When a master writes about sorrow
With a tweet, Letters of Note informed us about a letter by Henry James to his depressed friend Grace Norton, dating back to July 1883. IMHO, the core of his lucid and powerful prose is: consciousness is an illimitable power
Caring about what?
I spent most of the last two days helping my mother after her cataract surgery so only yesterday evening I noticed the statement of our friend Carl-Henric Svanberg: as everyboby knows, he said that “We (BP) care about the small people”. Was it just a weak sentence of a non mother-tongue speaker? Perhaps, but even [...]
Requiem for the languages
It seems someone has estimated that half of the world’s languages will disappear in the next fifty years: “fifty percent in fifty years” sounds suspect to me. As I heard from a British professor, we could see this phenomenon either as the triumph of the unimportant language spoken on an island close to the the [...]
Notes about TPCI 2008-11
The TPCI November Headline is Visual Programming Languages Popular (Logo, Alice, NXT-G) Visual programming? Are you on drugs? May I have some? :)
Are right libertarians gone for good? :)
Having read Jerith‘s answers to the Political Compass test, I tried it by myself. If you are curious, my coordinates are: Economic Left/Right: -4,62; Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5,79. From my point of view, the most interesting thing is not my result: oddly, it seems there are not many people placed in the lower-right square. Are there [...]
Use the right tool :)
Wandering around, I’ve found a wall advertisement Sado\Masochistic clothes Wikipedia reports that the standard way to write it is S/M: in other words, you are supposed to use a slash… but after a while I realized that a _back_slash might be a much better choice in such a context. :)
Bright dawn
Reading the referers of this website, I found that someone reached it querying a search engine for Text to Albachiara As I previously wrote, I think that “Albachiara” (Bright dawn in English) is one of the best Italian songs of all times. The lyric was written by Vasco Rossi, one of our most important singers [...]
Six words are enough
A friend has indirectly drawn my attention to an old issue of Wired, where it says that Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work. The proposed game is to write a biography using only six words. Already [...]
Yes we can. Really? :)
Dear Walter, our Country is so messy that to start using English slogans is something we really don’t need, not at all. I know that, before “Yes we can”, you’ve already used “I care” but please, try to refrain yourself from this bad habit. :)
A polyglot lyric
Reading the referers of this website, I found that someone reached it querying a search engine for Italian songs that are in English too Strictly speaking, they were looking for something that, in the context of computing, is known as a polyglot. I’m sorry but this is over my head: I can only think about [...]
