Found among Lines 16.04

La guarnición de Perugia no ha dicho una palabra.
JPla, 22.11.03

[Cartas europeas]

Found among Lines 15.12

Al igual que las casas viejas, a Marina y a mí los tecnócratas dominantes a buen seguro nos clasificarían entre los "residuos del pasado".

Lo que no existe en ese país desde hace décadas son compresas higiénicas. La economía planificada parece ignorar que en este país viven mujeres. Nadie puede explicármelo.

[Garabatos de diario]

Yo, con mi alma sencilla de izquierdista, sospechaba de tales privilegios y vacilaba en hacer uso de ellos. A Masha mis escrúpulos le parecían absurdos. Al contrario, decía que uno estaba francamente obligado a aprovecharlos.

[Recuerdos de un tumulto]

Found among Lines, 15.10

In 2014 nearly half of American households said they could not cover an unexpected $400 expense without borrowing or selling something.

[The Economist]

***

Que en vez de elevarse ellos hasta el nivel de la cultura hayan rebajado la cultura hasta su mediocre nivel

[JPReverte]

***

Estamos de enhorabuena: El Maratón Valencia Trinidad Alfonso bate su récord de participación con 13.500 inscritos a dos meses del evento.

[valenciaciudaddelrunning.com]

***

Se apoya en un crédito que no tiene.

[Eumeswil]

***

¿Qué dedo no duele al cortarlo?

[LFlores]

***

We have neither a dream nor an imagination.

We live only for today.

[wdr 2015]

Found among Lines, 15.09

You must die so that we can live.
[Einsatzgruppe commander]

 15.09.11

* * * 

Harald Bohr (hermano de Niels Bohr y excelente matemático) cuenta que unos de sus principios de actuación era el siguiente: si uno escribía una carta al otro, el destinatario no tenía la obligación de contestarla, ni siquiera de leerla.

[CPSnow] 

 15.09.06

* * *

Yo iba muy guapa, muy maquillada, con las pestañas negras, negras, que se llevaban entonces. Entré en una habitación pequeña, una cocina, donde había un viejo y una vieja. El viejo con una barba blanca, muy triste. Parecía Leonardo da Vinci. Él estaba callado, no hablaba porque ya no quería hablar con nadie. Y yo lo miraba, y él me miraba con esos ojos tristes, tristes, y empecé a llorar, y todo el maquillaje se me vino abajo a chorros por la cara. Él no decía nada, sólo me miraba con esos ojos.

[LBattaglia] 

 15.08

Found among Lines, 15.08

Personas que huyen y sus familias.

[tv]

15.08

 ***

Ritos que llevan celebrándole desde hace treinta años.

[tv]

15.08

***

Las míseras cabañas de la gente pobre están fuera de la vista, y así nada hay que estropee el conjunto.
[Omú]

15.08.23

***

Found among Lines, 12.10

As so often with evolution, a feature that appeared for one purpose was recruited for quite another one.
(...)
The group to which we belong together with our evolutionary relatives, the primates, was initially rather an inconspicuous part of this radiation.

[RFortey]

12.10.26

* * *

Parenting is the scarce resource.

[JHeckman]

12.10.22

* * *

El directo sólo es electricidad.

[AEspada]

12.10.02

* * *

By 1960 a third of all prescriptions from US doctors were for Miltown or a similar drug called Equanil.

[Quiet]

12.10.15

* * *

Found among Lines, 12.11

"Señor, queremos matar a alguien", dijo el portavoz de los insurgentes. "En Truxillo han matado a alguien, en Badajoz a uno o dos, otro en Mérida, y nosotros no vamos a ser menos que nuestros vecinos. Señor, queremos matar a un traidor". Como en el pueblo no tenían este material, fue una suerte para nosotros no aparecer en aquel momento cuando la buena gente de Almaráz podría habernos utilizado como sustituto en quien mosrar su lealtad.

