Alcides Fonseca

O alterado artigo 1124 estabelece que “é inválido o matrimónio entre duas pessoas, uma das quais baptizada pela Igreja Católica ou nela integrada e outra que não seja baptizada”. Ou seja, católicos e não católicos deixam de poder casar-se pela Igreja.

Fonte: i online

A primeira coisa que fiz ao olhar para esta notícia foi verificar que dia era hoje. Não, não é 1 de Abril. Ou seja, este Papa anda mesmo a passar-se da cabeça. Vamos analisar as consequências desta alteração:

• Casamento entre dois católicos: continua na mesma.
• Casamento entre dois de outra(s) religião(ões): igualzinho.
• Casamento entre uma católica e um gajo que foi convencido a baptizar-se para casar pela igreja: a Igreja ganha mais um tipo para as estatísticas, mas que não é católico. A Igreja perde por perder consistência na sua massa de crentes.
• Casamento entre um católico e outro que insiste em não se casar pela Igreja: casam-se pelo civil, fazem uma festa bonita, e é menos dinheiro que a Igreja ganha com o casamento. E baixa a moral dos padres terem menos matrimónios por celebrar.

Ou seja, não vejo em como esta decisão pode beneficiar a igreja, mas sempre são mais puristas! Mais valia simplesmente falsificarem os números de católicos no mundo. Aposto que há uns padres que andam de aldeia em aldeia de Portugal que não se importavam de dar uma mãozinha.

Technically, you’re already a cyborg. If you keep your cell phone with you most of the time, especially if the earpiece is in place, I think we can call that arrangement an exobrain. Don’t protest that your cellphone isn’t part of your body just because you can leave it in your other pants. If a cyborg can remove its digital eye and leave it on a shelf as a surveillance device, and I think we all agree that it can, then your cellphone qualifies as part of your body. In fact, one of the benefits of being a cyborg is that you can remove and upgrade parts easily. So don’t give me that “It’s not attached to me” argument. You’re already a cyborg. Deal with it.

So damn true. I keep my cellphone with me all the time, and (at least the previous one) it is my exobrain. Read the rest of Scott Adams’ post.

Retirado directa das Escolhas do MV, recomendo a leitura de Don’t Save Social Security e Minimum Wage Should Be Repealed, com os quais concordo fortemente.

Ah, e leiam usando o Readability, conhecido graças ao Sérgio.

One problem of the academia (at least where I’ve been studying) is that the general public (including its own students!!!) is not aware of the research being made there.

Some students started a weblog where they add new videos of researchers explaining their projects, something I believe each university and research institute should promote.

What about your local university? Do you know what interesting projects are going on there? And how?

Pedro Alves, sobre a mudança de paradigma dos currículos de uma visão baseada nos cargos ocupados, para uma alternativa deliverable-oriented.

I’ve used Google Docs in the past for some school assignments, and I must say it really sucks for collaboration in real-time. If more than two people are editing the same document at the same time, it turns into a living hell to keep the formatting in the document, and one editor from overlapping the other.

I then moved to Etherpad. While it lacks features, it works really great for plain text, which is what I use to share basic ideas, and a bit of bold for titles. And it would be a kick-ass online editor if merged with IDEone to run the code on the browser.

Now Google has acquired AppJet, Inc and they are supposed to work on Google Wave now, which is not what I really had in mind for them…

When I’m watching movies or tv shows, one thing that always fascinates me is the way computer screens don’t match what we are used to. Some of them use Windows or Mac, but most of them use really weird scifiesque interfaces, even if they are supposed to be realist shows, like 24.

Via Simon Willison, I got to know one of the artists behind those designs, and it’s an interesting resource when you’re thinking about graphical user interfaces, like I am right now.

Há no entanto uma pequena aldeia gaulesa……não, há, no entanto, um conjunto de pessoas que não se actualizam. Ok, faz parte, é natural que as pessoas se cansem de aprender coisas novas todos os dias, e que não tenham pedal (ou paciência) para se manterem actuais. Nem toda a gente pode ser como a minha mãe, que há 6 meses não sabia o que era uma rede social, e que hoje apascenta vacas e distribui sementes como se não houvesse amanhã. Mas, lá está, a minha mãe sempre foi muito à frente.

Para essas pessoas, que pararam no tempo, tenho uma sugestão: vão para casa. Reformem-se. Encostem à faixa da direita.

Façam o que quiserem, mas saiam da frente de quem cá anda e quer andar mais depressa. Saiam da faixa da esquerda, que estão a atrapalhar o trânsito.

Aplausos para a Jonasnuts e respectiva mãe.

By now everyone should know about my fetish with shoes. And adidas got the opportunity to bring another universe I love to footwear and the result is this fantastic Star Wars collection.

We need the rest. It’s important in ways we don’t often think about. We need to de-stress, and we need to recharge our mental batteries.

