Tadeu

Every time I look at this photo, I can’t help but laugh.

The best road sign ever seen…

Dedicated to chicken and philosophy fan, Pierre W.

Here’s more philosophy.

(by @GuiMurilo)

Thank you all so much. I'm sitting in an airport with a dying battery, but seriously, I have not felt so unstressed in a long time. More on this later, promise!

TRUTH!

hurry, human!

Brené Brown is a professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has dedicated her life to social work and studies vulnerability, courage, worthiness and shame.

Her fantastic 2010 TEDxHouston talk, The Power of Vulnerabilty, is one of the most popular TED talks with over 12 million views and led to Brown giving the final speech at a 2012 TED conference. That speech, Listening to Shame, is where the above quotes are taken from. Turns out Brown and I both love the same Teddy Roosevelt Man in the Arena quote. It’s literally the second quote I ever adapted into a comic (although it was posted as number 8) and remains one of my favourite quotes. In her speech, Brown tells of how that quote helped her during a difficult time amidst her own failures and setbacks (around the 12min mark). The fact that she references a quote I’ve already adapted in her own inspirational quote gave me the chance to get meta again and give a nod to my long-time readers who would recognise the first part of the comic.

RELATED COMICS: The Man in the Arena, Nature Loves Courage, The Fig Tree, Ultimate Self-Help Book.

- Brené Brown’s official website.
- Thanks to Mike, Saquib and Cynthia for sending me the TED talks.

I’ve been tracking down quotes from Robert G. Ingersoll, the subject of Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Great Agnostic: Robert G. Ingersoll and American Freethought.  I’ve been mightily impressed with the man: he was a strident atheist before it was cool (or uncool) to be strident, and as eloquent as Hitchens.  He was also reputed to be of impeccable charm and character. It would do us all good to read more of him, and realize that New Atheism isn’t the first in-your-face form of godlessless. (I presume that’s one reason Jacoby wrote her book.)

Anyway, checking an e-version of Ingersoll’s 1879 book, The Gods and Other Lectures, I found this as the frontispiece:

That’s about as strident as you could get for 1879!

And I must include a relevant quote I’ve used before, from Ingersoll’s 1890 essay God in the Constitution:

“We have already compared the benefits of theology and science. When the theologian governed the world, it was covered with huts and hovels for the many, palaces and cathedrals for the few. To nearly all the children of men, reading and writing were unknown arts. The poor were clad in rags and skins—they devoured crusts, and gnawed bones. The day of Science dawned, and the luxuries of a century ago are the necessities of to-day. Men in the middle ranks of life have more of the conveniences and elegancies than the princes and kings of the theological times. But above and over all this, is the development of mind. There is more of value in the brain of an average man of to-day—of a master-mechanic, of a chemist, of a naturalist, of an inventor, than there was in the brain of the world four hundred years ago.

These blessings did not fall from the skies. These benefits did not drop from the outstretched hands of priests. They were not found in cathedrals or behind altars — neither were they searched for with holy candles. They were not discovered by the closed eyes of prayer, nor did they come in answer to superstitious supplication. They are the children of freedom, the gifts of reason, observation and experience — and for them all, man is indebted to man.”

Finalmente! A humanidade passou anos inserindo dispositivos USB do jeito errado, mas alguém resolveu criar um conector reversível, que pode ser encaixado “para cima” ou “para baixo”.

Em comunicado à imprensa, o USB 3.0 Promoter Group acaba de anunciar o novo conector Type-C. Projetado para “permitir uma classe inteiramente nova de aparelhos superfinos, incluindo celulares, tablets, dispositivos dois-em-um, laptops e desktops” , o novo conector terá o tamanho do Micro USB. E o mais importante: ele enfim será reversível.

Este ano, Ajay Bhatt, o homem que criou o USB, disse à Economist estar trabalhando em um conector que você pode usar de ambos os lados, assim como o conector Lightning.

Mas ele será compatível com as portas USB atuais? Não, não será. Mas o USB já é meio velho, parecendo grande e desajeitado mesmo em sua versão micro. E provavelmente haverá uma série de conversores e um longo período de transição até que as fabricantes adotem o novo Type-C.

Ainda não está claro quais velocidades o novo conector vai atingir, nem quanta energia ele irá carregar. No entanto, ele deve ter especificações semelhantes ao futuro USB 3.1 de 10 Gbps. O USB 3.0 Promoter Group espera que as especificações sejam finalizadas em meados de 2014. [USB 3.0 Promoter Group via Verge]

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oswaldofguadalupe:

The Twitter Mandela Hall Of Shame

worth a read

You're looking at a newly released 8-frame movie of Saturn's enigmatic "hexagon." It is the highest-resolution footage ever acquired of the massive six-sided maelstrom atop the ringed planet's north pole, and boy howdy is it gorgeous.

