HMB, AgitÁgueda, Aveiro face


"I want to call mother in that hospital, what's the number?"
"Get in,” I said. "You can’t call that number"
"Why?”
"Get in and slam the door.”
She got in and slammed the door. The old garage man beamed at her. I swung onto the highway.
"Why can’t I call my mother if I want to?”
“Because,” I answered, “your mother is dead.»

In the gay town of Lepingville I bought her four books of comics, a box of candy, a box of sanitary pads, two cokes, a manicure set, a travel clock with a luminous dial, a ring with a real topaz, a tennis racket, roller skates with white high shoes, field glasses, a portable radio set, chewing gum, a transparent raincoat, sunglasses, some more garmentsswooners, shorts, all kinds of summer frocks. At the hotel we had separate rooms, but in the middle of the night she came sobbing into mine, and we made it up very gently. You see, she had absolutely nowhere else to go.
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Campeonato Nacional Jovens Xadrez, Luso link


In one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, Walter Mischel and his students exposed four-year-old children to a cruel dilemma. They were given a choice between a small reward (one Oreo), which they could have at any time, or a larger reward (two cookies) for which they had to wait 15 minutes under dificult conditions. They were to remain alone in a room, facing a desk with two objects: a single cookie and a bell that the child could ring at any time to call in the experimenter and receive the one cookie. As the experiment was described: “There were no toys, books, pictures, or other potentially distracting items in the room. The experimenter left the room and did not return until 15 min had passed or the child had rung the bell, eaten the rewards, stood up, or shown any signs of distress.”
The children were watched through a one-way mirror, and the iilm that shows their behavior during the waiting time always has the audience roaring in laughter. About half the children managed the feat of waiting for 15 minutes, mainly by keeping their attention away from the tempting reward. Ten or fifteen years later, a large gap had opened between those who had resisted temptation and those who had not. The resisters had higher measures of executive control in cognitive tasks, and especially the ability to reallocate their attention effectively As young adults, they were less likely to take drugs. A significant difference in intellectual aptitude emerged: the children who had shown more self-control as four-year-olds had substantially higher scores on tests of intelligence.
Thinking, fast and slow - Daniel Kahneman

SCORPIUS, Barra, Aveiro link


It wasn’t until Handwerker came up with a clever new ploy that his hot dogs really started selling. He recruited doctors from a nearby hospital to stand by his shop eating his hot dogs while wearing their white coats and stethoscopes. Because people place a high value on physicians, customers figured if doctors were eating there, the food had to be good. So they soon started buying from Handwerker, and his “Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs” took off. It makes you wonder just how many times
Sway - Ori Brafman, Rom Brafman

Vela Barra Aveiro

An officer with a partner is no safer than an officer on his own. Just as important, two-officer teams are more likely to have complaints filed against them. With two officers, encounters with citizens are far more likely to end in an arrest or an injury to whomever they are arresting or a charge of assaulting a police officer. Why? Because when police officers are by themselves, they slow things down, and when they are with someone else, they speed things up. “All cops want two-man cars,” says de Becker. “You have a buddy, someone to talk to. But one-man cars get into less trouble because you reduce bravado. A cop by himself makes an approach that is entirely different. He is not as prone to ambush. He doesn’t charge in. He says, ‘I’m going to wait for the other cops to arrive.’ He acts more kindly. He allows more time.”
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

WETRUST, AgitÁgueda, Aveiro face

Gottman has found, in fact, that the presence of contempt in a marriage can even predict such things as how many colds a husband or a wife gets; in other words, having someone you love express contempt toward you is so stressful that it begins to affect the functioning of your immune system. “Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community. The big gender difference with negative emotions is that women are more critical, and men are more likely to stonewall. We find that women start talking about a problem, the men get irritated and turn away, and the women get more critical, and it becomes a circle. But there isn’t any gender difference when it comes to contempt. Not at all.” Contempt is special. If you can measure contempt, then all of a sudden you don’t need to know every detail of the couple’s relationship.
Blink - Malcolm Gladwell

Ria de Aveiro, Costa Nova

o baterista de Jazz David Aldridge aborda estes temas num livro intitulado Rhythm Man:
Comecei a tocar percussão nos tabliers dos automóveis seguindo os ritmos, deixando-me ir com eles, enquanto não me saía dos ouvidos [...] O ritmo e a síndrome de Tourette combinaram-se para mim desde o primeiro dia em que descobri que fazer bateria do tampo de uma mesa me permitia disfarçar os movimentos que me sacudiam as mãos, as pernas e o pescoço [...] Esta maneira de disfarçar que eu acabava de descobrir fazia-me controlar a minha energia solta, canalizando-a numa corrente ordenada [...] Esta «explosão autorizada» levava-me a encontrar grandes reservas de sons e de sensações físicas, e fez-me compreender que tinha nisso, diante de mim, o meu destino. Seria um homem do ritmo.
Musicofilia Oliver Sacks

