E falando em serendipity...

Olhem que servicinho legal do yahoo eu achei: http://answers.yahoo.com/

É o seguinte: vc "posta" a sua pergunta e alguma boa alma lá responde. (coloquei o "posta" entre "" porque acho que postar não faz parte do português, apesar que eu posso estar errado, jah que no site do correios tem postar, e não no contexto de fórums)

O google também tem um serviço de answers (http://answer.google.com/answers/), só que esse é pago.

Ambos são em inglês. Dei uma procuradinha rápida no do yahoo e não achei perguntas em português.

Antigamente, havia um site associado ao fulano que tinha essa mesma idéia de vc poder perguntar algo e outras pessoas responderem. Mas esse site deve ter falido. Foi muito tempo atrás. Será que alguém lembra do nome dele? Vou postar essa pergunta lá no yahoo, hehehe.

serendipity

Cada palavra que existe no mundo ¬¬...

Serendipity é uma delas. Não, não tem em português, pelo menos até onde eu saiba (e também até onde as ferramentas de idioma do google sabem, o que aliás não é muito).

Serendipity é quando vc acha/descobre algo legal quando estava procurando por outra coisa, ou como diz esse site (em inglês), é a arte de achar algo procurando por outra coisa.

Me lembrei dessa palavra lendo o site do post anterior: http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2006/05/the_systematize.php
Mas por incrível que pareça, jah tinha conhecimento dessa palavra antes, por causa do filme de mesmo nome. Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serendipity_(movie)
Aliás, a Kate Beckinsale é a vampira dos meus sonhos, huhuhu (se vc viu Underworld ou Underworld Evolution, sabe do que estou falando).

Um texticulo

Um texticulo, que obviamente não fui eu que escrevi (fonte aqui):

The amorality of Web 2.0

October 03, 2005

From the start, the World Wide Web has been a vessel of quasi-religious longing. And why not? For those seeking to transcend the physical world, the Web presents a readymade Promised Land. On the Internet, we're all bodiless, symbols speaking to symbols in symbols. The early texts of Web metaphysics, many written by thinkers associated with or influenced by the post-60s New Age movement, are rich with a sense of impending spiritual release; they describe the passage into the cyber world as a process of personal and communal unshackling, a journey that frees us from traditional constraints on our intelligence, our communities, our meager physical selves. We become free-floating netizens in a more enlightened, almost angelic, realm.

But as the Web matured during the late 1990s, the dreams of a digital awakening went unfulfilled. The Net turned out to be more about commerce than consciousness, more a mall than a commune. And when the new millenium arrived, it brought not a new age but a dispiritingly commonplace popping of a bubble of earthly greed. Somewhere along the way, the moneychangers had taken over the temple. The Internet had transformed many things, but it had not transformed us. We were the same as ever.

The New New Age

But the yearning for a higher consciousness didn't burst with the bubble. Web 1.0 may have turned out to be spiritual vaporware, but now we have the hyper-hyped upgrade: Web 2.0. In a profile of Internet savant Tim O'Reilly in the current issue of Wired, Steven Levy writes that "the idea of collective consciousness is becoming manifest in the Internet." He quotes O'Reilly: "The Internet today is so much an echo of what we were talking about at [New Age HQ] Esalen in the '70s - except we didn't know it would be technology-mediated." Levy then asks, "Could it be that the Internet - or what O'Reilly calls Web 2.0 - is really the successor to the human potential movement?"

Levy's article appears in the afterglow of Kevin Kelly's sweeping "We Are the Web" in Wired's August issue. Kelly, erstwhile prophet of the Long Boom, surveys the development of the World Wide Web, from the Netscape IPO ten years ago, and concludes that it has become a "magic window" that provides a "spookily godlike" perspective on existence. "I doubt angels have a better view of humanity," he writes.

But that's only the beginning. In the future, according to Kelly, the Web will grant us not only the vision of gods but also their power. The Web is becoming "the OS for a megacomputer that encompasses the Internet, all its services, all peripheral chips and affiliated devices from scanners to satellites, and the billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds ... We will live inside this thing."

The revelation continues:

There is only one time in the history of each planet when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it is born.

You and I are alive at this moment.

We should marvel, but people alive at such times usually don't. Every few centuries, the steady march of change meets a discontinuity, and history hinges on that moment. We look back on those pivotal eras and wonder what it would have been like to be alive then. Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, and the latter Jewish patriarchs lived in the same historical era, an inflection point known as the axial age of religion. Few world religions were born after this time. Similarly, the great personalities converging upon the American Revolution and the geniuses who commingled during the invention of modern science in the 17th century mark additional axial phases in the short history of our civilization.

