sublimeguile

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streeter:

Forgot how much I loved this great Eminem/Yakity Sax mashup.
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When the noise reached us a second later, we recognized it as the loudest any of us had ever heard, louder of course than thunder, jets, and the explosive charges set off in quarries, the concentrated energies of tens of millions of years of solar energy being released in an instant. We recognized that we were caught up in an irreproducible and irrepresentable event.Moreover, what lent the scene its particular drama, though it would invariably be omitted from later accounts, was our terror as to what would happen next, for it seemed unlikely that there could ever be a sane, bloodless conclusion to the cataclysm.

The rocket rose, and there was a collective gasp, a most naive, amazed Ahh, inarticulate and primordial, as all of us for a moment forgot ourselves — our education, manners, and sense of irony - to follow the fine white javelin on its ascent through the southern skies.

— The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, by Alain De Botton, on the launch of a Japanese television satellite.
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At a first glance this may appear like a cool locking free operation that makes possible to perform a lot of higher level atomic operations without locking. Unfortunately if you study a bit more in depth the semantic it turns out that CAS is a weak, ill conceived, form of locking. Basically when CAS returns that it was not able to perform the operation because some client updated the key in the meantime you need to redo the operation again: this is like waiting for a lock, but with two main drawbacks:

- You will find that the lock was not obtained after you already did all the work to create the new value, issued and transfered the new value, and so on…

- There is no serialization of all the clients waiting for a key. […]

So IMHO CAS appears to be cool but it sucks.

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To most of us it seems extraordinary that Silvio Berlusconi is still prime minister of Italy. There can’t be many politicians who could survive the sort of scandals he’s been through: accusations of perjury, perverting the course of justice, proximity to the Mafia, accusations of membership of a sinister masonic lodge, of tax evasion and of corrupting public officials. And now, on top of all that, it has been discovered that he’s been enjoying Dionysian parties with dozens of young girls at both of his Sardinian and Roman villas.

This time he doesn’t even deny the central allegations. Not surprisingly, perhaps, since there’s overwhelming evidence of what went on: there are photographs of topless girls in G-strings lounging around his villa, there are wiretaps of businessmen lining up escort girls for Silvio’s parties. One escort has revealed she was given only half her “appearance fee” because she didn’t stay the night (she didn’t make that mistake again). The question isn’t did he or didn’t he, but simply: how on earth does he get away with it? How is it that a country we think of as a close neighbour, which we all think we know so well, has such a different morality to ours?

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Chopin, Nocturne, opus 27 #2, solo piano (via smalin)
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If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology (the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people (the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber (the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes (the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet (the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma (the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb. Otherwise they would murder us in our beds.

The shocking possibility that dumb people don’t exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the careers devoted to tending to them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my proposition: Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education (via jakelodwick)
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That erroneous assumption is to the effort that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence… Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues, and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else.
— H. L. Mencken, The American Mercury, April, 1924 (via jakelodwick)
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Lip Dubbing: Istanbul (Not Constantinople) on Vimeo (via Vimeo)
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Someone always asks the math teacher, “Am I going to use calculus in real life?” And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no. He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age.

Arthur Benjamin’s formula for changing math education | Video on TED.com

I think I’m the only person I know that still used trig regularly, but yeah, everyone uses statistics all the time.

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Pathologically provincial   people who are unable to come to terms with other people’s opinions, but   think they must enforce a single, right answer for everyone, do _not_   belong in public fora.  When that “single, right answer” is either simply   wrong or at least not the _only_ right answer, other people need to be   able to know this.  This is when the nutballs crack open and all hell   breaks loose.  You should be able to figure out how it happens and then   to see if it actually does happen that way, now.
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About 1 in 20 people go _mental_ when criticized in an unexpected way.   (I have the empirical data to support this number.  Trust me.)  They are   probably psychologically _unable_ to deal with unexpected disagreement,   since they usually come up with “you attack everyone you disagree with”   (which is what they do, and nobody else).  Some people react hysterically   to any experience of cognitive dissonance, and would rather die than have   to change their mind on something they are not specifically prepared to.
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Civility and politeness are extremely useful tools in communication with people who are more wrong than right, but of very little use with people who are vastly more right than wrong. This counter-intuitive observation comes directly from the fact that we simply do not need civil and polite ways of telling people that they are right about something. So the people who have most to gain from civility and politeness are people who know they are and intend to /stay/ wrong while they force everybody else hold their tongues. That may have been a very good way of building societies before /anyone/ was usually right about anything. It is only in the twentieth century that a sizable fraction of the population had any means to know whether they were in the right or in the wrong to begin with. Before we invented the concept of the real world, everybody lived their entire lives in their own emotional world. After science and technology invented the concept of the real world and of truth as correspondence between thoughts and reality, the internal, private world turned out to be /untrue/ almost all the time. These days, I keep telling people that you only /really/ grow up and become a human being (as opposed to a mere animal) when you realize that most of what you think and almost all you feel is /wrong/ and every person, however smart or highly esteemed by their peers, is utterly and completely incapable of determining where they are right among all this wrongness on their own. We tend to believe we are mostly right, however, and only notice when the consequences of our actions contradict our best expectations.