Cuando no importa la respuesta a una pregunta

A media lectura de este artículo (via mi — a falta de mejor témino — jefe) me di cuenta de que por más que mi personalidad lógica/científica me incline a responder preguntas, cuando convivo con otras personas muchas veces no las planteo para que alguien de una respuesta, sino para saber cómo la contestan, cómo llegan a esa respuesta, qué ideas siguen, cómo las argumentan, qué tanto creen realmente en lo que están diciendo. Y de hecho yo mismo a veces funciono así. Si me pongo a leer artículos y opiniones acerca del libre albedrío en principio es porque estoy buscando hacerme una opinión personal al respecto, pero a veces ese objetivo pasa un poco a segundo plano porque me entretengo más en el viaje de explorar las ideas, entender las diferentes posturas y sus por qués.

Supongo que por eso me gustan los edge cases: las preguntas que pocos se preguntan y por ende pocos han explorado de verdad, pero que por lo general son las que más hablan de cómo es una persona cuando se discuten.

Kids

2011-09-04. Oficialmente, el día en el que empiezo a pensar seriamente en que tal vez no quiero tener hijos. Just for the record.

Cuando la cinta de aislar no es suficiente...

... el silicón llega al rescate:



Habemus headphones. Por unos días más. Al menos. Espero.

Reflexiones de un concierto

El domingo fui a uno de los conciertos de aniversario del museo Marco, en el que la orquesta de cámara Consort tocó arreglos de canciones de rock para orquesta de cámara, con algunas intervenciones de guitarra y bajo eléctricos, y batería. Salí decepcionado. La ecualización de los instrumentos me pareció bastante pobre y la acústica no muy buena (aunque no esperaba gran cosa... pero incluso las bocinas no me parecieron de buena calidad). Y me dejó pensando en lo siguiente:

• El pandero es una pésima percusión para acompañar arreglos de rock.


• En general, los instrumentos de aliento-metal tienen timbres que me desagradan, o que al menos no me parecen apropiados para llevar la melodía (que en el concierto pasó varias veces). También en particular la flauta en este caso me sonaba algo estridente.


• Los arreglos para orquesta por lo general me parecen muy sin chiste; les falta la creatividad de un instrumento solista. Eso me hace pensar en que probablemente disfruto más los "Concierto para Violín No. X" que las piezas para orquesta completa. Lo que escuché ese día me recordó mucho a lo que he escuchado del disco Symphonic Rock de la Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, que no me gusta mucho.

Estoy consciente de que me he vuelto muy picky con la música. ¿Y con otras cosas? R, G y L sugieren que a todos nos está pasando y que es por esto. Muy buen capítulo de South Park =D, y al parecer muy apropiado para la discusión del día.

Programar sin código

Leí este paper, que propone una forma completamente diferente de programar: usando "tablas esquemáticas", algo parecido a tablas de verdad booleanas. La idea se ve interesante... me queda la duda que menciona el mismo paper, de si podría escalar a aplicaciones grandes, y de qué tan fácil sería trabajar en equipo sobre código así... problemas de commits conflictivos probablemente serían más complicados de arreglar. Pero me gustaría intentarlo alguna vez, parece bastante fluido, y sería una forma de forzarme a hacer algo "rutinario" de forma diferente.

Outliers: The story of success - by Malcolm Gladwell

Leído entre: Jun 23, 2011 – Jul 01, 2011 (8 días).

Lo que me gustó: Todo. Muy fácil de leer, contenido entretenido y que te pone a pensar, ni muy corto ni muy largo... Great book.

Lo que no me gustó: N/A.

En general: Muy recomendado.

Amazon lo tiene aquí.

Notas y citas:

"When Bill [Joy] was a little kid, he wanted to know everything about everything way before he should've even known he wanted to know," his father, William, says. (p.42)

Habla de que hay algunos puntos entre los que "vale la pena" diferenciar, hablando de IQ, pero que arriba del último punto, las diferencias no son tan relevantes (no por estar mucho más arriba en la escala, vas a tener mucho más éxito):

Langan's IQ is 30 percent higher than Einstein's. But that doesn't mean Langan is 30 percent smarter than Einstein. That's ridiculous. All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics, they are both clearly smart enough. (p.80)

Sobre ese mismo punto:

The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. "Put people into two categories,", Schwartz says. "Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected." (p.83-84)