[La maldita guerra de ESpaña]

12.11.15

* * *

"Estos y otros se dirigen a casa (de su secretario) Garrigó lo arrastran por la casa le matan, roban, queman ropas, trastes y quanto hay en casa, lo dexan enteramente [des]nudo, muerto le dan mil cuchilladas y lo echan a la hoguera.

[La maldita guerra de ESpaña]

12.11.20

* * *

Found among Lines, 12.09

"The first duty and the right of the art of war is to keep policy from demanding things that go against the nature of war, to prevent the possibility that out of ignorance of the way the instrument works, policy might misuse it".

[Von Clausewitz]

12.09.23

* * *

"It's so damn complex. If you ever think that you have the solution to this, you're wrong and you're dangerous".

[Dereliction of Duty]

12.09.23

  * * *

"The upshot, say critics, is a stock market so complex and opaque that many investors have little idea about how it operates and are made wary of it by the repeated glitches".

[FT]

12.09.23

Found among Lines 12.02

“Do I have one rupee to spend to save your life?”
[Poverty as Destiny]

12.02.13

* * *

Found among Lines 11.10

Destruirte no supone ninguna pérdida; preservarte no aporta ningún beneficio.
[S-21, Phnom Penh]

11.10.10

* * *

(...) impregnados por el aceite de la subvención (...).

[de Azúa]

13.10.10

* * *
 

Found among Lines 11.08

Hasta ahora se han arrestado en Munich a unos mil judíos con la finalidad de disponer de moneda de cambio en todos los casos. Se ha demostrado que todos ellos ya han hecho a ustedes alguna maldad.
[Münchener Abendszeitung, 1938]

11.08.06

* * *

El escándalo de la simultaneidad. 

¿Por qué deberían explicar su vida?

Tener la mente clara para las decisiones importantes.

[Enzesberger]

11.08.07

* * *

Es probable que [mamá] nunca aprenda a manejarse en la cárcel.

[Hildur von Hammerstein]

11.08.07

* * *

C'est pour ne pas se sentir ombres parmi les ombres, pour se savoir vivants et réels, comme les images qu'ils voient sur leur petit écran.

[Eco]

11.08.26

* * *

Huye, refúgiate en la espesura más última de tu ser, en tu trabajo, allí donde sólo eres tu "yo" anhelante, no un ciudadano, no el objeto de ese juego infernal, ahí, el único lugar donde la poca razón que te queda todavía puede actuar con sensatez en un mundo que ha enloquecido.

[Zweig]

11.08.25

* * *

Mientras flote seguiré cocinando.

[Podmore, Narcissus]

11.08.23

* * *

Juegos con ADN catalán.

[La Vanguardia]

11.08.21

* * *

Found among Lines 11.06

Ya no me caben dudas de que cerrarás más veces los ojos y dirás y harás muchas más cosas que me helarán la sangre, llamando a las cosas por los nombres que no son. 
[Pagaza]

11.06.11

* * *

Found among Lines 11.07

Nuestros señores estudiaron entonces los medios de atacar la ciudad mediante máquinas, a fin de poder penetrar para adorar al sepulcro de nuestro salvador (...). Se hacían traer maderas de tierras lejanas.
[Conquista de Jerusalén por los Cruzados]

 &

(...) permitió que las legiones devastaran los suburbios y les ordenó que trajeran madera y levantaran terraplenes. Para llevar a cabo el trabajo distribuyó el ejército en tres unidades; puso a los lanceros y a los arqueros en medio de los terraplenes y, delante las oxibelas, las catapultas y las balistas, para impedir que los enemigos hicieran incursiones contra sus obras y que los que estaban en las murallas intentaran estorbarles. Talaron los árboles y en poco tiempo los suburbios quedaron desforestados.
[Flavio Josefo]

11.07.31

* * *

Él comenzó a gritar para que los clérigos presentes le trajeran socorro; pero nadie vino en su ayuda.
[Insidias contra el obispo Pretextato]

11.07.31

* * *

La urdimbre de La historia

Unas lecturas paralelas se han cruzado por un momento: la racionalización de las relaciones entre las personas entre una bedder y sus alumnos, según lo cuenta Judt en su El refugio de la memoria, y la idea de historia de Tolstoi en El erizo y la zorra de Berlin. Completa este par, y lo cierra en parte, una imagen de una simulación por ordenador, muy simple, del vuelo en bandada junto con la más conocida referencia al bagel man de Levitt.

