yama_mayaa

Of the many books that I have read relating the experiences of victims in Soviet prisons and labour camps, Mr. Gustav Herling's A World Apart is the most impressive and the best written. He possesses in a very rare degree the power of simple and vivid description, and it is quite impossible to question his sincerity at any point.
In the years 1940­-42 he was first in prison and then in a forced labour camp near Archangel. The bulk of the book relates what he saw and suffered in the camp. The book ends with letters from eminent Communists saying that no such camps exist. Those who write these letters and those fellow-travellers who allow themselves to beieve them share responsibility for the almost unbelievable horrors which are being inflicted upon millions of wretched men and women, slowly done to death by hard labour and starvation in the Arctic cold. Fellow-travellers who refuse to believe the evidence of books such as Mr. Herling's are necessarily people devoid of humanity, for if they had any humanity they would not merely dismiss the evidence, but would take some trouble to look into it.
Communists and Nazis alike have tragically demonstrated that in a large proportion of mankind the impulse to inflict torture exists, and requires only opportunity to display itself in all its naked horror. But I do not think that these evils can be cured by blind hatred of their perpetrators. This will only lead us to become like them. Although the effort is not easy, one should attempt, in reading such a book as this one, to understand the curcumstances that turn men into fiends, and to realise that it is not by blind rage that such evils will be prevented. I do not say that to understand is to pardon; there are things which for my part I find I cannot pardon. But I do say that to understand is absolutely necessary if the spread of similar evils over the whole world is to be prevented.
I hope that Mr. Herling's book will be very widely read, and that it will rouse in its readers not useless vindictiveness, but a vast compassion for the petty criminals, almost as much as for their victims, and a determination to understand and eliminate the springs of cruelty in human nature that has become distorted by bad social systems. And apart from these general reflections, the reader will find the book absorbingly interesting and of the most profound psychological interest.

(набрал со скана, шоб було)

Подборочка ссылок на статьи и обсуждения:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/swiss-voters-back-minaret-construction-ban-1830789.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8385069.stm
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/switzerland/6685719/Switzerland-risks-Muslim-backlash-after-minarets-vote.html
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2009/11/swiss-minarets

Re: an exchange on the subject between Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson:

I agree with most of Robin's argument, but does it really answer Bryan's questions? I feel both of them are right, although in different ways.

The tricky thing here is the subjective feeling of continuity of self. We experience a break of continuity when we fall asleep in a normal way:

I lay me down and slumber
And every morn revive.
Whose is the night-long breathing
That keeps a man alive?
A.E. Housman (1859 - 1936)

and also when we die in a normal way; because continuity of self is a feeling, it is subject to reaction times, so arguably a person who happens to be in the epicenter of a nuclear explosion won't notice anything, no subjective break of continuity will take place — their brain will just cease to exist. I think this is the key to the whole argument: if you stop a person's mind so fast that the mind doesn't have time to notice the fact that it's stopping, then both the mind (after it is restarted, possibly in a different medium) and any external observers can subjectively agree that continuity has been preserved. I understand that the current cryonics implementations don't work this way, which is what Bryan argues.

However, is continuity such a big deal? After all, we are all used to breaks of self-continuity, even if we don't usually regard them as such. When I wake up every day, "I" am a different subjective continuity, and it is by sheer force of habit and by the fact that the new "I" has rather detailed "inside" memories of my previous continuities do I identify with them. Suppose a person falls asleep normally and, while asleep, dies of monoxide poisoning or heart failure — the person's mind will never be aware of this, because its sense of self-continuity is not operational. It just ceases to exist. If it can be somehow restarted, how is this different from waking up? Essentially, a new person (self-continuity) will wake up and say, "Where's my coffee?"

Also, if I woke up without any memories of "my" previous continuities (supposing further that such memories cannot be restored), what would it mean to say that I am me, as commenter Blackadder says in the other thread? In a trivial sense, I would be me because I definitely wouldn't be you or any other person, but that's about as far as it goes.

Красным залит нескомпенсированный исходящий трафик из нашего сегмента (LocalNet), который, скорее всего, идет на сидирование в различных пиринговых сетях (а на что ж еще такие объемы?) Грубая прикидка дает 2,5ТБ раздач/сутки в UA-IX и 500ГБ раздач/сутки в мир. Неплохо!