Apanha amêijoa, Ria de Aveiro

Here’s how Nisbett and Cohen explain the cultural differences. Cultures of honor, such as the American South, are characterized by a common point of origin. They develop in situations where individuals have to take the law into their own hands because there is no formal law in place to guard against competitors who can steal valuable resources. A psychology of violence emerges. You can steal domestic herding animals (cattle, goats, horses, sheep), but you can’t steal farming crops-you, of course, could steal some potatoes or carrots, but not enough to make a serious dent in the owner’s resources. Cultures of honor therefore tend to develop among herding peoples, not farmers with crops. Many of these cultures have emerged over history and across the continents, including such herding peoples as the Zuni Indians of North America, the Andalusians of southern Spain, Kabyle of Algeria, Sarakatsani of Greece, and Bedouins of the Middle East.
Moral Minds, Marc D. Hauser

AgitÁgueda, Aveiro link

Condon spent a year and a half on that short segment of film, until, finally, in his peripheral vision, he saw What he had always sensed was there: “the wife turning her head exactly as the husband’s hands came up.” From there he picked up other micromovements, other patterns that occurred over and over again, until he realized that in addition to talking and listening, the three people around the table were also engaging in what he termed “interactional synchrony.” Their conversation had a rhythmic physical dimension. Each person would, within the space of one or two or three 1/45 th-of-a-second frames, move a shoulder or cheek or an eyebrow or a hand, sustain that movement, stop it, change direction, and start again. And what’s more, those movements were perfectly in time to each person’s own words -emphasizing and underlining and elaborating on the process of articulation -so that the speaker was, in effect, dancing to his or her own speech. At the same time the other people around the table were dancing along as well, moving their faces and shoulders and hands and bodies to the same rhythm. It’s not that everyone was moving the same way, any more than people dancing to a song all dance the same way. It’s that the timing of stops and starts of each person’s micromovements -the jump and shifts of body and face were perfectly in harmony. Subsequent research has revealed that it isn’t just gesture that is harmonized, but also conversational rhythm. When two people talk, their volume and pitch fall into balance. What linguists call speech rate -the number of speech sounds per secondequalizes. So does what is known as latency, the period of time that lapses between the moment one speaker stops talking and the moment the other speaker begins. Two people may arrive at a conversation with very different conversational patterns. But almost instantly they reach a common ground. We all do it, all the time. Babies as young as one or two days old synchronize their head, elbow, shoulder, hip, and foot movements with the speech patterns of adults. Synchrony has even been found in the interactions of humans and apes. It’s part of the way we are hardwired.
The tipping point - Malcom Gladwell

Aveiro - Portugal, campeão europeu 2016 face


The historian William Cronon, nom whose book Changes in the Land these quotations are taken, concludes: Indian burning promoted the increase of exactly those species whose abundance so impressed English colonists: elk, deer, beaver, hare, porcupine, turkey, quail, ruffed grouse, and so on. When these populations increased, so did the carnivorous eagles, hawks, lynxes, foxes, and wolves. In short, Indians who hunted game animals were not just taking the ‘unplanted bounties of nature’; in an important sense, they were harvesting a foodstuff which they had consciously been instrumental in creating. When later generations of European colonists began to penetrate into the Midwest of North America, they came across a very different landscape: the prairies. The endless open spaces, inhabited by large herds of buffalo, seemed to them to be primeval. However, the nature of this landscape was largely the result of the burning practices of Indian hunters, who had been systematically burning down tracts of forest in order to create more grassland for buffaloes and other herbivores. As the historian Stephen Pyne observes in his book Fire in America, ‘except for the High Plains, where the short grass expanses were more or less determined by climate, nearly all these grasslands were created by man, the product of deliberate, routine frring’.Whenever, in our own time, a piece of prairieland was left to itself instead of being subjected to regular burning and grazing, the grasses were soon overgrown by trees and the prairie spontaneously reconverted to forest.
Fire and civilization - Johan Goudsblom

