Adam Victor Brandizzi

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BEST FOURTH WALL BREAK IN TV HISTORY

During the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, the use of “propaganda posters” were popular for encouraging good behavior — teaching safety, boosting worker morale, and rousing wartime sacrifice. I’ve always enjoyed the art and design of these posters, and decided to have Ted whip up a set of originals to address an area of behavior where modern society is often lacking: smartphone etiquette. Enjoy.

Posters illustrated and designed by Ted Slampyak

Related posts:

1. A Manly Handshake: An Illustrated Guide
2. Motivational Posters: Founding Fathers Edition
3. Motivational Posters: Winston Churchill Edition (Part I)
4. Announcing Art of Manliness Posters
5. Motivational Posters: Theodore Roosevelt Edition

Take an ordinary magic square and replace its numbers with resistors of the same ohmic value. Now the set of resistors in each row, column, and diagonal will yield the same total resistance value when joined together end to end.

This paramagic square, by Lee Sallows, is similar -- except that the resistors must be joined in parallel:

Muhammad Shahid Nazir had a hero’s welcome at Lahore airport last week. The fishmonger had gone to the UK last summer and worked in an east London fish market. His boss asked him to do something to attract attention to his sale of fish (one per British pound, $1.60 US). So he made up a ditty and sang it.

A customer made a video, put it up on Youtube and it attracted millions of hits. Nazir then got a record deal, made a video, and it went to 29 on the British pop charts.

this is the professional video

It is said that Nazir’s return was treated as such breaking news that a Pakistani channel interrupted its commemoration of the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto for it.

This story is a mirror image of Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” which satirized the tony Gangnam district of Seoul and was done by a long-time professional musician who had been in a punk band in the early zeroes.

Nazir is just a working class immigrant, and his video was promoted as a form of street cool. The phenomenon tells us about the global flows of celebrity and pop culture’s penchant for self-parody.

The original video is here

Just for fun: What was our world like a thousand years ago? Of course, technologically very different, but Song China and Muslim Spain had made real advances in science, technology and infrastructure. If CNN had existed then, what major events would they have listed and passed around by carrier pigeon? Some of the themes salient then are still recognizable today.

1. Among the more advanced societies in 1013 was the Umayyad caliphate of Spain, with its capital at al-Zahra near Cordoba. In that year, the renowned physician Abu al-Qasim al-Zahrawi, the father of operative surgery, died near Cordoba in the new artificial city of al-Zahra. His medical textbook, al-Tasrif, was translated into Latin and used for 500 years in Europe. He discusses 200 surgical instruments, some of which he invented. Cordoba at the time had 3000 mosques, 300 public baths, 70 libraries, and a population estimated between 400,000 and a million. It was the largest city in the world and among the more advanced. 1013 however marked the beginning of its decline. A rival Umayyad claimant attacked it in 1010-1013, and his Berber troops looted it and nearby al-Zahra. Many prominent and wealthy citizens had to flee, including some members of the Jewish community.

Great Mosque of Cordoba, photo by Juan Cole, June, 2011

The Umayyads also built a nearby sister city, al-Zahra, in the 900s, which was also a marvel, but in 1013 and again after the Umayyad caliphate ended in 1031 al-Zahra was attacked, looted, and sank beneath the sands, becoming mere legend. Spanish archeologists rediscovered it in 1908 or so and have excavated 10% of it. It is a day trip from Cordoba and has an excellent museum, and is well worth the trip.

Al-Zahra, Photo by Juan Cole, June, 2011

2. The Song period in China was in many ways a harbinger of our own modernity, witnessing significant urbanization and industrialization. Some observers suggest that its capital, later known as Kaifeng, surpassed Cordoba in size in 1013, though that is only true if we take the lower estimates for the latter city’s size at that time. In any case, in 1013, as in 2013, China was poised to become the world’s leading economy.

3. 1013 AD in the Middle East was the apogee of Shiite power. The Ismaili Shiite dynasty, the Fatimids, ruled North Africa, Egypt, and much of the Levant. The Shiites of Lebanon, the Alawites of Syria, the Druze of both countries, and some of the strength of Zaydi Shiite Islam in Yemen today all have their historical origins in part in Fatimid Shiite dominance. The Fatimids belonged to the Ismaili branch of Shiism.

