domingo, 30 de agosto de 2015

10 consejos del Papa Francisco para vivir feliz ;-)

Las religiones no me convencen, más concretamente las organizaciones religiosas no me convencen nada…
Aún así, se basan en personas y con todo lo que pueda haber de "marketing"… este Papa Francisco sólo puede caerme bien (de momento).



10 consejos del Papa Francisco para vivir feliz - Pijamasurf

1. Vive y deja vivir
2. Sé generoso con los demás
3. Procede con calma
4. El sentido de ocio saludable
5. Los domingos son días de asueto
6. Encontrar formas innovadoras de crear trabajos dignos para los jóvenes
7. Respeto y cuidado con la naturaleza
8. Deja de ser negativo
9. No hagas proselitismo, respeta las creencias de los demás
10. Trabaja por la paz

La complejidad de educar (ideas de Donald Winnicott, EN)

La educación, en su más amplio sentido, es esencial para el futuro:
How do you build a better world? There are so many well-known, urgent places you might start: malaria, carbon emissions, tax evasion, the drug trade, soil erosion, water pollution…Donald Winnicott deserves his place in history because of the dramatic simplicity of his approach. He proposed that the happiness and future satisfaction of the human race depended ultimately not so much on external political issues, but on something far closer to home: the way parents bring up their children. All the sicknesses of humanity were, in his view, in essence consequences of a failure of parental provision. Fascism, delinquency, rage, misogyny, alcoholism, these were only the symptoms of poor childhoods that the collective would have to pay for. The road to a better society begins in the nursery.
Love in Winnicott's writings: 
It’s about a surrender of the ego, a putting aside of one’s own needs and assumptions, for the sake of close, attentive listening to another, whose mystery one respects, along with a commitment not to get offended, not to retaliate, when something ‘bad’ emerges, as it often does when one is close to someone, child or adult.

Donald Winnicott | The Book of Life
And yet Winnicott’s brand of psychoanalysis was, on closer inspection, peculiarly English. He wrote pragmatic, homespun prose, expressing the deepest ideas in plain, unadorned language. There was no German incomprehensibility or abstraction here. There was also a characteristic English modesty about what he saw as the point of child psychoanalysis. He wanted to help people to be, in his famous formulation, ‘good enough’ parents; not brilliant or perfect ones (as other nations might have wished), but just OK. And that was because he displayed, to a high degree, the downbeat, modest, realistic, temperament which is the particular glory of the English mind.
Winnicott begins by impressing on his audience how psychologically fragile an infant is. It doesn’t understand itself, it doesn’t know where it is, it is struggling to stay alive, it has no way of grasping when the next feed will come, it can’t communicate with itself or others. It is an undifferentiated, unindividuated mass of competing drives. It isn’t a person. The early months are hence an immense struggle. Winnicott’s work never loses sight of this, and he therefore repeatedly insists that it is those around the infant who have to ‘adapt’, adapt so as to do everything to interpret the child’s needs and not impose demands for which the child is not ready.A child who has adapted to the world too early, or who has had inappropriate demands made upon it, will be a prime candidate for mental problems, just as health is the result of an environment that can respond appropriately to the child, which can keep elements of reality at bay, until the small creature is ready.But though the infant might sometimes want to kill and destroy, it is vital for the parents to allow rage to expend itself, and for them not in any way to be threatened or moralistic about ‘bad’ behaviour: ‘If a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has destroyed everyone and everything, and yet the people round him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real, that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from each other.’Winnicott interpreted violent feelings against parents as a natural aspect of the maturational process: ‘For a child to be brought up so that he can discover the deepest part of his nature, someone has to be defied, and even at times hated, without there being a danger of a complete break in the relationship.’However, there might be parents who could not tolerate too much bad behaviour and would demand compliance too early and too strictly. This would lead, in Winnicott’s formulation, to the emergence of a ‘False Self’ – a persona that would be outwardly compliant, outwardly good, but was suppressing its vital instincts; who was not able to properly balance up its social with its destructive sides and that couldn’t be capable of real generosity or love, because it hadn’t been allowed fully to explore selfishness and hate. Only through proper, attentive nurture would a child be able to generate a ‘True Self’.Winnicott had a special hatred for ‘people who are always jogging babies up and down on their knees trying to produce a giggle.’ This was merely their way of warding off their own sadness, by demanding laughter from a baby who might have very different things on its mind.The primordial act of parental health for Winnicott is simply to be able to tune out of oneself for a time in the name of empathising with the ways and needs of a small, mysterious, beautiful fragile person whose unique otherness must be acknowledged and respected in full measure.Winnicott called parenting: ‘the only real basis for a healthy society, and the only factory for the democratic tendency in a country’s social system.’Of course, there will be errors. Things go wrong in childhood. And that’s what psychoanalysis is for. In Winnicott’s eyes, the analyst in later years acts as a substitute parent, a proxy ‘good enough’ figure who ‘is in a position of the mother of an infant’. Good analysis has things in common with those early years. Here too, the analyst should listen without forcing the patient to get ‘better’ ahead of time. She shouldn’t force a cure down his or her throat, she should provide a safe place where bits of childhood that weren’t completed or went awry can be recreated and rehearsed. Analysis is a chance to fill in the missing steps.Since Winnicott’s death, we’ve collectively grown a little better at parenting. But only a little. We may spend more time with our children, we know in theory that they matter a lot, but we’re arguably still failing at the part Winnicott focused on: adaptation. We still routinely fail to suppress our own needs or stifle our own demands when we’re with a child. We’re still learning how to love our children – and that, Winnicott would argue, is why the world is still full of the walking-wounded, people of outward ‘success’ and respectability who are nevertheless not quite ‘real’ inside and inflict their wounds on others. We’ve a way to go until we get to be ‘good enough.’

