Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
A good writer is a good writer.
The public always likes an exposé, but what made the stories so popular was not simply the explosive revelations of military incompetence. García Márquez had managed to transform Velasco’s account into a narrative so dramatic and compelling that readers lined up in front of the newspaper’s offices, waiting to buy copies.
via Gabriel García Márquez, investigative journalist – Chris Blattman.
Intro to TOR: how you can be an anti-censorship activist in your sleep
Here's a nice little introductory article on TOR, The Onion Router, a privacy-enhancing technology that helps you to circumvent national, corporate and school firewalls and enhance your anonymity. Originally developed by the US military to help communications get in and out of countries that heavily filter their networks, TOR is free/open software and is maintained by many volunteers around the world, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
TOR works by passing your traffic through several (theoretically) unrelated computers all over the Internet, using cryptography to keep the origin, destination, and intermediary steps secret from each computer it passes through.
You can run TOR on your own computers and they'll become part of this array of intermediary hosts all over the net, making your network connection into a tool for privacy and free access to information
via Intro to TOR: how you can be an anti-censorship activist in your sleep Boing Boing.
Apple endured its darkest days during the early 1990s, when the PC had lost its original magic and turned into a drab, utilitarian tool. Buyers flocked to Dell’s cheap, beige boxes. Computing back then was all about the programs. Now, computing is all about the programming – the words and sounds and pictures and conversations that pour out of the Internet’s cloud and onto our screens. Computing, in other words, has moved back closer to the ideal that Steve Jobs had when he founded Apple. Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer.
Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Hello iPad, Goodbye PC.
The rapturous reaction to Apple’s tablet – the buildup to Jobs’s announcement blurred the line between media feeding-frenzy and orgiastic pagan ritual – shows that our attitude to the tablet form has shifted. Tablets suddenly look attractive. Why? Because the nature of personal computing has changed.
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Hello iPad, Goodbye PC.
I really need to get thinner!
Obesity, widowhood & happiness
Which is worse for happiness – being fat or suffering the death of a spouse?
Two recent papers suggest the answer is – being fat.
First, Marina-Selini Katsaiti finds that “obesity has a negative and statistically significant effect on individual well being”. She estimates that, in Germany, a three-point rise in BMI (from, say 24 to 27 – equivalent to gaining around 20 pounds for someone who’s 5’8”) reduces happiness on average by so much that it would require a 67% pay rise to compensate. In Australia it would require a doubling of income to offset the adverse effect of such a weight gain. Of course, these figures tell us how little income raises happiness, as well as how much chubbiness reduces it.
In the UK, the effect is smaller, but even here a 10-point rise in BMI reduces happiness by 0.1 units on a seven-point scale.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Obesity, widowhood & happiness.
Haitians Eat Dirt, Cars Eat Corn Redux
Posted on: January 26, 2010 9:31 AM, by Sharon Astyk
A couple of years ago, I wrote a post with the above title, about the way that biofuel and meat production in the US was pushing up world food prices. I observed, as has been documented in any number of studies, that when the world's poorest people and the world's richest people's vehicles (or their pets, to their appetite for grain fed meat) compete for food, the cars, pets and rich folk always eat first – the rich come to the table once for their share of staple grains, then three of or four more times for more grains in the form of meat. We then come to the table again for a share for meat for our pets, and now two or three more times for a share for grain for our cars. Only after we have sated ourselves on meat, our pets have done the same and our cars have sated themselves on biofuels do the world's poor get to come and eat a little grain. Or if the grain is gone, or its price risen out of reach, they fill their bellies with what they can find – the dirt in the title refers to “cookies” made out of clay that Haitian people were eating to quiet their misery because they could not afford enough food to live.
In 2008, as Aaron Newton and I document in _A Nation of Farmers_ prices for grain rose precipitiously around the world. In the US, the price of rise rose by 30%. In places like Haiti, where the majority of the population already spends more than 60% of their income on food, the price rises amounted to 300%. Even the price of the dirt for the cookies rose, out of the reach of some of the most desperately poor.