* * *

[El refugio de la memoria, Tony Judt]

Una vez, a finales de los setenta, ejercí esa competencia [la de decano adjunto en King’s College] al mediar entre un puñado de estudiantes (chicos y chicas, ya que King’s era mixto desde 1972) a los que una mañana temprano se había visto retozando desnudos por los prados del college y una bedder que se había sentido ofendida por semejante falta de decoro. Los estudiantes estaban completamente desconcertados: en aquellos tiempos postautoritarios les resultaba incomprensible que nadie encontrara perjudicial tal comportamiento, y mucho menos ‘inadecuado’. No se trataba, como me señaló uno de ellos, de que ‘lo hubieran hecho en la calle’, en una referencia a Paul McCartney que razonablemente podían esperar que reconociera un colega-de-los-sesenta como yo.

La bedder, sin embargo, era inconsolable. Y no porque no estuviera familiarizada con la desnudez. Había sido testigo de generaciones de jóvenes jugadores de rugby retozando medio borrachos en paños menores  antes de desplomarse presas del sopor etílico. Pero esto era diferente. Para empezar, habían participado chicas y eso la había ofendido. En segundo lugar nadie había hecho el menor esfuerzo por fingir, disimular o taparse. Y, en tercer lugar, se habían reído ante su desagrado. En pocas palabras, habían infringido las reglas de su compromiso y se sentía humillada.

Resultó que los estudiantes en cuestión procedían en su mayoría de escuelas públicas: estudiantes de origen modesto procedentes a una primera generación socialmente ascendente. También eso ofendía a la bedder. Una cosa era ser tratada con condescendencia por jóvenes caballeros al estilo antiguo, que normalmente se hubieran disculpado al día siguiente y expresado su remordimiento mediante un regalo, o incluso con un cariñoso y sentido abrazo. Pero este nuevo tipo de estudiantes la trataba como a una igual, y era esto, más que cualquier otra cosa, lo que hería sus sentimientos. La bedder no era una igual de los alumnos: nunca lo sería. Pero al menos ella tenía un derecho tradicional, al menos durante los años en que ellos eran estudiantes, a su contención y a su respeto. ¿Qué sentido tenía ser una sirvienta mal pagada si eso dejaba de ser así? En tal caso la relación quedaba reducida a la de un simple empleo, y llegados a este punto mejor le iría en la fábrica de conservas local.

Los matices de este encuentro se me hubieran escapado totalmente de no haberme educado a mí mismo en el principio de “nobleza obliga”. Traté de explicarles a los estudiantes – que eran diez años más jóvenes que yo-  exactamente por qué aquella señora de mediana edad estaba tan ofendida y disgustada. Pero todo lo que pude oír fue la justificación de una servidumbre obligada por contrato en una época de igualitarismo teórico. Desde luego no estaban contra la institución de las bedders, de la que eran beneficiarios. Simplemente pensaban que aquellas mujeres tenían que estar mejor pagadas: como si eso fuera a inmunizarlas contra las ofensas clasistas y las llevara a dispensar a los chicos y chicas, cuyas camas hacían, de sus obligaciones (por condescendientes que fueran) de ser educados y considerados con ellas.

Los estudiantes reflejaban fielmente actitudes de su tiempo. Lo mismo que los economista de hoy – y a pesar de que afirmen con todo cariño sus preferencias radicales-, ellos eran de la opinión de que más vale reducir todas las relaciones humanas a cálculos racionales del interés personal. ¿Seguro que la bedder hubiera preferido ganar el doble y aceptar hacer la vista gorda ante un comportamiento que encontraba ofensivo?

