mandarine

Two naughty kids play a stupid game: they throw bricks off the terrace roof of their high-rise apartment building. Basically, they hold the bricks over the railing, let go, and run off to hide so that nobody sees them.

One day, a man walks out of the lobby on the ground floor, just as two bricks are following a parallel free-fall trajectory in mid-air. One brick hits the ground two feet to the right of the man and smashes to pieces with a loud thud, while the other kills him.
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Maybe you remember my Christmas e-book stack. After I had downloaded a whole shelf worth of e-books, representing the space of a USB stick, I wondered whether there was a thing I could do to contribute in return. Obviously, I could donate money to the Gutenberg project. But I found better: I found I could contribute by proofreading scanned pages so that they could be turned into free quality e-books.

The distributed proofreaders website organises the work of online volunteers who show up when they feel like proofreading a few pages. The unofficial target is one page a day — I prefer to do seven pages a week. I have found it a marvellous way to contribute, and a great way to get to know books in a totally new fashion. As I write this post, I am correcting OCR mistakes in Hector Berlioz’s Correspondance Inédite. It almost feels as if I am Berlioz’s editor, 138 years after his death.

You might want to give it a try if you feel you have the soul of an editor, if you believe classics are the property of all, if you like to discover new books at random, if you find some thrill in interacting with text, if you want to be part of a team and a project, if you wish to contribute to web 2.0 without being a geek, or if you just do not mind giving a hand to what I believe is a true literary wonder of the world.

Believe it or not, school is a very egalitarian system.
However elitist a given school may be, kids with better grades do not have fancier uniforms, they do not eat nicer food at school lunches, they do not get better chairs in classrooms or better spots in the schoolyards. This absence of objective short-term reward in return for a learning effort is probably why so few schoolkids are eager to learn more and better. This is totally rational: if there is no reward, why bother. If you do, you are stupid and are treated as such. School excellence is frowned upon by popular kids, and bland mediocrity is the golden standard if one wants to get respect from one’s teenage peers.

In addition, this egalitarian system gives kids the wrong idea about society: when they leave school, they will be totally inadapted to today’s economic system when one does not get anything for nothing. Unless one strives to be among the best, one is gradually sucked down into the economic drain. The sooner they learn this sad truth, the better armed they will be.
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Three thousand miles and sixty thousand feet(*): this is the total distance and total uphill climb that I travel on my bicycle each year, mainly for commuting purposes. In eight years, my mileage will be the length of the Earth’s circumference. Well, to tell you the truth, I am shamelessly bragging about something that has not happened yet: [more]

Everybody takes a coffee break or a cigarette break at some point in their work day. I just fulfilled a fantasy I have had for as long as I have been reading Emily’s Telecommuter Talk: a laundry break. Yep: today, for some obscure family-logistics -cum- frost-on-the-winshield -cum- baby-sort-of-feverish-reasons, I missed two trains in a row and decided I’d stay home to work.

I’ve had my office phone redirected to my home phone, and at 10:30 AM, I took a laundry break and spent ten minutes in the sun to hang out the bed sheets. That was some treat!

It was so grand that I boldly decided I’d indulge in an even grander treat: the 20′ after-lunch nap. Now I know what it is I will be asking from my boss at the next yearly interview: it won’t be a bonus, it won’t be a raise, it will be one day of telecommuting each week.

Piracy is theft: now and then, when I watch a DVD, instead of the typical legal warning text, I have to watch a complete video sequence involving people stealing cars, purses, and other objects, and the ending shot is someone downloading something from the internet, with a vibrating slogan in large red letters: Piracy is Theft. I say no. Piracy is piracy, theft is theft, and it is not up to Sony Music or Warner Home Video to brainwash me into redefining what theft is.

What is theft?

I believe that ever since the concept of property has germinated inside the narrow conscience of a pervert Homo not-so-Sapiens (germination accurately captured by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes), theft has always been two inseparable things: the victim is deprived of something he/she has worked for, while the thief obtains something without having worked for it. Prejudice for the victim, benefit for the thief. Which one is more important?

I frankly doubt we would consider theft the same way today if historically it had not deprived the victims of their property. If people could still use their stuff after it had been stolen, I doubt they would even contemplate filing a complaint with the police.

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The sequel of the ten things I like. The first five were:

• The letter k
• Kant (philosophy)
• Kindergarten (rural public schools)
• Kilimandjaro (global warming)
• KDE (Linux)

Here are entries 6-10: [more]

I have looked at reviews on automated comment management plugins. Nothing seems perfect. I suggest a basic low-tech semi-manual approach that can help you follow-up on comments you have left in blogs. I describe it with Firefox. [more]

I do not know whence the contagion originated, but I know I caught it from Charlotte who had been infected after visiting a Kitten.
Here are ten things I liKe, ten things the mandarine blog is about: [more]

I write long posts. When I want to make a difficult point, I often need to walk the reader down a long path. Sometimes, the proof could be written with fewer words, but it would be inedible dehydrated logic. Naked skeletons of ideas are more appealing if I can put some flesh around them.

Yet long posts take a long time to read, and this can deter readers. I resent this, but I am myself the perfect example: I seldom have more than half an hour before me when I want to keep up with blogs I like, and I systematically put aside posts I think will take me too much time to read. [more]