Hablando de una serie de pueblos en Kentucky donde por mucho tiempo todo el mundo parecía muy peleonero y se mataba por cualquier cosa:

... and the consensus appears to be that that region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call a "culture of honor." (p.166)

Siguiendo con el análisis de los pueblos donde todos se mataban, habla de cómo los acentos (formas de hablar/pronunciar) parecen funcionar de la misma forma que los comportamientos (heredados culturalmente), y lo relaciona:

Whatever mechanism passes on speech patterns probably passes on behavioral and emotional patterns as well. (p.175)

Hace referencia a las "Hofstede's Dimensions", en especial al "Power Distance Index" (PDI), que "is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority" (p.204-205)

Hofstede, similarly, references a study done a few years ago that compared German and French manufacturing plants that were in the same industry ad were roughly the same size. The French plants had, on average, 26 percent of their employees in management and specialist positions; the Germans, 16 percent. The French, furthermore, paid their top management substantially more than the Germans did. What we are seeing in that comparison, Hofstede argued, is a difference in cultural attitudes toward hierarchy. The French have a power distance index twice that of the Germans. They require and support hierarchy in a way the Germans simply don't. (p.205-206)

En el capítulo acerca de cómo las aerolíneas orientales son (tal vez "eran") más propensas a accidentes, propone que en gran parte el problema es porque las personas "abajo" del capitán no reaccionan y/o actúan como deberían cuando creen que el capitán está haciendo algo mal:

The Korean language has no fewer than six different levels of conversational address, depending on the relationship between the addressee and the addresser [...] The first officer would not have dared to use one of the more intimate or familiar forms when he addressed the captain. (p.214-215)

Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientations" — that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously. [...] But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. (p.216)

A bit random. Reforzando el punto de que el bagaje cultural es una influencia mucho más grande de lo que normalmente creeríamos:

In languages as diverse as Welsh, Arabic, Chinese, English and Hebrew, there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers. (p.228)

También con respecto al punto pasado, menciona que para los asiáticos es mucho más sencillo efectuar operaciones aritméticas simples (e.g. suma) por la regularidad de su sistema numérico:

... for number above twenty, we put the "decade" first and the unit number second (twenty-one, twenty-two), whereas for the teens, we do it the other way around (fourteen, seventeen, eighteen). The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on. [...] The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plu twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: It's five-tens-nine. (p.229)

Drunkness side-effects

Llevo un rato semi-ebrio, y estuve escuchando grillos (muy claramente) durante un rato, hasta que apague la luz de mi cuarto. Entonces dejaron de escucharse repentinamente. Weird... and interesting...

Batch convert audio files in Windows

Bat file:

@echo off
for %%f in (*.%1) do (
ffmpeg.exe -i "%%~f" -ab 192k -y "%%~nf.mp3"
)

Usage: "batfilename.bat original_file_extension", e.g. "toMp3.bat wma".

This obviously requires ffmpeg.

Thor

Vista en: May 5, 2011. Cine.

Lo cool: Efectos visuales. Me gustó también que aunque modernizaron la mitología nórdica, no sentí todo fuera de lugar (en particuar el papel de Loki me agradó).

Lo no cool: Innecesaria y forzadamente cheesy.

En general: Entretenida. Tal vez la vería otra vez, sólo para ver Asgard.

Interview with the Vampire

Vista en: Abr 15, 2011. Mi casa.

Lo cool: Nada particularmente bueno.

Lo no cool: Nada que se me haya quedado grabado.

En general: Entretenida, y arriba de mis expectativas.

The King's Speech

Vista en: Abr 21, 2011. Cine, con Diana.

Lo cool: En general la trama, y el soundtrack.

Lo no cool: Nada en particular.

En general: Buena película. Sí la volvería a ver.

Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

Vista en: Abr 16, 2011. @ Ricardo's.

Lo cool: Nada en particular.

Lo no cool: No hay ninguna infinite playlist ni nada remotamente parecido. Very disappointing.

En general: Abajo de mis expectativas. Not extremely boring though.

Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia

Leído entre: Mar 29, 2011 – Abr 01, 2011 (4 días).