A RTP anterior ao 25 de Abril era um medium paradoxal. Por um lado, cumpria por inteiro nos noticiários a função de megafone do regime salazarista-marcelista. O próprio chefe do Governo, Marcelo Caetano, apologista da TV, usava a seu bel-prazer a RTP, que ajudara a criar, com as suas Conversas em Família, que não eram nem conversas nem em família, antes prelecções, em forma de aulas de cátedra para o povo. Antes dele, Salazar desconfiara da TV, com razão, pois o medium podia facilmente destruir o seu mito, a custo construído, de ditador à distância. Defensor da forma de comunicação do medium, Caetano não discursava, como fizera Salazar, antes simulava “conversar” com alguém que, todavia, não intervinha na “conversa”. As prelecções políticas do chefe do Governo terão criado um efeito contrário ao desejado: ao “naturalizarem” o primeiro-ministro, tomavam-no vulnerável. Ao querer distinguir-se de Salazar, Caetano enfraquecia a aura de distância e de génio solitário que o seu antecessor criara. Por outro lado, com liberdade de escolha dos programas (não se comparava com a TV dos regimes de tipo soviético), a TV portuguesa abria horizontes aos espectadores. As séries estrangeiras mostravam outros mundos, culturas, regimes, amiúde mais livres. Os programas portugueses, mesmo se apolíticos, eram instâncias dialógicas; o diálogo contradizia, pela sua mera existência, a unicidade e a verticalidade da mensagem política do regime. Nesse sentido, Zip-Zip foi uma pequena revolução comunicacional. Era gravado em “falso directo” perante uma audiência ao vivo, no formato hoje chamado talk show, e apresentado dias depois. Pelo humor de Raul Solnado, falava de questões de actualidade, não directamente políticas.
Eduardo Cintra Torres, A Televisão e o Serviço Público

Sean Riley & The Slowriders, Vagueira face


Antes do século XX, a versão fundamentalista do islamismo dos salafitas era pouco atractiva fora do deserto arábico. Já não é assim. Os que se dedicam à difusão do salafismo, financiados pelos petrodólares da Arábia Saudita, tiveram um grande impacto na forma como muitos muçulmanos comuns interpretam hoje a sua fé, assim como na forma como se relacionam com as outras religiões e com os muçulmanos menos ortodoxos e os não-sunitas, em especial os xiitas. Controlado pelos extremistas islâmicos, este salafismo financiado pelo petróleo serviu como justificação ideológica para a jihad violenta, que tem por objectivo reinstaurar o califado islâmico do século VII, e impulsionou grupos como a al-Qaeda, o Hamas e as brigadas de bombistas suicidas sunitas do Iraque, da Palestina e do Paquistão.
A motivação saudita para exportar o islamismo salafita tornou-se ainda maior depois de radicais fundamentalistas terem desafiado as credenciais muçulmanas da família saudita no poder ao assumirem o controlo da Grande Mesquita de Meca em 1979 o ano em que, por coincidência, se deu a revolução iraniana e houve um elevado aumento dos preços do petróleo. Como Lawrence Wright sublinha na sua história sobre a al-Qaeda,A Torre da Derasosrego':
O ataque à Grande Mesquita (...) despertou a família real para a efectiva possibilidade de uma revolução. A lição que a família retirou daquele impasse sangrento é que apenas poderia proteger-se contra extremistas islâmicos dando-lhes mais poder. (...) Consequentemente, os muttawa, vigilantes religiosos subsidiados pelo governo, tornaram-se uma presença esmagadora no Reino, vagueando pelos centros comerciais e restaurantes, perseguindo os homens para irem à mesquita nas horas da oração e garantindo que as mulheres estavam devidamente cobertas.
Não contente com a opressão, no seu próprio país, do mais pequeno grau de liberdade religiosa, o governo saudita partiu para a evangelização do mundo islâmico, utilizando os milhares de milhões de rials ao seu dispor através do imposto religioso - o zakat - para construir centenas de mesquitas e universidades c milhares de escolas religiosas em todo o mundo, com imãs wahhbita e professores. Assim, a Arábia Saudita, que representa apenas um por cento da população mundial muçulmana, apoiaria 90 por cento dos encargos de toda a religião, anulando as outras tradições islâmicas. A música desapareceu do Reino. A censura abafou a arte e a literatura; e a vida intelectual -que quase não teve possibilidade de florescer no jovem país atrofiou. A paranóia e o fanatismo ocupam naturalmente as mentes fechadas e receosas.

Quente, plano e cheio - Thomas L. Friedman

he also disapproved of whining because he understood that it is contagious and destructive. Comparing notes on how unfair or difficult or ridiculous something is does promote bonding-and sometimes that’s why griping continues, because it’s reinforcing an us-against-the-world feeling. Very quickly, though, the warmth of unity morphs to the sourness of resentment, which makes hardships seem even more intolerable and doesn’t help get the job done. Whining is the antithesis of expeditionary behavior, which is all about rallying the troops around a common goal.
An astronaut's guide to life on earth - Chris Hadfield