Three thousand years from now, when keen minds review the past, I believe that our ancient time, here at the cusp of the third millennium, will be seen as another such era. In the years roughly coincidental with the Netscape IPO, humans began animating inert objects with tiny slivers of intelligence, connecting them into a global field, and linking their own minds into a single thing. This will be recognized as the largest, most complex, and most surprising event on the planet. Weaving nerves out of glass and radio waves, our species began wiring up all regions, all processes, all facts and notions into a grand network. From this embryonic neural net was born a collaborative interface for our civilization, a sensing, cognitive device with power that exceeded any previous invention. The Machine provided a new way of thinking (perfect search, total recall) and a new mind for an old species. It was the Beginning.

This isn't the language of exposition. It's the language of rapture.

The Cult of the Amateur

Now, lest you dismiss me as a mere cynic, if not a fallen angel, let me make clear that I'm all for seeking transcendence, whether it's by going to church or living in a hut in the woods or sitting at the feet of the Maharishi or gazing into the glittering pixels of an LCD screen. One gathers one's manna where one finds it. And if there's a higher consciousness to be found, then by all means let's get elevated. My problem is this: When we view the Web in religious terms, when we imbue it with our personal yearning for transcendence, we can no longer see it objectively. By necessity, we have to look at the Internet as a moral force, not as a simple collection of inanimate hardware and software. No decent person wants to worship an amoral conglomeration of technology.

And so all the things that Web 2.0 represents - participation, collectivism, virtual communities, amateurism - become unarguably good things, things to be nurtured and applauded, emblems of progress toward a more enlightened state. But is it really so? Is there a counterargument to be made? Might, on balance, the practical effect of Web 2.0 on society and culture be bad, not good? To see Web 2.0 as a moral force is to turn a deaf ear to such questions.

Let me bring the discussion down to a brass tack. If you read anything about Web 2.0, you'll inevitably find praise heaped upon Wikipedia as a glorious manifestation of "the age of participation." Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia; anyone who wants to contribute can add an entry or edit an existing one. O'Reilly, in a new essay on Web 2.0, says that Wikipedia marks "a profound change in the dynamics of content creation" - a leap beyond the Web 1.0 model of Britannica Online. To Kevin Kelly, Wikipedia shows how the Web is allowing us to pool our individual brains into a great collective mind. It's a harbinger of the Machine.

In theory, Wikipedia is a beautiful thing - it has to be a beautiful thing if the Web is leading us to a higher consciousness. In reality, though, Wikipedia isn't very good at all. Certainly, it's useful - I regularly consult it to get a quick gloss on a subject. But at a factual level it's unreliable, and the writing is often appalling. I wouldn't depend on it as a source, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it to a student writing a research paper.

Take, for instance, this section from Wikipedia's biography of Bill Gates, excerpted verbatim:

Gates married Melinda French on January 1, 1994. They have three children, Jennifer Katharine Gates (born April 26, 1996), Rory John Gates (born May 23, 1999) and Phoebe Adele Gates (born September 14, 2002).

In 1994, Gates acquired the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci; as of 2003 it was on display at the Seattle Art Museum.

In 1997, Gates was the victim of a bizarre extortion plot by Chicago resident Adam Quinn Pletcher. Gates testified at the subsequent trial. Pletcher was convicted and sentenced in July 1998 to six years in prison. In February 1998 Gates was attacked by Noël Godin with a cream pie. In July 2005, he solicited the services of famed lawyer Hesham Foda.

According to Forbes, Gates contributed money to the 2004 presidential campaign of George W. Bush. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Gates is cited as having contributed at least $33,335 to over 50 political campaigns during the 2004 election cycle.

Excuse me for stating the obvious, but this is garbage, an incoherent hodge-podge of dubious factoids (who the heck is "famed lawyer Hesham Foda"?) that adds up to something far less than the sum of its parts.

Here's Wikipedia on Jane Fonda's life, again excerpted verbatim:

Her nickname as a youth—Lady Jane—was one she reportedly disliked. She traveled to Communist Russia in 1964 and was impressed by the people, who welcomed her warmly as Henry's daughter. In the mid-1960s she bought a farm outside of Paris, had it renovated and personally started a garden. She visited Andy Warhol's Factory in 1966. About her 1971 Oscar win, her father Henry said: "How in hell would you like to have been in this business as long as I and have one of your kids win an Oscar before you do?" Jane was on the cover of Life magazine, March 29, 1968.

While early she had grown both distant from and critical of her father for much of her young life, in 1980, she bought the play "On Golden Pond" for the purpose of acting alongside her father—hoping he might win the Oscar that had eluded him throughout his career. He won, and when she accepted the Oscar on his behalf, she said it was "the happiest night of my life." Director and first husband Roger Vadim once said about her: "Living with Jane was difficult in the beginning ... she had so many, how do you say, 'bachelor habits.' Too much organization. Time is her enemy. She cannot relax. Always there is something to do." Vadim also said, "There is also in Jane a basic wish to carry things to the limit."