Lo cool: Pretty much everything... Aprender acerca de "musical seizures". El capítulo 6 (Musical Hallucinations). El capítulo 9 (Papa blows his nose in G: Absolute Pitch), donde habla —por ejemplo— de que aparentemente hay mucha correlación entre el grado de "tonalidad" del idioma que habla una persona, y su habilidad o predisposición para "aprender" absolute pitch de niño (usando como ejemplo a estudiantes de música chinos y estadounidenses). El capítulo 14 (The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and Music). El capítulo 16 (Speech and Song: Aphasia and Music Therapy) donde habla de cómo personas que no pueden hablar, extrañamente pueden cantar sin problemas, y cómo eso se ha usado como terapia para regresarles parte de su capacidad de hablar.

Lo no cool: Nothing...

En general: Buen libro, bastante recomendable.

Amazon lo tiene aquí.

Notas y citas:

[Hablando de earworms]

The duration of such loops is generally about fifteen to twenty seconds, and this is similar to the duration of the visual loops or cycles which occur in a rare condition called palinopsia where a short scene —a person walking across a room, for example, seen a few seconds before— may be repeated before the inner eye again and again. That a similar periodicity of cycling occurs in both visual and auditory realms suggests that some physiological constant, perhaps related to working memory, may underlie both. (p.49)

And yet and earworm may also, more rarely, include a visual aspect, especially for those musicians who automatically visualize a score as they are hearing or imagining music. One of my correspondents, a French horn player, finds that when her brain is occupied by a brainworm,

reading, writing, and doing spatial tasks like arithmetic are all disturbed by it. My brain seems to be pretty well taken up with processing the [brainworm] in various ways, mainly spatial and kinesthetic: I ponder the relative sizes of the intervals between the notes, I see them laid out in space, I consider the layout of the harmonic structure that they are a part of, I feel the fingerings in my hand, and the muscular movements required to play them, although I don't actually act these out. It's not a particularly intellectual activity; it's rather careless and I don't put any intentional effort into it; it just happens...
I should mention that these unbidden [brainworms] never interfere with physical activity or with activities that don't require visual thought, like engaging in normal conversation. (p.51)

I asked her why she spoke of musical "hallucinations" rather than musical "imagery".
"They are completely unlike each other!" she exclaimed. "They are as different as thinking of music and actually hearing it." Her hallucinations, she emphasized, were unlike anything she had ever experienced before. They tended to be fragmentary —a few bars of this, a few bars of that— and to switch at random, sometimes even in mid-bar, as if broken records were being turned on on and off in her brain. All of this was quite unlike her normal, coherent, and usually "obedient" imagery — though it did have a little resemblance, she granted, to the catchy tunes that she, like everyone, sometimes heard in her head. But unlike catchy tunes, and unlike anything in her normal imagery, the hallucinations had the startling quality of actual perception. (p.55)

Even Tchaikovsky was keenly aware that his great fertility in melody was not matched by a comparable grasp of musical structure — but he had no desire to be a great architectonic composer like Beethoven; he was perfectly happy to be a great melodic one. (p.98)

The fact that most people with congenital amusia are virtually normal in their speech perceptions and patterns, while profoundly disabled in musical perception, is very startling. Can speech and music be that tonally different? Ayotte et al. at first thought that the ability of amusic people to perceive the intonations of speech might be because speech was less exacting than music in its requirements for fine pitch discrimination. But Patel, Foxton, and Friffiths have shown that if intonation contours are extracted from speech, amusic individuals have severe difficulties discriminating these. It is clear, therefore, that other factors, such as the recognition of words, syllables, and sentence structure, must play a crucial part in allowing sevely tone-deaf people to speak and understand nuances of speech almost normally. (p.111-112)

The Finnish entomologist Olavi Sotavalta, an expert on the sounds of insects in flight, was greatly assisted in his studies by having absolute pitch — for the sound pitch of an insect in flight is produced by the frequency of its wingbeats. Not content with musical notation, Sotavalta was able to estimate very exact frequencies by ear. The sound pitch made by the moth Plusia gamma approximates a low F-sharp, but Sotavalta could estimate it more precisely as having a frequency of 46 cycles per second. (p.130)

When people with absolute pitch "hear a familiar piece of music played in the wrong key", Daniel Levitin and Susan Rogers write, "they often become agitated or disturbed... To get a sense of what it is like, imagine going to the produce market and finding that, because of a temporary disorder of visual processing, the bananas all appear orange, the lettuce yellow and the apples purple." (p.131)

