cat /proc/claus

Little Jimmy lived in a small town by a lake. One day, he went to the lake and saw a large monster coming out of the lake. The monster looked mean and hungry, and was walking toward’s Jimmy’s town.

Jimmy ran as fast as he could to his town, and shouted at the top of his lungs:
- HELP! HELP! An monster am coming from the water!

Three people (Ann, Bob and Charlie) came to see what the ruckus was about:
A> Jimmy, what did you say?
J> I said an monster am coming from the water! Help!
B> That sounds terrible!
C> Jimmy, you can’t say “an monster”, the correct way is “a monster”
B> But jimmy is young, he has the right to make such mistakes!
A> Right? Of course not, I learned how to talk properly, Jimmy should too! Also, what about the “am monster”?
B> Well, it is an accepted form in certain kinds of poetry and popular discourse, isn’t it? Little Jimmy is actually a culturally aware poet!
C> You can’t mean that, that is ridiculous!
B> You are oppressing Jimmy’s way of expressing himself!

J> Help! The monster am coming from the water!
C> What do you mean by water?
B> Maybe he means the lake?
A> But there is water in the sea too, how do you know the monster is not actually in the sea?
B> But even if the monster came from the sea, it would be a terrible happening to all of the world, wouldn’t it?
C> But the sea is so far away…
B> You are being too selfish! The people in the seaside town also deserve to be protected from monsters!
A> Well, if they want to be protected, maybe they should protect themselves… why should we protect them from sea monsters?
B> Because maybe now it is a sea monster, but next time it may be a grass monster, and come from the grass near our town!
A> I’m well protected against grass monsters. If you are worried, you should be protecting yourself.

About that time, the monster arrived and devoured Ann, Bob, Charlie, and Little Jimmy as well.

Many times, this is watch it feels like when I watch people debate politics.

In this one year I have been living in this city, the one thing that makes me livid, is how freaking RUDE people who work here are. There is no concept at all that being nice to your customer is part of the product or service they are selling you.

You pay, they give you the goods, and you better be happy about it. Now get out.

Today I got greeted by (or better grunted by) a clinic´s secretary who could not deign herself to say words such as please or thank you to people trying to schedule an appointment at the place she works for. Worse yet: she would get offended when I asked her to repeat what she had said (hey, ear doctor?) and when I asked her to give me walking directions from the nearest subway station. What´s wrong with these people, don´t they realize that they just lose customers that way?

Problem is, they probably don´t. For what I have seen here in Rio, this kind of treatment is the norm, not the exception, and everyone seems to take it in stride. ¨City of happy, relaxed people¨, yeah right.

Person A generates a document, using Power Point (don’t ask). Sends it to person B. The document displays slightly differently on person’s B computer, due to differences in fonts, environment, program version. B performs minor changes to “fix” these displays differences, and sends the document back to A. A then see differences in his own computer, fix them, and sends them back to B.

Rinse, Repeat.

>_>

This week I was in a discussion on a web forum about whether robots would develop religion or not. During this discussion, I reminded myself of Isaac Asimov´s short story, ¨Reason¨, which is set in a space station where the robots had, in fact, developed religion. I wanted to re-read the story, but couldn´t find it ANYWHERE.

But I did find out that the story was published in 1941. That is 70 years ago. There is no reason for this story not to be in the public domain, spread far and wide, helping kids out there stretch and challenge their brains.

Shame on you, copyright laws.

SMBC is among the comics that I read on a regular basis. As a friend of mine expertly described, SMBC strips are either absolutely inane, or absolutely genial — no in-betweens. Yesterday they published this one:

The sad thing about this strip is that not only it is absolutely correct about the ¨pundit thinking¨, but it is also absolutely incorrect about scientists not using it. In my academic life I have often read papers where statements are made based solely on the ¨I thought about it many times¨ reasoning. It is not malice; when your job is to think many ideas, and then put those ideas to test through experimentation, it is really hard not to get enamored to some of your more fascinating intellectual children. To put your beliefs through the ¨do I think this is true just because I thought it cool¨ test is a skill that must be developed and kept in practice, because it is not natural to our pattern-loving brain processes.