Olifante * (olifante)'s Public Profile in the Diigo Community

Curious, eclectic

I am interested in interests: programming languages,natural languages,Python,Ruby,Haskell,Erlang,Mandarin Chinese,juggling,swimming,piano,classical music

hobbies: playing piano,ball juggling,playing Nintendo Wii. My favorite music are Air,Beck,Manu Chao,Arcade Fire,Devendra Banhart,Ojos de Brujo,Marisa Monte,Chico Buarque,Zeca Afonso,Fausto,White Stripes,Cujo,Amon Tobin,Peace Orchestra,Boards of Canada,Dufay,Claudio Monteverdi,Johann Sebastian Bach,Telemann,Frederic Chopin,Franz Schubert,Gustav Mahler,Claude Debussy,Maurice Ravel,Poulenc,Milhaud,Béla Bartók,Shostakovitch,Sergey Prokofiev,Messiaen,Pärt,Miles Davis,Charlie Parker,Errol Garner,Django Reinhardt,Bessie Smith,Thelonious Monk,Bob Dylan,Cecilia Bartoli,Marco Beasley,Kraftwerk,Brian Eno,The Sound,Wolfgang Press,King Crimson,Robert Fripp,David Sylvian,The Fall,Joy Divison,Kurt Weill. Movies: Mulholland Drive,Don't Move - Die and Rise Again!,Rumble Fish,Memento,The Usual Suspects,City of God,Good Bye Lenin!,Spirited Away,The Shining,Il Piccolo Diavolo,Johnny Toothpick,Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,Being John Malkovich,Pan's Labyrinth,Shallow Grave,Reservoir Dogs. TV: Twin Peaks,Rome,New Battlestar Galactica,Black Adder,Brideshead Revisited,Northern Exposure,Yes Minister,Soap,The Simpsons,Robot Chicken,Dexter's Lab,Ren & Stimpy,Aeon Flux,South Park,SpongeBob SquarePants,Cow and Chicken,I Am Weasel. Books: Guns Germs and Steel,The Language Instinct,Gödel,Escher and Bach,Le Ton Beau de Marot,The Loom of Language,What is the Name of this Book,Touched with Fire,The Emperor's New Mind,Writing Systems,The Chinese Language - Fact and Fantasy,Goldstein's Classical Mechanics,Gurtin's An Introduction to Continuum Mechanics,Hirsch & Smale's Differential Equations,Dynamical Systems and Linear Algebra,Kai Lai Chung's Elementary Probability Theory,Cohen-Tanoudji's Mécanique Quantique,Griffiths' Introduction to Elementary Particles,Bransden and Joachain's Physics of Atoms and Molecules,Huang's Statistical Mechanics,A Little Java - a Few Patterns,The Little Schemer,Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture,Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,Alan Turing - The Enigma of Intelligence,Perdido Street Station,Ubik,The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,Now Wait for Last year,Marune Alastor,Gateway,Dune,The Lathe of Heaven,The Dispossessed,Flow My Tears the Policeman Said,Permutation City,Non-Stop. My Heros are Charles Darwin,Alan Turing,Albert Einstein,Niels Bohr,John von Neumann,Richard Feynman,Thomas Jefferson,Douglas Hofstadter,Philip K. Dick,Mário Soares,Paul Graham,Noam Chomsky,Roger Penrose,Gottfried Leibniz,Richard Stalmann,Tim Berners-Lee,Guido van Rossum,Simon Peyton Jones,Hieronymus Bosch,M.C Escher,Richard Dawkins,Daniel Dennett,Alan Kay,Donald Knuth,Guy Steele,Gerald Sussman,Seymour Papert,Chuck Moore,Bob Kahn,Vint Cerf,Douglas Engelbart,Dan Ingalls,Phillip Wadler,Saunders Mac Lane,Edward Lorenz,Mitchell Feigenbaum,Martin Gardner,Steve Jobs,Ken Thompson,Dennis Ritchie,William Clifford.

Member since Mar 27, 2008, follows 5 people, 0 public groups, 2113 public bookmarks (2286 total).