Absolute pitch can shift with age, and this has often been a problem for older musicians. Mark Damashek, a piano tuner, wrote to me about such a problem:
When I was four, my older sister discovered that I had perfect pitch —could instantly identify any note across the keyboard without looking... I've been surprised (and disturbed) to find that my perceived piano pitch has shifted upwards by perhaps 150 cents [a semitone and a half]... Now when I hear a recorded piece or a live performance, my best guess at what note is being played is consistently, absurdly high. (p.133)

To give you a sense of how strange a lack of absolute pitch appears to those of us who have it, take color naming as an analogy. Suppose you showed someone a red object and asked him to name the color. And suppose he answered, "I can recognize the color, and I can discriminate it from other colors, but I just can't name it." Then you juxtaposed a blue object and named its color, and he responded, "OK, since the second color is blue, the first one must be red." I believe that most people would find this process rather bizarre. Yet from the perspective of someone with absolute pitch this is precisely how most people name pitches — they evaluate the relationship between the pitch to be named and another pitch whose name they already know... (p.134-135)

Jenny Safran and Gregory Griepentrog at the University of Wisconsin compared eight-month-old infants to adults with and without musical training in a learning test of tone sequences. The infants, they found, relied much more heavily on absolute pitch cues; the adults; on relative pitch cues. This suggested to them that absolute pitch may be universal and highly adaptive in infancy, but becomes maladaptive later and is therefore lost. "Infants limited to grouping melodies by perfect pitches", they pointed out, "would never discover that the songs they hear are the same when sung in different keys or that words spoken at different fundamental frequencies are the same." In particular, they argued, the development of language necessitates the inhibition of absolute pitch, and only unusual conditions enable it to be retained. (The acquisition of a tonal language may be one of the "unusual conditions" that lead to the retention and perhaps heightening of absolute pitch.) (p.138)

He could do this because his musical imagery and memory were intact. He knew how music —his own music and others'— should sound. It was only his perception of music that was distorted.
[footnote]
In this way, he differed radically from Mr. I., the painter who became totally unable to see color because of damage to the color-constructing areas of his visual cortex. Mr. I. became not only unable to perceive colors, but unable to imagine or see them in his mind's eye. (p.143-144)

For many years, the only patient I knew to be a synesthete was a painter who suddenly became totally coloblind following a head injury. He lost not only the ability to perceive or even imagine color, but also the automatic seeing of color with music which he had had all his life. Though this was, in a sense, the least of his losses, it was nevertheless a significant one, for music had always been “enriched,” as he put it, by the colors that accompanied it.
This persuaded me that synesthesia was a physiological phenomenon, dependent on the integrity of certain areas of the cortex and the connections between them — in his case, between specific areas of the in the visual cortex needed to construct the perception or imagery of color. The destruction of these areas in this man had left him unable to experience any color, including “colored” music. (p.179)

She describes her experience this way:
I always see images when I hear music, but I do not associate specific colors with particular musical keys or musical intervals. I wish that I could say that a minor third is always a blue-green color, but I do not distinguish the intervals all that well. My musical skills are pretty modest. When I hear music, I see little circles or vertical bars of light getting brighter, whiter, or more silvery for higher pitches and turning a lovely, deep maroon for the lower pitches. A run up the scale will produce a succession of increasingly brighter spots or vertical bars moving upward, while a trill, like in a Mozart piano sonata, will produce a flicker. High distinct notes on a violin evoke sharp bright lines, while notes played with vibrato seem to shimmer. Several stringed instruments playing together evoke overlapping, parallel bars or, depending on the melody, spirals of light of different shades shimmering together. Sounds made by brass instruments produce a fan-like image. High notes are positioned slightly in front of my body, at head level, and toward the right, while bass notes are located deep in the center of my abdomen. A chord will envelop me.(p.190)

It may be that Clive, incapable of remembering or anticipating events because of his amnesia, is able to sing and play and conduct music because remembering music is not, in the usual sense, remembering at all. Remembering music, listening to it, or playing it, is entirely in the present. (p.228, my emphasis)

Extraordinary, creative interactions can occur when someone with Tourette's performs as a musician. Ray G. was a man strongly drawn to jazz who played drums in a band on the weekends. He was noted for his sudden and wild solos, which would often arise from a convulsive drum-hitting tic — but the tic could initiate a cascade of percussive speed and invention and elaboration. (p.249)