Quiet and solitude and reflection lead to greater happiness when they’re a part of our daily lives, at least in some degree. What you do during this time — read, write, run, nap, sit, watch, listen, even have a quiet conversation, play, study, build — isn’t as important as the simple fact of having that time of disconnection.

— Leo Babauta, The Importance of Finding Focus (via Minimal)

My favorite happy song by The Blue Man Group, and was the one they didn’t play live in Lisbon.

The challenge of the next decade? Design for trillions. (via Pedro Custódio)

After the meme has started with a version of unix in 14 lines of Ruby, and an improvement for 13 lines by writing it in Python, I present you the same version of unix, ported to scala.

Note that this is not serious code. Just wanted to reduce one line in another language, and felt Scala would offer me the pattern matching I was looking for. I will also give haskell a try, but I don’t think I can reduce the number of lines due to the IO monadic thing.

And I’m sure I can reduce the number of lines in either python or ruby without making it look ugly, but I’ll leave that for those you want to learn those languages.

Beast Machines is the sequel to Beast Wars, part of the Transformers franchiser. A small group of Maximals finds themselves in an empty Cybertron controlled by an evil Megatron and some new army robots. It’s their task to bring the technorganic balance to their planet.

This was a show I watched when I was a kid in saturday mornings, so I really feel nostalgic re-watching the show. And I really enjoy the humor in the show. Not as geek as Reboot’s, but just fine.

Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd lives in a monospaced typeface world. Whereas everyone else is traipsing around picking dazzling fonts to describe their world, your nerd has carefully selected a monospace typeface, which he avidly uses to manipulate the world deftly via a command line interface while the rest fumble around with a mouse.

A nice guide to understanding nerds (should be replaced by “geeks”, but I don’t want to be one of those annoying nerds that requires all the words to be exactly used). (via @relva)

Nerds are fucking funny. Your nerd spent a lot of his younger life being an outcast because of his strange affinity with the computer. This created a basic bitterness in his psyche that is the foundation for his humor. Now, combine this basic distrust of everything with your nerd’s other natural talents and you’ll realize that he sees humor is another game.

Cyrano de Bérgerac is the 1990 movie about the homonymous play and features Gérard Depardieu.

I really like the movie, specially the rhymes by Cyrano. Even if it’s french and old, I really recommend it!

In this week’s Interaction Designer Methodologies I was presented to STATIC!, a project that investigates design as a way of increasing people’s awareness of their energy consumption. This has a special interest for me, since I’ve already worked on a project in this field with ISA.

In Sweden, a law was passed that makes the use of Automatic meter reading mandatory. The STATIC! project used that data to produce some provocative objects. From “patterns on bathroom tiles”:“http://www.tii.se/static/disappearing.htm that disappear with too much water to” curtains that save the solar power and emit light in night”:http://www.tii.se/static/curtain.htm, they produced an interesting series of prototypes.

The Time magazine nominated this Flower Lamp for the Best Inventions of 2006.

The Polyphonic Spree – Light and Day taken from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind OST.

A while ago my wife, the non-techie in our family and a Mac user, asked me: “How come Dell or Toshiba or Sony don’t make their own OS’s? I mean, if each brand had its own OS it would be better because the people that built the computers know the computers better than Microsoft.” — Minimal

The first time I read this I actually though it was a good idea. If each OS focus on that particular hardware the manufacture is selling, they would make it as stable as possible (think Apple). At least it would be the end of Bluescreens.

But that would become a problem for application developers: suddenly they don’t have the win/linux/mac problem, but rather win/linux/mac/dell/toshiba/lenovo/vaio/…. And using virtual machines like Java or .NET is not the solution because everyone appreciates native solutions (at least for the graphical user interface). Sure this could be improved and high-level languages like Python and Ruby could be used with different backends for the OS, but it’s the same as the current Java solution.

And then there is the drivers for peripherals. Linux (and Mac) users already suffer the problem of not having drivers for some devices, and if every brand had its own OS, I bet you could only buy Dell accessories for your Dell computer because that’s the drivers available.’

The best solution I see is to each one make a flavor of Linux and test the drivers to their specific hardware, so they can all run the same applications. They can choose between Gnome and KDE (and others) according to the computer specs, but as far as I know even those options are pretty compatible.

Giles Bowlett on learning by succeeding or by failing.

Obviously, if you want to learn something, and the brain responds to failure without learning anything, but it responds to success by learning, then focusing on failure is not a good learning strategy.

To learn, all you have to do is succeed.

Notice what that doesn’t say. It doesn’t say what you have to succeed at.

And I like that There’s some powerful neuroscience supporting this and a great book which goes into exquisite detail.. Really interesting approach. I would conclude that I need to succeed at less important tasks in order to learn the total part. Like playing SuperMario or other games. You don’t need to master all the weapons and tricks on the first level.