…just for the record.

Just for the RSS: this is why the blog has closed on September 4: Le temps des adieux…

Scientific American features an intriguing article on the (mental, not economic) depression: Depression’s Evolutionary Roots.

Excerpts:

Depression seems to pose an evolutionary paradox. Research in the US and other countries estimates that between 30 to 50 percent of people have met current psychiatric diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder sometime in their lives. But the brain plays crucial roles in promoting survival and reproduction, so the pressures of evolution should have left our brains resistant to such high rates of malfunction. Mental disorders should generally be rare — why isn’t depression?

» Read more…

According to this blog post, and only taking into account the bloggers living in Cuba, here you have some quick figures:

• 53.57% of the Cuban bloggers have Internet access at home.
• 93.33% of the Cuban bloggers have only a modem connection and only 6.67% have ADSL.
• 74.55% of the Cuban bloggers have Internet access at work.
• Cuban bloggers use: 76.32% a digital camera, 47.37% a media player, 28.95% a webcam, 23.68% a mobile phone, 5.26% a GPS device.
• Other online activities of Cuban bloggers: 94.34% e-mail, 92.45% reading news, 81.13% commenting articles, 66.04% participating in social networks, 58.49% chatting, 52.83% sharing photos, 35.85% subscribing to RSS feeds, 28.3% participating in professional networks, 24.53% watching online videos, etc.
• Topics the Cuban bloggers are writing about: 63.32% personal, 57.64% politics, 46.72% arts, 36.24% news, 20.52% music, 18.78% movies, etc.
• Topics the Cuban bloggers are reading about: 75.32% politics, 58.3% news, 57% arts, 46.38% personal, 32.34% music, 2.34% movies, etc.
• Time used for blogging by Cuban bloggers is taken from: 56.58% watching TV, 40.79% sleeping, 28.51% reading, 25.44% domestic tasks, 23.25% work, 21.93% walking, 21.49% family time, 16.23% practicing sports, 14.91% learning, 13.6% time with friends, 12.28% going to cinema, 11.84% listening to the radio, 9.65% playing.
• 75.44% of the Cuban bloggers consider their blog as a form of journalism.
• Cuban bloggers publish on: 82.38% Blogger, 17.18% WordPress.
• 82.14% of the Cuban bloggers disclose their real identity on their blogs.
• Benefits of having a blog: 47.77% have many new friends who would like to meet them in person, 46.43% have improved their general education, 38.39% are better informed than from the TV and newspapers, etc.

Idiocy #1: Clustering phylogenetic variation patterns. Assignee: Microsoft Corporation.

Quote:

A method of generating biomolecular clustering patterns comprising [...] identifying evolutionary events in each of the identified plurality of positions at each node in the evolutionary tree.

Cool. At least, Microsoft is atheist.

Idiocy #2: Rapid knowledge transfer among workers. Assignee: Accenture Global Services GmbH, owned by Accenture Limited, a Fortune Global 500 company originally split from Arthur Andersen.

Quotes:

The system 100  is one exemplary embodiment of a knowledge transfer system for transferring knowledge from expert workers at a client location to apprentice workers at an outsourcing location. For example, the system may be useful for outsourcing a job function or other responsibility by a client to an outsourcing agency. In order to achieve business goals, the client engages the outsourcing agent to transition the job function from expert workers at a location of the client to apprentice workers at a location of the outsourcing agency. After the transition, the apprentice workers perform the job function on behalf of the client on an ongoing basis throughout the engagement.

» Read more…

Din ciclul «hai să ne pişăm pe stradă»:

I was tempted by HP Mini 1116NR some time ago, but I very much disliked its stupid resolution of 1024 x 576. Now I see I was right not to buy it. Eugenia Loli-Queru just proves how much a closely-related variant, HP Mini 1120NR, sucks:

The screen resolution is a major disappointment at 1024×576 instead of 1024×600. The reason being, not only because many Gnome apps just don’t fit in that space, but also the special interface that HP worked on was DESIGNED for 600 px height as minimum! At 576px there are places where the UI doesn’t fit, or it is forced to have scrollbars, and the difference is that of about 25 px. This feels like engineers made all their work and testing on a 600px screen, and one day, a product manager comes in, takes his coat off, faces them all, and says: “Gentlemen, we want to be different. We are going for 576px height instead”. I believe the engineers’ faces would have been priceless to see that day. [...]

The wireless icon won’t report reception percentage with my new router, while it would with my older Netgear router. It will also take up to 1 minute to even start try to connect to a network — be it after a wake up or a full reboot, and with any of the two routers. [...] That’s a few minutes lost every day.

The ethernet port is not full sized, and so older-styled Ethernet cables do NOT fit. None of our ethernet cables here fit (this was the first device ever that had this problem with our cables, and there have been countless devices in my hands through the years), we had to buy a new one at Frys, one that had a slimmer plastic protection around the main connector.

» Read more…

…and they tell me to use fluorescent bulbs (or even LED ones) to be “eco-friendly”! From a forum thread, here’s how a HP contractor in Shanghai has sent to a HP customer a replacement power cord: in a huge box strapped to a 10 kg wooden pallet!

