In my not-so-humble opinion, one of the best books ever written about
(mis)management is William Bouffard's Puttin’ Cologne on the Rickshaw
(July 2012).
http://puttincologneontherickshaw.com
Cheers
Giancarlo
Does anyone else think that this
is both hilarious and scary?
My perception, fwiw, is that it's depressing rather than hilarious.
There are also several other matters in which prejudice and unfounded or
warped perceptions stand in the way of science, knowledge and
understanding .
One of
Suresh Ramasubramanian [today]
This thread seems to say figo - the masculine -
is cool while the feminine, figa is vagina,
and by extension, hot, sexy etc?
No, it doesn't work that way (though someone in Ford seems to think so).
It starts with the fact figa is jargon for vagina - therefore
Indrajit Gupta wrote:
Aargh! Think of those driving around in Ford Figos!
That's remarkable. Silly me, I didn't know. As far as I can tell nobody
in Italy, so far, has discovered that such a car actually exists. And
apparently nobody in India knows that there is a place where its name
has a
At this point... I have a question.
What is Figo supposed to mean in Indian-automotive English?
I shall be grateful for an explanation.
Giancarlo
A correction, fwiw, on swearing in Italian.
Italian, for example is primarily blasphemous.
Actually it isn't. Probably because religiosity is declining,
blasphemous swearing has become rare, practically disappearing. While
scatological, and even more so sex-related, expressions are widely
ashok listmans...@gmail.com wrote (about blasphemy declining in Italy):
Are you sure? A couple of years ago i was fishing
in the north east .. and everyone of the men
(without exception) used a variation of 'dio cane'
or 'dio porco' or 'dio maiale'... the creative ones
would mix some
Of course I don't understand the specific Indian implications of this
thread, but worldwide I find overintellectualised BS particularly
unpalatable.
Cheers
Giancarlo
Biju Chacko wrote: Who's with me?
I must be, as a devoted pastafarian.
It's painful for me to admit my guilty ignorance of your wonderful
branch of the True Church - the Moderately Mobile Shavige Baath.
g
Pranesh Prakash wrote:
Could someone who follows this more closely
explain how big a leap wikimath is from having
these discussions on Usenet and mailing lists?
As far as I can see, none at all.
And facebook is definitely worse. It isn't even a good bbs.
Cheers,
Giancarlo
Udhay wrote:
Interesting metaphor. I wonder, though,
what place Linux has in this theology.
I had some fun, sixteen years ago, reading Umberto Eco's comments (they
were meant to be more humorous than philosophical). In addition to
explaining why Makintosh is Catholic and DOS is Protestant,
I have never been particularly interested in Oscars (or other awards)
and I have some doubts about the criteria.
But Sandra Bullock deserves some praise for her sense of humour in
accepting the worst actress judgement (before she won the best
actress award - though she knew that she had a
Thank you all. :)
I am intrigued (sometimes confused) by the debate on this subject. I
trust that there will be more. But, in the meantime, fwiw let me define
a few perspectives as I see them.
Some of the technical language is obscure for me. But the basic fact,
from my angle, is that I am
And, after all, when did we see the last Renaissance man?
(And whatever happened to the Renaissance women?)
They are alive an kicking. Though invisible in the overwhelming flow of
commonplace idiocy.
One called me by phone, out of the blue, a few minutes ago. She read
some things in my
I have deliberately waited some months before raising this subject
because I wanted to be reasonably sure to know what I am talking
about. But I am more and more convinced that something quite relevant
has happened.
I have been using linux for only five years (currently ubuntu 9.10).
Quite
Am I [Andrew Thomas] the only person who finds this obscene?
Counting me, it's two. And there are more.
It's also stupid.
And what are Steve Jobs and the iPad doing on the front cover of The
Economist?
(Thank you, Pranesh and Udhay, for the answers on Thunderbird).
Giancarlo
Two not-so-silly questions.
I have Thunderbird 2.0.0.23. Should I upgrade or wait for some debugging?
How can I have more than one language spellchecking in Thunderbird?
(Please don't answer rtfm aka look it up).
(If it's necessary to know... os linux - ubuntu 9.10).
Thanks
Giancarlo
Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:
I have been rather taken of late with the idea of leading
a nomadic existence at some point in my life.
It almost feels like that's what humans were meant to do.