Sin embargo, tal como lo recuerdo, era la bedder la que mostraba haber captado con más sutileza las verdades esenciales del intercambio humano. Los estudiantes, desconocedores de sí mismos, repetían como loros una visión capitalista reducida y empobrecida: un ideal de unidades productivas, a modo de mónadas, que maximicen el provecho privado, pero indiferentes a la comunidad o a la convivencia. Su bedder veía el asunto de modo distinto. Ella podría ser medio analfabeta y escasamente educada, pero sus instintos la guiaban sin error a la comprensión de la relación humana, a las reglas no escitas que la sostienen y al apriorismo de la ética interpersonal en la que descansa. Sin duda alguna ella no había oído hablar nunca de Adam Smith, pero el autor de la Teoría de los sentimientos morales seguramente la habría aplaudido.

[El erizo y la zorra, Isaiah Berlin] 
Esa es, pues, la desmedida ilusión que Tolstoi se propone denunciar: que, con sus propios recursos, los individuos son capaces de entender y controlar el curso de los acontecimientos. Creerlo así es convertirse en víctima de un tremendo error. Junto con esos rostros públicos – esas gentes huecas, a medias auto-engañadas, a medias conscientes de su superchería, gentes que hablan compulsivamente sin ton ni son sólo para cubrir las apariencias y evitar enfrentarse con las verdades desnudas-, junto con esa complicada maquinaria que oculta el espectáculo de su impotencia, de su prescindibilidad, de su ceguera, yace el mundo real, el curso de la vida que los hombres entienden, la dedicación a los detalles habituales de la existencia cotidiana. Cuando Tolstoi compara la vida real – la experiencia “viviente”, individual, concreta, diaria- con la visión panorámica conjurada por los historiadores, advierte con absoluta claridad cuál de las dos cosas es real y coherente, y cuál un pergeño, a veces ideado con elegante ingenio pero siempre ficticio. Aunque no se parece a Virginia Woolf en esto – como casi en nada- Tolstoi fue quizás el primero en expresar la célebre acusación que medio siglo después lanzaría la escritora contra los profetas de su generación – Shaw, Wells y Arnold Bennet-, materialistas ciegos que nunca comprendieron qué es lo que constituye la esencia de la vida, confundiendo los accidentes externos, los aspectos banales ajenos al alma humana – las llamadas realidades sociales, económicas y políticas- con lo que por sí solo es genuino: experiencia individual, relación específica entre personas, colores, olores, sabores, sonidos y movimientos, celos, amores, odios, pasiones, chispazos intuitivos, momentos de transformación, sucesión común y cotidiana de datos privados, que son lo que constituye cuanto existe, es decir, la realidad. 

[The Computational Beauty of Nature, Flake]

 

[Ay, cómo se nota que el libro es de 1998, ¡poco más de 10 años!]

[Freakonomics, Levitt & Dubner]
So if sumo wrestlers, schoolteachers, and day-care parents all cheat, are we to assume that mankind is innately and universally corrupt? And if so, how corrupt?
The answer may lie in ... bagels. Consider the true story of a man named Paul Feldman.

