Buchada
m. n. f. / 2014
Um amigo meu que é gaúcho disse que sabe fazer churrasco. Nunca entendi qual é a grande habilidade que existe nisso, porque colocar carne no fogo é uma coisa que a gente faz desde as cavernas… é como fritar um ovo. Talento que me impressiona é o do sertanejo, que costura dentro do estômago de um bicho as vísceras dele, coloca pra ferver e depois reconhece: “eu faço uma buchada que não fede”.
A focus on “existential” or “categorical” inequality is what in the 19th century Europe used to be called a radical position, associated with the post-1789 developments. Once all formal distinctions of class between clergy, aristocracy and people were abolished, there was, it was argued, no need to focus on the existing income differences. This view reached its peak under the French Third Republic when inequality was increasing by leaps and bounds, while formal equality was left untouched.(The socialist position at the time was that formal equality is just the first step towards real equality which requires also the diminution of economic inequalities.) The same radical position holds fast and true today: once you see the world as primarily composed of various groups, you quickly slip into “identity” politics whose main objective is to equalize formal legal positions of the groups—and basically let everything else the same.
According to Thorborn, that’s what the world has been remarkably successful in doing in the past 30 years. There are well-known and substantial advances in the equal treatment of different groups (listed above); there was also a strong push for “horizontal” equality, which is the term used in economics to indicate that on average there should be no wage differences between men and women, blacks and whites etc. (that is, atleast no differences that cannot be explained by better skills or experience). The progress there, although not as substantial as in legal equality, has been real too.
But the quasi single-minded focus on “existential” inequality was not always helpful, and I think in some cases was outright harmful, to the general reduction of income and wealth inequalities. The success in the latter would—I think it could be argued—also reduce income differences due to racial or gender discrimination. In other words, pushing for reduction of inequality in general would make lots of sense even if our primary objective is to reduce specific gender or racial income inequalities. But this is not how things worked out. Rather, the focus was on “horizontal” inequalities while the overall, general inequality was left to its own devices, namely was allowed to increase.
The focus on “existential” inequality is wrong, in my opinion, for at least three reasons.
First, the emphasis of group differences quickly spills into identity politics, splintering the groups that do have an interest in fighting for change. The joint front crumbles. The groups end up by caring just about the change in their own positions and become indifferent to the rest. I am unaware for example that gays or immigrants, once their objectives of legal equality achieved, have shown particular interest to fight for economic equality in general, be it in the United State or the world. Splintering has made people focus on their own complaint; once that complaint is solved, they are indifferent to the rest.
Second, the focus on “existential” inequality leaves the basic problem unsolved because the way it poses the issue is wrong. I noticed this in a recent discussion regarding legalization of prostitution. For feminists, prostitution is a reprehensible activity that they would like either to ban, discourage through some ill-defined teach-ins of women, or curb its demand by punishing clients who are predominantly males. Not only do these approaches just drive the problem underground without solving it, they are futile because the root case of prostitution is not addressed. The root cause today (and perhaps in history) is income and wealth inequality. There are many (mostly) men with huge incomes and there are many (mostly young) women with poor job prospects and no money. This drives prostitution nationally and globally (as in sex tourism). So,the point is not to address gender inequality only (men vs. women) but its economic cause. Consider what would happen even if horizontal equality between men and women were achieved, a thing which, with higher enrollment and graduation rates among women than men, and rising number of rich women, man soon happen. The problem will simply become that instead of 90% of customers being men we shall have a “fair” and “gender-neutral” distribution of customers with 50% men and 50% women. Will such gender equality solve the problem? Obviously not: prostitution, a reprehensibly activity in the eyes of the gender-focused activists, will merely become gender-balanced. Is this all they really want to achieve? No. But, of course, it reveals that the real cause of the problem lies elsewhere, in inequality, and that their approach is misdirected.
Third, the emphasis on “existential” equality is politically easy because it is not serious. It faces no real opposition from the right-wing politicians and conservatives because it does not affect the underlying structure of economic inequality and political power. Instead of fighting for meaningful general changes (e.g. increased vacation time for all, shorter work-week for all, more favorable working conditions for parents, longer maternity and paternal leave, higher minimum wage for all etc.)—the issues on which the success has been quasi nil, but which would cut into the profits and thus face a strong economic opposition from the businesses, proponents of the “existential” equality care only up to the point where legal equality is established. Strictly speaking, such equality is also in the well-understood interest of capitalists. We know at least since Gary Becker that, economically, discrimination is inefficient for those who practice it. But general measures that improve the position of the employees will not of course please those who have economic power. So the proponents of “existential” equality stop midway again. Formal equality is surely a necessary condition for overall betterment, but it is not sufficient. A movement toward more generalized equalization of human condition requires not only legal equality but also substantively greater (income and especially wealth) equality.
