Iterations of Oneself

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A bunch of plastic eyes and a bit of nonsense

I am always impressed by how creative some people can be. I am not a very creative person, but I enjoy very much to see other people apply their creativity in all sorts of things. I feel very excited and joyful whenever I see a good application of creativity. To be honest, I am very jealous of the people that can cause this joy in others, and I find it very exciting to try to be one of them.

The idea for this post is not my own. This is an idea I got one day while browsing reddit. One redditor’s friend had started playing around with plastic eyes, sticking them to random things, and giving these random things a whole new appearance and expression. I loved it! I wanted to do it myself!

I decided to add some plastic eyes randomly on stuff in the office; and see if the plastic eyes could give new life to the things they were stuck to as well as how people would react to them.

I eventually set myself on the mission, and went on to buy 10 pairs of small plastic eyes and 5 pairs of bigger plastic eyes.

10 pairs of small eyes and 5 pairs of bigger eyes

Once I had everything ready, I had to show up in the office, and decide where I was going to put 15 pairs of plastic eyes. I wanted them to be discrete, but not too discrete; such that people would not notice them until they actually started interacting with the object where the eyes were placed.

The main candidates were smartphones, but I ended up using all sorts of things: A water bottle, a kindle, a PSP, a monitor, a ping-pong paddle, a copy machine; among other things.

The result was rather simple. I got a few smiles and a few laughs, as well as a lot of fun. I really enjoyed this experiment. I look forward to doing other things in the office, to have some fun and maybe surprise some people.

Here is one of the pictures of today, and below a link to a bunch of them:

Here is a link to the gallery with some pictures from today

Apr 4

To Rome, With Love. A movie by Woody Allen, 2012.

While The New York Times, in print and online, continues to be a marvel of American journalism, the economics of the business are challenging, and have been for some time. Despite the success of the pay model, and the hard work of Guild members and excluded managers alike, New York Times Media Group revenues declined 22 percent during the term of your last contract, from 2003 to 2011.

We wish this weren’t true, but it is. No business can face a decline of this magnitude without taking steps to bring its costs into line with the smaller revenues. Over the last few years, we’ve reduced staff, tightly controlled nonpayroll expenses and eliminated some unprofitable operations, and froze defined pension plans for non-union employees. The Guild did participate with us when we sought a temporary 5 percent payroll reduction in 2009 as part of this effort, and we deeply appreciate it.

Nevertheless, we have to do more. To ignore it would be to put The Times itself, and all of our jobs, at risk. And the most important thing we can do is to eliminate the expense, risk and volatility of the defined-benefit pension plans many of our employees have enjoyed over the years. In doing this, we are acting no differently than most other employers in America — as The Times itself reported a few weeks ago, only 14 percent of employees throughout the country still have defined-benefit pension plans. They are great for employees, but they are, sadly, unaffordable.

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Terry Hayes, Senior Vice President Operations and Labor, New York Times, in a memo to staff explaining the paper’s position on labor negotiations with the Newspaper Guild of New York.

The news: the Newspaper Guild of New York, which represents many New York Times newsroom employees, and the Times have been negotiating a new contract after the previous one expired. The Times, which saw a net loss of $39.7 million in 2011 would like to reduce future pension obligations.

The Guild, which also represents 3,000 media employees at New York area news organizations as diverse as Thompson Reuters, the Nation, El Diario and Jewish Forward, calls the Times’ new offer “slightly less offensive” than previous proposals.

Hayes’ memo via Jim Romenesko.

(via futurejournalismproject)

Hang in there NYT : (

Beautiful video; on love, humanity, space exploration, and Carl Sagan.

The Brain on Love

By: Diane Ackerman

NY Times, 3/24/2012 

A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of your life literally transforms you.

All relationships change the brain — but most important are the intimate bonds that foster or fail us, altering the delicate circuits that shape memories, emotions and that ultimate souvenir, the self.

Every great love affair begins with a scream. At birth, the brain starts blazing new neural pathways based on its odyssey in an alien world. An infant is steeped in bright, buzzing, bristling sensations, raw emotions and the curious feelings they unleash, weird objects, a flux of faces, shadowy images and dreams — but most of all a powerfully magnetic primary caregiver whose wizardry astounds.

Brain scans show synchrony between the brains of mother and child; but what they can’t show is the internal bond that belongs to neither alone, a fusion in which the self feels so permeable it doesn’t matter whose body is whose. Wordlessly, relying on the heart’s semaphores, the mother says all an infant needs to hear, communicating through eyes, face and voice. Thanks to advances in neuroimaging, we now have evidence that a baby’s first attachments imprint its brain. The patterns of a lifetime’s behaviors, thoughts, self-regard and choice of sweethearts all begin in this crucible.

We used to think this was the end of the story: first heredity, then the brain’s engraving mental maps in childhood, after which you’re pretty much stuck with the final blueprint.