Once upon a time, Feldman dreamed big dreams. Trained as an agricultural economist, he wanted to tackle world hunger. Instead, he took a job in Washington, analyzing weapons expenditures for the U.S. Navy. This was in 1962. For the next twenty-odd years, he did more of the same. He held senior-level jobs and earned good money, but he wasn't fully engaged in his work. At the office Christmas party, colleagues would introduce him to their wives not as "the head of the public research group" (which he was) but as "the guy who brings in the bagels."
The bagels had begun as a casual gesture: a boss treating his employees whenever they won a research contract. Then he made it a habit. Every Friday, he would bring in some bagels, a serrated knife, and cream cheese. When employees from neighboring floors heard about the bagels, they wanted some too. Eventually he was bringing in fifteen dozen bagels a week. In order to recoup his costs, he set out a cash basket and a sign with the suggested price. His collection rate was about 95 percent; he attributed the underpayment to oversight, not fraud.
In 1984, when his research institute fell under new management, Feldman took a look at his career and grimaced. He decided to quit his job and sell bagels. His economist friends thought he had lost his mind, but his wife supported him. The last of their three children was finishing college, and they had retired their mortgage.
Driving around the office parks that encircle Washington, he solicited customers with a simple pitch: early in the morning, he would deliver some bagels and a cash basket to a company's snack room; he would return before lunch to pick up the money and the leftovers. It was an honor-system commerce scheme, and it worked. Within a few years, Feldman was delivering 8,400 bagels a week to 140 companies and earning as much as he had ever made as a research analyst. He had thrown off the shackles of cubicle life and made himself happy.
He had also- quite without meaning to- designed a beautiful economic experiment. From the beginning, Feldman kept rigorous data on his business. So by measuring the money collected against the bagels taken, he found it possible to tell, down to the penny,) just how honest his customers were. Did they steal from him? If so, what were the characteristics of a company that stole versus a company that did not? Under what circumstances did people tend to steal more, or less?
As it happens, Feldman's accidental study provides a window onto a form of cheating that has long stymied academics: white-collar crime. (Yes, shorting the bagel man is white-collar crime, writ however small.) It might seem ludicrous to address as large and intractable a problem as white-collar crime through the life of a bagel man. But often a small and simple question can help chisel away at the biggest problems.

Despite all the attention paid to rogue companies like Enron, academics know very little about the practicalities of white-collar crime. The reason? There are no good data. A key fact of white-collar crime is that we hear about only the very slim fraction of people who are caught cheating. Most embezzlers lead quiet and theoretically happy lives; employees who steal company property are rarely detected.
With street crime, meanwhile, that is not the case. A mugging or a burglary or a murder is usually tallied whether or not the criminal is caught. A street crime has a victim, who typically reports the crime to the police, who generate data, which in turn generate thousands of academic papers by criminologists, sociologists, and economists. But white-collar crime presents no obvious victim. From whom, exactly, did the masters of Enron steal? And how can you measure something if you don't know to whom it happened, or with what frequency, or in what magnitude?
Paul Feldman's bagel business was different. It did present a victim. The victim was Paul Feldman.

When he started his business, he expected a 95 percent payment rate, based on the experience at his own office. But just as crime tends to be low on a street where a police car is parked, the 95 percent rate was artificially high: Feldman's presence had deterred theft. Not only that, but those bagel eaters knew the provider and had feelings (presumably good ones) about him. A broad swath of psychological and economic research has shown that people will pay different amounts for the same item depending on who is providing it. The economist Richard Thaler, in his 1985 "Beer on the Beach" study, showed that a thirsty sunbather would pay $2.65 for a beer delivered from a resort hotel but only $1.50 for the same beer if it came from a shabby grocery store.

In the real world, Feldman learned to settle for less than 95 percent. He came to consider a company "honest" if its payment rate was above 90 percent. He considered a rate between 80 and 90 percent "annoying but tolerable." If a company habitually paid below 80 percent, Feldman might post a hectoring note, like this one:

The cost of bagels has gone up dramatically since the beginning of the year. Unfortunately, the number of bagels that disappear without being paid for has also gone up. Don't let that continue. I don't imagine that you would teach your children to cheat, so why do it yourselves?