This is worse than bad, and it is, unfortunately, representative of the slipshod quality of much of Wikipedia. Remember, this emanation of collective intelligence is not just a couple of months old. It's been around for nearly five years and has been worked over by many thousands of diligent contributors. At this point, it seems fair to ask exactly when the intelligence in "collective intelligence" will begin to manifest itself. When will the great Wikipedia get good? Or is "good" an old-fashioned concept that doesn't apply to emergent phenomena like communal on-line encyclopedias?

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call "the mainstream media." Here's O'Reilly: "While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls 'we, the media,' a world in which 'the former audience,' not a few people in a back room, decides what's important."

I'm all for blogs and blogging. (I'm writing this, ain't I?) But I'm not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere - its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from - and, yes, more important than - what bloggers can do. Those despised "people in a back room" can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition - or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don't want to be forced to make that choice.

Scary Economics

And so, having gone on for so long, I at long last come to my point. The Internet is changing the economics of creative work - or, to put it more broadly, the economics of culture - and it's doing it in a way that may well restrict rather than expand our choices. Wikipedia might be a pale shadow of the Britannica, but because it's created by amateurs rather than professionals, it's free. And free trumps quality all the time. So what happens to those poor saps who write encyclopedias for a living? They wither and die. The same thing happens when blogs and other free on-line content go up against old-fashioned newspapers and magazines. Of course the mainstream media sees the blogosphere as a competitor. It is a competitor. And, given the economics of the competition, it may well turn out to be a superior competitor. The layoffs we've recently seen at major newspapers may just be the beginning, and those layoffs should be cause not for self-satisfied snickering but for despair. Implicit in the ecstatic visions of Web 2.0 is the hegemony of the amateur. I for one can't imagine anything more frightening.

In "We Are the Web," Kelly writes that "because of the ease of creation and dissemination, online culture is the culture." I hope he's wrong, but I fear he's right - or will come to be right.

Like it or not, Web 2.0, like Web 1.0, is amoral. It's a set of technologies - a machine, not a Machine - that alters the forms and economics of production and consumption. It doesn't care whether its consequences are good or bad. It doesn't care whether it brings us to a higher consciousness or a lower one. It doesn't care whether it burnishes our culture or dulls it. It doesn't care whether it leads us into a golden age or a dark one. So let's can the millenialist rhetoric and see the thing for what it is, not what we wish it would be.

Garotinhos e Garotinhas do meu Brasil

E agora, o wannabe candidato a presidente Antony Menininho resolveu fazer greve de fome. Na minha opinião, o Antony Gorduchinho apenas queria fazer uma dieta pra perder um pouco daquelas pelancas, aí aproveitou pra fazer um estardalhaço e dizer que entrou numas de greve... Nada melhor do que na véspera do dia do trabalho, entrar em greve, assim vc não perde um dia útil, huahuahua.

E deu agora a pouco na folha, que o Gorduchinho já perdeu 700 gramas. É, a dieta-greve já está trazendo resultados... É o Molequinho experimentando a dieta dos miseráveis do Brasil, com ou sem greve.

Whatever, dude!

P.S. Em todo caso, se vc acredita no Pirralhinho, tem o site do indivíduo aqui.

Sem criatividade total

Hoje, além de estar sem criatividade para bolar um título bacana, estou sem criatividade para escrever algo bacana tb.

Por isso, nestes momentos de tédio infinito, quando as idéias fluem direto para o vórtice do nirvana budista (o nada, em suma), o melhor a fazer é relaxar e ler uns quadrinhos.

Existe o já clássico Dilbert. Pra quem trabalha ou já trabalhou numa empresa (média pra cima), vcs vão se identificar muito com essas tirinhas. Mesmo pra quem é um vagabundo total, e nunca trabalhou na vida, é muito engraçado.

Outra tirinha, que eu acabei topando graças aos comentários do Scott Adams (o criador do Dilbert) no seu blog, é Pearls Before Swine. Seus personagens são animaizinhos fofinhos (no desenho, claro), mas que fazem muita coisa doida. E coisa doida não no sentido infantil, porque essa tira é tudo, menos infantil. Vale muito a pena. Ao contrário do Dilbert, que já foi (não sei se ainda é) publicado por aqui, Pearls eu nunca vi por essas bandas. Por isso, não sei qual seria o nome oficial em português.

Pois é, por hoje é só...

...ou não.