jueves, 27 de agosto de 2015

11 libros a leer si quieres hacer política

Los 11 libros que deben leer los que pretenden hacer política - Pijamasurf



nidad). Esta lista está basada en esta otra, con unos aditamentos.
1. El príncipe, Nicolás Maquiavelo
2. Aristóteles, Política 
3. San Agustín de Hipona, La ciudad de Dios (426. d. C.)
4. Tomás de Aquino, ­Suma teológica (1596)
5. Montesquieu, Del espíritu de las leyes (1747)
6.  Tomás Moro, Utopía (1516)
7. John Locke, ­ Ensayo sobre el entendimiento humano (1690)
8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviatán (1651)
9. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, El contrato social
10. Adam Smith, La riqueza de las naciones (1776)
11. Denis Diderot, ­La Enciclopedia (1751)

miércoles, 26 de agosto de 2015

lunes, 24 de agosto de 2015

El encanto del lujo…

Despite the widespread availability of good quality cheap products (watches, handbags, cars…), there remains a remarkable appetite for extremely expensive versions of them…
Why We Continue to Love Expensive Things | The Book of Life

So the immediate question is: why would someone spend two hundred times more on a watch? The standard response at this point is to get rather severe, judgmental and censorious; and to assume that the only reason one might buy the expensive item is the desire to show off, to parade one’s affluence and to try to humiliate others. In short, buying it is a piece of aggressive self-assertion. This sort of analysis derives from our society’s folk memory of a stock character in fiction – the mean rich idiot –

This issue needs to be addressed urgently because it’s remarkably stressful to live in a society where luxury seems like a necessary route to a good life. The implicit philosophy of luxury goods is that the ingredients of fulfilment lie considerably outside an ordinary salary; which condemns a huge section of society to feelings of incompleteness. By definition ‘luxury’ is what 95% of the population either cannot, or can only just (with huge effort) afford. So there’s a genuine need to attack the brilliance with which luxury has managed to position itself as both central to life – yet unavailable. Luxury has a menacing, baffling position in relation to our ambitions. 
But we can suggest that the impulse to buy luxury goods doesn’t come from greed or the desire to humiliate others. … The love of luxury breeds in societies where it feels very dangerous to be average… It isn’t coincidental that the love of luxury has been particularly in evidence in societies where the average existence is a properly painful place to be. 
…certain places are rather inimical to luxury, that Rolex and Louis Vuitton, Prada and Aston Martin have done spectacularly badly in Denmark, a country which boasts the third highest level per capita income in the world and one of the most equal distributions of wealth anywhere.
The Danish case illustrates one large possible solution to the social problem of luxury. The desire for luxury is inversely related to the level of dignity of an average life; as dignity goes up, so the desire for luxury comes down. It was never really about greed, the love of luxury was an individual response to a political failure: the inability of governments to ensure that an average life could be a flourishing life. 
… 
…luxury isn’t just a fear of the average, it’s also a symptom of trust in authority, driven to a potentially excessive degree. 
But this trust can be usurped by the less deserving characters from ad agencies, who act a little like a malevolent supply teacher who work on a student’s credulity, exploiting his trust in authority, built up over years by a series of benign teachers. Our willingness to do what we’re assured is the right thing gets us into trouble when it’s hijacked by people who don’t really have our best interests at heart. 
Our love of luxury goods isn’t freakish or vainglorious. It is attuned to some genuine needs: the need not to be drawn into a degraded average existence and to follow the prestigious voices of authority, speaking to us from billboards and magazines.


