Adam Victor Brandizzi

When the Civil War ended, thousands of Confederates chose to leave the United States entirely and settle in Brazil. “Shall any Southerner be blamed, if he seeks a land where the night of vengeance has not come, that his day may not be one of threatening?” asked Ballard S. Dunn in Brazil, the Home for Southerners (1866). “Why should he? For, as surely as that these four years of disastrous war have left most of those who have been true to themselves and their ancestors penniless, homeless, despoiled, and bereaved, so surely the future, with its cumbrous disabilities, and fearful forebodings, promises nothing better than poverty and humiliation.”

About 10,000 Southerners made the trip to Brazil, where most settled in the state of São Paulo. Today their descendants form an ethic subgroup. In the city of Americana, the 300-member Fraternity of American Descendants holds an annual festival with Confederate flags, uniforms, and music, and a local cemetery holds the remains of W.S. Wise, the great-uncle of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter.

Here are more Easter comics!

Also, a happy birthday to Pierre! Hope you have a great day!

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Piketty ontem na Harvard Kennedy School (foto roubada da Masoomeh Khandan) Desperto o blog da sonolência dos últimos meses para falar sobre o que todo mundo tem falado (o mundo como esse estranho lugar onde as pessoas debatem conceitos abstratos ligados a dinheiro e produção): o novo livro de Thomas Piketty, "Capital in the 21st Century", que deve roubar  de "Why Nations Fail" e "This Time Is

w-for-wumbo:

niggas-:

playerprophet:

ohneooo:

beast-of-joy:

“The concept is simple. Take a blank sheet with nothing but the basic outline of a pinup girl and illustrate a unique scene around her.”

holy FUCK.

I’ll probably always reblog this cuz it’s just mind-blowing, holy cow

Emin Gün Sirer has a fascinating post about how the use of NoSQL caused technical failures that led to the demise of Bitcoin exchanges Flexcoin and Poloniex. But these are only the latest in a long line of hacks of exchanges, other services, and individuals; a wide variety of bugs have been implicated. This suggests that there’s some underlying reason why Bitcoiners keep building systems that get exploited. In this post I’ll examine why.

Let’s step back for a minute and talk about how we keep buildings physically secure. Locks are the first thing that come to mind, but they’re only a small part of the picture. Physical security is not just preventive but also reactive and corrective. We have intrusion-detection systems and ways of going after criminals. In particular, stolen goods are difficult to convert into cash. In the absence of the state and the rule of law, locks by themselves would do little to keep buildings secure.

Software security is exactly like that. Keeping attackers out is only the first line of defense; companies spend as much on intrusion detection. As the Heartbleed bug demonstrates, we don’t have processes that will produce code that’s free of vulnerabilities given the practical constraints of software development. Relying on prevention alone, then, is simply not an option. But the extent to which practical security relies on detection over prevention may be surprising. For example, my colleague Joseph Bonneau has argued that authentication is becoming a machine learning problem. The upshot is that on many or most sites where security matters, stealing a password is not by itself sufficient to impersonate the user.

Perhaps most crucially for e-commerce, banks can reverse fraudulent transactions and law enforcement of digital financial crimes is relatively competent. As a result, stolen passwords and credit card numbers are worth only fractions of a penny on the dollar. Viewed in this context, the role of cryptography and access control is merely to raise the bar sufficiently for attackers so that the risk of getting caught combined with the diminished ability to monetize break-ins skew the economics in favor of the defender.

Bitcoin’s design destroys this delicate balance of prevention, detection, and correction, and puts the entire onus on preventive measures. [*] If an attacker breaks into a server containing private keys, he can steal the bitcoins immediately and irreversibly. Furthermore, a stolen bitcoin is still a bitcoin. [**] While there’s been talk of taint-tracking mechanisms to prevent thieves from cashing out, these haven’t materialized and there are fundamental technical and political difficulties with such proposals.

I suspect that developers of Bitcoin services who are responsible for security consistently and dramatically underestimate what it takes to build a secure Bitcoin service. Coding and operational practices that are perfectly adequate for building a typical e-commerce site turn out to be utterly inadequate for, say, a Bitcoin exchange. Going back to the lock analogy, developers think they need a door lock when in fact they need Fort Knox. And software security as a field has simply not matured to the point where we’re even capable of building systems that rely primarily on preventive technological mechanisms in the face of persistent, financially motivated adversaries.

This analysis suggests that Bitcoin businesses will continue to face a rocky future, considering that the state of software security will not improve overnight. This is why research into techniques like threshold cryptography is so important; these measures can help secure wallets even when the underlying environment is vulnerable. At the same time, perhaps the security needs of the Bitcoin ecosystem will finally provide the kick in the pants needed to improve coding practices, security reviews and audits, adversarial testing, and operational security to the point where we can build systems that are secure by design. If this happens, it will have a huge, lasting, positive impact on the overall state of Internet security.

[*] These differences seem to be largely inherent, but they can be mitigated a little bit by measures such as keeping bitcoins in cold storage.