In the beginning, Feldman left behind an open basket for the cash, but too often the money vanished. Then he tried a coffee can with a money slot in its plastic lid, which also proved too tempting. In the end, he resorted to making small plywood boxes with a slot cut into the top. The wooden box has worked well. Each year he drops off about seven thousand boxes and loses, on average, just one to theft. This is an intriguing statistic: the same people who routinely steal more than 10 percent of his bagels almost never stoop to stealing his money box-a tribute to the nuanced social calculus of theft. From Feldman's perspective, an office worker who eats a bagel without paying is committing a crime; the office worker probably doesn't think so. This distinction probably has less to do with the admittedly small amount of money involved (Feldman's bagels cost one dollar each, cream cheese included) than with the context of the "crime." The same office worker who fails to pay for his bagel might also help himself to a long slurp of soda while filling a glass in a self-serve restaurant, but he is very unlikely to leave the restaurant without paying.
So what do the bagel data have to say? In recent years, there have been two noteworthy trends in the overall payment rate. The first was a long, slow decline that began in 1992. By the summer of 2001, the overall rate had slipped to about 87 percent. But immediately after September 11 of that year, the rate spiked a full 2 percent and hasn't slipped much since. (If a 2 percent gain in payment doesn't sound like much, think of it this way: the nonpayment rate fell from 13 to 11 percent, which amounts to a 15 percent decline in theft.) Because many of Feldman's customers are affiliated with national security, there may have been a patriotic element to this 9/11 Effect. Or it may have represented a more general surge in empathy.
The data also show that smaller offices are more honest than big ones. An office with a few dozen employees generally outpays by 3 to 5 percent an office with a few hundred employees. This may seem counterintuitive. In a bigger office, a bigger crowd is bound to convene around the bagel table, providing more witnesses to make sure you drop your money in the box. But in the big-office/small-office comparison, bagel crime seems to mirror street crime. There is far less street crime per capita in rural areas than in cities, in large part because a rural criminal is more likely to be known (and therefore caught). Also, a smaller community tends to exert greater social incentives against crime, the main one being shame.
The bagel data also reflect how much personal mood seems to affect honesty. Weather, for instance, is a major factor. Unseasonably pleasant weather inspires people to pay at a higher rate. Unseasonably cold weather, meanwhile, makes people cheat prolifically; so do heavy rain and wind. Worst are the holidays. The week of Christmas produces a 2 percent drop in payment rates-again, a 15 percent increase in theft, an effect on the same magnitude, in reverse, as that of 9/11. Thanksgiving is nearly as bad; the week of Valentine's Day is also lousy, as is the week straddling April 15. There are, however, a few good holidays: the weeks that include the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Columbus Day. The difference in the two sets of holidays? The low-cheating holidays represent little more than an extra day off from work. The high-cheating holidays are fraught with miscellaneous anxieties and the high expectations of loved ones. 
Feldman has also reached some of his own conclusions about honesty, based more on his experience than the data. He has come to believe that morale is a big factor-that an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work. He also believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He got this idea after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors-an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and administrative employees. Feldman wondered if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn't consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)

Sonnet 66

                                 66
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born:
And needy Nothing trimmed in jollity;
And purest faith, unhappily forsworn;
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced;
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted;
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced;
And strength by limping sway disabled;
And art made tongue-tied by authority;
And Folly (Doctor-like) controlling skill;
And simple Truth, miscalled Simplicity;
And captive good attending Captain ill.
   Tired with all these, from these would I be gone:
   Save that to die, I leave my love alone. 


Harto de todo esto, muerte pido y paz:
de ver cómo es el mérito mendigo nato
y ver alzada en palmas la vil nulidad
y la más pura fe sufrir perjurio ingrato
y la dorada honra con deshonra dada
y el virginal pudor brutalmente arrollado
y cabal derechura a tuerto estropeada
y por cojera el brío juvenil quebrado
y el arte amordazado por la autoridad
y el genio obedeciendo a un docto mequetrefe
y llamada simpleza la simple verdad
y un buen cautivo sometido a un triste jefe;
   harto de todo esto; de esto huiría; sólo
   que, al morir, a mi amor aquí lo dejo solo.


[En palabras de Agustín García Calvo]

Belleza maculada - Alkionai hémerai

Hace muchos años, por las fechas en que el Marqués de Tamarón publicaba su Belleza maculada, apareció este poema de Sánchez Ferlosio, también en el ABC que D. Rafael fustigaba. Entre papeles ha reaparecido hace poco y estas páginas se merecen su inclusión.

* * *

Cielo desgarradoramente azul

para el recuerdo de los días alegres:

azul testigo del azul perdido

de los azules días del cormorán, 

todos ayeres.

