The Vasa

Today's post, after a month hiatus is part anecdote, part Software Engineering advice, since I imagine a good part of my readership (if it indeed exists) must contain Computer Science people. The story is about a Swedish ship called Vasa, which sank 330 years ago. The story goes that during the ships construction, with the design already made, and most of the hull already laid down, king Gustavus Adolphus decided that just one gun deck was not enough, so he demanded two. At the time, Sweden was not yet renowned as the land of sexual liberation and safe cars, and since nobody had the guts to tell the king he was a dimwit regarding shipbuilding, his modifications were made. The result, the maiden voyage lasted about 20 minutes, and with first strong wind capsized the ship, resulting in it making water immediately and sinking within 7 minutes. At least, thanks to the bay of Stockholm, the ship has been preserved almost intact, including parts of the ship sails to this day.

From Stockholm

Smut is in the eye of the beholder

I do not give a flying fuck to Diesel or its party, but the advertising company that created this video definitely deserves praise for making a hilarious video. It consists of footage from old porn flicks, but with key parts of the scene overlaid with crayon like images suggesting something completely different than the original film. Like, for example replacing the lower part of a woman receiving cunnilingus with an image of a harmonica. It just cracks me up every time!


Diesel SFW XXX - Watch more free videos

Welcome to Nollywood

I have recently watched an interview with Fernando Meirelles, of The Constant Gardener fame, in which he mentioned that Nigeria has a film industry comparable, if not more prolific than, India. Even I, that pride myself in knowing many bits of random knowledge, was impressed by discovering this. It is pretty impressive especially because, if wikipedia is to be believed, they are making money making small budget films. This shows that there is a business model very different from Hollywood that can work, and generate affordable movies for the masses.



From the IMDB profile of Nigerian films, we can clearly see how prolific they are and the turnaround time for films are pretty quick, since there are movies which their part two are released the same year as the original, like 100% Husband one and two in 2005.

Quinoa dish

 

As I was reading a science magazine one particular article caught my atention regarding this Andean grain called Quinoa, which is, apparently, a very healthy source of proteins. In order to make it more palatable to westerners, every single site I have seen says that quinoa is like rice, which is understandable, although it looks nothing like it. So, since I am now into healthy eating and shit, I decided to give it a try, and I ended up cooking Quinoa like rice and using it to complement my Shrimp Aglio e Olio, the results of which are shown in the picture above. I do not exactly understand the "nutty" flavor term they use to describe how quinoa tastes, but I understand it has slightly more taste than plain rice. My veredict is that it tastes a bit stronger than rice, and it is slightly trickier to cook because the grains are smaller, and you end up losing many of them in the process of rinsing and cooking quinoa, but the results are not bad.

Fucking Bus 176

On a random London rant (it even rhymes almost Cockney way), I am getting increasingly irritated by the buses on route 176 from my home into work. My problem is that every single morning at rush hour around 8:30 in the morning, these buses decide to stop and wait for 5 to 10 minutes at Camberwell Green, and then again to change drivers a stop afterwards, wasting an additional 5 minutes. I am sensitive to the needs of bus drivers, since they are not machines and must rest, but come on, the rush hour is definitely not the right time to do rest stops, they could certainly do this rest say at 7, and then work till 9 just so that people who are in a hurry to get to work can actually take the bus without worrying.

Way too funny

Probably the funniest video I watched for months, showing a TV interviewer getting completely fucked up laughing at the interviewee because of his voice. Even if you are compelled to be politically correct, it is impossible not to laugh (just try).



As a side remark, the comments in the video make it clear that this video is a fake program as part of another comedy sketch, so do not take it too seriously. In any case, a cheap and good laugh.

Sherlock Holmes and South London

I have recently read a couple of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, and was thrilled to know that some of them, at least all of the ones I read take place in south London, mere blocks away from where I live. For example, in A Study in Scarlet, a murder takes place in Brixton Road, with mentions of Camberwell (home of the Camberwell Carrot) and other locations, while in The Sign of Four also happens in a broadly similar location in south London.

This can be mainly attributed to Doyle's living in Norwood, which is further south in London. Now the ironic part is that these parts of London remain a bit lawless, and Brixton and Camberwell are definitely no strangers to murder and knife crime nowadays.


View Larger Map

English Language

This morning I was assailed by a deep linguistic question: is there any Daughter of a Bitch? Thinking closely on the matter, it seems odd that one can use the offensive term Son of a Bitch, SOB and whatnot, but it seems English-speaking women are impervious to this offensive term. Can a woman be a son of a bitch? I mean, it would be linguistically wrong, as this noun should agree with the gender of the target, is it not?

The story behind today's epiphany is more or less the following. As I came back from the supermarket this morning, I was confronted with a local English girl, not one of the types who speak the Queen's English, mind you, but rather the one that would be called a Chav around these parts. This girl was rather unpleasant, and sported a T-Shirt with the message "If you think I'm a bitch, you should meet my mother". The shirt immediately made me think, is she a bitch, or a ... a ... a what?

Now, to further this discussion, I urge any reader to provide some insight to me.

NASA

In these anti-American times, one American institution stands out almost untarnished by the reputation of other, less moral, north-American organizations. I must confess that, like many other people in the old continent, I am not a big fan of the United States of America, maybe because as a youngster, I believed all their bull about freedom and their definition of capitalism. But one of the things that certainly led me to perfect my English speaking skills was my admiration for the technological breakthroughs made by the Americans. At that time, Americans were big nerds, and some of the best engineers in the world were Americans, a legacy of their Apollo program. And NASA definitely represents some of the finest things America can do if it stop thinking about its interests overseas.

Unfortunately, like all great empires, for America is an empire in denial, it has gotten to the point where it wants to enjoy the fruits of its might. And this means that less and less Americans really want to go through the efforts that their 20th century generation went through to make sure they are at the forefront of technology and civilization. With this in mind, the taste of 50 year anniversary of NASA is bittersweet as less effort and money is being injected into this institution, so as fund doomed efforts to consolidate the empire.

Nevertheless, cheers for NASA. Let us all hope that more people share its old values.

Go

It is now official, I started playing the ancient game of Go, though I got off to a rather slow start. My first 10 games were a fiasco, so if I take the Go proverb that says "Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible", then I am doing pretty well. One puzzling thing in my start is that my friend Paulo, who introduced me to the game, sort of changed the proverb to lose your 100 games, which sort of indicates how much I suck at the game.



Nevertheless, it seems like a fun game to play (regardless of my losing streak), and I will try to convince myself to read strategy books on Go. The game is beautifully simple in terms of rules, but the tactical and strategic complexity from these simple rules is amazing. This complexity is such, that despite the existence of plenty of extremely good chess playing programs, very few good Go playing programs exist for any but the smallest board sizes.