Mental String

drawing power

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 10:40:23 +0000

Once I posted about biro-web, a website made with drawings made with just trivial pens and imagination. Now, it’s author Jon Burgerman is drawing them for BBC Comedy cartoon section. Doesn’t please all tastes but it’s certainly different.

I wonder if in the future, light anti-depressives will be something like this. It sure made me laugh.

dinners close to a red light district

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 02:44:31 +0000

At elementary school there weren’t many things I liked to do. Besides being a very quite child, I was very tall for my age and therefore had too clumsy movements to join most of other kids plays. Although I was a good student, I was always being humiliated by the teacher about my bad handwriting. Anyhow, there was one thing I really loved to do: paper folding (aka origami). It was _the_ thing that pulled me from the almost zombie state and got me wired. Occasionally we had classes to do only paper folding where I learned models at first sight and repeated them till perfection. But eventually my teacher didn’t had more models to teach and I was bored again.

Fifteen years later, over a dinner at Mr. Jacks with some foreign friends, I’ve come to realize that my keenness for paper folding wasn’t just an hobbie of only a few or a kids play. Paper folding (origami) plays a really big part in the culture and tradition of Asian countries, specially in Japan and Korea. The fact that amazed me most was a Korean tradition that involved paper cranes - the model I enjoy most folding.

This tradition is still popular today and used widely in Korea. It says that if you fold 1000 paper cranes and give them to the one you love, your wishes of love will come true. Yes, 1000. Still not very impressed? Then, first do some math: I take between 5 to 10 minutes to fold the Korean paper crane version (which isn’t very different from the one I’ve learned in elementary school but slightly more complex, providing a more elegant and robust model) from a square extracted from a A4 paper sheet. Assuming one would take 5 minutes on average, he would be occupied for more than 83 hours. Seems a lot? Right, but it’s still not hard enough so why don’t we save some trees and use instead of A4 paper sheets, 5cmx5cm ones - the most common size for the 1000 paper crane folding? I never tried folding this size but I’m sure it’s a pretty hard task.

If you got interested in the paper crane model, you can try it yourself by following this animated instructions. But if what really catchs your eye is the 1000 paper tradition, you might want to know that it’s possible to buy kits online with 1000 paper sheets and even glass bowls to put them. Right, what I shouldn’t be telling you is that if you are lazy, it’s possible for about 40 euros to buy packages of already folded paper cranes. But of course you wouldn’t cheat on such a thing, am I right?

Special thanks to Darae Yoon for all the helpful info on the subject and also for the company at that dinner. :)

bookcrossing, the best thing since french fries

Wed, 17 Nov 2004 02:36:43 +0000

I received today my first book from bookcrossing. It came from Greece in a neat brown package and I’m just thrilled with the idea that bookcrossing actually works.

For the ones who might not know bookcrossing yet, the main idea is quite simple: people start by registering books they have at bookcrossing.com and tag them with a number and some instructions. Then, they release it and that’s when the real book crossing starts. There are several methods for doing it and I think I still don’t know them all. The classic one is to release it into the wild by leaving it at some place where it can be found by someone else. Although it sounds nice, this method has proved to get many books lost. Alternatively, one of the most used methods are book rings where the book travels around the people that have subscribe to it and in the end the book returns to it’s original owner. Book rays, same as the previous, but the book keeps traveling ad infinitum. And, of course, simply borrowing it to anyone interested. Oh, yes, there are also RABCK (Random Acts of Bookcrossing Kindness) where someone wants to send a book to someone else randomly, who then reads it and sends it to someone else they randomly find on the site.
It’s possible to check at anytime who first registered a book, where it has been and who has it at the moment through journal entries that each registered book has.
I’m aware that this idea doesn’t attract everyone and even myself only got really interested now, although I heard about it sometime ago. In what comes to books, I hardly read one twice and, unless it’s not mine, why not allow someone else to read it? Most books are too precious to keep in a bookshelf for years IMHO, plus, this way books come with bonus stories about the traveling they already made meeting different places and readers. It’s something like free software meeting project Gutenberg meeting interactive global library. :-)

the crystal ball of the XXI century

Tue, 16 Nov 2004 01:05:57 +0000

Ok. So, you are an IT bloke, and you know that if you wanna succeed, you should at least be up to date. Plus, you need to be able to predict things so that you’re not behind when they happen. What do you?