[**] A recent paper led by Sarah Meiklejohn argues that it currently is difficult for thieves to launder large sums of bitcoins. If this changes, we can expect that the incentives will shift even further in favor of attackers.

Thanks to Joseph Bonneau and Ed Felten for reviewing a draft.

Vienna’s Café Central was crowded with intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century, including Freud, Lenin, the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, and endless chessplayers.

When Victor Adler made the argument that war would provoke a revolution in Russia, Leopold Berchtold replied, “And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at the Café Central?”

Mr. Bronstein was Leon Trotsky.

The index to the fourth edition of George Thomas’ Calculus and Analytic Geometry contains an entry for “Whales” on page 188. That page contains no reference to whales, but it does include the figure above.

German mathematician Erich Bessel-Hagen was often teased for his protruding ears.

In 1923 his colleague Béla Kerékjártó published a book, Vorlesungen Über Topologie, whose index lists a reference to Bessel-Hagen on page 151.

That page makes no mention of Bessel-Hagen, but it does contain this figure:

Is that libel?

Passado um pouco a poeira, vou dar a minha opinião sobre essa confusão envolvendo o IBGE. Li que algumas pessoas falaram que o possível adiamento da PNAD contínua era fruto de intervenção política no órgão. A tese é que, pela PNAD contínua, a taxa de desemprego nacional era maior em cerca de dois pontos de […]

Justo

Here on this corner of the internet, we see a lot of abandoned places. For some of them, we can even understand how circumstances might have led their abandonment. This however, is a head-in-hands kind of moment.

The Castello di Sammezzano is a show-stopper, a jaw-dropper. Hidden away in the Tuscan hills of Northern Italy, this electrifyingly beautiful Moorish castle was built a whopping 400+ years ago in 1605, but for more than two decades, it’s been sitting empty, neglected, vulnerable to vandalism and to the elements.

(c) Massimo Listri

There are 365 rooms in the Castello di Sammazzano, one for every day of the year. The Moroccan-style palatial villa is a labyrinthe of exquisitely tiled rooms, each one intricately unique. Originally built by a Spanish noble, Ximenes of Aragon in the 17th century, it wasn’t until the 19th century that the castle would find its arabian identity and be transformed into the etherial palace it resembles today.

(c) Dan Raven

(c) Martino Zegwaard

(c) Darmé

This is all owed to its inheritor, Marquis Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes, a largely forgotten but key cultural, social and political figure in Florence when the city was the capital of Italy. Ferdinando, who lived and died at the property, spent 40 years planning, financing and realizing this exotic castle that would become the most important example of orientalist architecture in Italy– only to be left to ruin at the hands of modern-day investors.

After the Marquis’ death at the end of the 19th century, there was a period of uncertainty for the property and historical records appear to be rather patchy. During the war, the Germans came looting, stealing mainly from the castle’s surrounding park that had once been considered the largest and most exotic in Tuscany. They took many important statues and fountains of Moorish style, as well as an entire bridge and a grotto featuring a statue of Venus. When the war ended, the castle became a luxury hotel, restaurant and bar.

Unfortunately there appears to be no photographs of the villa during this period, I couldn’t even get the name of the hotel, which reportedly closed its doors in 1990. For a decade, it stood without a master of the house until 1999, when a British company ceremoniously bought the Castello di Sammezzano at auction. But still, the castello would remain unoccupied; it’s vaulted rooms and archways empty and unappreciated.

The plan for Sammezzano called for an 18-hole championship golf course and a large sports facility and clubhouse. But construction hadn’t yet begun when the investment company ran into “economic issues” and the castle was forgotten, left to fall into an extreme state of disrepair. The exterior damage by vandals and the weather is fairly evident. On the inside, many windows were broken, railings cut, chandeliers and rosettes stolen.

It wasn’t until 2013 that a local non-profit committee was founded to help raise awareness of the increasingly decaying castle. They have no ownership of Sammezzano but they help to arrange and promote public openings. And while the Comitato FPXA (after the initials of Ferdinando Panciatichi Ximenes of Aragon) has been doing their part, the property has been quietly sold to the global developer, Palmerston Hotel & Resorts.

On their website, the developer’s to-do list includes several worldwide projects, including the Castello Sammezzano, which they intend to develop into a “luxurious sporting resort, incorporating a boutique hotel, apartments, spa and country club with golf, tennis and various sporting amenities”. They have obtained all necessary planning approvals and claim redevelopment is scheduled to commence in 2014.

Another luxury hotel development might not be the fairytale ending we were necessarily waiting for, but here’s hoping this arabian castle will finally be restored to its former glory– and maybe they’ll let us come round for a mint tea under those otherworldly ceilings.

Stay tuned for updates on the Comitato FPXA facebook page. 