Their approach (“formal equality and then nothing”) is what Rawls calls “meritocratic equality”, the lowest level of equality where all participants are legally free to pursue whatever career they choose but where their starting positions are vastly different. All those who care exclusively about “identities” do only that: they aim to place everybody on the same starting line, but do not care if some come to the starting line with Ferraris and others with bicycles. Their job is done once everybody is on the same starting line. Case closed: just when the real issues begin.
In a competitive market, if you do the work to lower your price by 10%, your market share grows.
If you dig in deep, analyze, reengineer and make thoughtful changes, you can lower your price another 10%. This leads to an even bigger jump in market share.
The third time (or maybe the fourth, or even before then), you only achieve a 10% savings by cutting safety, or quality, or reliability. You cut corners, certainly.
The last 10% costs your workers the chance to make a decent living, it costs your suppliers the opportunity to treat their people with dignity, and it costs you your reputation.
The last 10% isn't worth it.
We're not going to remember how cheap you were. We're going to remember that you let us down.
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From Quora, an answer to the question "If we pour water on the sun with a bucket as big as the sun, will the sun be extinguished?"
The probable answer is "no." The Sun involves a special type of fire that is able to "burn" water, and so it will just get hotter, and six times brighter.
Water is 89% oxygen BY MASS. And the Sun's overall density is 1.4 times that of water. So if you have a volume of water the VOLUME of the Sun, it will have 1/1.4 = 0.71 times the mass of the Sun, and this mass will be .71*.89 = 63% of a solar mass of oxygen and 8% of a solar mass of hydrogen. The Sun itself is 0.74 solar masses of hydrogen and 0.24 solar masses of helium.
So you end up with a 1.7 solar mass star with composition 48% hydrogen, 37% oxygen, and 14% helium (with 1% heavier elements).
Now, will such a star burn? Yes, but not with the type of proton-proton fusion the Sun uses. A star 1.7 times the mass of the Sun will heat up and burn almost entirely by the CNO fusion cycle, after making some carbon and nitrogen to go along with all the oxygen you've started with. So with CNO fusion and that mass you get a type F0 star with about 1.3 times the radius and 6 times the luminosity of the present Sun, and a temperature somewhat hotter than the Sun (7200 K vs. the Sun's 5800 K). It will be bluish-white, with more UV. That, along with that 6 times heat input, will cause the Earth's biosphere to be fried, and oceans to probably boil.
Well, we probably shouldn't do that then. (via gizmodo)
Tags: science SunOsias Jotavia Nicolas.brantut
Esta é nossa Foto Gump do dia, que mostra o bizarro e misterioso furacão hexagonal que tem em Saturno.
Não é um furacãozinho qualquer, meu amigo. Localizado no pólo norte de Saturno, está há décadas (talvez milênios) ocorrendo uma tempestade que não cessa. É uma poderosíssima e corrente vento de seis lados, que mede 321.868,8 km de diâmetro. No interior, os ventos sopram a 200 quilômetros por hora, alimentando um enorme furacão central, que gera sub-furacões menores para todos os lados.
Uma vez que não há nada sólido em Saturno para conter ou mesmo desacelerar o fluxo de gás que está causando esse fenômeno, não há nenhuma indicação que a tempestade passará um dia. Nós somente mapeamos e descobrimos esta bizarra curiosidade no polo norte de Saturno há duas décadas, mas isso pode já estar assim, desse jeito, há muitos milhares de anos antes mesmo da Humanidade surgir na Terra, e se bobear, antes mesmo da própria Terra surgir no sistema solar.
Como a tempestade lá começou é um grande mistério, que talvez no futuro um poderoso simulador computacional possa nos dizer.
Esta imagem, que é basicamente uma visão do topo do planeta, vem da sonda Cassini , e a razão pelo qual dá pra ver tão claramente a tempestade misteriosa, é que a inclinação axial de Saturno e sua localização orbital permitiram que a luz alcançasse o pólo norte diretamente. A visão do turbilhão hexagonal de gases só vai ficar melhor em 2017, quando será o solstício de verão do hemisfério norte de Saturno.
Infelizmente, o fim-de-vida da missão Cassini também se dará neste mesmo ano, de modo que teremos sorte se uma das últimas imagens que a sonda nos enviar for um hexágono gigantesco gloriosamente iluminado pelo sol.
Você deve estar se perguntando por que razão a tempestade é hexagonal e não circular, ou mesmo oval, como a tempestade vermelha de Júpiter, que são formas mais orgânicas que o padrão hexagonal.
