Lihtsalt 5 huvitavat postitust siit ja sealt

1. Milton Friedman eelistas elada loodussõbralikus keskkonnas ja hindas kõrgelt loodussõbralikust enda elumaja asukohas ja arhitektuuris. Samas blogis on muide üleval ka postitus George W. Bush'i farmi loodussõbralikkusest ja arhitektist, mis võib niimõndagi inimest üllatada.

2. Kui paljud eestlased teavad, et Europarlamendis toimub hääletamine jätkuvalt mitte elektrooniliselt, milleks on kõik eeldused muide olemas, vaid käega märku andes? EU Referendum vahendab hüperbürokraatia inertsust:

Graham Booth, one of the remaining UKIP MEPs, who avers that the well documented inaccuracies of the "show of hands" voting system in the European Parliament led him to make a call, last year, for full electronic voting, since the equipment is already in situ. That request, he says, was dismissed out of hand.
. . .
During voting on a report by Mr. Kaczmarek on "EU partnership in the Horn of Africa", amendment No. 5 was declared "Rejected" by the chairman Vidal Quadras, having assessed the show of hands "for" and "against" the amendment.

An electronic check then revealed that it had actually been APPROVED by no less than 567 votes to 17 (with 18 abstentions). Quadras blamed the MEPs for "not holding their hands high enough".

See oleks naljakas, kui see poleks nii masendavalt nõme!

3. Hiljuti avaldas Jerusalem Post ülevaatliku artikli Harvardis tehtud uurimusest The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict , mille autorid väidavad, et hiljutise Liibanoni ja Iisreali vahel peetud sõja - informatsiooni sõja - võitis Hizbullah:

"An open society, Israel, is victimized by its own openness," Marvin Kalb and Dr. Carol Saivetz of the Shorenstein Center of Harvard University concluded in their research paper, "The Israeli-Hezbollah War of 2006: The Media as a Weapon in Asymmetrical Conflict."

"A closed sect, Hizbullah, can retain almost total control of the daily message of journalism and propaganda," manipulating its image to the world.

Uurimus ei jäta tähelepanuta ka ajakirjanike tendentslikust ja valmisolekut lavastustes kaasa mängida selle nimel, et tulevikus oleks tagatud ligipääs infojagajate juurde. Kui teema huvitab, siis Richard North on natuke täpsemalt (nii 75 leheküljel) lahanud eelnevalt mainitud konflikti meediakajastust (PDF).

Eestlastele võiks antud teema huvi pakkuda juba ainuüksi sellepärast, et Eesti puhul on tegu avatud ühiskonnaga, kus meediat ei ole lihtne mingitest piirkondadest või sündmustest eemal hoida, samas kui Venemaal on meedia keskvalitsuse kontrolli all ja (välis)ajakirjaniku eemale jätmine Venemaal toimuvast võib tähendada olulisi piiranguid uudistele, mida ta saab kajastada ja seega tema võimele enda tööd teha.

4. Shaolini kung-fu kui zen budismi väljendus:

"If you're practicing Shaolin kung fu properly, it is a form of meditation," he said.

"It's just fast and hard meditation, instead of slow or sitting. And that's why many of those moves seem so strange -- because they're actually moves that were developed for meditation purposes as well as self-defense and not purely self-defense purposes."

Huvitav segu reportaazist, uurivast ajakirjandusest ja kultuuride segunemisest USAs.

5. Alati üllatavast Wikipediast võib leida ka vastuse - vähemalt vastuse alguse - küsimusele, kui kaua läheks ahvidel vaja aega, et hakkama saada mõne Shakespeare'i teosega:

One computer program run by Dan Oliver of Scottsdale, Arizona, according to an article in The New Yorker, came up with a result on August 4, 2004: After the group had worked for 42,162,500,000 billion billion years, one of the "monkeys" typed, “VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t . . ." The first 19 letters of this sequence can be found in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona". Other teams have reproduced 18 characters from "Timon of Athens", 17 from "Troilus and Cressida", and 16 from "Richard II".

A website entitled The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, launched on July 1, 2003, contained a Java applet that simulates a large population of monkeys typing randomly, with the stated intention of seeing how long it takes the virtual monkeys to produce a complete Shakespearean play from beginning to end. For example, it produced this partial line from Henry IV, Part 2, reporting that it took "2,737,850 million billion billion billion monkey-years" to reach 24 matching characters:
RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r"5j5&?OWTY Z0d…

Ja loomulikult on arvuti klaviatuur antud ka ahvidele, et näha, mis siis tegelikult juhtuma hakkab. Tulemused on võib-olla isegi ennustatavad:

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by "bashing the hell out of" the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it. The zoo's scientific officer remarked that the experiment had "little scientific value, except to show that the 'infinite monkey' theory is flawed". Phillips said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned "an awful lot" from it.

Vot!