Лю Болин — невидимый человек (via Marginal Revolution)
http://v1kram.posterous.com/liu-bolinthe-invisible-man

Пост http://sergeyhudiev.livejournal.com/603322.html (via http://leolion-1.livejournal.com/135601.html) навел на мысль: воинствующий сциентизм докинзовского разлива — это коллективный батхёрт, вызванный тем, что вера (англ. religion ≠ рус. религия) дает людям то, что наука в обычном изложении(?)/сама по себе(?) людям не дает. Надо бы развить.

http://www.nec.co.jp/solution/telescouter/index.html

NEC слепила и со следующего года намеревается продавать примочку типа очков из Dennou Coil — устройство, отображающее картинку прямо на сетчатку. Вот только стоить будет пока дороговато (25 млн. иен штука). Забавна фраза NEC про «не вполне удовлетворительное качество, обеспечиваемое существующими системами машинного перевода» — не вполне удовлетворительное, ага. Синхронисты могут спать спокойно. Устройство пока собираются использовать для виртуального присутствия специалистов и показа чертежей и т.п. информации.

http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/ — визуализация многомерных массивов данных, художества
http://nyamo.su/?t=http://iichan.ru/b/res/843820.html — комната анонима

по свободе воли:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freewill/
http://meteuphoric.blogspot.com/2007/07/free-will-isnt-concept-unless-you-mean.html
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2006/03/tyrone_takes_on.html
http://chukotkasun.livejournal.com/424217.html (косвенно)

по школе:
http://mathreader.livejournal.com/23464.html
http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html
http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing ad nauseam, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views still remain to be considered on their merits.

Куски письма Льюиса Холдейну http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/9350.html

This post stems from a discussion of stack trace problems at the CLR team blog.

The problem

When an existing exception is thrown in the normal way with throw e, any stack trace that was recorded in it is overwritten and destroyed. This complicates debugging and logging — the stack trace seen by a top-level handler (which, in a long-running application, must log it and somehow restore the application to operation) is practically useless. Throwing existing exceptions — ones which were previously caught and stored or serialized — is a necessity when doing custom cross-thread invoke, e.g. a custom thread pool. Custom remote call solutions also suffer from this problem.

The known hacksolution

Microsoft's Remoting team encountered the same problem, but they had the advantage of being able to modify the CLR. They introduced the internal Exception._remoteStackTraceString field, which is not overwritten by CLR when an exception is thrown. Exception.StackTrace prepends the contents of this field to the normal stack trace. They also introduced two internal methods on Exception, PrepForRemoting and InternalPreserveStackTrace, which squirrel away the existing stack trace into this field. However, all these members are internal, so they cannot be reliably called by third-party code with similar needs.
It seems that Chris Taylor was the first to discover these internal members. He published a hack which preserves stack trace in an exception by accessing _remoteStackTraceString with Reflection. A more mature version of this hack by Fabrice Marguerie calls InternalPreserveStackTrace (again using Reflection). Later, Brad Wilson ranted on this subject. Brad also mentions that the Reflection team did not use stack trace preservation, but instead introduced the pesky TargetInvocationException (which most everyone has to unwrap and throw the inner exception ASAP to propagate the original exception).

Back to the present

When I mentioned this hack in the discussion at the CLR team blog, CLR team's Mike Magruder pointed out its essential brittleness/hackiness. Mike is, of course, right; I am sure no-one who uses this hack is happy about messing with mscorlib's internals; but the problem has to be dealt with. Mike's criticism prodded me into looking for a more portable solution.