• Leonid Afremov is painting in too striking colors, however his paintings don’t look bad. Take a look at Afremov.com (3 levels of clicking away, you’ll find them in big size) and on Deviantart (the download links often give good sizes).
• Amusing Ourselves to Death — Huxley vs. Orwell.
• Urban Heat Island (because we don’t care about the trees).

» Read more…

Normally, I am bored to be reminded obvious facts I can’t change, and common-sense issues, so I’ve simply skipped Schneider’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter in the last couple of months. I gave the latest one a thoough reading though, and I’m glad I did: it was a good one.

No, this is not Debian-specific: it’s Linux-specific. All the distros do that: they “fix” some small issues in a package by simply discontinuing it! The story «Debian: contempt for “end user” values has to stop!» is about what you lose when upgrading from Etch to Lenny, not what you lose when upgrading from XP to Vista. Think about that.

I forgot to mention this when I first read it: Germany’s Bright Idea is actually the worst idea that could have occurred to someone in a so-called civilized country. And no, Dörentrup is not in Cuba, nor in Romania in the 80s. There is definitely a regression in the common-sense and in other functions of the human brain, and it’s only sad that this idiocy happens in Germany, not in (say) Japan.

They say that «Microblogging has become too important for one company to rule the field.», and consequently… To Live, Twitter Must Die. In full cynicism, couldn’t all the Twitter users die the same day Twitter dies? (Except my nephew, of course.) This should lead to a better world. Then, there is another article on Slate about… The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting. Read it.

As a casual reading, Time-Traveling for Dummies proved to be surprisingly pleasant. That’s because it was written by a physicist. It’s old news that you can’t kill your own grandfather (unless in a poorly-constructed sci-fi story), and more generally you can’t change the history (which should make the time-travelling utterly boring and useless), but the cute one is that… you can’t visit any time before your time machine was built. And «The Time Traveler’s Wife very nearly gets it right: Since Henry is the time machine, he can’t visit any time before he was born.»

Apparently, they’re legally free: PimpYourFont.com. Horrendous site, but some of the fonts are funny…

Random quick sampler

Here’s a very prolific Belgian graphical artist who has hundreds of different œuvres on Flicker: Ben Heine. Many of them are available at large size too, should you want to use them as wallpapers. In a single page (or by sets), you can watch them on Flickriver too.

A small surprise for me was this one, because the recipes are… in Romanian!

And here’s a visual search engine concentrator I discovered by accident: Spezify. Extremely funny at times, just search for something.

A number of years ago (I can’t remember when), I guess there was a trick, a hack or a special offer for a limited time (or something I can’t remember of) that allowed to some users of Yahoo! Mail (possibly only the non-US ones, such as the users of Yahoo! Canada, Yahoo! UK, Yahoo! France, etc.) to enable the POP3/SMTP access to their account… for free, as opposed to the paying Yahoo! Mail Plus.

As my primary Yahoo! account is on Yahoo! Canada (I can’t remember why I did that, but I practically abandoned two older Yahoo.com accounts because of the spam), I was able to get the Mail Plus functionality for free.

Today, it still works. I can use Sylpheed to manage my Yahoo! Mail Canada account:

Cool. I feel privileged. I was smart, back then…

Smashing Magazine Desktop Wallpaper Calendar: August 2009 (most wallpapers have a no-calendar version too).

Free fonts: Philosopher, Sans Culottes, Kraken, PixelYourLife, My handwriting.

Tailfins of 1959, and more cars of the ’50s in the links noted in this comment.

Here’s a surprise: Wild crows can recognize individual people. They can pick a person out of a crowd, follow them, and remember them — apparently for years. But people — even people who love crows — usually can’t tell them apart. So what we have for you are two experiments that tell this story.

The rest, in The Crow Paradox.

RO: TLP are o serie de postări ce cuprind adaptări prescurtate din cartea Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, ceea ce m-a făcut să caut originalul.

EN: There is an illegal copy (OCR-ized?) of the book here. You can also read most of the first story on Amazon.com as a preview of the book, but I’ve liked it too much (revives a specific nostalgia for me), so I’m pasting it here, without the unrelated ending:

He Fixes Radios by Thinking!

When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in. I had a heater, and I’d put in fat and cook french-fried potatoes all the time. I also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank.

To build the lamp bank I went down to the five-and-ten and got some sockets you can screw down to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. By making different combinations of switches — in series or parallel — I knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadn’t realized was that a bulb’s resistance depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations weren’t the same as the stuff that came out of the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all half-lit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty — it was great!

» Read more…

He has a lodging problem or something. And here’s how he decided to protest in Havana, on the famous Malecón. Cute, eh?

Otherwise, Boring Home Utopics has interesting pictures.

Fabulously hilarious, but requires you to have a reasonably good knowledge of the Old Testament too: Religion 101: Final Exam. (Very much consistent with Susie’s views.)

Traducere în română: Examen la religie.