Acabei de lembrar do último ep de Lost que eu assisti, sobre o querido e roliço Hurley. Uma coisa eu tenho que concordar com ele: só numa fantasia ou surto psicótico uma loirinha daquelas iria estar a fim dele. Ou então na ilha de Lost, que pode ser eventualmente uma fantasia ou sonho de alguém, bem como o surto psicótico do JJ Abrams.

Agora sim, o fim.

Jornal do SBT

Uma pergunta que não se cala na minha cabeça: por que raios o tio Silvio do SBT passa o jornal do SBT duas vezes, em seguida? E nem é de madrugada que isso acontece, é antes das "séries premiadas"...

Bom, antigamente, o SBT colocava o jornal (na época, com o Hermano Hering) em loop infinito nas madrugadas... Tudo bem, era só pra encher linguiça na programação e não ficar com a tela zunindo com os traços verticais coloridos ou cheia de estática, isso eu até aceito...

Agora, pra que isso? Será que o Carlos Nascimento, o atual apresentador, tem no contrato cláusula de tempo de exposição, e pra economizar, eles passam o mesmo jornal duas vezes seguidas? Mistérios...

Em tempo: acho isso uma merda mesmo, e acabei indo dormir sem ver West Wing...

Damn you, SBT!!

Whatever, you damn bastards!!!

Alone again

Mais uma vez, sozinho no lab...

Ouvindo a abertura/encerramento de Air:

Air OST1 - 03 - Tori no Shi.mp3
Air OST1 - 26 - Farewell song.mp3

Aliás, que anime triste o Air... Mas um dos melhores que eu já vi.

Oh, whatever, dude.

P.S. - para baixar esse anime, vá no #omda ou #hirameki
Links ai do lado, na parte de links, ora...

Ainda no mesmo lugar...

Ok, são mais de seis da tarde, a noite de outono já chegou e a escuridão já começa a reinar lá fora. Enquanto isso, aqui dentro, enfurnado no glorioso lcmi (o nome do laboratório), continuo na minha árdua jornada através dos indecifráveis textos canônicos e apócrifos que compõem este maravilhoso campo chamado IA... ¬¬

E enquanto lendo e escrevendo, vou comendo um bis branco (que só agora eu vi que tem o nome de bis laka e não bis branco...). Aliás, um bis branco não, uma caixa de bis branco...

Neste intervalo, entre o último post e este, outros valorosos companheiros de mestrado passaram por aqui, entretidos com suas próprias batalhas (tradução: dissertações ^^). Não sei se fico mais feliz ou triste, por saber que outros estão na minha situação....

Oh, whatever, dude. It sucks!

Continuando...

Holy crap!, I wrote a lot of nonsense stuff in last post, but I really didn´t say what I was intending to say.

How loser I am... You know, what a normal person would be doing in a bright, warm, blue-sky sunday afternoon? Playing with its kids (if you are unlucky to have any... ^^), taking a walk with your girlfriend (or boyfriend, it depends on your sexual preferences...), or hanging out with some fellas. All this would be what a NORMAL person would be doing. Even if you are a loser, you would be laying down on your sofa, drinking some beers and watching the damned sunday´s tv shows (including that boring sports shows...).

But hey, if you are a REALLY loser, a freak, a geek, an otaku (don´t know what it is? search the wikipedia or google it, you damn bastard lazy!), you will be sitted in front a screen with a keyboard, or writing some shit that no one will ever care about, or reading this same shit... ¬¬

Now you know why my life sucks!

Just for record: this damned blogger posted my first post twice! Oh, this really sucks, but, whatever, dude...

Primeiro post

Uow, o primeiro post a gente nunca esquece! <- bah, que frase infame.

Na verdade, nem é o primeiro blog q eu crio. O outro, q deve estar no céu dos blogs, teve uma vida bem curta. Mal nasceu, e já foi para o lado obscuro da realidade (nem q seja virtual).

Ok, ok, chega disso!

Cá estou eu, num belo começo de tarde de domingo, enfurnado num laboratório, cercado de apenas computadores.

Man, it sucks! Yeah, now I´m writing in english. I don´t know why, but sometimes it feels more confortable to write in english. Maybe it´s ´cause I´m willing to practice, or maybe because, in this way, my subconscious think no one will read (and it is probably right!). Bah, anyways, it sucks! Everything sucks! I was gonna say porn movies don´t suck, but hey, those porn actress suck a lot!!! huhuhuh

And if by chance, someone reads it, and thinks my english sucks, fuck you!! Yeah, I can´t care less. Dude, whatever!

Well, I really love the sound of this: "whatever, dude!" or "dude, whatever". In fact, I love this word: whatever! huhuhuh... And of course, after watching Lost and Supernatural, I can´t stop saying "dude". Yeah, Hurley "Staypuff" (or whatever how it is written) rocks!