a) make random guesses
b) go to the closest witch and ask her to look into her crystal ball for you
c) take the red pill and go ask Oracle

Seriously, how often do you think about what the future holds in terms of technology? Our parents have witnessed some of the biggest inventions ever, should we expect something of the same magnitude? According to this BBC article, inventions in the future will have a much smaller impact in our lives than the ones in the past.
The article reminded me of a BT Exact white paper I read some time ago. It’s authors, Ian Pearson and Ian Neild, have compiled a technology timeline (link to pdf) to provide BT researchers and managers a way to foresee what the future holds when they have to make products or services. The document is quite easy to read and doesn’t focus only on technology itself but also in areas like education, demographics, transport and others and deserves a quick browse. It started in 1991 and has been updated every two or three years, learning from it’s own mistakes, and adding new predictions every edition. I’ve emailed Ian Pearson asking if there will be a new version since the latest dates from 2001 and it’s scheduled for next spring. Meanwhile, here are some handpicked predictions for the future from that document.

Loneliness in aged population greatly reduced by network communities	2010
Most software written by machine	2011
Orgasmatron	2012
Space hotel for 350 guests, using recycled Shuttle fuel tanks	2015
Need to book time slots to use some key roads	2020
Computer enhanced dreaming	2020
Deep underground cities in Japan	2020
Emotion control devices	2025
More robots than people in developed countries	2025
Emotion control chips used to control criminals	2030
Use of human hibernation in space travel	2030
Dream link technology	2030
Brain ‘add-ons’	2033
Moon base the size of small village	2040

And if for some reason you don’t find this enough to make the future sound interesting, try this technology timeline and poke into future millennia. Satisfaction garanteed or your money returned. Maybe.

ilustration and design

Sat, 13 Nov 2004 01:29:00 +0000

“The Japanese colour is not only elegant, smart and delicate, it also shows another quite clear aspect. First of all Japanese people have an intuitive and flat chromatic perception and apparently they don t see the colour in the daylight as Westerners do. Even the deep and bright colours or the delicate and light ones - more then the glares of the lights and the shadows - are decided on the basis of the meaning of the colour that a particular object has or on the perception of it. […] This book together with the itinerary exhibition and the web site shows it in a complete form. The project moves its first steps from the desire and the need to show the immense seductive power of the illustrators living and working in Japan. MONDOFRAGILE is above all a homage to the visual Japanese culture. It is an unconditional love declaration to that millenary tradition and to its continuous ability to renew and widen the borders of the visual world. The selection criterion of the artists represented in the book is strictly emotive; we have chosen images and pictures able to struck our senses, those where the visual effect, the perception of the forms and the chromatic choice involve more the emotional sphere then the logic one.“

from the introduction of the book Mondofragile (fragile world)

The creator of this book is an Italian design/animation company called Delicatessen that putted together 400 works of 24 Japanese artists. Now, they created another book called Mascotte! which does not only have illustration works but also reaches several other fields of design, photography, advertising works and more.

Still on the illustration line, check the results of this contest which had for the theme, Gary Larson’s work The far side.

chestnuts in autumn

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 17:17:47 +0000

It’s not a very good year for selling chestnuts, miss E. said. She is 73, and spent a big part of them doing it so she ought to know. She started by helping her relatives and through the years she sold at almost every city in the country. There isn’t anything relevant about chestnuts that she doesn’t know about.

First, offered me two extra chestnuts. Because I was friendly she said. Then, gave me big beautiful smile when I asked to take some pictures of her. I’ve promissed her a copy. I hope she likes it.

planning the plans

Wed, 10 Nov 2004 01:10:16 +0000

Some of my friends would say I’m a plan maker by nature. Truth is, I hate to make plans, but I dislike even more the consequences of not making them. I would rather toy with a plan at it’s own speed and give birth to it when we both think it’s ready. I don’t see this has a passive attitude although I know this has as much of wishful thinking as naiveness.

My future is starting to stumble on me and plans are required so that I don’t fall but rather lift off. Faster that I wished, my last school semester is running towards it’s end, and with that the closer is my internship and graduation. Delaying this for another year sounds appealing but I can’t afford that. Rather, my parents can’t afford having me another year in the university. I need to get rid of this feeling of being such a weight to them and perhaps even pay them back somehow to justify why they did so many sacrifices to allow me to do what I wanted. For that, I’m the one that has to do some sacrifices now: this semester expects me to work like mad while at the same time I’m craving for some vacations. Maybe I’ll have to make some plans to have some at some point.