But as a wealth of imaging studies highlight, the neural alchemy continues throughout life as we mature and forge friendships, dabble in affairs, succumb to romantic love, choose a soul mate. The body remembers how that oneness with Mother felt, and longs for its adult equivalent.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships. Daniel J. Siegel and Allan N. Schore, colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, recently discussed groundbreaking work in the field at a conference on the school’s campus. It’s not that caregiving changes genes; it influences how the genes express themselves as the child grows. Dr. Siegel, a neuropsychiatrist, refers to the indelible sense of “feeling felt” that we learn as infants and seek in romantic love, a reciprocity that remodels the brain’s architecture and functions.

Does it also promote physical well-being? “Scientific studies of longevity, medical and mental health, happiness and even wisdom,” Dr. Siegel says, “point to supportive relationships as the most robust predictor of these positive attributes in our lives across the life span.”

The supportive part is crucial. Loving relationships alter the brain the most significantly.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

When two people become a couple, the brain extends its idea of self to include the other; instead of the slender pronoun “I,” a plural self emerges who can borrow some of the other’s assets and strengths. The brain knows who we are. The immune system knows who we’re not, and it stores pieces of invaders as memory aids. Through lovemaking, or when we pass along a flu or a cold sore, we trade bits of identity with loved ones, and in time we become a sort of chimera. We don’t just get under a mate’s skin, we absorb him or her.

Love is the best school, but the tuition is high and the homework can be painful. As imaging studies by the U.C.L.A. neuroscientist Naomi Eisenberger show, the same areas of the brain that register physical pain are active when someone feels socially rejected. That’s why being spurned by a lover hurts all over the body, but in no place you can point to. Or rather, you’d need to point to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the brain, the front of a collar wrapped around the corpus callosum, the bundle of nerve fibers zinging messages between the hemispheres that register both rejection and physical assault.

Whether they speak Armenian or Mandarin, people around the world use the same images of physical pain to describe a broken heart, which they perceive as crushing and crippling. It’s not just a metaphor for an emotional punch. Social pain can trigger the same sort of distress as a stomachache or a broken bone.

But a loving touch is enough to change everything. James Coan, a neuroscientist at the University of Virginia, conducted experiments in 2006 in which he gave an electric shock to the ankles of women in happy, committed relationships. Tests registered their anxiety before, and pain level during, the shocks.

Then they were shocked again, this time holding their loving partner’s hand. The same level of electricity produced a significantly lower neural response throughout the brain. In troubled relationships, this protective effect didn’t occur. If you’re in a healthy relationship, holding your partner’s hand is enough to subdue your blood pressure, ease your response to stress, improve your health and soften physical pain. We alter one another’s physiology and neural functions.

However, it’s not all sub rosa. One can decide to be a more attentive and compassionate partner, mindful of the other’s motives, hurts and longings. Breaking old habits isn’t easy, since habits are deeply ingrained neural shortcuts, a way of slurring over details without having to dwell on them. Couples often choose to rewire their brains on purpose, sometimes with a therapist’s help, to ease conflicts and strengthen their at-one-ness.

While they were both in the psychology department of Stony Brook University, Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron scanned the brains of long-married couples who described themselves as still “madly in love.” Staring at a picture of a spouse lit up their reward centers as expected; the same happened with those newly in love (and also with cocaine users). But, in contrast to new sweethearts and cocaine addicts, long-married couples displayed calm in sites associated with fear and anxiety. Also, in the opiate-rich sites linked to pleasure and pain relief, and those affiliated with maternal love, the home fires glowed brightly.

A happy marriage relieves stress and makes one feel as safe as an adored baby. Small wonder “Baby” is a favorite adult endearment. Not that romantic love is an exact copy of the infant bond. One needn’t consciously regard a lover as momlike to profit from the parallels. The body remembers, the brain recycles and restages.

So how does this play out beyond the lab? I saw the healing process up close after my 74-year-old husband, who is also a writer, suffered a left-hemisphere stroke that wiped out a lifetime of language. All he could utter was “mem.” Mourning the loss of our duet of decades, I began exploring new ways to communicate, through caring gestures, pantomime, facial expressions, humor, play, empathy and tons of affection — the brain’s epitome of a safe attachment. That, plus the admittedly eccentric home schooling I provided, and his diligent practice, helped rewire his brain to a startling degree, and in time we were able to talk again, he returned to writing books, and even his vision improved. The brain changes with experience throughout our lives; it’s in loving relationships of all sorts — partners, children, close friends — that brain and body really thrive.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing. Its doors of perception swing wide open. The flip side is that, given how vulnerable one then is, love lessons — sweet or villainous — can make a deep impression. Wedded hearts change everything, even the brain.

(Source: youmightfindyourself)

From Java code to Java heap

Although the subject of optimizing your application code’s memory usage isn’t new, it’s not one that is generally well understood. This article briefly covers the memory usage of a Java process, then digs in depth into the memory usage of the Java code that you write. Finally, it shows ways to make your application code more memory-efficient, particularly in the area of using Java collections such as HashMaps and ArrayLists.

