Λινξ 120: Πράγματα Για Διάβασμα
1. Ο Ντέιβιντ Σεντάρις γράφει για την αδερφή του που αυτοκτόνησε
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked as we stepped back into the sunlight. For that’s all any of us were thinking, had been thinking since we got the news. Mustn’t Tiffany have hoped that whatever pills she’d taken wouldn’t be strong enough, and that her failed attempt would lead her back into our fold? How could anyone purposefully leave us, us, of all people? This is how I thought of it, for though I’ve often lost faith in myself, I’ve never lost it in my family, in my certainty that we are fundamentally better than everyone else.
Η συνέντευξη που είχα πάρει από τον Ντέιβιντ Σεντάρις, εδώ.
2. Σχετικά με την ιδέα Ελβετών να δίνει το κράτος μηνιαίο επίδομα 2000 ευρώ σε όλους τους πολίτες
Είναι πολύ λιγότερο τρελή (ή "σοσιαλιστική") από ό,τι φαντάζεσαι.
We are not proposing a minimum income — we are proposing an unconditional income. A minimum wage reduces freedom — because it is an additional rule. It tries to fix a system that has been outdated for a while. It is time to partly disconnect human labor and income. We are living in a time where machines do a lot of the manual labor — that is great — we should be celebrating.
3. Ο άνθρωπος που ξέχασε πώς να θυμάται
Η απίστευτη ιστορία ενός ανθρώπου που, μετά από μια εγχείριση στον εγκέφαλο, έχασε την ικανότητα να σχηματίζει καινούριες μνήμες.
The operation relieved the severity and the frequency of Molaison’s seizures, but there was a disastrous side effect. As Scoville and a colleague noted, Molaison could no longer “find his way to the bathroom, and he seemed to recall nothing of the day-to-day events of his hospital life.” Molaison’s testable intelligence remained normal; his basic personality seemed unchanged; and he could remember quite a lot of his past, but he was no longer able to form new memories. He could remember how to get to the house in which his family previously lived, but not to the one to which they moved ten months before the operation was performed. He would use the lawn mower one day and not have a clue where it was the next. He could read the same magazine day after day without showing any sign that he had encountered it before. H.M. had become a stunningly pure case of anterograde amnesia.
The new research by Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, which was published in Developmental Science this year, showed that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew — “dog” or “ball” — much faster than children from low-income families. By age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes.
5. 24.000 λέξεις για το OS X Mavericks
Κάθε που βγαίνει νέα έκδοση του λειτουργικού της Apple ένας κύριος που τον λένε Τζον Σιρακιούζα γράφει ένα γιγάντιο review που χρησιμεύει και ως manual, καθώς καταγράφει κάθε παραμικρή λεπτομέρεια, κάθε γωνίτσα, τα πάντα. Φέτος το επικό δημιούργημα φτάνει τις 24 χιλιάδες λέξεις, μισό βιβλίο δηλαδή, και κυκλοφορεί και με τη μορφή e-book για να το διαβάσει κανείς με την ησυχία του. Ο συγγραφέας έγραψε κι ένα ενδιαφέρον post για το "πώς γράφτηκε".
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