(Meanwhile, posting should get back to normal in the next days. It has been raining on my raft lately so I’ve decided to suspend posts for the sake of the blog itself.)

the mankind family

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 18:01:44 +0000

Did you ever thought about your family tree closely? Common sense says that we all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents and so on following a geometric progression, doubling in each generation. But, as someone said, “common sense is what tells us that the world is flat“.

If we assume that there is a new generation each 25 years and we go back 600 years, that’s 2²⁴ which is already a respectable number of 1 million grandparents. But things get trickier when we go further. For instance, if go back another 600 years (to 800AD), that will get us 2⁴⁸. That’s 281.5 trillion grandparents and with this we get a problem: in 800AD there weren’t that much people on the world. Actually, today we are only 6.3 billions.

So where’s the catch? You probably guessed it already. Our ancestors along the way married their cousins without knowing. This is called pedigree collapse and the closer the cousin, the bigger is the percentage of the collapse. Of course the worst case is when two siblings got married (think royalty-wise for instance) when it’s a major 50% collapse. With a first cousin it’s a 25% cut-down but collapses are still relevant with more distant cousins which is the most common case.

Some geneticists believe that everybody on earth is at least 50^th cousin to everybody else and most of us are a lot more closer, which really puts the mankind family concept into perspective. So, please keep up in mind that if you get mad with some complete stranger, chances are that he/she is probably your 25^th cousin. :)

fever burp

Sun, 24 Oct 2004 05:33:46 +0000

I don’t know for how long I’ll put up with this attic feeling. Taming my bonking head is urgent or my quivering will to keep going will fade out for good. I need to stand up and redefine my objectives to break this thick biased ties that has stuffed my life with fears and spectator memories.

PS: I’ve upload some new photos.

handpicked news

Sat, 23 Oct 2004 13:53:50 +0000

Europe is following Canada’s example on the use of shocking images in the anti-smoking campaign: a total of 42 images containing from rotten lungs to a man with a large tumour on his throat. The European comission will let each country do decide whether or not to include the images on cigarette packs. Somehow, I think that smokers will not be the only ones to get shocked by this.
Should programs made by public broadcasters, like television and radio - paid with public funds - belong to public domain? Dutch parliamentarians believe so and they go further: it should be distributed online.
In an interview to the MOJO magazine, the Icelandic singer Bj�rk confessed that Am�lia Rodrigues is one of her 3 favourite female voices being povo que lavas no rio the favourite song from her.

how big is a crucifixe anyway?

Thu, 21 Oct 2004 01:30:02 +0000

In February the French Parliament approved a law proposed in December last year to ban the use in schools of the Muslin headscarf along with Sikh turbans, Jewish skullcaps and large Christian crucifixes. The law came into effect at the start of the new school year (in last month) and it’s created it’s first victims. I still find hard to believe this is really happening in an European country.

So, it’s ok to wear cloths with offensive writings, black leather covered in with metal chains, gothic, latex, or even to wear (really!) less. But if someone wants to cover him/herself more because of it’s own beliefs, then we make a big fuss about it, right?

How can someone’s use of a headscarf interfere with another’s space? It doesn’t. So the only argument I can see here is the fact that some young women are intimidated by Muslim men who oblige them to wear the scarf. Sure I don’t agree with such thing, but will this be solved with a law?

Hell no! At worst, it’ll make them get out of school sooner, preventing them from accessing education and information and this is the opposite of what should be done. Using this law is no solution to this problem and besides, what right has the French government to force someone not to do something by forbidding it, based of the fact that they might be being forced to do it? Is this any better? What about the majority that use, not only the headscarf, but also turbans or skullcaps, and that truly believe on their convictions and wish (freely) to use it? In the end they have two options: disobey their religion, or compromise their education. This is not opening their lifes, but rather restraining them more.