Read more...

Cyborg card players of the 1920s. Hermann Peschel, seated at right, lost his left arm and his right arm below the elbow in the First World War. The grip of these super-early artificial arms could be controlled by shoulder movements.

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JOHANNESBURG—Following the death of former South African president and civil rights leader Nelson Mandela today at the age of 95, sources confirmed that the revered humanitarian has become the first politician in recorded history to actually be miss...

World leaders have been sending a flood of tributes and tweets about their love and respect for Nelson Mandela. But what did the great statesman think of them? A little-noticed 2002 video of Mandela captures how he really felt. Margaret Thatcher was “warm and motherly,” he said, but George W. Bush was very arrogant.

The almost one-hour long clip shows Mandela at his home in Johannesburg, signing a series of his artworks to be sold for charity by London’s Belgravia Gallery.

He wears a neck brace throughout for comfort and is flanked by his staff and gallery personnel. It’s a candid talk that airs his opinions about everything from politicians to current affairs and shows off his characteristic sense of humor. A recap:

Nelson Mandela had a deep respect for Princess Diana for the work she was doing to change attitudes when it came to HIV/AIDS. Says Mandela in the video: “People said if a British princess can actually shake hands with AIDS sufferers and sit down, then there is nothing in this superstition.”

The two world figures also showed the same compassion to AIDS sufferers. Early in the video, Mandela recounts a story of the stigma shown by a group of villagers in South Africa, who fed three Aids orphans whose parents had died of HIV/AIDS by throwing food into their hut: “So I then decided to demonstrate to them that you can actually go in and touch the children and sit there. So I sat there for about 25 minutes and I came out holding the poor/two children.”

Many have called Prince Charles a cad, but Nelson Mandela thought the royal was a “fine chap.” In the video, he talks about his appreciation of Charles’ taste in architecture and recounts an episode in Brixton when they were mobbed by a crowd of admirers.

Of his mother, Mandela called her “remarkable” and was impressed by the fact that the Queen of England served tea herself. “In public she’s very stiff, but when I stayed in Buckingham palace, she was a totally different person.”

Margaret Thatcher once regarded Nelson Mandela as a common terrorist, but she gets no unkind word from the former president. Instead, Mandela calls her “warm and motherly” and cleverly recounts an exchange he had with a prominent English politician to make a point about why she was called the Iron Lady: “When I saw Margaret Thatcher for the first time, we were supposed to have a meeting for one hour. Our meeting lasted for three hours and I had to offer an excuse. I then went to Neil Kinnock in parliament, and he was very excited. He says, ‘How is the Iron Lady?” I said, ‘She was warm and motherly.’ He says, ‘Warm and motherly? You must have met another lady.’”

Nelson Mandela had a fond place in his heart for politicians who supported the ANC’s fight during the apartheid years. Former French president Francois Mitterrand was one of them. “That one (Mitterrand) was good because we (ANC underground movement) used France as the gateway to Europe, because we were deliberate, because Mitterrand was a man who has fought the Germans, went underground and remained in his country and fought. And we reckoned that he understood our position (as the ANC) very well and we went there.”

He holds Pakistan’s Nawaz Sharif in equally high regard for not bending to political pressure when the Brits questioned his decision to host Mandela when he was released from prison: “…The (British) High Commissioner went to Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister and gave a strong protest. They ignored him and said, ‘This is Pakistan, we are going to give him the treatment that he deserves,’ so he (the British High Commissioner) left in protest.”

Mandela was among the many international leaders who protested the war on Iraq. He publicly condemned the unilateral decision and is especially scathing about the two leaders at the forefront of the invasion: “The Security Council is free to go out and take unilateral action. They are undermining what Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt agreed upon in 1941 because the idea of the United Nations comes from those two… (Tony Blair) really is humiliating Britain because Bush is really an arrogant chap.”

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Bons desenvolvedores de software tem aprendido a reconhecer e eliminar de seu código os chamados “code smells”. Mas é preciso ir além e saber reconhecer outros problemas. Neste texto falaremos sobre os “reunião smells”.

Sinais intuitivos

No trânsito existe dois tipos de placas. O primeiro tipo é em forma de círculo e com fundo branco. Este é prescritivo, indica aquilo que as pessoas desobedecem. O segundo tipo é em forma de losango e com fundo amarelo, ele é descritivo, apenas avisa sobre problemas e/ou potenciais perigos.

São as placas de advertência. Em desenvolvimento de software, programadores tem sido treinados para enxergarem em seu código essas advertências. Sinais de que logo à frente haverá um problema ou perigo. Código duplicado. Classes grandes demais. Violações dos princípos SOLID em geral. A comunidade os tem chamado de “code smells”, maus cheiros de código. Mas há smells também em outros lugares além do código.