Good read on the patterns of usage of memory in Java.

Thoughts on marriage

In recent times, marriage has suffered a big loss of popularity in western cultures. Studies have shown that the percentage of people that are married has been in steady decline for a couple of decades. In the United States, married people are not anymore a majority of the population.

It is very common to see youths that do not expect to get married, and that don’t think of marriage as an obvious next step in life.

The institution of marriage has largely been a utilitarian union. For a good part of human history, marriage was the core of a society that needed to distribute work and responsibilities between the members of the basic cell of society.

In its earliest states, marriage would constitute a ‘team’, where men would be the providers, and women the housekeepers. Both members of the ‘team’ would bring in their capabilities and form a unit able to survive and bear children, thus fulfilling a set of primal instincts and social expectations.

For several generations, the role models and expectations put on marriage evolved. From all the styles of social organization, men kept the role of providers and women that of housekeepers. It was in the early 20th century that single income families as we know them became prevalent in America and other countries.

Not long after the suburban middle class family had established itself; along with the latter decades of the 20th century came the apparent weakening of marriage. It took only a couple of generations to see how divorce rates surged tremendously. In the United States, most generation X children had to live through their parents’ divorce, and after their peak around 1980, divorce rates never quite recovered. The ‘1 in 2’ figure (50% of marriages end up in failure) is a terrifying attribute of marriage nowadays.

Also, people are generally marrying later. In the 60’s, the average age for marriage was 23 for men and 20 for women. Now it’s 28 and 26 respectively.

These numbers give marriage a grim look. Some people attribute these figures to a shift in the general mindset of society. The rise of more liberal contemporary cultural forces has made some segments of society more receptive and more tolerant of less traditional paradigms of living. Unmarried cohabitation and premarital sex have become more commonplace in modern society, and they have also gained terrain in the collective moral consciousness. Less people now consider any of them a moral fault.

Knowing all we know now, we can see how lately a question has surged and is being asked in several segments of western societies: Is marriage a failed institution? Have societies evolved in a way that renders marriage an obsolete idea? Well, maybe; but we might want to look at the question differently.

Marriage is an evolving kind of union. Although its evolution has been relatively slow, the pressures exerted on it by liberal cultural influences has had an effect, and marriage is now different than it was before. It has transitioned from an utilitarian union where cohabitation and child-bearing were the main objectives. It has evolved onto something else.

The improvement of medical sciences and surge of new philosophical currents has allowed middle class human beings to shift child-bearing more towards their 30s; for some marriages child-bearing is not part of the equation at all. For modern youth, the twenties are becoming an age of discovery and self-insight. In this context marriage is not anymore a necessary societal union; it becomes an optional union, fostered by intimacy, mutual trust and love; and for this kind of marriage child bearing is too an option; not an end.

So may we ask again: Is marriage a failed institution in modern western societies? Well, maybe not. Maybe it is just that marriage has changed, and it now means something different than it used to mean, and it is going to take some time for society to adapt to that. Maybe now humanism, intimacy and love have conquered marriage; back from the hands of patriarchal social models, social expectations, and obsolete cultural perspectives.

…or maybe that’s just what I’d like to believe.

Sources:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Union_11_12_10.pdf

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303544604576430341393583056.html

Feb 8

I’m still in love with the keyboard, but my viewpoint of what’s important in life has evolved. I’m much more interested in the world, interested in humanity, interested in the environment, the planet. I view myself now as a human being, not a musician. Musician is what I do. It’s not what I am. And it makes a huge difference.

- Herbie Hancock, on the present moment. (via americanroutes)

Instagram Engineering: What Powers Instagram: Hundreds of Instances, Dozens of Technologies

instagram-engineering:

One of the questions we always get asked at meet-ups and conversations with other engineers is, “what’s your stack?” We thought it would be fun to give a sense of all the systems that power Instagram, at a high-level; you can look forward to more in-depth descriptions of some of these systems in…

John Steinbeck on Falling in Love: A 1958 Letter to his eldest son

youmightfindyourself:

New York
November 10, 1958

Dear Thom:

We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers.

First — if you are in love — that’s a good thing — that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you.

Second — There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you — of kindness and consideration and respect — not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

You say this is not puppy love. If you feel so deeply — of course it isn’t puppy love.

But I don’t think you were asking me what you feel. You know better than anyone. What you wanted me to help you with is what to do about it — and that I can tell you.

Glory in it for one thing and be very glad and grateful for it.

The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.

If you love someone — there is no possible harm in saying so — only you must remember that some people are very shy and sometimes the saying must take that shyness into consideration.

Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also.

It sometimes happens that what you feel is not returned for one reason or another — but that does not make your feeling less valuable and good.

Lastly, I know your feeling because I have it and I’m glad you have it.

We will be glad to meet Susan. She will be very welcome. But Elaine will make all such arrangements because that is her province and she will be very glad to. She knows about love too and maybe she can give you more help than I can.

And don’t worry about losing. If it is right, it happens — The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.

Love,

Fa