Religion is part of one’s identity and denying that makes me have an itch on my stomach. Sure I’m aware that religion can preach extremist ideas. But if we want to proclaim a Europe of tolerance in a time of globalization, I certainly can’t think this is a good way to deal with the problem. France claimes that it is just defending its nation secularism, but I see as just another form of desguised intolerance.

a�ucar aos pacotes

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 20:16:05 +0000

Qualquer portugu�s que tenha pairado algum tempo pelo estrangeiro, j� foi eventualmente atropelado por um (f)igoroso fig�! quando disse o seu pa�s de origem. Nada de novo, afinal, o Lu�s Figo � uma das nossas marcas nacionais no estrangeiro a par do vinho do Porto, do Algarve e do fado. Enquanto dist�co nacional n�o h� como negar o valor do fado, mas confesso que n�o � o meu o tipo de m�sica. Na verdade, at� sei muito pouco sobre ele e a prova est�… nos pacotes de a�ucar da Delta :)
Passo a explicar. No m�s passado, a Delta editou uma (excelente) s�rie alusiva aos 100 anos do fado. Desde Mariza a Carlos Paredes, passando pela incontorn�vel Am�lia, os grandes s�mbolos est�o todos l�, mas houve um em particular que me chamou � aten��o por destoar do ar formal ou recatado dos restantes. Um jovem acompanhado � guitarra por uma mulher (imagem do lado). Se o olharmos de perto, nota-se que as tatuagens do jovem (acalorado) s�o dignas do kamasutra!
Mas afinal, era eu que n�o conhecia O outro lado do fado. Hoje, quase por acidente, acabei por descobrir que se trata da capa de um CD/livro vendido este ano pelo p�blico.
L� se vai a minha teoria de que havia um ilustrador na Delta que nos andava a pregar partidas.

confession

Sun, 17 Oct 2004 03:43:14 +0000

It’s 4:30am. It’s Sunday morning. There’s a bluesy tune on the playlist. And I’m finnaly making the big confession. I’ve a congenital problem. I don’t know how to pick shoes.
I just don’t. In my last attempt to buy a pair, I made sure at the shop that they were comfy. The result? Five blisters and a cranky mood. It’s no use. Everytime I give some pair of shoes a try, I end up crying for some sleazy sneakers. Some have born unable to distinguish colors. I’ve born unable to pick nice shoes.

Portugal 7 - Russia 1

Thu, 14 Oct 2004 02:22:03 +0000

The portuguese soccer team keeps swinging between brilliant and disastrous exhibitions and reminding me why I prefer other sports to soccer. After a quite humiliating tie against Liechtenstein, whose population wouldn’t fill Lisbon main stadium, Portugal defeated Russia today by an impressive 7-1. As usual, for the next few days, soccer fans will formulate new theories (or proclaim the correctness of their previous ones) on how we can win the world cup, foresee the next results and, of course, blame someone for this roller-coaster performances. It’s not a pattern, it’s just soccer passion and there’s nothing wrong about it, I just don’t understand it, I guess.

mist�rios

Tue, 12 Oct 2004 00:56:35 +0000

Dois mist�rios para fechar o dia.

O primeiro. Porque ser� que � noite h� uma coluna de fumo a sair (apenas) do meu departamento? Ser� alguma investiga��o sobre uma nova tecnologia de comunica��o wireless, neste caso, por sinais de fumo? Ideias?

O segundo. Porque � que, at� hoje, aparentemente eu era a �nica pessoa que n�o sabia que a generalidade dos museus est�o fechados � segunda-feira? Ora bolas…

scanning session

Sun, 10 Oct 2004 16:30:39 +0000

Henri Cartier-Bresson
Rue Mouffetard, Paris, 1954

PS: I’ve upload some of the photos I’ve scanned last friday. Check them here.