Why We Hate Cheap Things | The Book of Life




















miércoles, 19 de agosto de 2015

El problema del “no fork available”

La gestión de memoria de OSX era buena. Como buen Unix que es, se lleva pensando y programando desde 1978, con lo que, si algo funciona bien, lo mejor es que no lo toques, sobre todo cuando es eficiente y hace su trabajo estupendamente. Pero llego Apple y su mania de “tocar” a ver si así se puede llevar el gato a su agua, mover el problema a su terreno, crear “su estándar” y que, a ser posible sea incompatible con el resto.Por suerte, esto se puede cambiar, aunque, desde Yosemite, no se puede hacer desde el propio comando ulimit. Si intentamos cambiar los parámetros desde el ulimit, aunque parece que funciona, veremos que no varian (curiosamente). Apple reinventando la rueda y la forma para no permitir al usuario que toque y modifique su propio sistema, gra-cias.
Curiosamente, si nos aburrimos y ponemos el siguiente comando:
launchctl limit
Veremos que… oh sorpresa, nos aparece lo mismo pero desde otra perspectiva: 
Es decir, Apple ha pasado del demonio de toda la vida que siempre ha funcionado bien y va como la seda para pasar a su propio sistema de demonios (de ahí el launchctl). Lo que nos da un olor a donde hay que tocar para modificarlo ya que el fichero del /etc/limit.conf pues curiosamente, ya no existe y no vale… ni siquiera si lo ponemos en /private/etc nuevo sitio para las configuraciones.
Pero, si vamos a la carpeta /Library/LaunchDaemons nos encontraremos con un fichero llamado limit.maxfiles.plist que justamente es un XML de configuración el cual ejecuta el demonio del launchctl y que… sorpresa sorpresa, los números corresponden a lo que el ulimit y el limit nos escupen. Yo, desde aquí, os recomiendo dejar un valor de 524288, quedando el fichero tal que así. 

Cómo tratar a las personas y obtener los mejores resultados

…magnífico @vorpalina como tantas veces.
Cómo tratar a las personas y obtener los mejores resultados | iniciativa vorpalina

A considerar:
  1. Toda persona sin excepción siempre lo es
  2. Toda persona es el resultado de lo que hace de forma repetida y de las personas que le rodean
  3. Toda persona busca sentirse sinceramente valorada
  4. Toda persona necesita tu confianza y confiar en tí
  5. A toda persona le interesa lo que ella piensa y no lo que tú piensas
  6. Toda persona solo quiere ser feliz
  7. Toda persona ama algo o a alguien
  8. Toda persona es el término medio entre lo que a tí te gustaría que fuera y lo que tú crees que es
  9. Toda persona lo ha pasado en algún momento bien y en algún momento mal
  10. Toda persona es útil para algo
  11. Toda persona tiene miedo
  12. Toda persona acierta unas veces y se equivoca otras

CEOs are often the last to know

 vía @DavidHeinemeier

At some point “unintended side effects” becomes “predictable outcomes”.

CEOs are often the last to know – Signal v. Noise
The only reliable way to get this sort of information is to ask. You cannot just extend the “open door” invitation, lean back in your executive chair, and think that you’ve done all you can.
Jeff, or a team he charges with finding facts (and not protecting egos or appearances), has to follow up on the leads, examine the stories, identify root causes, and propose sanctions and remedies. And Amazon has to be willing to accept that maybe some of its systems are producing consequences it does not desire, and that they should change.

martes, 18 de agosto de 2015

How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos (aeon)

 via @sgala… The gentrification of hacking is… well, perhaps a perfect hack. 
How yuppies hacked the hacker ethos – Brett Scott – Aeon  Brett en twitter: @Suitpossum
I’m going to stake a claim on the word though, and state that the true hacker spirit does not reside at Google, guided by profit targets. The hacker impulse should not just be about redesigning products, or creating ‘solutions’. A hack stripped of anti-conventional intent is not a hack at all. It’s just a piece of business innovation. 
The un-gentrified spirit of hacking should be a commons accessible to all. This spirit can be seen in the marginal cracks all around us. It’s in the emergent forms of peer production and DIY culture, in maker-spaces and urban farms. We see it in the expansion of ‘open’ scenes, from open hardware to open biotech, and in the intrigue around 3D printers as a way to extend open-source designs into the realm of manufacture. In a world with increasingly large and unaccountable economic institutions, we need these everyday forms of resistance. Hacking, in my world, is a route to escaping the shackles of the profit-fetish, not a route to profit. 
Go home, yuppies.