Cada lado do hexágono tem 13.800 km, o que é maior que o diâmetro da Terra! Este hexágono está rodando a uma velocidade que lhe permite uma volta completa a cada 10 horas e 39 minutos. Este é o mesmo período em que as emissões de rádio de Saturno são lançadas a partir do seu interior.
Segundo a Wikipedia, a hipótese para explicar o hexágono no polo norte de Saturno foi desenvolvida na Universidade de Oxford. Os cientistas acreditam que as formas hexagonais surgem onde há um íngreme gradiente latitudinal na velocidade dos ventos atmosféricos na atmosfera de Saturno. Similares formas regulares foram criados em laboratório quando um tanque circular de líquido foi rodado em velocidades diferentes em seu centro e periferia. A forma mais comum era de seis lados, mas as formas de dois a oito lados, também foram produzidas.
As formas eram obtidas em uma área de fluxo turbulento entre os dois órgãos rotativos de fluidos diferentes e com velocidades diferentes.
Um número de vórtices estáveis de forma semelhante surge sobre o lado mais lento da fronteira de fluido e estes interagem com uns com os outros no espaço, produzindo uma forma uniforme em torno do perímetro.
O post O furacão hexagonal de saturno foi criado no blog Mundo Gump.
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Last week I finally saw The Imitation Game, the movie with Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing.
OK, so for those who haven’t yet seen it: should you? Here’s my one paragraph summary: imagine that you told the story of Alan Turing—one greatest triumphs and tragedies of human history, needing no embellishment whatsoever—to someone who only sort-of understood it, and who filled in the gaps with weird fabrications and Hollywood clichés. And imagine that person retold the story to a second person, who understood even less, and that that person retold it to a third, who understood least of all, but who was charged with making the movie that would bring Turing’s story before the largest audience it’s ever had. And yet, imagine that enough of the enormity of the original story made it through this noisy channel, that the final product was still pretty good. (Except, imagine how much better it could’ve been!)
The fabrications were especially frustrating to me, because we know it’s possible to bring Alan Turing’s story to life in a way that fully honors the true science and history. We know that, because Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 play Breaking the Code did it. The producers of The Imitation Game would’ve done better just to junk their script, and remake Breaking the Code into a Hollywood blockbuster. (Note that there is a 1996 BBC adaptation of Breaking the Code, with Derek Jacobi as Turing.)
Anyway, the movie focuses mostly on Turing’s codebreaking work at Bletchley Park, but also jumps around in time to his childhood at Sherborne School, and to his arrest for “homosexual indecency” and its aftermath. Turing’s two world-changing papers—On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery and Intelligence—are both mentioned, though strangely, his paper about computing zeroes of the Riemann zeta function is entirely overlooked.
Here are my miscellaneous comments:
For more, see an excellent piece in Slate, How Accurate Is The Imitation Game?. And for other science bloggers’ reactions, see this review by Christos Papadimitriou (which I thought was extremely kind, though it focuses more on Turing himself than on the movie), this reaction by Peter Woit, which largely echoes mine, and this by Clifford Johnson.
I can't think of a single time that an individual or an organization has created a brand-new worldview, spread it and then led that tribe.
There were Harley-type renegades before there was Harley Davidson. There were digital nomads before there was Apple. There were pop music fans before there were the Beatles and Rastafarians before Marley.
Without a doubt, a new technology creates new experiences. But the early adopters who gravitate to it were early adopters before we got there.
Our job is to find the disconnected and connect them, to find people eager to pursue a goal and give them the structure to go achieve that goal. But just about always, we start with an already existing worldview, a point of view, a hunger that's waiting to be satisfied.
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btw eu adoro os filmes dele
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If someone asked you how to do something, would you act it out, using no words at all?
Of course not. Yet, in our increasingly post-literate world, it seems like organizations are afraid to use prose. It doesn't cost anything, and when you post a link, you have all the room in the world to clearly write out a narrative of how something works. You can even do it in 200 languages without too much trouble.
Here's the fundamental mistake that marketers make: Great design often needs little explanation. And so, natural, organic, effective design often comes without written instructions. But, and it's a huge but, the converse is not true. Shipping something without instructions doesn't mean it's a great design.
What are the chances that a guest is going to use this hotel shower properly the first time?
Why does Ikea believe that providing nothing but little pictures is the best way to teach someone to do something?
After wasting hours trying to figure out the proseless instructions for a fancy lamp I purchased from an Italian company, I wrote a narrative for the company, in the vain hope that perhaps they'd save other people the trouble.