This is a very interesting thought.
In the early days of the internet, some of us believed that it
If I may... one more question.
If bing is microsoft (out of the frying pan into the fire) is ask the
only worthwhile alternative to google?
(I am doing my best to stay away from yahoo.)
I haven't quite figured out, so far, what ask is and how it works. It
seems to be related to excite...
I am grateful for the helpful answers.
Quick replies to two questions.
Thaths wrote:
They are beginning to be corrupted
Do you have any specific examples that
makes you reach this conclusion?
No. And this is why I am *not* dropping Google, though I am beginning to
break the habit and to
When I started to use Google (ten years ago or thereabouts) I was fed up
with other search engines working badly by trying to pilot finds.
I said to myself, at the time: as long as Google stays with its promise
not to be warped by commercial interests or other selfish influences,
this is it.
Pranesh Prakash wrote:
Have you checked about:config for
browser.search.defaultenginename?
Thank you for the suggestion. But I never set any default engine (had
I done so, it wouldn't have been yahoo) and I can't find any such config.
Also, the code error causes the same problem with other
If I remember well, one of the threads in silk a while ago was about
yahoo being up to some mischief.
Here is another example. In a recent review of one of my books (in case
anyone is interested... it's The Power of Stupidity) there are links
to my website. But one of them doesn't work - it
Udhay Shankar wrote:
Can you post the URL? I can't comment without looking at it.
Here it is
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2186713/book_review_the_power_of_stupidity.html?cat=9
The link that gets de-routed is in the third (and last) line of the
first paragraph of the review,
Kiran wrote:
Do you have yahoo toolbar or any other addon/plugin
supplied by yahoo installed on your browser?
and also:
The yahoo redirect is due to addon/plugin/toolbar
you have installed. Either that or your default
search engine is yahoo.
No. I use Firefox and I don't have any yahoo
Thaths wrote:
FWIW, Searching for [www] in Google shows Yahoo
as the first hit (i.e.the I'm Feeling Lucky hit).
This may not be the yahoo toolbar in action,
but the browser trying to be intelligent.
Strange as it sounds, I guess that may, indeed, be the answer.
I wish software didn't try
... actually ten months ago. In September 2008.
I wonder if anyone remembers. I asked a silly question. And I got lots
of not-at-all-silly answers. :)
It was about cases in (Indian or other) folklore or fiction where
things come alive.
At the time Nishant Shah wrote:
Would like to have a
A story of how it happened is in http://gandalf.it/stupid/intro.htm
Cheers
Giancarlo Livraghi
I hope it isn't boring to go back to the subject of a series of cartoons
on Canadians opening an office in India. (The thread was many a
true word is spoken in jest?)
In case anyone is interested... the sequence is becoming quite long,
with more peculiar developments.
It's continuing in
In http://userfriendly.org there is a sequence of cartoons that has been
going on for over two weeks. It started on April 27 and it will continue
I don't know how long.
It's about a bunch of Canadians opening an office in India.
Any comments or opinions?
Cheers
Giancarlo
Udhay,
... if anybody knows Illiad, please ask him
where he got the impression that there are lots
of food delivery options in Chennai at 2 AM.
I don' know J.D. Frazer Illiad - though sometimes I enjoy his cartoons.
And I don't know if the has any first-hand knowledge of India - or spent
Have you got to where they get the money to go to Chennai? ROTFL.
Yes, that was the antefact. A fairly long sequence - April 14 to 25.
Weren't we talking about home delivery options at 2 am?
Not from my point of view. Unless they provide teleportation, it would
take quite a while to
Of course I am not trying to be stupidly meticulous (quite often
quotations are attributed to different people - and sometimes it isn't
easy to tell who said what).
But I have always been fascinated with human stupidity (and I've written
a book about it). It may help to place some comments
Mayank Dhingra wrote:
I am reading a book by Desmond Morris
called The Human Zoo and am
finding it pretty intriguing.
I read his books many years ago and I remember only a general
impression. I quite enjoyed The Naked Ape (somewhat less The Human
Zoo).
I am *not* suggesting that Desmond
The people who make those movies never factor in the IQ levels
of the target audience. They think we are fools/dumb anyway.
In 98% of all cases, they're correct.
True. But does it really matter if it's physically possible? It's
fiction, anyway.