domingo, 9 de agosto de 2015

La manipulación de los colores en el cine y la publicidad

Qué es la realidad? Definitivamente, no la que el cine nos muestra. Con todo, estas manipulaciones también son útiles para acercarnos a una respuesta o al menos a una reflexión al respecto: si la realidad es tan fácil de intervenir, acaso no es solo que esta no admita una definición única, sino que quizá en su naturaleza está aceptar esas mismas intervenciones, hasta llegar a la versión que buscamos.
La manipulación de los colores en el cine y la publicidad para inducir emociones (explicada por un experto) – Pijamasurf

La realidad no es lo que parece. Paradójicamente, como nos parece la realidad es la única forma que tenemos de aprehenderla y comprenderla. Este es un problema viejo de la epistemología que paulatinamente ha transitado a casi cualquier disciplina que en algún punto de su desarrollo se ha enfrentado al llamado “problema de la realidad”. ¿En dónde reside esta? ¿En su dimensión objetiva o en la representación que nos hacemos de esta? 
Un ejemplo en donde esto es palpable (aunque no siempre evidente) es el cine. … parte del valor artístico del cine reside precisamente ahí: en la posibilidad de plasmar y compartir una cosmovisión, una subjetividad, por medio de recursos audiovisuales.
En este sentido, la manipulación del color se convierte en un elemento imprescindible de dicha narrativa. Como sabemos bien, los colores poseen cualidades que por distintas razones asociamos a emociones específicas, estados de ánimo, circunstancias y demás aristas de la realidad que encuentran vehículo y significación en ciertas tonalidades. Los cineastas saben bien esto (y no solo ellos) y lo aprovechan para situar en su audiencia en determinado êtat d’âme.
 
Hace unos días, en el sitio Co.Design, el colorista Dave Markun enlistó algunas estrategias mínimas que se utilizan… 
En un anuncio político, el candidato y su familia pueden aparecer en tonalidades sutilmente amarillas (amistosas), mientras que su oponente se mostrará en tonos azul oscuro (negativos y distantes). 
Rojo implica emociones fuertes –ira, pasión, amor– y, además, se utiliza para que hacer que la audiencia concentre su atención en un punto en específico. “Los primos del rojo –magenta y púrpura– son los unicornios del cine. Se tiende a aplicarlos a algo inusual”, dice Markun. 
Lo siniestro o desagradable se pinta en verde fluorescente, un color perturbador que hace lucir algo anormal o francamente feo. Sin embargo, cuando el verde se encuentra en donde debe, entonces inspira salud y felicidad. Por eso, cuando se le resta a una situación “real”, entonces esta parece seca y enferma… 
Los colores, por otro lado, también pueden utilizarse para recrear una realidad inexistente: flashbacks, sueños, distopías y más. En este caso la imaginación es quien muestra el camino, pero no menos cierto es que también existen ciertas reglas no escritas al respecto: a veces los recuerdos están teñidos de una pátina dorada,en otros casos el futuro es oscuro y sombrío
y los sueños se desvanecen en matices y transparencias
 
Si se trata de generar lugares físicos y no solo mentales, entonces, nos dice Markun, el turquesa y el naranja se encuentran entre los preferidos de los coloristas…

sábado, 8 de agosto de 2015

La revolución es discretamente individual

 "Yo soy otro tú, y no quiero ser tú. Solo así tú puedes ser otro yo."

La revolución es discretamente individual - Pijamasurf
Mientras aprendo a distinguir el territorio del mapa, me es más evidente nuestra unicidad. Entre más yo me asumo, mis fronteras se me revelan cada vez más tenues. Somos uno, pero no lo mismo. Impecables e infinitas manifestaciones de un mismo vacío. Entre más me observo y me hago responsable de todos mis yo’s y la pluralidad de sus manifestaciones, más impecablemente e íntegramente puedo ser yo. 
Al observar lo que es, puedo ser lo que soy, y permitir que todo siga fluyendo tal cual es, la suma de todas sus partes. Se trata de hacer no de buscar, actuar no reaccionar, compartir no vender, sumar no competir, y sobre todo de ser, no de pretender. 
Está(mos) sucediendo(nos) ahora. 
Somos al fin y al cabo solo la suma de nuestros actos. 
Solo el acto se vuelve trazo.

miércoles, 5 de agosto de 2015

6 Contrarian Business Views from Peter Thiel

 at @OpenViewVenture I have read some interesting (and unconventional) ideas from Peter Thiel.
6 Contrarian Business Views

1. There are no formulas for business, only pseudo-science.

It’s because every moment in the history of business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page won’t build a search engine. The next Mark Zuckerberg will not be building a social network. If you are copying these people, you are in some sense not learning from them.