Fatimid Empire

Shiite Muslims believe that after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632, power should have been put in the hands of the closest thing he had to a living son, his son-in-law and first cousin, Ali b. Abi Talib. After Ali, it should have gone to the descendants of Muhammad through Ali and Fatimah (the Prophet’s daughter). The schism came with the succession to the sixth such successor to the Prophet, or Imam, Imam Ja`far al-Sadiq. The Ismailis follow his eldest son Isamil and his descendants.

In the 800s and 900s, Ismaili proselytizers had success among North African Berber tribes, who formed the backbone of the armies that took Tunisia, Egypt and much of the Middle East. The Fatimids founded Cairo under the astrological sign of Mars, to indicate success in War, in 969. The al-Azhar seminary, which the new Egyptian constitution has just made an arbiter of Islamically-derived laws in Egypt, was founded as an Ismaili university in 970-972. Some scholars have argued that the al-Azhar became influential on the European idea of the university. In 1017, the Fatimids completed the building of the al-Hakim Mosque, which is still a tourist attraction in Cairo. Fatimid-era Shiite movements survived the later revival of Sunnism in the Levant, which is what makes Lebanon and Syria so religiously complex today. But in Egypt and North Africa, the later Sunni revival made these areas religiously monochrome. I argued Tuesday that in contrast to 1013, in 2013 we are seeing a revival of Sunni Muslim religious parties and power.

4. Iran and Iraq were dominated by the Iranian Shiite Buyid dynasty, though most subjects were Sunni Muslims and the Buyids kept the Sunni Abbasid caliph, the sort of pope of the Sunnis, in office even as they deprived him of most temporal power. The Buyids may have originally been Zaydis from Mazandaran in Iran (as are many tribes of northern Yemen today), but they converted to Twelver Shiism over time.

Twelver Shiites followed the younger son of Imam Ja`far al-Sadiq, Musa al-Kazim, whose shrine is in north Baghdad and lends its name to the neighborhood of Kazimiya. They believe the line ended with the Twelfth Imam. The Twelfth Imam is hidden and will one day reappear, sort of like the return of Christ, as the conquering Mahdi or promised one. Gradually, the Shiite clergy were given some of the prerogatives originally belonging to the Imams, but in 1017 there still wasn’t much in the way of a professional Shiite clergy. The situation in 1013 in Iraq, with a Shiite dynasty ruling, is similar to that in 2013, though of course Iraq is now a republic with a Shiite majority. The discontents of Sunni Iraqis under Shiite rule, however, have some resemblances (and although they are not now ruled by Iran, many assert that they may as well be!). Historian Richard Bulliet has argued that cotton cash-cropping, made possible by the medieval warming period (900-1250) underpinned the economic efflorescence of Iran in that era. Today, Iraq and Iran depend heavily on petroleum exports rather than agricultural goods (cotton instead is a staple of the Egyptian economy today).

5.

Mahmoud of Ghazni, the great Turkic Muslim conqueror from Central Asia, in 1013 took Kabul and Punjab from the Hindushahiya rajas who had formed a coalition to keep him from coming down into India.

This was one episode in a long history of interaction between Central Asian Islam and Hindu South Asia that continues in Indo-Pak relations. But geopolitically, the threat of the tribes beyond the Hindu Kush to the plains of Punjab is still salient in the struggle of urbane Punjabis against frontier Taliban today.

6. Although it probably wasn’t very important then, some things did happen in Europe. King Sweyn 1 of Denmark and his son Canute invaded England and briefly dethroned Ethelred (who thereby got the sobriquet “the Unready.” He fled for a while to Normandy, which was probably unwise. It may have suggested to the Normans that the king of England was weak and ripe for the plucking. In Ireland, in 1013 Mael Morda, King of Leinster, allies with the head of the Dublin Vikings Sigtrygg Silkbeard against Ireland’s High King, Brian mac Cennétig (Kennedy).

