My Blog

Que distância é esta que
Atravessa tempos e mares
Desaparece ao despertar do dia
Quando abro os olhos e deixo a mente vagar?

Que distância é esta que
Vence barreiras
Dá adeus a solidão
E se torna inexistente quando o telefone toca?

Que distância é esta que
Mesmo dispersa
Através de milhas e metros
São meros centímetros encravados na memória?

Que distância é esta que
Nem o tempo
Nem o espaço
Aniquilam a força da proximidade presente?

Que distância é esta que é
Imposta pela geografia
De um mundo real
Me separa do poder e me aproxima

Do querer?

(Ângela Bretas)

Dedicado à pessoa que mo dedicou no seu blog. Porque não posso ser insensível ao carinho de quem se preocupa comigo, e nunca mostrou querer o que quer que seja de mim em troca.

Carl Bildt wrote an excellent article for the Expressen on the legacy of Olof Palme. You can also check Bildt’s blog post on the same subject, something I recommend in case Swedish is not your thing.

A Demotivator in the same line as the one from my Obvious Fact post. Mesmerized by them? You can find plenty more where that one came from.

It is not often I feel pleasantly surprised with something. Just look at the Internet. Having witnessed its growth out of university campus and research labs and into the wild, and accepting it as part of my day to day business, it would be normal if I took it for granted and, just like a husband that after many years of life together doesn’t notice his wife’s new haircut, didn’t see anything out of the ordinary with it anymore.

But that is not the case. What left a good taste in my mouth was the amount of free and valuable information in the form of books available. While searching for the text of the French original of “Le Jardin des Supplices” (see my previous post) to compare with my plain paper English translation, I felt flabbergasted with the quantity of sites containing links to books, books and more books. Some of them, like Project Gutenberg, only publish copies of bibliography already in public domain, their copyright having expired. But the quantity of up to date material encompassing the entire spectrum of human knowledge is astounding.

As a quick exercise I decided to make a list of free books resources. The original idea was to create a set of bookmarks, but it will be worth sharing them if I manage to put at least one of you in the mood for some reading. Here it goes.

• The Project Gutenberg
• arXiv.org
• O’Reilly Open Books
• Microsoft Reader Catalog of eBooks
• Blackmask Online
• Wikibooks
• Tech Books For Free
• The National Academies Press
• Books-On-Line
• EServer.org: Accessible Writing
• The Online Books Page

And remember, there are plenty more resources if you just google for them.

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. ”

Le Jardin des Supplices (The Torture Garden)
Octave Mirbeau, 1899

Now that the buzz about St. Valentine’s day is long gone, it is time to remember a huge segment of lovers that still keep on ticking in the back burner of our heads but have had the right to zip, zilch, nada for the duration of that day. I mean a special kind of lover, the ex lover.

At this point you may be thinking this is a joke. I can understand you think that, because I did mean this to be a joke. But now I am not quite so sure. Have you reflected on the importance of such people in our lives, even our society? From the most sincere to the decadent, back stabbing, blood sucking kind of ex lover, they all taught us a few things, even if only that we should keep way from them like the devil from the cross. After all, as Nietzsche put it so eloquently, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

So, since it is a real shame that there isn’t a single day of the year specially elected for the purpose, we should be creative and celebrate the past with a keen eye on the future. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in the old maxim “Say it with flowers”. What about a collection of carnivorous plants then? Get a nice wrapping paper, write a note with a big thank you (and maybe a good riddance), and you are set to go. The symbolism may be lost on some of the recipients, but what counts is our smug feeling inside.

The news may not come as a surprise to many, but it’s official now and if you dismissed it as lack of skill there’s a perfectly sensible physiological explanation. Under the title “Blood pressure reactivity to stress is better for people who recently had penile–vaginal intercourse than for people who had other or no sexual activity” scientists try to explain the ordeal with a complex mix of blood pressure effects and hormone levels in the body. And if chat like this makes you tickle, you can cough up the US $30 to have the real thing by your bedside at night.

You can find the original news here.

From Overheard in New York:

Little boy: What’s the “n word,” Dad?
Dad: I’m not gonna tell you.
Little boy: Why?
Mom: It’s worse than all the other words because it makes specific people feel bad.
Dad: You don’t need to know it. It’s one of those things you’ll learn when you get older. You’ll learn a lot of bad things when you get older.

–Barnes and Noble, Astor Place

A French designer has a business that produces and sells synthetic human skin fashion articles. As he puts it, his fashion is

“a successful alchemy between the captivating and the repulsive
for a sensuel fashion without complacency.

G o r e + C h i c = V e r y C h i c“

Yeah, sure, whatever. He is quite aware that his work is bizarre and will shock, even repulse people. He is banking on it, no doubt. There’s plenty of people that will buy into anything just because it does exactly that, and he is simply putting his hopes on that niche market.

Now, if we take one step back, and think calmly about it, is there really a reason to feel repulsion at it? Is synthetic human skin really skin at all? Is real animal skin more acceptable? Or is it because we see it as an attack on human dignity? After all skin is the most visible part of our body. It’s part of our physical essence. This is a simple issue, but signal of what’s to come. We can already see the ethical landscape being redrawn as a result of face transplants and stem cell research. The issues at stake are basically the same: what it is to be human and how far can we go before challenging that same definition.