Mas premios: ahora, los de “bitacoras”. Una mala traduccion de algo intraducible, weblog o blog (o, con mi asento seviyano, un bloh) por puro purismo en lugar mostrar una mayor apertura de miras linguisticas… pero en fin, escribo desde un Mac y mejor que acorte esto y no me coma mas acentos. Nacho esta entre los nominados a mejor blog nuevo, suerte!
Archive for October, 2003
Note to myself: Mejores “bitacoras” hispanas
Friday, October 31st, 2003El Mito de S
Friday, October 31st, 2003
Marcotte couldn’t test the relative “life improvement” of successful suicides—since they were, of course, dead—but he could study those who had failed at suicide to determine if their lives improved after the attempt. The results are surprising. Marcotte’s study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—”hard-suicide” attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)
Why should suicide be an economic boon? Once you attempt suicide you suddenly have access to lots of resources—medical care, psychiatric attention, familial love and concern—that were previously expensive or unavailable. Doubters may ask why the depressed don’t seek out resources earlier. But studies have demonstrated that psychological and familial resources become “cheaper” after a suicide attempt: It is difficult to find free medical care when you are sad, but once you try to kill yourself, it’s forced on you.
Suddenly the calculus of suicide has become even more complicated. Now attempting suicide seems a rational choice, as long as the attempt isn’t too successful. But this conclusion alarms suicidologists: Treating suicide as a logical act runs counter to everything they have been advocating for the past 40 years.
Podr
La dama del perrito
Friday, October 31st, 2003
A todo cerdo le llega su Mac
Thursday, October 30th, 2003
En route to a party Friday night I dropped by the Apple store, thinking I’d hang around for a few minutes, tap my fingers impatiently, roll my eyes, then give a sarcastic “hoorah” when 8 PM came, and we could buy the thing.
Down the escalator to the store. (I used to park near the department store at Southdale, but now I always park by the entrance closer to the Apple Store. It only makes sense.) The store was closed. The gate was down. A guard stood in front of the darkened shop. Wha? Then I saw the rope. Then I saw the line. People were queued up down the hall around the corner. Waiting. For an operating system.
“How many people did you have last night?” I asked the clerk the next day as he rang up my purchase.
“Eight hundred.”
Ladies and gentlemen, THAT is marketing 101. Create the buzz. Create the desire. Create the scarcity. Keep anyone from getting it. Make the early devotees feel part of the elect. Count down the minutes. Then open the door and watch the money come in.
My wife could not understand what I was talking about. Eight hundred people, lined up at 8 PM on Friday in a shopping mall, for what did you say, a game?”
No. An operating system.
“These people need lives,” she said.
They have them, I explained. They just revolve around operating systems.
“They need real lives. They need children.”
They have them, I explained, and they’re – but I stopped there. Leave it be.
Un ejemplo mas de MacFever… al que nosotros mismos hemos sucumbido. El viernes salio Panther, ayer miercoles nos compramos un iBook (no se crean, el mas barato, aunque con wireless). Si hay gente que con 45 se compra un Porsche (si? quienes?) a mi me ha dado por un juguete innecesario, que me hace bilingue en XP y OS X, y que justifico como forma de empezar la tesis con buen pie. Apenas lo sabemos usar, el wirless tenemos que instalarlo, cada dos por tres le damos a una tecla y nos hace un extranno, y como ven no se poner ni acentos ni ennes. Pero es que es taaaaaaaaan lindo…
La anecdota de arriba, esplendidamente escrita por Lileks, via el Onlineblog del Guardian,
Bodas de baba
Thursday, October 30th, 2003
Groom blogs written by Gordon, G and their technologically nimble affianced brethren are becoming an increasingly popular way for engaged men to communicate wedding details, vent frustrations, and chronicle engagements. They are also poking holes in one of the longest-standing assumptions about the multibillion-dollar wedding industry: that grooms are passive, stoic creatures who have no feelings about their impending nuptials.
“You don’t get a groom’s perspective anywhere,” said Gordon, who lives in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It’s like the groom is another accessory along with the bridal gown, along with the cake and the flowers.”
[…]
But troll the Internet, and you may find a passage like this, from National Public Radio editor J.J. Sutherland’s [s
La
Thursday, October 30th, 2003
VATICAN CITY—As Pope John Paul II enters his 26th year as pontiff, the world is stopping to reflect on the legendary funnyman’s career as one of the most influential performers in modern history. Standing staunchly against contraception and women’s equality right through the turn of the 21st century, the pope and his quirky, deadpan comic persona still entertain audiences around the world.
Revered by multiple generations for his weird and wonderful wit, the 83-year-old pontiff is perhaps the best-known stand-up alive today. Throughout an amazing two and a half decades as head of the Catholic Church, the pope has produced, in both his live appearances and his published works, a treasure trove of humor second to none.
[…]
The pope has created more saints and beatified more people than all the previous popes combined, and no other pope has toured as extensively as he has. The quintessential showman loves to take his act on the road. He’s entertained audiences in 117 countries and met with hundreds of world leaders, including dictators Augusto Pinochet and Fidel Castro.
“John Paul is the hardest-working pope in history,” actor Jonathan Winters said. “He’s an inspiration. And not just for other comedians like myself, but for everyone, from theologians who will never be ordained because they’re women, on down to the little children in the crowded ghettos of Third World cities who heed his message about the evils of contraception. Let’s not even go into the gays in Boise.
Claro que su humor es de los que matan. En fin.
On Blogs and Echoes
Wednesday, October 29th, 2003
Blogging is like screaming in an echo-chamber.
You feel very bad when there is no echo coming back just after your scream.Myth makes Echo the subject of longing and desire. Physics makes Echo the subject of distance and design. Where emotion and reason are concerned both claims are accurate.
And where there is no Echo there is no description of space or love.
There is only silence.
La primera cita est
Note to myself: La invenci
Tuesday, October 28th, 2003La Techie accidental
Tuesday, October 28th, 2003
I don’t know, but I would lay pretty substantial odds that half or more of today’s techie women got there the same way I did. No teenage hackfests, no college CS major, no certifications, no 80-hour coding death marches. Just something needing doing, and a woman willing to cuss the computer until she figures out how to make it do what she wants.
Some accidental techies are indeed male; I know one or two. I do wonder about the distribution, though. The accidental techies I know typically came from pink-collar occupations, and how many men does one find in those?
I wonder about some other things, too. Do accidental techies get paid what their jobs are worth? (I have no cause for complaint there, I am glad to say.) How many of them feel as much an impostor as I do? What do the intentional techies think of them? Do they ever learn all the in-jokes? Or the acronyms? Would they advise others to sneak in the back door the way they did? Is it even possible to plan to do that, or does it always “just happen?”