Modern parallels? Well, tongue in cheek: Denmark is today light years beyond Britain in green energy, and if the Tories go on wavering on green policy, they will eventually be branded “Unready” by a British public that suffers from climate change. And, well, US politics has a Kennedy on Capitol Hill again, who probably is safe from the Republican silkbeards in 2014.

In 1958, acoustician William MacLean of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn answered a perennial question: How many guests can attend a cocktail party before it becomes too noisy for conversation? He declared that the answer, for a given room, is

where

N₀ = the critical number of guests above which each speaker will try overcome the background noise by raising his voice
K = the average number of guests in each conversational group
a = the average sound absorption coefficient of the room
V = the room's volume
h = a properly weighted mean free path of a ray of sound
d₀ = the conventional minimum distance between speakers
S_m = the minimum signal-to-noise ratio for the listeners

When the critical guest N₀ arrives, each speaker is forced to increase his acoustic power in small increments ("I really don't know what she sees in him." -- "Beg your pardon?" -- "I say, I REALLY DON'T KNOW WHY SHE GOES OUT WITH HIM") until each group is forced to huddle uncomfortably close in order to continue the conversation.

"We see therefore that, once the critical number of guests is exceeded, the party suddenly becomes a loud one," MacLean concluded, somewhat sadly. "The power of each talker rises exponentially to a practical maximum, after which each reduces his or her talking distance below the conventional distance and then maintains, servo fashion, just the proximity, tête à tête, required to attain a workable signal-to-noise ratio. Thanks to this phenomenon the party, although a loud one, can still be confined within one apartment."

(William R. MacLean, "On the Acoustics of Cocktail Parties," Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, January 1959, 79-80.)

O rei Pedro II Karageorgevich (ou Petar II Karađorđević ou ainda Пеtар II Карађорђевић) da Iugoslávia (1923-1970)

O presidente da Assembleia Nacional, o parlamento venezuelano, Diosdado Cabello, afirma que o presidente Hugo Chávez não necessariamente tem que tomar posse em Caracas, capital do país, no dia 10 de janeiro. Segundo ele, a ausência de posse nesse dia não determina a ausência absoluta.

Cabello diz que a constituição deixa claro que, se o presidente não pode comparecer à Assembleia no dia da posse, ele pode prestar juramento no Tribunal Supremo de Justiça.

Essa tese também foi defendida pelo vice-presidente Nicolas Maduro, ex-líder sindical do metrô de Caracas, que em dezembro, antes da partida do líder bolivariano para sua 4ª operação em Cuba, foi designado por Chávez seu virtual delfim político.

Segundo Cabello e Maduro, as normas não especificam nem quando nem onde deveria ser essa posse perante os integrantes do Supremo.

Isto é, ambos deixaram o caminho aberto para os rumores que indicam que Chávez, se estivesse relativamente bem para sair do hospital, poderia ir até a embaixada da Venezuela em Havana e juramento na representação diplomática, já que trata-se de solo venezuelano encravado em território cubano.

Mas, digamos que Chávez não possa prestar juramento na embaixada, porque poderia ser difícil para que o convalescente líder bolivariano saia do hospital. Nesta hipótese, uma alternativa seria usar a UTI do Centro de Investigaciones Médico Quirúrgicas (CIMEQ), o hospital em Havana.

No entanto, nem a UTI nem o resto do Cimeq são território venezuelano.

Neste caso, poderia ser usado um precedente peculiar para isto, a “Manobra Karageorgevich”, com a qual poderiam transformar a sala do hospital temporariamente em território venezuelano em Cuba.

O rei Pedro e sua mulher, a rainha Alexandra, com bebê/príncipe herdeiro Alexandre, nascido no menor encrave que a Iugoslávia já teve…na Inglaterra.

O MENOR E MAIS EFÊMERO ENCRAVE DO MUNDO: Em 1945 o rei Pedro II Karageorgevich da Iugoslávia, que estava exilado em Londres desde 1940 por causa da invasão nazista a seu país, estava em um dilema. Sua mulher, a rainha Alexandra, com a qual havia casado em 1944, estava a ponto de dar a luz.

Mas, segundo a lei dinástica de seu reino, se o príncipe herdeiro não nascesse em território nacional iugoslavo, perderia o direito à coroa.