[Hablando de personas que dejan de sentir una parte del cuerpo, ya sea por atrofia debida a falta de uso o a que fue amputada]

There may be inhibition or deactivation not only peripherally, in the nerve elements of the damaged tendons and muscles and perhaps in the spinal cord, but also centrally, in the "body image," the mapping or representation of the body in the brain. A. R. Luria, in a letter to me, once referred to this as "the central resonances of a peripheral injury." The affected limb may lose its place in the body image, while the rest of the body's representation then expands to fill the vacancy (p.257)

Ignacy Paderewski, the Polish pianist and composer, gives a very detailed account in his memoirs about a spider which could apparently distinguish thirds from sixths, and would come down from the ceiling to the piano whenever he played Chopin études in thirds, only to decamp ("sometimes, I used to think, quite angrily") when he switched to études in sixths (p.261)

[Hablando de un experimento en el que se le pedía a diferentes personas que agruparan una serie de notas largas y cortas]

They found that while Japanese speakers preferred to group the tones in a long-short parsing, the English speakers preferred a short-long parsing. Iversen et al. propose that "experience with the native language creates rhythmic templates which influence the processing of nonlinguistic sound patterns." (p.265)

[Hablando de música que le vino al autor a la mente, con percepción completa, y no se la podía quitar]

Orlan asked me to sing or hum some of the songs. I did so, and there was a long pause.
"Have you abandoned some of your young patients?" he asked. "Or destroyed some of you literary children?"
"Both," I answered. "Yesterday. I resigned from the children's unit at the hospital where I have been working, and I burned a book of essays I had just written... How did you guess?"
"Your mind is playing Mahler's Kindertotenlieder," he said, "his songs of mourning for the death of children". I was amazed by this, for I rather dislike Mahler's music and would normally find it quite difficult to remember in detail, let alone sing, any of his Kindertotenlieder. But here my dreaming mind, with infallible precision, had come up with an appropriate symbol of the previous day's events.(p.304-305)

American Beauty

Vista en: Mar 27, 2011. Mi casa.

Lo cool... El video de Ricky acerca de la bolsa "bailando" en el aire. El cambio de actitud de Lester.

Lo no cool... Nothing in particular.

En general: Very good movie.

Se me hizo curiosa la actitud de Ricky durante toda la película. Me hizo pensar en los Tranquils de Dragon Age.

Proud of myself

Dragon Age: Origins

Playthrough time: ~75 hrs (Origins) + ~17 hrs (Awakening) + ~2 hrs (Leliana's Song) + ~2 hrs (Witch Hunt) + ~3 hrs (Golems of Amgarrak) + ~2 hrs (The Darkspawn Chronicles).

Lo que me gustó: Prácticamente todo =D. Great game.

Lo que no me gustó: The Darkspawn Chronicles no estuvo bueno. Leliana's Song pasable, y en Witch Hunt faltó que saliera más Morrigan (aparte de que los 2 estuvieron bastante cortos).

Overall: Excelente juego. Worth every penny.

Notas: Dragon Age: Origins tiene de todo.
Tuve una plática acerca de zapatos con Leliana que me hizo sentirme el amigo gay.
A cada uno de los miembros de tu equipo le agradas o le desagradas. Si le agradas, existe la posibilidad de acostarte con él/ella, y si le desagradas, es más probable que decida irse, o te traicione, o algo. Todo acompañado de un tono de voz adecuado cuando te hablan (risa, amigable VS seco, cortante). A cada uno tienes que hablarle de cierta forma para que te apruebe.
Los personajes se sienten bastante reales. E.g., una conversación en la que besé a Morrigan después de lograr que se enojara conmigo, me aprobó un poco más:
Alex: "Would you object?"
Morrigan: "Only if you stop..."
Luego de acostarme con Morrigan: "I see the stories they tell about Grey Warden endurance... are not exaggerated" jajaja. También luego de eso, me regala un anillo, y aunque mis respuestas al respecto parecen enojarla durante la conversación, al final tuve un "Morrigan approves +6". Mujeres complicadas en todos lados.
Otra conversación al respecto:
Alex: "Would you care to join me in my tent?"
Morrigan: "Should I consult my deceptive nature to give you an answer?"
Alex: "Get in the tent woman."
[Morrigan acepta con cara devilish haha]


