les strates de l'histoire de la pensée, à la recherche des motifs qui ont conduit à la fabrication du pouvoir moderne." - Adriano

Edward Tufte recommended this cool site to collaboratively write scientific papers or technical presentations in LaTeX. Amazingly there's no software to download, it's all in the cloud. The WYSIWYG viewer in the browser is worth checking out. You can get an extra 50 MB for your free account using this invitation link: https://www.writelatex.com/signup... Every document you create has a secret link. Just send it to your co-authors, and they can review, comment and edit. Outputs PDF, of course. - Adriano

These three are really interesting: 1\ With an alphabet that's been around since around 400 CE, Armenian is one of the most distinct relatives of the majority of other European languages. 2\ Mongolian - written vertically, this script is only written in cursive, and was displaced in large part by the Cyrillic alphabet in the Soviet era. 3\ The Lontara alphabet is a radical simplification of the Brahmic script -- it may look almost ridiculously simple, but it's no more so than any other, and is actually an abugida like some other scripts above. - Adriano

Funny that it remarks that Hebrew is without vowels yet shows a version with vowels. - Akiva

"All educated Arabs learn the Koranic-based language that linguists call "modern standard Arabic". It is used in political speeches, news broadcasts and nearly all writing—but nobody speaks it spontaneously in the marketplace or over the dinner table. Most people struggle to write it correctly." \\ Spoken dialects lack mutual intelligibility. http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWeb... - Adriano

à la Bibliothèque de l'Hôtel de Ville de Paris ! - Adriano

"Institute of Culinary Education Chef Instructor Anthony Caporale takes you on a guided tour of the history, chemistry, and technology behind whiskey, Bourbon, and Scotch! He'll ferment beer, distill moonshine, and talk about how production techniques such as malting affect flavor. Learn the science behind dark spirits." - Adriano

Completely mind-blowing... Wolfram presents highlights from his big fat NKS book: starts very simple with cellular automata, but eventually rule 110 becomes a universal computation machine which can emulate Ricci tensor from relativity and Feynman diagrams in quantum physics. Imagine an experiment where the universe is a Turing machine. The discussion of his Principle of Computation Equivalence is important for the limits of current science and the foundations of mathematics. Computational irreversibility shows how nature is undecidable in Godel's sense, and thus is unpredictable... we can only observe how complex things will evolve :-) - Adriano

See the beautiful tattoo visualization via Monica Quast, who is a Ph.D. student at the University of Campinas, Brazil, working on bivalve phylogeography. The organisms depicted are (going clockwise): a cyanobacterium, a foraminiferan, 3 diatoms, an oak leaf and acorn, a Spirogyra cell, a red cage fungus, a stauromedusa, a nautilus, a tardigrade, an ophiuroid, and a badger. \\ At first biologists could draw only small trees, typically with a dozen branches at most. They were held back by the fact that a group of species may possibly be related in many different ways. If a biologist adds more species to a group, the possibilities explode. For 80 species, there are more trees than there are atoms in the known universe. Simply comparing every single tree would be impossible. Fortunately, mathematicians developed statistical methods for searching quickly through potential trees to find the ones that do the best job of explaining all the evidence. - Adriano