Bajamos por escabrosas escombreras

hacia los ríos parados y podridos,

perdiendo hasta el ayer: los días del alción

en la sonrisa de los hijos muertos.

La mar se vuelve negra,

se muere el cormorán,

¿y quién hará el azul, quién hará el día,

quién hará el ayer?

Tiempo apresado en el futuro escrito

del libro encalendado e idumarcial,

sin todavía.

Tiempo forjado en hierro de trofeo

y en bronce ecuestre fundido y perpetuado,

y bruñidas de historia las medallas

de las edades enfuturecidas

blanquean rojos cruores

de antiguas sañas en cándido alabastro:

peer en botija para que retumbe,

para que otumbe y para que lepante.

El calendario trae el tiempo ya apagado,

exorcizado, amortizado, reinvertido

en valores de viuda, no temáis:

toda zozobra anticipadamente

ha sido degollada

por Herodes el Grande, por Futuro Magno:

Ne redeant Saturnia regna!

Clavada la vertical del fiel de la balanza,

ventura y desventura, cada una en su platillo,

pesarán para siempre exactamente igual.

Némesis protectora y vigilante,

cascando de un mismo golpe el uno contra el otro

sus blandos cráneos de recién nacido,

cuidará de matar cada mañana

la desesperación y la esperanza.

Peril on the sea

Durante algún tiempo participé en un foro donde se discutían asuntos relacionados con el futuro de la energia. Aprendí varias cosas, aunque no conseguí acostumbrarme al tipo de discusiones que se daba (en rigor, que dábamos), y lo terminé dejando. Este artículo del Economist acerca de la posible interrupción de las vías de transporte marítimo de la energía (Peril on the sea) me llamó mucho la atención.
Naturalmente hay muchos otros Perils on the sea, pero una cosa no quita la otra.

* * *

Iba a copiar el artículo aquí aunque veo que el enlace funciona bien sin necesidad de subscripción. Lo dejo de todos modos por si la generosidad del Economist tiene un límite. El diagrama no es del artículo.

* * *

Peril on the sea

Oct 2nd 2003
From The Economist print edition

Are terrorists now aiming to block shipping lanes and disrupt the flow of oil and other goods ?

ON MARCH 26th, the Dewi Madrim, a chemical tanker off the coast of Sumatra, was boarded by ten pirates from a speedboat. They were armed with machine guns and machetes and carried VHF radios. They disabled the ship's radio, took the helm and steered the vessel, altering speed, for about an hour. Then they left, with some cash and the captain and first officer, who are still missing.

So what? South-East Asia is the home of piracy. There was an alarming 37% increase in incidents during the first half of this year. Raiders board ships, steal cash and kidnap crew members, then hold them for ransom. Some criminals even steal a ship and sell its cargo—then repaint it, equip it with false documents and put it to work. The region, with its lax security and poor maritime supervision, is famous for such “ghost ships”.

But according to a new study* by Aegis Defence Services, a London defence and security consultancy, these attacks represent something altogether more sinister. The temporary hijacking of the Dewi Madrim was by terrorists learning to drive a ship, and the kidnapping (without any attempt to ransom the officers) was aimed at acquiring expertise to help the terrorists mount a maritime attack. In other words, attacks like that on the Dewi Madrim are the equivalent of the al-Qaeda hijackers who perpetrated the September 11th attacks going to flying school in Florida.

Coupled with this, there is evidence that terrorists are learning about diving, with a view to attacking ships from below. The Abu Sayyaf group in the Philippines kidnapped a maintenance engineer in a Sabah holiday resort in 2000. On his release in June this year, the engineer said his kidnappers knew he was a diving instructor; they wanted instruction. The owner of a diving school near Kuala Lumpur has recently reported a number of ethnic Malays wanting to learn about diving, but being strangely uninterested in learning about decompression.