O rei Pedro não podia voltar a seu país. Ele estava em uma sinuca e tentava encontrar uma solução na suíte 212 do Hotel Claridge, em Londres, onde residia no exílio.

A Grã-Bretanha, aliada do Reino da Iugoslávia, decidiu não deixar o rei Pedro na mão.

O rei Jorge VI, o primeiro-ministro britânico Winston Churchill e o rei Pedro assinaram um acordo pelo qual a soberania da suíte 212 do Hotel Claridge seria cedida por 24 horas à Iugoslávia, para logo em seguida voltar à Grã-Bretanha. Ali seria o parto real.

A lenda diz que os empregados do hotel espalharam terra especialmente levada da Iugoslávia para que o herdeiro nascesse – literalmente – sobre solo iugoslavo, e não somente sobre os macios tapetes transitoriamente “iugoslavizados”.

Desta forma, a suíte 212 do Claridge foi o menor encrave territorial de toda a História mundial, além de ser o mais efêmero de todos. Uma espécie de Bálcãs em pleno coração de Londres.

No entanto, o príncipe Alexandre, ali nascido, nunca conseguiu ser rei. Mas, por outro motivo: a Iugoslávia foi governada a partir do fim da guerra pelo líder comunista Josep Brioz Tito, que aboliu a monarquia. E, nos anos 90, a Iugoslávia deixou de existir, dividindo-se entre vários países independentes.

Baseado neste precedente, uma alternativa é que o presidente de Cuba, Raúl Castro, ceda à Venezuela o território da UTI durante 24 horas, transformando-o em um minúsculo encrave venezuelano na ilha de José Martí, Bola de Nieve e Ernesto Lecuona. Assim, Chávez poderia prestar juramento em território venezuelano.

O elegante hotel Claridge, em Londres. Sua suíte 212 foi uma mini-Iugoslávia por 24 horas.

E falando em Cuba, um pouco de Ernesto Lecuona, “Vals de los mares”:

PERFIL: Ariel Palacios fez o Master de Jornalismo do jornal El País (Madri) em 1993. Desde 1995 é o correspondente de O Estado de S.Paulo em Buenos Aires. Além da Argentina, também cobre o Uruguai, Paraguai e Chile. Ele foi correspondente da rádio CBN (1996-1997) e da rádio Eldorado (1997-2005). Ariel também é correspondente do canal de notícias Globo News desde 1996.

Em 2009 “Os Hermanos“ recebeu o prêmio de melhor blog do Estadão (prêmio compartilhado com o blogueiro Gustavo Chacra).

 Acompanhe-nos no Twitter, aqui.

 …E leia os supimpas blogs dos correspondentes internacionais do Estadão:

E, de bonus track, veja o Facebook da editoria de Internacional do Portal do Estadão, aqui.

Here’s more Goldilocks.

When Germany occupied Denmark in 1940, physicist Piet Hein published an innocent-seeming poem:

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing compared to the pain
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding the first one again.

The German censors let it go, not understanding its meaning -- that while enduring occupation was bad, ceasing to resist would be worse. "It said that what happens to you from outside is less important than how you take it," he explained later. "The Danes knew what I meant."

In later years Hein cultivated a talent for such tiny aphoristic poems, which he called "grooks":

Problems worthy
of attack
prove their worth
by hitting back.

There is
one art,
no more,
no less:
to do
all things
with art-
lessness.

The road to wisdom? -- Well, it's plain
and simple to express:
Err
and err
and err again
but less
and less
and less.

Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T.T.T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.

In all he wrote more 7,000 grooks, which have become a part of Scandinavian culture. "I cannot really say where my activity as a scientist ends and where my activity as a man of letters begins," he said. "Whether I am writing a poem or solving some technical problem, I think the same."

Maneater, Aaron Jasinski

- - -

Follow Aaron Jasinski on Tumblr HERE!

É por essas e por outras que o Zeca Pagodinho é idolatrado e considerado muito mestre. O cara pegou seu quadriciclo e foi ajudar a galera atingida pelo temporal em Xerém. Para quem não sabe, o Zeca tem um sítio por lá, onde ele reúne amigos para famosas rodas de samba com churrasco.

Aqui dá para ver o vídeo.