The real problem is that most of those
This isn't really a silly question. I am working on a book and there is
a page where I am quoting examples of myth, legend, folklore, fairy
tales, fiction or whatever where a picture or a statue or an idol or
an icon turns into a living person or some sort of real thing.
Obviously Pygmalion.
Gosh... I'm overwhelmed.
I am getting many more suggestions than I can fit into one or two
paragraphs, but if anyone has any other ideas please keep going. It's
all very interesting and maybe I can write something separately, getting
more specifically into the subject.
Deepa wrote:
The Economist's latest comment on the situation in Italy is sadly
accurate (maybe slanted on the mild side).
http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11751325
But they are wrong about history. It is most unlikely that Nero burnt
Rome. He was a cruel bastard (but not
ashok [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
the funny thing i notice about italians
(and i meet many of them...) is that nobody
admits voting for berlusconi's party,
yet he keeps coming back.
Maybe the people you meet are the ones who didn't. (Quite definitely I
*never* did, though I am not
Suresh,
Not just languages, dialects.
Yes, of course.
Do you find yourself talking say regionally
accented Italian with someone who has
a strong regional accent ...
No. But sometimes it's fun to drop into dialect if and when there is
one that someone else and I can share.
(People from
Charles,
... a distinction between bi-lingual and bi-cultural.
... people who speak two languages but only identify
with a single culture, versus people who speak two
languages and identify with two cultures.
I don't want to clutter the list... but I think this is a relevant point.
John Naisbitt wrote in Megatrends (1982): The gee-whiz futurists are
always wrong because they believe technological innovation travels in a
straight line. It doesn't. It weaves and bobs and lurches and sputters.
Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future (1997): Luckily for me, most of my
predicitions
On 9/27/07, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote:
one of the most read papers in Plos medicine
recently was a study showing that over 70%
of medical studies were bogus, simply due
to poor statistics.
Can someone please give me the url of that paper?
Thanks
gl
...
This isn't more than a pinprick. And it's only about a detail. I
wonder how anyone can call it a landmark decision.
The one (maybe) redeeming quality is that (perhaps) the major lobbies
don't win *every* time.
But that's very far from being enough.
Cheers
Giancarlo Livraghi
Udhay,
http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/
I'd be especially interested
in comments from Vip and Rishab.
Do you mind if I chip in?
I think any automated device to measure reputation, reliabilty or
trust is dangerously stupid. It would be so anyhow. To make things
worse, the criteria in this case
I'd always thought that fireworks (and rockets) were invented in China.
But apparenty they were developed much earlier in Magna Graecia i.e.
by Greeks in southern Italy.
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blrockethistory.htm
(Fireworks - and all sorts of noisy explosive gimmicks - are
Does anyone know why a book by Douglas Adams is called The salmon of
doubt?
I feel rather stupid, but I haven't been able to understand the meaning.
Irony, I would guess... but about what?
Cheers
Giancarlo
Having rejected Nicholas Negroponte's offer
of $100 laptops for schoolchildren ...
Does anyone know why India rejected the offer?
Is there any news on actual development of the MIT-sponsored project
anywhere - and-or any other alternative developments?
The concept makes sense, though it's
Eugen Leitl wrote:
I can see the utility of ebook versions of books
and an occasional Internet use, but without
pedagogic straightjackets notebooks would make
teaching worse, not better.
Yes.
I don't mean notebooks instead of schoolbooks or computers instead of
teachers. That's bovine
Could some of this stuff be the the product of some splog device?
in
arithmetic?
There is a lot of such nonsense around, but it's peculiar to see it
happen when discussing science and computing...
Giancarlo
(Giancarlo Livraghi [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://gandalf.it)
, in 2004, on complex mechanical computing machines
in the hellenistic period - but that was less than 3000 year ago).
Does anyone know here there may be more information on this subject?
Thanks
Giancarlo
(Giancarlo Livraghi) (gian @ gandalf.it) (http://gandalf.it).
Udhay Shankar wrote:
It is setting off all my bullshit alarms.
I think we should keep our bullshit alarms non constant alert.
Maybe it's a hoax. Pretty elaborate, with all sorts of other material
on the site, links, etc. But even if it *is* a hoax, it's quite close
to a lot of dangerous
are other hoaxes, while
some are real?
I wonder...
Giancarlo Livraghi
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