Durante mi primer playtrough me gustó mucho que en el segundo quest que hice, aparentemente me fui por un lado "diferente" de las ruinas que estaba explorando, y sentí que el juego me daba la libertad de irme por donde yo quisiera, y hacer las cosas en el orden en que quisiera. Durante ese tramo, me metí en sótanos, pasadizos, cuartos antiguos del castillo, llenos de trampas, enemigos, dragones, MUCHOS items... Para no desaprovechar todo el loot posible ahí, realmente me sentí como scavenger, y me regresé a vender todo lo que había juntado para poder regresar por más (haciendo dinero como un aventurero medieval de verdad (probably)). Finalmente me di cuenta de que toda mi excursión "alterna" era el único camino a seguir jaja, pero inicialmente fue un sentimiento muy agradable.

Planear tu estrategia para una pelea hace TODA la diferencia. Una pelea que perdí 3 veces, la gané sin ningún casualty cuando puse a mi maga a lanzar una tormenta de rayos por las escaleras por donde todos los enemigos tenían que subir, luego a que ella sola atacara con todo al mago enemigo (que por lo general es el que me mataba con un hechizo de explosión) y puse a todo mi party esperando quietos arriba de las escaleras (normalmente bajaban a atacar a quien se encontraran), básicamente para rematar a los enemigos que ya venían debilitados por los rayos. El mago sorprendentemente llegó hasta arriba (cuando podía haber atacado de lejos) y fue casi el primer enemigo que murió. En Golems of Amgarrak, una pelea contra 6 golems me tomó como 6 intentos, hasta que en el último hice lo mismo de poner a mi equipo esperando afuera del cuarto, luego salir corriendo yo solo con todos los golems atrás, y ya que se atoraron todos juntos en la puerta, atacarlos con hechizos de área de efecto, "bombas", etc.

Hay mucha política a lo largo del juego: decidir a quién ayudar, con quién aliarte, a quién traicionar, si dejarte sobornar, sobornar a alguien, si casar a 2 personas, si matar a uno para que el otro no se enoje contigo y se vaya... Y sorpresas por lo mismo. Después de rescatar a la princesa Anora, aparentemente me traicionó, pero luego resulta que sólo había sido para poder escapar más fácil...

Ya terminé mi segundo playthrough (en la dificultad más alta) y lo disfruté casi igual que el primero. Jugué otra historia, con decisiones diferentes, dilemas diferentes, estrategias diferentes... y voy por una tercera =).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb - The Black Swan

Leído entre: Nov 23, 2010 – Mar 21, 2011 (7737 días).

Lo que me gustó: Nada en especial, aunque en general se me hizo buen libro.

Lo que no me gustó: Un poco que repite mucho su tesis... pero estoy consciente de que a veces hasta a mí es necesario decirme algo varias veces para que de verdad se me quede. Sólo a veces.

En general: Chido, para ponerse un poco a pensar.

Amazon lo tiene aquí.

Notas y citas:

Dejé de apuntarlas muy rápido, probablemente hubo otras que me llamaron la atención pero no llegaron hasta acá.

So I disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or "incentives" for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can. (p.xxv).

The problem lies in the structure of our minds: we don't learn rules, just facts, and only facts. Metarules (such as the rule that we have a tendency to not learn rules) we don't seem to be good at getting. (p. xxvi)

Indeed those who read too much Wittgenstein (and writings about comments about Wittgenstein) may be under the impression that language problems are important. They may certainly be important to attain prominence in philosophy departments, but they are something we, practitioners and decision makers in the real world, leave for the weekend. (p.xxx-xxxi)

The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. (p.1)

Mi nueva área de trabajo

De entrada hay que decir que de ahora en adelante, trabajaré parado. Tomé la idea de este post de Gina Trapani (editora de Lifehacker, uno de los blogs que sigo). Me tocó estrenar área de trabajo, monitor de 21 pulgadas (=D), un cluster de máquinas 286 para resolver cualquier problema jaja¹, y "posición de trabajo". A ver cómo me va.

[caption id="attachment_878" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Nueva área de trabajo (1/2)"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_878" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Nueva área de trabajo (2/2)"][/caption]


¹ Obviously joking. Creo que son Pentium, y no van a estar prendidas, sólo son para darle altura a lo demás.

Habemus Pics

Los Pics que pedí a Microchip llegaron bastante rápido =D. Let the fun begin.