It’s the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Wow, I was only a child then, but even I knew that it was a momentous event.
Now as a new decade approaches a new wall has already been built, the battle lines are fuzzy and the enemy would be much harder to defeat.
It is funny in a perverse way. Capitalism suffers from its excesses, and there is at least a considerable fraction of people who agree that left to its own devices capitalism fails (I dare to say that more people were convinced of capitalisms problems by the recent economic crisis rather than the former soviet union).
Democracy is heading to a collision course with religion. Not a specific religion but with the practice of religion. It is a question I mull but cannot seem to get any headway in. I just hope we solve this within our lifetimes. In a way as hard problems tend to be, I don’t know where I stand when the collision happens, all that I know is that it probably will happen.
rePost::The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God Of Manga – Telegraph
Is the astroboy movie any good? Hope they live up to how great the manga/anime was!
Foreign correspondents arriving in Tokyo to cover the State funeral of the Showa Emperor in 1989 were surprised to find almost as much media attention, and public grief, focussed on the death of a comic artist.
Osamu Tezuka died shortly after Emperor Hirohito. His funeral cortege passed through street lined with grieving fans: grandparents who read his early comics accompanied by grandchildren who were fans of more recent TV shows, respected film-makers and science fiction authors alongside office workers carrying posters of their favourite Tezuka characters. An American serviceman stationed in Yokosuka recalled walking through the city on the morning Tezuka’s death was announced: people clustered around TV stores, weeping at the news.
Tezuka’s precocious talent for art and storytelling helped him overcome bullying at school and survive the war years. Those early experiences created a lifelong determination to speak against war and injustice, constant themes in his work.
His early comics made him a teenage superstar while still in medical school. On graduation, he chose comics over science, but his passion for medicine crops up in many of his works. His career output is staggering, one of the largest in comics – around 170,000 pages. Like fellow-workaholics Margaret Thatcher and Winston Churchill, he slept in short stretches and worked almost non-stop.
But his interests went far beyond comics. He was an accomplished animator, illustrator, designer, film critic, essayist, novelist, director, screenwriter, radio and TV pundit and advertising icon. He had a wide circle of friends in the arts, sciences and media, and communicated directly with his fans – a 21st century celebrity far ahead of Twitter.
via The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God Of Manga – Telegraph.
rePost::The Long View: In defense of Esperanza Cabral : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose
I’ve bemoaned the lack of goodToGreat political blogs in the Philippines. Most tend to be ideologues and tend to bend over backward to defend their beliefs. Its refreshing to know that there is at least one High Quality blog in the Philippines about politics. Now if only I can find another 4 goodToGreat political blogs , I can finally start looking for goodToGreat Econ/Business blogs from the Philippines!
What struck me immediately about the controversial blog entry was that the problems the public has come to associate with officialdom and relief were notably absent. There was no pilfering, no looting, no diversion of relief to line official pockets. This, in itself, is a colossal achievement: the warehouses are secure, items are tidily kept and they presumably end up where they should. Another thing that struck me was that the secretary has proven true to her pledge to be transparent and accountable about donations: they are publicly available, on line, listing monetary donations, and donations in kind, and the disbursement of relief goods.
via The Long View: In defense of Esperanza Cabral : Manuel L. Quezon III: The Daily Dose.
rePost::The Referendum – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com
A friend once told me “I don’t judge other people; Why should I let them judge me?”. This was in response to me ranting about how I feel people react when espousing some of the things I believe in, or I do not believe in. Since then I’ve tried thinking this way. If I am judged to be something; I just let it be. If I care too much of how other people see me, I will cease to be the person I am, and I like the person I am. I may have a lot of faults, insecurities and sins, but as my friends make fun of me when I say it: “I am the nicest guy I know.” (Mulling this question seriously I am not the nicest guy I know but I am definitely in the top 5). Yes there is a referendum, but we must understand that people mostly are self involved. People are mostly judging themselves; and simply put deep down nobody like looking down on themselves. Life is not a game that can be won or lost. It simply is life. Read the whole article to understand what The Referendum phenomenon means.
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
via The Referendum – Happy Days Blog – NYTimes.com.
rePost::Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology – Boing Boing
I believe that blaming your genes for almost anything is the wrong way to go. It is a cop out and I would never want to be that way. We have the lives we have, deal with it, learn love change improve create. The limitations that our genes impose on us is not as shackling as the limitations we place on ourselves.
Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian PsychologyAnne Innis Dagg’s “Love of Shopping” is Not a Gene is a scathing, entertaining and extremely accessible geneticist’s critique of “Darwinian Psychology” — that is, the “science” of ascribing human behavior to genetic inevitability. Dagg, a biologist/geneticist at the University of Waterloo, identifies Darwinian Psychology as a nexus of ideological pseudoscience cooked to justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality.One after another, Dagg examines the cherished shibboleths of Darwinian Psychology, examining the research offered in support of such statements as “Rape is genetic” or “Black people are genetically destined to have lower IQ scores than white people” and demolishes each statement by subjecting it to scientific rigor, including an examination of all the contradictory evidence ignored by proponents.
via Love of Shopping is Not a Gene: exposing junk science and ideology in Darwinian Psychology – Boing Boing.
rePost::The Twilight Saga: New Moon Spawns IMDb Battle of the Sexes Turf War | /Film
Mom’s want to be 16 year olds and 16 year olds want to be mom. Priceless. Interesting yung graphs click through!
The funniest thing about the rankings is the demographics behind the votes The average Male user rating is a 3.3, while the average female user rating is an 8.0. And while females under 18 rate the film a 8.7, the most popular demo is the “Twilight Mom”, females aged 30-44, which have given the film an average rating of a 9.9. Wow… Full graphs after the jump.
via The Twilight Saga: New Moon Spawns IMDb Battle of the Sexes Turf War | /Film.
rePost::20-year old Iraqi woman dies; father ran her over for being too Westernized – Boing Boing
I am too mad to comment. These people make religion harder for the rest of us. Fuck. I fear that the time when we have to choose between religious freedom and freedom of speech is near. I know what I’ll choose , I just don’t like the other people on that side.
20-year old Iraqi woman dies; father ran her over for being too Westernized
noor faleh almaleki.pngA young Iraqi woman died tonight in Arizona because her father believed she had become too Westernized. Noor Faleh Almaleki, the 20-year old pictured here, moved to the Phoenix area in the mid-90s with her family.
via 20-year old Iraqi woman dies; father ran her over for being too Westernized – Boing Boing.
rePost::2009-10-20/high_anxiety.md at master from raganwald's homoiconic – GitHub
Who knows how to play Go? Let’s play some time.
Where does one buy a Go set here in the Philippines?
The following stuff was about one person trying learn go!
I’ve long wanted to play this game ever since I got hooked on the anime playing at qtv 11 about Go.
Need to search the interwebs for local go gaming groups!
Try something, she encouraged. Succeed, fail, it doesn’t matter. Try something and see how it works out. But I sat, paralyzed by fear, paralyzed by indecision. It wasn’t that I didn’t know which move to play. That phrase suggests that I could see a few plays, had a few ideas of things I wanted to do. But I had no idea what I could be trying to do. I couldn’t select a move because I didn’t see any moves. Sure, I could place a stone on any vacant intersection, so in a sense I had a list of possible moves. But at any non-trivial level, a move suggests some sort of intention. I had no intentions, I had no idea what I could be trying to do or why.
via 2009-10-20/high_anxiety.md at master from raganwald’s homoiconic – GitHub.
rePost::Good People Work Hard
I’ve heard the excuse “Don’t have enough time” from a lot of people. The thing is we make time, we are only young once why not push ourselves to the max. We never know how long we have in this life, i’d rather say to myself I did all that I could have, all that I can within the choices I made, than say to myself I was a victim of my circumstance.
We never have enough time. We make time for the things we believe to be important!
I, of course, wrote the DVI-to-CRS software, which also required some tricky font caching (the algorithm for which is the basis of my only published paper, which was actually written by my co-author, guess who?). Those were some intense days of working together, getting it all to work. The CRS was in a cramped basement room, and I had to load and unload each sheet of photographic paper in the darkness, and feed it into the triple-bath developer. Any bug could be potentially in my code or Knuth’s firmware, and as I mentioned, debugging wasn’t easy. After a number of very long days, I came in one morning, and came into Knuth’s office just as he was arriving and handing a stack of legal paper to his secretary. “Here’s a paper I wrote, please type it in,” he told her. I was floored. We’d been working night and day; did he write the paper in his sleep?
It is not uncommon that, in the middle of an important project, you need to work extra hard. But Knuth, despite working all day to make his code work, still spent an unknown amount of time writing papers (maybe during sleep…), so he wouldn’t compromise his scientific output. It just reminds me that to be really good, it is not enough to have good ideas. You also need to work hard.
Next time you feel overwhelmed by your projects, think about this.
via Good People Work Hard.
rePost::How to memorialize friends who have passed away on Facebook – Boing Boing
Spent about 30 minutes thinking what I would want when I die. Kind of surreal, but nice.
Over on the Facebook blog, head of security Max Kelly has just explained what to do to memorialize the profile of someone who has passed away:
We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it’s important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialized.
…When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. We try to protect the deceased’s privacy by removing sensitive information such as contact information and status updates. Memorializing an account also prevents anyone from logging into it in the future, while still enabling friends and family to leave posts on the profile Wall in remembrance.
If you have a friend or a family member whose profile should be memorialized, please contact us, so their memory can properly live on among their friends on Facebook.
via How to memorialize friends who have passed away on Facebook – Boing Boing.