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Recent Bookmarks and Annotations

Googling for Sociopaths (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought) on 2009-12-15
- One of the best things about capitalism is the way it handles sociopaths. Major executives look up to Alexander the Great and apparently try to follow in his footsteps. But instead of leading a murderous campaign across Asia, they decide to make something people want: newspapers and movies and television shows. True, they’re far from perfect, but you have to admit it’s a lot better than mass slaughter.
What a mess our military has made | Dan Plesch | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk on 2009-11-30
- al-Qaida probably lured the US into Afghanistan with the 9/11 attacks, envisaging that the resulting war with the Pashtun areas would enable them to repeat the empire-destroying victory over the Soviets.
- among the Arab diplomatic corps the idea is almost a given, while in the west it cannot even be discussed.
- 2 more annotations...
- - Today, the idea that a political adversary might lay a military trap is incomprehensible to an ostensibly rational military establishment
  - On the Psychology of Military Incompetence, by Norman Dixon, provides an insight into the problems of authoritarian personalities in authoritarian institutions being unable to "see" the obvious.
think pink: You'll never get what you want. on 2009-11-29
- money is useful, but ultimately it’s bullshit. I’ve been wealthy and miserable, and I’ve been broke and happy. Key words here: “Shared accommodation.”
Why experts are morons: a recipe for academic success « Finite Attention Span on 2009-11-23
- if the world were made of custard, global warming might lead to major dessertification
Turner Lost CNN, Fonda, Fortune, Feels ‘Like a Dummy’ (Update1) - Bloomberg.com on 2009-10-18
- “War is obsolete,” Turner said. “The last time someone
  surrendered was Japan and that was 60 years ago. The Afghans
  will never surrender. We will just get tired and come home.
  We’ve already given up on Iraq and there’s oil in Iraq, there’s
  no oil in Afghanistan.”
- if
  you economize and don’t buy new airplanes or long-range jets, or
  that sort of thing, you can get by on a billion or two.
danieltenner.com — What problems does Google Wave solve? on 2009-10-16
- The way Google should have advertised Wave is: “it solves the problems with email”
Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn - Telegraph on 2009-10-16
- unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected.
- unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.
- 1 more annotations...
- - lucky people generate good fortune via four basic principles. They are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan on 2009-09-14
- there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism.
- there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism.
- 7 more annotations...
- - there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism.
  - there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism
  - two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits. I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism
  - What the liberty-as-means libertarian calls for is the freedom to experiment: let different localities try different things, and learn from this experience.
  - This leads then to a call for “states as laboratories of democracy” federalism in matters of social policy; or in a more formal sense, a call for subsidiarity
  - The freedom to experiment needs to include freedom to experiment with different governmental (i.e., coercive) rules.
  - a liberty-as-means libertarian ought to argue, in some cases, for local autonomy to restrict some personal freedoms.
Opinion: The unspoken truth about managing geeks on 2009-09-14
- for IT groups respect is the currency of the realm.
- IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.
- 13 more annotations...
- - work in both fields requires a technical expertise that can't be faked and a proficiency that can only be measured by qualified peers.
  - Capacity for technical reasoning trumps all other professional factors
  - I believe you can predict success or failure of an IT group simply by assessing the amount of mutual respect within it.
  - in IT, colleagues can significantly influence the careers of the entire team.
  - IT pros can come to be seen as whiny or as having a victim mentality. Presuming this is a trait that must be disciplined out of them is a huge management mistake.
  - Good IT pros are not anti-bureaucracy, as many observers think. They are anti-stupidity.
  - The primary task of any IT group is to teach people how to work.
  - IT's job at the most fundamental level is to build, maintain and improve frameworks within which to accomplish tasks.
  - if the people who represent IT to the organization at large aren't cognizant of how the technology works, can't communicate it in the manner the IT group needs it communicated, can't maintain consistency, take credit for the work of the group members
  - Who decides if a doctor is a doctor? Other doctors! So, if your IT group isn't at the table for the hiring process of their bosses and peers, this already does a disservice to the process.
  - Standard managerial processes are nearly useless in an IT group.
  - the fight in most IT groups is in how to get things done, not how to avoid work.
  - What IT pros want in a manager is a technical sounding board and a source of general direction.
Views: Criminal Incompetence - Inside Higher Ed on 2009-08-29
- Facial tattoos are the ultimate abandonment of all hope of a life outside.
- In some lines of work, the forehead is a perfectly good place for one's CV. It may even qualify as proof of ambition.
- 5 more annotations...
- - A woman in Canada learned that there was a business in the American Southwest called Guns for Hire. She did not realize that it was a theatrical group that specialized in reenactments of Old Western shoot-outs and the like. She called its office to try to arrange the disposal of her husband.
  - mafiosi are quite incompetent at doing anything" other than shaking down legitimate businesses and enforcing trade agreements among smaller-scale hoodlums
  - If [mobsters] showed any competence at it, their clients would fear that they might just take over.
  - The most powerful figures in this system, says Gambetta, tend to be the least intellectually distinguished.
  - In a corrupt academic market, being good at and interested in one's own research, by contrast, signal a potential for a career independent of corrupt reciprocity