Month: November 2006

Categories
in portugal

há palavras que ficam, muito para além do azul.

Ao longo da muralha que habitamos
Há palavras de vida há palavras de morte
Há palavras imensas, que esperam por nós
E outras frágeis, que deixaram de esperar
Há palavras acesas como barcos
E há palavras homens, palavras que guardam
O seu segredo e a sua posição

Entre nós e as palavras, surdamente,

As mãos e as paredes de Elsinore

E há palavras e nocturnas palavras gemidos
Palavras que nos sobem ilegíveis à boca
Palavras diamantes palavras nunca escritas
Palavras impossíveis de escrever
Por não termos connosco cordas de violinos
Nem todo o sangue do mundo nem todo o amplexo do ar
E os braços dos amantes escrevem muito alto
Muito além do azul onde oxidados morrem
Palavras maternais só sombra só soluço
Só espasmos só amor só solidão desfeita

Entre nós e as palavras, os emparedados
E entre nós e as palavras, o nosso dever falar.

Mário Cesariny (9 de Agosto de 1923 – 26 de Novembro de 2006)
(in english)

Categories
geek

t-shirt



elas andam aqui.

Categories
just life

dawn

goscinny would certainly call upon some hidden corsican roots of mine to justify the fact that i am… susceptible. a movie, a book, a well-spoken presentation on a seminar or a brief intelligent conversation are all it takes to shake my world and give me the energy to ignore drawbacks and jump over frustrations, in order to achieve something and enjoy the process of getting there, more than the the finishing line itself.

maybe i am overreacting – but i won’t jump from denial (more like indifference, in the case) to despair, without stopping in the middle and trying to do something about the problem.
just let me figure a plan.

Categories
photography

megapixels race

this article in the new york times blog explains exactly why you shouldn’t be only looking at the number of megapixels on your new digital camera, through an interesting experiment:

On the show, we did a test. We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. I wanted to hang them all on a wall in Times Square and challenge passersby to see if they could tell the difference.

Even the technician at the photo lab told me that I was crazy, that there’d be a huge difference between 5 megapixels and 13.
I’m prepared to give away the punch line of this segment, because hey—the show doesn’t air till February, and you’ll have forgotten all about what you read here today, right?

Anyway, we ran the test for about 45 minutes. Dozens of people stopped to take the test; a little crowd gathered. About 95 percent of the volunteers gave up, announcing that there was no possible way to tell the difference, even when mashing their faces right up against the prints. A handful of them attempted guesses—but were wrong. Only one person correctly ranked the prints in megapixel order, although (a) she was a photography professor, and (b) I believe she just got lucky.
(…)

In THEORY, you should be able to see a difference. But you can’t.”

exactly. besides, more megapixels mean bigger files, for equivalent quality. focus on the lens quality and the image sensors behind it, and start spending the rest of the money on trips to the places you want to photograph instead.

Categories
links and ideas

it’s world toilet day

“Safe water and sanitation are now recognised as human rights but over one billion people do not have access to water and over two and a half billion people are without sanitation. A child dies every 15 seconds from water-related diseases as a result.

World toilet day helps WaterAid mark the fact that 2.6 billion people do not have somewhere safe, private or hygienic to go to the toilet.”

you can help calling awareness to the situation by, for instance, knitting a river or getting involved, if you can. more on wateraid, here.