January 2010
50 posts
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Slideshow
I like slideshows. I mean the real ones with a slide projector and little slides mounted on cardboard or plastic frames. The colors are vivid, the beauty of the grain, the gentle noise of the carrousel moving and clicking. I am not suggesting that it is any better than using slideware and running it off a computer. It is just different.
Most kids today have never seen a slideshow, so when I was...
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“Sólo solo en Oslo.”
– Luis playing with words.
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Playing with processing
I have to produce a series of tutorials for multiple linear regression and ANOVA for one of our online courses. As part of the tutorials I want the students to play with fitting regressions in R, but before that I want them to play with regressions in a web browser. Probably there are plenty of linear regression applets in internet, but I wanted to roll out mine, so I can learn how to do it.
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Guernsey McPearson's Drug Development Dictionary →
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“‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It...”
– Oscar Wilde in De Profundis. Oh, the irony of quoting this quotation.
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An idea of family
Large: You know that point in your life when you realize that the house that you grew up in isn’t really your home anymore? All of the sudden even though you have some place where you can put your stuff that idea of home is gone.
Sam: I still feel at home in my house.
Large: You’ll see when you move out it just sort of happens one day one day and it’s just gone. And you can never get it back. It’s like you get homesick for a place that doesn’t exist. I mean it’s like this rite of passage, you know. You won’t have this feeling again until you create a new idea of home for yourself, you know, for your kids, for the family you start, it’s like a cycle or something. I miss the idea of it. Maybe that’s all family really is. A group of people who miss the same imaginary place. (Dialogue in Garden State)
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“Your task is not to foresee the future, but to enable it.”
– Antoine de Saint Exupéry in Citadelle.
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Un cronopio no more
According to the nice domaintools folks, I first registered uncronopio.org on 5 February 2002. That is eight years with a name that started as a play on Julio Cortazar’s Cronopios and Famas (Historias de Cronopios y de Famas in Spanish). It was an easy choice, one of my favorite books and the chance to make some sort of statement: I was un cronopio (a cronopio).
In the short stories...
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Practicing with Euler
I like both languages (sense Spanish, English, Japanese…) and programming (sense Python, R, Fortran…).
This week I started going over the challenges of Project Euler to practice problem solving and programming. My language of choice is Python—I am a bit rusty—but I will also work on the problems to learn a new language. I haven’t decided yet, but I would like to give a try to a...
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“Vago no soy, quizá algo tímido para el esjuerzo.”
– Inodoro Pereyra, El Renegau.
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“You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice.
If you choose not to...”
– Neil Peart in Freewill.
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Timing with Rush
Cycling to work takes me different time depending on weather conditions. I think that my best time is ‘The camera eye’ (11 minutes). Today it took me ‘Anthem’, ‘2112 Overture’ and ‘The temples of Syrinx’ (I heard the last song twice) for around 13 minutes. It is certainly nicer than using a watch.
Exercise for the reader: time rides with whatever...
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Albahaca
Albahaca is the Spanish word for basil, which was borrowed from Arabic together with a large number of other words. We have discussed before with friends when is the start of summer in the Southern hemisphere: the first of December or the twenty something of December (solstice). Both of them are arbitrary dates.
I propose another — even more arbitrary — starting date: the first time of the year...
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“Nowadays, one of the churches of Tlön maintains platonically that such and such...”
– Jorge Luis Borges in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.
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Rituals
I start every morning making coffee. For a long time the routine included putting ground coffee in a very small (read toy) espresso machine. Since last Christmas I have been using a Mocha Pot (aka stove top espresso) that I received as a gift. Thanks M and O!
There is an increasing interest in providing frictionless experiences, making life extremely easy. However, sometimes at least, we require...
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Security
As I pointed out before, last year was full of travel. As a bearded male ‘with an accent’—who doesn’t have an accent?—I endured more than my fair share of searching, chemical noses looking for explosives, etc. When facing the security theater I often thought this (from XKCD):
Others, like Bruce Schneier, have explained it a lot better: stop the panic, our reactions are...
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“En el extremo de la calle
la florista se emborracha con Legui
y la ciudad la...”
– Luis Alberto Spinetta en Todos estos años de gente.
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“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the...”
– Henry Hazlitt in Economics in one lesson.
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“The most important maxim for data analysis to heed, and one which many...”
– John Tukey. 1962. Annals of Mathematical Statistics 33(1): 1-67 (pages 13-14).
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Resonating with Calvino
This happens relatively frequently: I am talking with someone who doesn’t know me well and, at some point of the conversation, I have mentioned that I am a forester. Then we move into books and I mention someone like Borges or Calvino and they look at me with this puzzled face as in ‘I didn’t know that foresters could read’. I know, it happens to other professions as well;...
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2009 in trips
Last year’s summary of airplane trips, with links to routes using great circle mapper:
Sweden: 40,000 km in twelve days (December).
Japan: 22,000 kilometers in two weeks (August).
USA: 30,000 km over 5 weeks (June-July).
Australia: 11,000 km in 5 days (April).
Domestic to Rotorua, five times: 1,350 km (each).
New Year resolution: travel a lot...
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“Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a...”
– Robert A. Heinlein in The rolling stones.
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“Before the art of illumination there was blackness and afterward there will also...”
– Orhan Pamuk in My Name Is Red.
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“The espresso machines in station cafés boast their kinship with the locomotives,...”
– Italo Calvino in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
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About a book
Most of my books contain only text; not only that, they are mostly black and white text. Expanding my list, I can see books that contain, again, black and white text and some simple diagrams. Most of them contain color covers that, with all respect to cover designers, have as only purpose to hook the reader on buying the content between the covers.
I do own some books with color pages, mostly...
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“Life is full of choices, and to choose one thing is to forgo another. The...”
– Being foreign from The Economist.
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“A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not...”
– Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose.
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“Ecology is the science of everything. Nobody knows everything. Nobody even knows...”
– P.J. O’Rourke in All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty
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The art of losing
Very few things last forever. Forever used to mean a hundred or a thousand years—even the universe had a beginning and will have an end; today it could mean three, five years. One of the reasons things last so long (or so little) is the need for self-consistency.
Consistency can be good when we are true to our best, but it can be a drag when we want to become better. I have to break now with over...