Images by urban exploration photographers Dan Raven / Darmé / Martino Zegwaard

silentgiantla:

Animated artwork by Rebecca Mock

Fine, detailed and subtle animated artwork created by New York illustrator Rebecca Mock. Apparently the animated gif back to stay, gradually more and more people are exploring this old format and customers asking for shouting. Several of these illustrations were created for the New York Times or The Warlus magazine.

devopsreactions:

by _KaszpiR_

labellefabuleuse:

Miroslava Duma during Paris Fashion Week, Fall 2014

dancemetotheendofluv:

flowy…

pleated leather skirt

From Alice in Wonderland to Times Square, a delicate dance of the imagination.

When Zelda Sayre married legendary Jazz Age novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald to become Zelda Fitzgerald, she was anointed “the first American flapper” and embarked on one of the most turbulent relationships in literary history. Though best-remembered as a writer and dancer, Zelda, unbeknownst to many, not only considered herself an artist but was also an exceptionally gifted one. Her paintings place her among history’s famous writers with little-known talents in the visual arts, including Tolkien’s drawings, Sylvia Plath’s sketches, William Faulkner’s Jazz Age illustrations, and Flannery O’Connor’s cartoons.

Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald (public library) collects 140 illustrations and 80 of her paintings from the late 1930s and 1940s, lovingly compiled by her granddaughter, the Vermont-based writer, filmmaker and artist Eleanor Anne Lanahan. From her cityscapes of New York City and Paris to her psychedelic Biblical allegories to her delicate paper dolls she made for her daughter Scottie, the art paints an intricate picture of her psychoemotional world and reflects her passion for fairy tales, her irreverent dance with the absurd, and her enormous sensitivity to beauty — a visual reflection of the blend of intense intelligence and unapologetic mischievousness that made Zelda so alluring.

But as a lover of Alice in Wonderland art, I was especially thrilled to see Zelda’s paintings for the Carroll classic:

Zelda: An Illustrated Life is an absolute delight from cover to cover. Complement it with the art of Norah Borges.

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Existe uma tendência equivocada de achar que todo o antissemitismo esteja associado a sentimentos anti-Israel e a extremistas islâmicos fanáticos, embora estes realmente existam. Mas o episódio de ontem em Kansas City, assim como centenas de outros ao redor do mundo todos os anos, inclusive no Brasil, se deveu pura e simplesmente ao ódio aos judeus.

O atirador, depois de preso, teria gritado “Heil Hitler”. E não, ele não era muçulmano, como muitos islamofóbicos gostariam que fosse apenas para terem mais uma oportunidade de atacar os muçulmanos. O terrorista (sim, usarei esta expressão) era um americano branco, supremacista, racista, cristão, membro de Ku Klux Klan e de 73 anos chamado Frazier Glenn Cross.

Existem pessoas que se tornam antissemitas por serem anti-Israel. Estas são mais comuns no mundo árabe. Existem pessoas que são anti-Israel por serem antissemitas. Estas são mais comuns na Europa. E existem pessoas que são antissemitas independentemente da posição que possuam em relação a Israel, pois também tendem a odiar os palestinos. Estes são os neonazistas europeus, americanos e mesmo no Brasil. Isto é, são antissemitas e islamofóbicos (e anti-árabes, pois em alguns casos não toleram cristãos do Oriente Médio) ao mesmo tempo.

Eu mesmo já ouvi de pessoas conhecidas que “judeus” e “libaneses” são os responsáveis por uma série de problemas do Brasil, como corrupção. Claro, estas pessoas, se ficarem doentes e tiverem condições, certamente tentarão se internar no Einstein ou no Sírio-Libanês. E não verão o menor problema em serem atendidos por um médico com sobrenome árabe ou judaico.

Enfim, triste escrever um post de antissemitismo no Pessach. Mas Boa Páscoa à comunidade judaica em São Paulo, Rio, Nova York, Israel, Irã e outras partes do mundo.

Apenas comentários do post do dia ou do post prévio serão publicados

Guga Chacra, comentarista de política internacional do Estadão e do programa Globo News Em Pauta em Nova York, é mestre em Relações Internacionais pela Universidade Columbia. Já foi correspondente do jornal O Estado de S. Paulo no Oriente Médio e em NY. No passado, trabalhou como correspondente da Folha em Buenos Aires

Comentários islamofóbicos, antissemitas, anticristãos e antiárabes ou que coloquem um povo ou uma religião como superiores não serão publicados. Tampouco ataques entre leitores ou contra o blogueiro. Pessoas que insistirem em ataques pessoais não terão mais seus comentários publicados. Não é permitido postar vídeo. Todos os posts devem ter relação com algum dos temas acima. O blog está aberto a discussões educadas e com pontos de vista diferentes. Os comentários dos leitores não refletem a opinião do jornalista

Acompanhe também meus comentários no Globo News Em Pauta, na Rádio Estadão, na TV Estadão, no Estadão Noite no tablet, no Twitter @gugachacra , no Facebook Guga Chacra (me adicionem como seguidor), no Instagram e no Google Plus. Escrevam para mim no gugachacra at outlook.com. Leiam também o blog do Ariel Palacios