Month: July 2008

http://www.amazon.com/Finding-Still-Point-Book-Communications/dp/1590304799|The essence of zazen|

By John Daido Loori

Very simple & beautiful approach to zazen. Great as start point.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Zen-Mind-Beginners-Shambhala-Library/dp/1590302672|”The purpose of studyng Buddhism is not to study Buddhism but to study ourselves.”|

By Shunryu Suzuki

http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624|Epidemics at Large|

by Malcom Gladwell

The basic premise on this book is that epidemics can be thought as a general pattern appliable as well to health, social phenomena or technology. A very well written book, Gladwell makes a extensive investigation, gathers information that may seem disgragated and elaborates a proposition. Not a scientific method traditional approach, but a good starting point to the understanding and use of this knowledge.

http://www.amazon.com/Wabi-Sabi-Artists-Designers-Poets-Philosophers/dp/1880656124|Imperfect Impermanent Incomplete|

By Leonard Koren.

Wabi-Sabi is the quintessential aesthetic  of the Japanese art. This gorgeous book describe what is Wabi-Sabi in a Wabi-Sabi format and content. In less than 80 pages, many filled with beautiful photographs, describe the metaphysical, spiritual, state-of-mind, moral and material qualities that create Wabi-Sabi.

The Wabi-Sabi quality can be discovered everywhere, although demands careful attention to find it. For us, quite far from the Japanese  mind, Wabi-Sabi explains the beauty we feel and see on many things that are nevertheless overlooked and unappreciated. The tension between the Wabi-Sabi aesthetic and our concious western-modernist aesthetic might be extremely interesting to explore.

 

Getting back to The Little Schemer  proved more challenging. The last couple of chapters are pretty hard and will  need a revisit ASAP. The presentation of the Y combinator as a consequence of recursion over the generation of functions is mind-blowing.

This book make me feel that I know nothing about computing and need to learn everything again. And it’s great!

I’ve recently found about the Dunning-Kruger effect on a blog post by Steve Yegge. Despite the fact I do like Joel’s book and even have used his technique on a few recruiting process, I’ve found that for everyday businesses, even Smart&Get-things-done guys can be too hard to get.

Anyway, the point I want to talk about is a side effect of Dunning-Kruger. While in college, in some classes, I would get to a point in which I knew almost nothing about something but was very creative about it, getting lot’s of ideas to do things that I didn’t knew in that moment were hard or impossible to do. The DK effect. But some of those ideas were worth trying for the learning. And even some of them, although they would be harder to execute than it initially appeared, were good ideas indeed. Because of DK, you don’t know the limitations and thus your brain is free to create. When you get to know a lot about something, limitations and restrictions are evident and thus your brain restrain some of those ideas. Anyway, the truth is that some of those ideas could be accomplished and be good.

Once, on a Digital Image Processing class, I had the idea of processing photographs of rooms, aisles, buildings, etc along with some makers. Then make a 3D projection of the markers to “infere” the dimensions of the room, making measurement of spaces simple as a click. At first, the idea sound great, and started working on the math. Then I passed through a disenchantment phase: it was like 1994, digital cameras weren’t readily available, the math started to be harder than I knew and computing processing was not so easy to get. Then I quit the idea and moved forward. Now, I know better and maybe it was a good idea. I’ve seen some 3D projections based on 2D images and are awesome.

That said, I will give a chance to those naïve ideas. Maybe someone could be good after all…

This is the simplest way I’ve found to get pretty permalinks and/or URLs for this blog (for SEO optimization): use a 37signals-like standard prefix the id of the post to the prettyfied version of the title of the blog. Use the following to Find the post:

 

def self.find_by_permalink(permalink)
  return(nil) unless permalink
  self.find(permalink.split("-")[0])
end

 

Use the following to build the permalink:

 

def permalink
    "#{self.id}-#{self.title.gsub(/[^a-z0-9]+/i,'-')}"
end