The news has been quieter about biofuels in the last few years, and grain prices have descended some since their meteoric rise in 2008, on the heels of the depression. The speculative bubble and high energy prices that fueled the price increases have declined somewhat. It would be easy to think that the problem had disappeared. But this is not true. The USDA's 2009 data reveals that fully 1/4 of all the grain produced in the US went into our cars, while more people (in excess of 1 billion) went hungry than ever before in human history.
via Haitians Eat Dirt, Cars Eat Corn Redux : Casaubon’s Book.
Found this post funny, and some…
A prime example is the following transcript of a recovered phone conversation between myself and Marcee Moran, “You Changed my Life in a Moment,” girl version 2.0, circa 2004:
Jaton, internalizing Dr. Phil: Leave him. You’re a beautiful girl, and anyone would be lucky to be with you.
Marcee Moran: Really Jates? Fuck that means a lot coming from a guy like you.
Jaton, in his head, “a guy like me…”: You can forgive a guy like that, but you can’t forgive me for this little thing… running you out of business?
(Note: line lifted from You’ve Got Mail (1998). One of the very rare WWTHD fail.)
Marcee: Jaton? What? Hello?
Jaton: Nothing. Maybe we can talk about this tom? We can see 50 first dates. It could be our first date.
(Note: sadly, I really said this.)
Marcee: Yeah why not! I’ll call Grace and Maggie.
Oh Ducky, you know they’re going to crop you out of that photo right?
For the better part half of the last decade, I kept falling in love with these Marcee Morans who always decided that I had a vagina. And as the friendship with these girls grew stronger, the less of my advice they heard, and the more assholes they saw.
“Aren’t there any good guys out there?” the Marcee Morans said.
I never knew what to answer so I’d just freeze, nod in all the right places, and try to be helpful, even if part of me wanted to answer, “if by sensitive you mean, sexy,” as I telepathically tuck her hair behind her ears.
via Because X is the new Why » Living in the Friend Zone.
Noynoy seems to be knowledgeable and thoughtful enough. I think although Villar’s actions speaks for themselves running a country is a far greater endeavor than running a successful business.
Full Video of Noynoy Aquino on Economic Policy Open Forum (Question and Answer)
January 24th, 2010 by cocoy
Here is a series of video from NoyTV with Senator Aquino answering a Q&A post his Economic Vision policy speech before the Makati Business Club.
via Full Video – Noynoy Aquino on Economic Policy Open Forum | Filipino Voices.
The quote is what George Clooney’s character in Up In The Air loves to say when he is firing people. Just have to say that this movie evoked my emotions, and for that I believe it is worth watching. I watched In Good Company last friday when I was at home sick and I have to say that I somehow forgot how beautifully made that film was. There are feature films that resonate anytime, while some films although good enough on their own is transformed when you are living it and watching the film doesn’t feel phony.
PS1:: Some people who built empires have never been fired. Read about some of the serial entrepreneur who never had to work for anyone but themselves their whole lives.
PS2:: Up in the air, and In Good Company are splendid films. Up in the air has so many funny/witty/smart quotes and exchanges between the characters.
Before you all start complaining about being let go, let’s be honest. You guys at Sun drove a once-great company into the ground. Who in their right mind would buy Sun and keep its employees? On the bright side, anybody who ever built an empire or changed the world sat where you are right now.
via The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A reader asks: Why is Larry doing his big Sun announcement tomorrow?.
Sabi nga ng Zombieland “Enjoy the small things!!!!!” Loved reading this, hope you can too.
This miracle is in the small things of daily life; we must live in the understanding that at every moment there is a way out of each problem, the way of finding that which is missing, the right clue to the decision which must be taken in order to change our entire future.
But how to find the courage for this? As I see it, God speaks to us through signs. It is an individual language which requires faith and discipline in order to be fully absorbed.
via Finding the signs « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.