Filmes irmãos (II)

Santiago (João Moreira Salles, 2007)

e

Exit through the Gift Shop (Banksy, 2010)

Capitalismo (II)

"After a while, some people got up to leave. One was Saul Perlmutter, the astrophysicist. Another was a man named Murat Sonmez, an executive at the Silicon Valley software firm Tibco. Sonmez, like Arbess, had attended Perlmutter’s talk that morning, called “Dark Forces at Play.” He had been astonished by Perlmutter’s description of the acceleration of the expansion of the universe, about how every time scientists look at the night sky through a powerful telescope they see the vestiges of events that occurred billions of years ago.

They walked out together and headed down the Promenade, toward the Congress Hall. The sky had cleared. The mountains, newly covered in snow, sparkled beyond the rooftops. Snow misted down from the pines like pixie dust; now and then, as the sun warmed the boughs, clumps fell noiselessly to the street. Sonmez began to tell Perlmutter about Tibco and its expertise in sifting through and finding patterns in the acceleratingly expansive universe of digital data. Tibco had designed the data-sorting software for Amazon, Federal Express, Goldman Sachs, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, eBay, the airlines, and the Department of Homeland Security. “We can prevent blackouts,” Sonmez was saying. “We can predict when a gambler at a slot machine will cease to be happy.” He explained how Tibco, on behalf of Harrah’s, had designed a system that can figure out when a gambler is about to encounter a loss of such magnitude that it will cause him to leave the casino and perhaps never come back. The casino’s Luck Ambassadors will then offer the gambler a free meal or a ticket to a show (Tibco’s software having determined that there are otherwise empty seats to fill or excess inventory to slough off), and distract the gambler long enough to entice him to return later, to continue losing money in palatable increments. At the moment, he said, Tibco was building an engine that will mimic the way the human brain recognizes patterns.

Such wonders amazed even Perlmutter, a man who passes the hours considering the mysteries of the cosmos. It sounded like just the thing he’d been searching for. He spent his days engaged in a visual analysis of unstructured data—looking, as he put it, for a needle in a haystack. Perlmutter, who is at Berkeley, said that he would like to visit Tibco in Palo Alto and talk about ways in which Tibco might be able to help him understand the universe. Sonmez said that he would love to hire some of Perlmutter’s Ph.D.s. They exchanged cards, shook hands, and parted ways."


THE NEW YORKER (Magic Mountain, por Nick Paumgarten, 5 de março de 2012)
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/05/120305fa_fact_paumgarten#ixzz1vRn3RiT2

Capitalismo

Do site da Amazon:

Prisons

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Deleitando Ensena

(Universidad de Guanajuato, México)

"Las letras tienen amargas las raíces, si bien son dulces sus frutos." - Máxima de Diego de Saavedra y Fajardo (1584-1648)

"Ler é como ter uma esteira [ergométrica] no quarto: no começo, dá uma preguiça desgraçada, mas logo você toma gosto e já não consegue parar." - Máxima de Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (1945 - )

História Natural

"No Itamaraty, para os diplomatas chefes de missão que morriam em posto, fora do Brasil, havia uma segunda cerimônia, com grande pompa, quando os despojos voltavam ao solo pátrio. Eram-lhe prestadas honras militares, equivalentes às que havia recebido antes, no país em que estava acreditado. Um embaixador, nesses casos, tinha o direito a duas mortes, lá e cá, como aquele boêmio baiano que Jorge Amado inventou e cujo berro ainda ecoa. 

A glória póstuma era subtraída, em alguma medida, pela classificação que o corpo recebia para que, embalsamado, pudesse entrar no Brasil devidamente rotulado. Na nossa nomenclatura alfandegária, era chamado de “exemplar de história natural”, o que correspondia aos fatos, mas nada acrescentava à reputação."

(A morte sem os mortos, por Marcos de Azambuja, Revista Piauí http://revistapiaui.estadao.com.br/edicao-61/memorias-pouco-diplomaticas/a-morte-sem-os-mortos)

O Cálice, seguro

"Her image accompanied me even in places the most hostile to romance. On Saturday evenings when my aunt went marketing I had to go to carry some of the parcels. We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes. Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires." (Araby, in Dubliners by James Joyce)

Da série "os idiotas que nos governam" (II)