Any labor which accepts the competition with slave labor - is slave labor

Norbert Wiener ha sido uno de los padres fundadores de la computación moderna y esa disciplina a la que dieron nombre y que luego ha quedado diluida: la cibernética. Uno no deja de sorprenderse al leer que estudió con Hilbert, Hardy, Russell o Landau y ver la actividad intelectual que desarrolló. Ocurre que usamos la misma palabra (universidad) para realidades que, a lo que parece, no tienen nada que ver - salvo ocasionalmente compartir edificios. Preocupado por el futuro, Wiener puso a salvo su alma confiando en que los desarrollos tecnológicos, de por sí mismos, pudieran ser moralmente neutros. Copio unos párrafos al respecto de su libro Cybernetics (or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine), 1961, 2nd ed.

* * *

Let me now come to another point which I believe to merit attention. It has long been clear to me that the modern ultra-rapid computing machine was in principle an ideal central nervous system to an apparatus for automatic control; and that its input and output need not be in the form of numbers or diagrams but might very well be, respectively, the readings of artificial sense organs, such as photoelectric cells or thermometers, and the performance of motors or solenoids. With the aid of strain gauges or similar agencies to read the performance of these motor organs and to report, to "feed back," to the central control system as an artificial kinesthetic sense, we are already in a position to construct artificial machines of almost any degree of elaborateness of performance. Long before Nagasaki and the public awareness of the atomic bomb, it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard of importance for good and for evil. The automatic factory and the assembly line without human agents are only so far ahead of us as is limited by our willingness to put such a degree of effort into their engineering as was spent, for example, in the development of the technique of radar in the Second World War.
I have said that this new development has unbounded possibilities for good and for evil. For one thing, it makes the metaphorical dominance of the machines, as imagined by Samuel Butler, a most immediate and non-metaphorical problem. It gives the human race a new and most effective collection of mechanical slaves to perform its labor. Such mechanical labor has most of the economic properties of slave labor, although, unlike slave labor, it does not involve the direct demoralizing effects of human cruelty. However, any labor that accepts the conditions of competition with slave labor accepts the conditions of slave labor, and is essentially slave labor. The key word of this statement is competition. It may very well be a good thing for humanity to have the machine remove from it the need of menial and disagreeable tasks, or it may not. I do not know. It cannot be good for these new potentialities to be assessed in the terms of the market, of the money they save; and it is precisely the terms of the open market, the "fifth freedom," that have become the shibboleth of the sector of American opinion represented by the National Association of Manufacturers and the Saturday Evening Post. I say American opinion, for as an American, I know it best, but the hucksters recognize no national boundary.

Here a sad story indeed must be told

Hace unos fines de semana estuve en un gran museo y no dejé de pasar por el departamento asirio. Recordé lo leído acerca de la otra cara de las expediciones arqueológicas (y los museos). Copio de Otto Neugebauer, The exact sciences in antiquity, 1969, 2nd ed.

* * *

At this point it may be useful to insert a few general remarks about excavations and publication of texts because little is known about these problems outside the small circle of the initiated.

A modern excavation is a highly complex enterprise. A staff of architects, draftsmen, photographers, epigraphers, and philologists have to assist the archeologist in his field work. But this is only the first and easier phase of an excavation. The preservation of the ruin, the conservation of the objects found, and, most of all, the publication of the results, remains the final task for which the work in the field is only the preliminary step.
Here a sad story indeed must be told. While the field work has been perfected to a very high standard during the last half century, the second part, the publication, has been neglected to such a degree that many excavations of Mesopotamian sites resulted only in a scientifically executed destruction of what was left still undestroyed after a few thousand years. The reasons for this fact are trivial. The time required for the publication of results is a multiple of the requirements for the field work. The available money is usually spent when a fraction of the original planned excavation has been completed, benefactors are hard to find to pay for many years of work without tangible or spectacular results, and.the scholars get interested in special aspects of the problem involved or go out for new material instead of performing the tedious work of publishing the thousands of details which the accidents of excavation have provided. The final result is not much different from the one obtained by the treasure-hunting attitude of the earliest excavators.