Most people would never to choose to read it. Except the people who are stuck and confused, which is precisely the group you write instructions for. When in doubt, write it down. By all means, you still need pictures, even video. But there's nothing to replace the specificity that comes from the alphabet. Use labels. Use words.
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Osias Jotaentão...
Recebi do Douglas Junior o link pra essa pergunta, mas não vou postar o link aqui pra vocês não zuarem o cara que fez a pergunta…
Eu posso… Mas porque eu sou bonzinho 
Clique na imagem para vê-la maior:
Não só o fato de consultar sem select… O resto da ideia também é muito boa…
Dúvida com banco de dados e java.
Galera tenho uma aplicação na qual eu vou criar um form que vai conter uns checkboxes que serão as lojas (ex: loja1, loja2…. até loja10) para cada loja existe uma tabela no banco, o problema é o seguinte:
Nem todos os clientes têm 10 lojas, mas todos os bancos têm 10 tabelas, ou seja, mesmo que o cara só tenha 2 lojas, o banco vai ter as 10 tabelas. loja1 e loja2 com dados, e as outras sem nenhum dado. Então eu não precisaria criar os checkboxes para as lojas 3 até 10, apenas da 1 e 2.
A ideia é : Checar se tabela está vazia, caso esteja, eu não crio o checkbox.
Então eu queria saber se tem alguma forma de checar se uma tabela no banco está vazia, SEM DAR SELECT , pois acho que deixaria o negocio um pouco lento. Desde já obrigado!!
The post Ajuda: Consulta no banco sem select appeared first on Vida de Programador.
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Osias Jotavia Chexpirit
A major Magritte show ran at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was fascinating to see all of his greatest hits in one place, nicely curated and hung.
Unlike the Louvre, photography was forbidden, which got me thinking about ideas, photos and originals.
In front of the Mona Lisa are hundreds of people, all taking a picture, sometimes with their cameras held overhead to get a better view. Why? What's the point of taking a picture of the most famous, most photographed painting in the world? You're certainly not going to take a better picture than you can find online with a few clicks.
It feels obvious that people aren't capturing the painting, they're capturing the moment, their proximity with a celebrity. "I was there, here look." Can you imagine going to the Louvre and walking right by the Mona Lisa? (I did this once, and I confess it wasn't easy). I mean, she's famous.
Magritte was an artist who worked in ideas, not in craft. A photo of his painting is totally sufficient to get the point he was trying to make. The paintings themselves almost feel like ghosts, like non-digital represenations of the purity of his original idea, the one we saw a thousand times before we ever walked into the museum.
By forbidding photography, the museum does nothing at all to protect copyrights, but instead creates a different sort of intimacy. Is this a famous painting? Can I prove I was here?
The most useful impacts of a show in real life, I think, are the juxtapositions created by intelligent curation and display. Missing for me was any connection at all to the other people in the room, the buzz of celebrity, the tribal aspect of, "oh, hey, you're here too?"
For those of us who work in ideas (which is most of us, now) the real question the Magritte show asks is, "if your ideas spread far and wide, do we need to see the original?"
When the idea is famous enough, what is the original, anyway?
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Marketers make change happen. Good marketing can change governments, heal the sick and bring a new technology to the masses. Marketers spend money (sometimes lots of it), take our time and transform our culture. It's quite a powerful position to be in.
Who decides, then, what and how it's okay to market?
At a recent conference for non-profits, a college student asked me, "what right does a public health person have to try to change the behavior of an at-risk group?" That one was easy for me. How can they not work to tell stories and share information that will help those at risk change that behavior?
And then, just a day later, I heard the story of a marketer who intentionally bankrupts the elderly by loading them up with worthless 'investments'. He said, "Hey, if it makes them happy in the moment and they voluntarily buy what I'm selling, who cares? I'm not doing anything against the law, and if it's not against the law, I'm not going to stop."
Shame.
Or the spam phone banks that steal brand names and generate tens of thousands of calls a day, tricking small businesses into buying fake SEO services, or the e-cig makers who market to kids, looking to build a long-term business based on addiction...
For me, the line is clear. If the person you're trying to change knew what you knew, would they want to change? And so the placebo is ethical, because in fact, it makes people better when they believe. And the expensive wine is ethical, because it's a placebo, purchased by people who can afford it. But the fraudulent penny-stock scam is wrong, because the withheld information about the fraud being perpetrated is a selfish lie.
If you're okay saying to yourself and your family, "I tell selfish lies to the weak, the young and the uninformed for a living," then I guess we need better laws. I'm hopeful, though, that we'll figure out how to do work we're proud of first.
