Archivos diarios: 21 de octubre de 2002

Webugger

nos ofrece una aleccionadora historia sobre Microsoft, el correo electrónico y la fruta. Para grabarla en piedra y dejarla junto a la cama (más que nada, para tropezar con ella cuando vas al baño).

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…oficialmente La Más Verborreica?.

Gracias, Javier, es agradable saber que al menos tengo un lector.

la mejor bitacora de España

Esta es guay 🙂

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Genera tu propio pasayo diabólico.

Y luego dicen que Flash no sirve para nada.

(vía jwz’s LiveJournal Entries)

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Una inscripción en piedra hallada cerca de Jerusalén podría ser la referencia más antigua Jesucristo (es preciso registrase para leer la noticia completa):

If the inscription is authentic and indeed refers to Jesus of Nazareth, it would be the earliest known documentation of Jesus outside the Bible. The magazine, which announced the find today, is promoting it as «the first-ever archaeological discovery to corroborate biblical references to Jesus.»

Other scholars are reacting with caution, calling the find important and tantalizing but saying it will probably be impossible to confirm a definite link between the inscription and any of the central figures in the founding of Christianity.

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…se complica con los nuevos teléfonos:

If you’re male and your mobile hasn’t got an in-built camera you might not get a date with Mariko, or thousands of girls like her. Then again it might be in your favour. Mariko, you have to understand, is a young Tokyo girl who’s part prostitute, part racketeer, and she likes to check out the faces of her «dates» by mobile before she goes on a job. «If we can check a guy’s face over our cell phones, we know the sort of trustworthy guys that we can hang out with for a while,» Mariko told Japan’s Weekly Playboy magazine recently.

En un artículo, Better than Text? se cuentan ésa y otras posibilidades de los teléfonos con cámara. Algunas son muy serias:

As well as being fun, the picture phones are finding serious applications. Famously well-ordered, Japan has less reported crime than the West, but street crime is rising and investigators are happy to enrol any new help ? which is where the camphone, now carried by more than seven million people in Japan, has found a role. Police chiefs in Osaka, the country’s second biggest city, recently agreed that citizens could wirelessly e-mail them pictures of suspects if they come across a crime.

The social implications of this could be enormous. Not everyone carries a camera, but the majority now carry a phone, and they are much more discreet. When camphones become the norm some sociologists believe that all public activity will come before the recording lens. For Britons who already feel over-scrutinised by surveillance cameras, any claim to privacy will vanish in a flash of clicking mobiles. Japanese individuals can already act as Little Brother, as some multimedia services can now send movie clips by mobile, too.

En el caso de Europa, ¿correrán los teléfonos con cámara la misma suerte que los teléfonos WAP o nos pondrán a un paso más cerca de la sociedad transparente de David Brin?:

For in fact, it is already far too late to prevent the invasion of cameras and databases. The djinn cannot be crammed back into its bottle. No matter how many laws are passed, it will prove quite impossible to legislate away the new surveillance tools and databases. They are here to stay.

Light is going to shine into nearly every corner of our lives.

The real issue facing citizens of a new century will be how mature adults choose to live — how they might compete, cooperate and thrive ? in such a world. A transparent society.

Viendo las alternativas tal y como las pinta David Brin, quizá nos convenga comprarnos un teléfono de esos en cuanto podamos.

(vía Smart Mobs)

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Un amigo me pregunta por qué no traduzco las citas en inglés. Bien, hay varias explicaciones, pero la más simple y directa es que no me apetece.

Verán.

Una de las cosas que hago para ganarme la vida es traducir. Y traducir puede ser una actividad agradable, y haber traducido es una alegría, pero el proceso en sí es duro, lento y cansado. Por tanto, si traduzco espero cobrar por mi trabajo.

Por suerte, tengo un jefe que es muy comprensivo con mi manía de actualizar la bitácora. Estoy trabajando en mi mesa mientras él me vigila por encima del hombro. Yo voy haciendo mis cosillas, pero de pronto algo me llama la atención y tengo que ponerlo. No le importa. Como tampoco le importa que lea el correo, navegue por sitios raros y en general explore sin parar.

A cambio, yo trabajo a horas intempestivas y cuando lo hago espero cobrar.

Pero claro, nadie me pagaría por traducir las citas que pongo en la bitácora. Y traducir, para mí, es trabajo (melancólico, que decía Monterroso, pero trabajo). Y sin encima tuviese que traducir todo lo que pongo, me temo que no actualizaría muy a menudo.

Pippa

es la mujer de un programador, Jason Carreira, que se ha montado una bitácora para contar su visión de las cosas, emitir ácidos comentarios sobre la relación testosterona-programación y en general para dejar a su marido a caer de un burro siempre que sea necesario:

I don’t understand why men seem to have such odd priorities. Grendel, for instance, took an early flight out today (one that I’ve asked repeatedly in the past for him to NEVER TAKE AGAIN but whatever). He gets up at 5, wakes up the baby, has time to watch SportsCenter and sync his email for reading on the plane, and yet is unable to find five minutes before he leaves to help me get the trash and recycling to the curb. Odd, isn’t it?

Grendel, mientras tanto, se ha montado una bitácora más llamada Setting the Story Straight, para, pues eso, contar su versión.

Yo soy rarito, me gusta mucho más el de ella. Y sus comentarios sobre la relación entre pornografía y programación son impagables:

Okay, here’s yet another blog… this one by inluminent. Now, again, I’m a woman. Someone please explain why pictures of hotties barely dressed and blogging about computer stuff goes together? This for me, is like finding the missing link or something. Reading blogs I become Dian Fossey… studying the endangered Programmer and his Porn.

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Los quince personajes de ficción más ricos según la revista Forbes. En la cabeza de la lista, Santa Claus, con una fortuna estimada en infinito. ¿Podía ser de otra forma?

Entre los otros personajes aparecen Bruce Wayne, Lex Luthor y Charles Foster Kane.

(vía asparagirl lives here)

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De la contraportada:

Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality.

Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.

Es interesante la idea, que ya había leído, de que nuestro yo consciente a pesar de creerse en control de nuestras acciones no es realmente el que decide o actúa.

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