BUS

Sat, 09 Oct 2004 23:54:14 +0000

O autocarro solu�ava no meio do tr�nsito � pelo menos umas duas horas. Quem ainda n�o tinha adormecido com o relato da bola, ia como eu, entretido a ler ou a olhar a paisagem distorcida pela chuva l�nguida no vidro da janela; talvez a pensar na morte da bezerra ou do cordeiro ou do potro. Sim, porque havia tempo para tudo naquela viagem: o tr�nsito estava adormecido e sem vontade de ir a lado algum.
O sol, esse, j� tinha picado o ponto e ido para casa… � sempre a mesma coisa. A continuar assim algu�m vai ter que se queixar ao encarregado: cada vez sai mais cedo e deixa mais trabalho por fazer na bancada. Sempre quero ver que desculpas vai arranjar desta vez. Bom, adiante.
No banco da frente, um puto ensinava � m�e quem era o son goku e o vegeta ilustrando-os nas got�culas do vidro quando, de repente, da parte da frente do autocarro vieram gritos. Meio autocarro levantou-se e a outra metade esticou o pesco�o.
O motivo do alarido parecia ser o homem que estava parado no fundo do corredor. Alto, ma�udo, dava-lhe a� uns 50 anos. Mais n�o, pareceu-me que j� tinha demasiados. Vestia um bon� do euro e uma t-shirt da nike. Numa m�o, segurava um saco do feira-nova e na outra um rev�lver. Lamento, mas n�o lembro da marca deste.
Pelo jeito da coisa, ele n�o queria apenas uma moedinha e todos j� tinham entendido isso porque o saco j� come�ava a encher e ele vinha em direc��o do fundo do autocarro. Eu precisava de formular um plano mais r�pido que a subscri��o de cr�dito por telefone. Olhei � volta. No banco do lado um homem ainda com o Jornal de Not�cias na m�o olhava para mim e acenou-me com a cabe�a ao que eu retribu� instintivamente. Como n�o o conhecia de lado nenhum, deduzi pouco depois que n�o se tratava de um cumprimento e que o meu pedido de cr�dito tinha sido aprovado. Perd�o, o plano. O plano tinha sido formulado. Fic�mos � espera.
Assim que o saco do feira-nova me foi mostrado, o homem do jornal levantou-se e aproximou-se por detr�s do lar�pio. Mais um segundo e tudo estaria terminado quando de repente um berro veio do banco detr�s.
“Golo! Gooollo! Tomai l� que � para aprenderem!” - Acordei. Estremunhado, virei-me para tr�s e esbocei qualquer coisa que pretendia ser um sorriso. No banco do lado, uma senhora gr�vida ressonava enquanto que l� fora continuava a mesma chuva frouxa - “Mais 10 minutos, Paulo. Mais 10 minutos".

can you spare a minute?

Fri, 08 Oct 2004 01:26:38 +0000

About 128-bit encryption keys:

“Complexities are expressed as orders of magnitude. If an algorithm has a processing complexity of 2¹²⁸, then 2¹²⁸ operations are required to break the algorithm. (These operations may be complex and time-consuming).
Still, if you assume that you have enough computing speed to perform a million operations every second and you set a million parallel processors against the task, it will still take over 10⁹ years to recover the key. That’s a billion times the age of the universe.“

from this cryptography book.

Impressive? Yes. But there’s a flaw on this theory: technology is not constant over time. More processing power together with brains writting more efficient cracking algorithms is all that will take to get 128-bit keys breakable during my life time. And that’s what I call impressive.

did you do your prank today?

Thu, 07 Oct 2004 01:49:08 +0000

While I was in Utrecht, Kuba had the unfortunate idea of trusting his room keys with Rob, when he went home for Christmas holidays. Of course Rob wouldn’t let that pass by. And so wouldn’t we, :P.
I can’t imagine Kuba’s face when he arrived from Poland at 5am after a 30 hour bus ride and entered the room to find all his items in a single square meter column in the center of the room. And I really mean all of his room items, from his bed to his desk and bicycle: everything got piled up carefully, lego-like, and - this is quite important - tied up with toilet paper.

Do you think that was a cool prank? Try this one. (via meia de leite).

And last, but not least, duct tape wall tapings: get a friend, some meters of duck tape and then… duct tape your friend to a wall. Or ceiling. Whichever makes more sense. Or less.

Grand Opening

Wed, 06 Oct 2004 03:22:31 +0000

Get some PHP documentation. Add time and patience q.b.. With a flashlight, poke for bugs for some days and finally attach everything together with some duck tape. The outcome might very well be something nice. Or maybe not.
Either way, here it is. A new design and structure to my homepage. This time with a shinny new domain and containing a weblog. It took me quite a while to put this one up and running although most of the time was spent taming some of the IE esoteric features (a.k.a. bugs): believe me, it was quite an adventure.

The photo section is still work in progress: I need to scan some photos asap and then I’ll decide exactly what to do about it. Meanwhile, I’ve uploaded some photos to a flickr account which, btw, is a quite nice way to share photos online. Their flash organizr-thingy makes the creation of photo albums an extremely easy task.

The big news about this new structure is obviously the blog. Older posts than this one were imported from my livejournal which now permanently moved to here. For the ones who followed me there, the only changes will be in format: now, posts will swing between English and Portuguese according to topic or mood. I hope that my English will be up to it.