Alguns desing patterns existem devido a langage smells: quando a sua linguagem de programação não dá suporte a algo ou dá suporte equivocado, você se vê implementando um desing pattern específico e percebe, então, esta pequena falha da linguagem. Quando você percebe que há muito código repetido em muitas classes/arquivos e que não podem ser refatorados, isso pode ser um smell de seu processo de desenvolvimento, que pode estar excessivamente cerimonioso.

Smells de comunicação

Mas nem só de código vivem os desenvolvedores de software. É preciso se comunicar com clientes, usuários, e colegas. Gastamos boa parte do nosso tempo em reuniões, algumas delas fundamentais pra definir o que iremos fazer, pra definir SE iremos fazer alguma coisa, e até mesmo se seremos pagos pelo que fizemos. Da mesma forma como se pode ler “sinais” em fontes de um sistema como code smells, pode-se ler também “reunião smells”.

São coisas sutis aqui e ali. Algo é dito que não está incorreto, não é literalmente falso, mas que pode nos indicar que a algo não vai bem. Que, abaixo da superfície de normalidade, há problemas graves que cedo ou tarde vão emergir.

Exemplo 1: A palavra “só”
“é só chamar o método X”, é “só usar o framework Y Plus”, “é só criar um gerador de código”.
Isso pode ser dito por um cliente que secretamente espera pagar a você ou sua empresa menos se os convencer que você não trabalhará tanto. Pode ser dito por um gerente que não entende completamente como funciona o seu trabalho do dia-a-dia. Ou pode ser dito por você mesmo num momento de auto-ilusão.
Mas é bom destacar que é apenas um sinal, não uma prova de que a frase é mentira. Frequentemente é verdade e é “só” chamar o método X que seu problema deixa de existir.

Exemplo 2: Diminutivos
“Um sisteminha”, “um botãozinho”, “um relatóriozinho”, “uma telinha”, “um campinho” (nunca ouvi “um campão”), uma procedurinha…
Isso geralmente é dito, como no exemplo acima, pra tentar minimizar a quantidade de trabalho seu ou da sua empresa, ou por auto-ilusão. Também costuma ser acompanhado da palavra “simples”
Novamente, convém destacar que nem sempre é falso: existem sistemas que são pequenos, mesmo. Existem coisas simples. “Campinho”, no entanto, é outra conversa…

Exemplo 3: a palavra “já”
“Já puxa os dados”, “já vem implementado”, “já trata a segurança”, “já faz tudo pra você”, “já vem configurado”, “já estamos terminando”
Geralmente serve pra minimizar algo, como dito acima, mas também indica uma forte ansiedade de alguma das partes. Se na sua reunião você ouvir muito esta palavra, comece a se perguntar por quê.

Exemplo 4: Alerta vermelho: todos os exemplos juntos ao mesmo tempo!
“É um sisteminha simples que é só clicar no botãozinho que já puxa os dados”
Fuja!

This post sponsored by the delicious caramel, chocolate and nougat inside every Milky Way®

For some of you, sites like this one are a welcome distraction from what you really should be doing or, more likely, what someone else thinks you really should be doing. So to go one recursive step further, here are five distractions from this distraction, a short list of fantastic free browser games, from Cookie Clicker to Kingdom of Loathing:

• Cookie Clicker: In this highly-addictive browser game developed by Julien Thiennot, your goal is simply to make more cookies. You can from hundreds of cookies to thousands to millions to billions of cookies. Just keep clicking that cookie. You can use cookies to acquire the assistance of people, specifically grandmas, and technology, like a time machine, to increase your cookie production and collection. Just keep clicking. There is no end to the cookies. Or the game.

• A Dark Room lies somewhere between a classic text adventure and a Zen koan. It is considered a "passive browser game," which means there is a lot of waiting. But don't give up. You don't play the game as much as it plays you.

• Oodlegobs: Viruses, called Oodlehobs, are the heroes of this game by Nitrome, and cats are the enemies. You control the Oodlegobs as they wage war against the Mew Tube network by infecting cat videos. Exciting side-scrolling action is combined with smart planning as you coordinate the Oodlegobs to fight the felines. Play it everyday, but especially on Caturday.

• Candy Box is a trendsetter in the ASCII art, minimalist narrative genre of roll-playing browser games. It's deceptively simple. You receive candies. Approximately one per second. But then things get deeper. Much, much deeper. The sequel, Candy Box 2, was released in October.

• Kingdom of Loating: Be you a Seal Clubber, a Turtle Tamer, a Pastamancer or Sauceror, in Kingdom of Loathing adventure awaits! Quests, puzzles and insanely spicy enchanted bean burritos await in this excellent text-ish world brought to you by Jick. Discover how everything works on your own, or lean on the excellent Kol Wiki. The fun literally never ends.