It

My solution exploits the fact that cross-AppDomain calls need to preserve stack traces of exceptions propagating across the AppDomain boundary. Cross-AppDomain calls seem to use the serialization infrastructure to get non-trivial data across, so when Exception's SetObjectData constructor sees the CrossAppDomain flag in the supplied SerializationContext, it prepares the exception for subsequent throwing — by setting the crucial _remoteStackTraceString field in essentially the same way as InternalPreserveStackTrace, although SetObjectData forgets to insert a newline after the old stack trace. It remains, then, to call an exception's GetObjectData and SetObjectData, tricking it into believing that it is being serialized across the AppDomain boundary.
The primitive version of my solution relied on BinaryFormatter to do the heavy lifting:

static Exception WithPreservedStackTrace (Exception e)
{
    var context   = new StreamingContext (StreamingContextStates.CrossAppDomain) ;
    var formatter = new BinaryFormatter  (null, context) ;
    formatter.FilterLevel = TypeFilterLevel.Full ;

    using (var stream = new MemoryStream ())
    {
        formatter.Serialize (memory, e) ;
        memory.Position = 0 ; // rewind stream
        return (Exception) formatter.Deserialize (memory) ;
    }
}

This works like a charm, but all the unnecessary extra work done by BinaryFormatter galled me, so I poked around RedBits code some more and evolved the following version, which uses the arcane ObjectManager class:

static void PreserveStackTrace (Exception e)
{
    var context = new StreamingContext  (StreamingContextStates.CrossAppDomain) ;
    var manager = new ObjectManager     (null, context) ;
    var serinfo = new SerializationInfo (e.GetType (), new FormatterConverter ()) ;

    e.GetObjectData  (serinfo, context) ;
    manager.RegisterObject (e, 1, serinfo) ; // prepare for SetObjectData
    manager.DoFixups () ;                    // ObjectManager calls SetObjectData for us

    // voila, e is unmodified save for _remoteStackTraceString
}

This still wastes a lot of cycles compared to InternalPreserveStackTrace, but has the advantage of relying only on public functionality. Purists who really want to avoid calling InternalPreserveStackTrace can use this workaround :3

Мягкие «элементарные частицы». Ридибундусы нервно курят в сторонке.

http://www.particlezoo.net/

http://www.marcriboud.com/marcriboud/ASIE/JAPON/

Избранные места из сочинений американцев 6-8 классов на сабжевую тему. Для англоговорящих обхохот гарантирован. тыц тыц тыц

• One of the creepy qualities of adults is that they have an answer for everything.

• Adults are not only smarter but they are very boring too. They are always acting so adult-like in a way that is so boring to me, but apparently amusing to other adults like them.
• Three children and a wife can be a real hassle, some people can't even handle one.

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/07/seth-godins-talk-from-business-of-software-2008.html

В частности, обьясняет успех Эппла (несмотря на слишком высокое цена/качество)

Update: а вот Джоэль на ту же тему
http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2009/09/joel-spolskys-talk-at-business-of-software-2008-on-being-number-one.html

Попалась любопытная диссертация некоего Richard Bennett Slatcher на соискание PhD, по-видимому, по психологии. Идея диссертации в том, что стандартные биографические расспросы и светский треп препятствуют эмоциональному сближению, а вопросы более личные — помогают. Мысль, конечно, не нова, но список «более личных» вопросов представляет некоторый интерес.
( Сам список )

Котофото — чем занимается и где бродит ваш котэ
полнофункциональный GPS-приемник размером 26х26х7 за каких-то 25 долларов... да, у радиолюбителей сегодня оч-чень интересные детали Ж)

Антайдзи (安泰寺) — дзен-буддистский монастырь, принимающий в т.ч. гайдзинов

Процесс поиска:

Есть у нас сейчас группы людей, которые занимаются народными танцами, писанкарством, поют народные песни и т.п. Однако все это — историческая реконструкция, в одном ряду с «рыцарскими турнирами» и постановкой великих битв на местности. Народное — оно, по идее, идет из народа, из современной жизни, и содержит дух времени; попсня (в отличие от попа) народом принимается, но я не слышал, чтобы молодежь спонтанно создавала группы с прицелом играть попсню. Народная музыка сейчас — inter alia рэп, хип-хоп, разнообразный хард-рок, металл; народное художественное творчество — граффити; народные танцы — inter alia брейк. Во всем этом чувствуется жизненная сила. Куда она только потом девается? What a waste! Они же могут горы своротить!

В Шанхае почти достроенный 13-этажный дом упал целиком. Купившие квартиры в 3-х соседних, таких же домах требуют вернуть деньги, и вообще жильцы шанхайских высоток теперь чувствуют себя не в своей тарелке...