The first answer that I believe, and this sort of pulls from the uniqueness of these companies, is that (in the opening sentence of Anna Karenina) that all happy families are alike. All unhappy families are unhappy in their own special way. I think the opposite is true of business. I think all happy companies are different. They’re doing something unique.


2. All unhappy companies are alike because they failed to escape the essential sameness of competition.

If you’re too focused on competing, maybe you’re losing sight of what’s really important.


3. There are companies that are competitive and there are companies that have monopolies.

If you are a one of a kind company, a happy company that’s doing something different, you are a monopoly. It is the goal of every founder, of every entrepreneur, it should be their goal to try to build a monopoly business.


4. Capitalism and competition are antonyms.
The people who don’t have monopolies pretend to have them. The people who have monopolies pretend not to have them. The apparent difference is quite small. The real difference is really big. That’s intellectually why we don’t understand this monopoly question.

I think there’s also a psychological part of this as well though that’s very subtle but is very important to understand where we are taught that competition is valuable. There’s this safety in crowds, that if a lot of people are trying to get something, it must be a good thing to do. If there’s a long line of people waiting to get in somewhere, you just get in line. You don’t even ask why people are standing in line.

… We’re taught to compete for all of the same credentials. If you’re on an athletic team in high school or college, you’re competing on things there. The competition has the effect of definitely making you better at that which you’re competing. If you spend years prepping for an SAT test, you will get better at taking the SAT test. If you’re on a swim team in high school, you’ll get better at swimming because you’re focused on beating the people around you. It always comes with this price of possibly losing sight of broader questions, of questions of what’s really valuable or what’s really important.


5. We’ve discovered most things already. If there are things we haven’t discovered. They’re super hard to figure out.

I suggest this trichotomy of three categories of conventions, things that everybody already knows to be true, mysteries that are almost impossibly hard to figure out, and things that are in between which I call secrets, things that are hard to figure out, nobody knows yet, but if you work at it you can figure it out. It’s my claim that a secret or some idiosyncratic body of knowledge is often at the core of all of these great businesses. It’s something you’re very passionate about learning about.


6. There will be two modes of progress in the 21st century — globalization (copying what works) and technology (discovering new things).

I think that in the 21st century there will be two modes of progress. One I sort of describe is globalization, copying things that work, going from one to end, horizontal or extensive growth. I always draw that on an x-axis. The other one is technology, vertical progress, discovering new things, going from zero to one. I draw that on a y-axis.

I always put globalization on the x-axis and technology on the y-axis in order to underscore how these things are not synonyms, even though they get used almost synonymously and interchangeably all the time. China today is the paradigm of globalization. It has a very straightforward plan for the next 20 years. It just must copy things that work. The US, Western Europe, Japan can skip a few steps and can avoid copying some of our bad ideas. It’s just straightforwardly all about globalization.

I think when you look over the last 200 years, there have been periods of globalization and periods of technology. They’ve been somewhat different in character. The 19th century was a period of enormous globalization and technological progress. They sort of went in tandem. It came to an end in 1914 with the First World War. Globalization sort of started to go in reverse. There was less trade, less connections between different parts of the world. Technology kept going very, very fast.


Today, we would talk about the developing and the developed world. The developing countries are those which are copying the developed world. This dichotomy of developing and developed is sort of a pro-globalization convergence theory of history where everybody will become more alike as globalization proceeds apace.

It is also a dichotomy that is somehow I find to be anti-technological. When we say that we’re living in the developed world in the US, western Europe, Japan, we are implicitly saying that we’re living in that part of the world where nothing new is going to happen, which is done, which is finished, which should be resigned to a long period of stagnation where the younger generation should not expect to be living lives any better than their parents.

I think this is a conception we should resist very, very strenuously. We should not accept this label that we’re living in the developed world. I think we should instead ask anew, how do we go about developing the so-called developed world?