Records de tardor

Maquiavelli

From this it arises that all the armed prophets conquered and the unarmed ones were ruined.

—The Prince, Maquiavelli (VI, pp. 25)

tr. Harvey C. Mansfield, 1998

Easy Street

Costumari (I)

A pagès, la mainada, per saber si el bon Jesuset els estima i si els Reis els portaran força coses, es posen un branquilló de gram a dins dels narius, i el fan bellugar al ritme de la següent cançoneta:

"Herbeta de Sant Tomàs, sang a terra, sang a terra; herbeta de Sant Tomàs, sang a terra, sang al nas." 

L'aspror de l'herbeta, en fregar aquesta per les mucoses, les excita i en fa rajar una goteta de sang, i la mainada fa tot el que sap perquè caigui damunt del vèrtex d'una creueta, feta damunt del sòl amb dues palletes. Si hi cau, és anunci de l'efecte desitjat i que els Reis seran generosos i portaran força coses, i si no cau al vèrtex de la creu, hom ho interpreta contràriament.

—Costumari Català Vol. I, Amades

(Edicions 62, 2005 – 1a ed. 1952)

Buscant a internet més informació sobre l'herbeta de Sant Tomàs, m'he trobat amb The Singular Beast: Jews, Christians and the Pig (de Claudine Fabre-Vassas) i un article que el cita. Lectura per dies, i dies, i dies... El folklore de la sang arreu del món (en especial a Europa: França, Catalunya, etc.) sembla tenir una íntima relació amb el porc com a animal "domèstic" i important font d'aliment, roba, etc. Tot i la seva gran utilitat per a la pagesia i societat en general durant la història, és el una de les bèsties amb pitjor reputació (brut, estúpid, golós...).

Aujourd’hui, beaucoup de chercheurs privilégient donc une explication culturelle.«  En 1966, Mary Douglas, une ­anthropologue britannique, a replacé les interdits du Lévitique [le troisième des cinq livres de la Torah] dans la logique d’une classification des animaux consommables, précise Claudine Fabre-Vassas. Pour les juifs, les mammifères jugés consommables sont caractérisés par le fait qu’ils ont la patte fendue et qu’ils ruminent. Or, le porc n’entre pas dans cette taxinomie  : il a la patte fendue, mais il ne rumine pas. Il est donc un hybride, une sorte d’aberration de la nature qui peut se révéler dangereuse.  » Dangereux pour les musulmans et les juifs, le porc est ­devenu un étranger pour les chrétiens et les athées  : dépouillé de ses atours mythologiques, le voilà aujourd’hui réduit à un simple «  produit animal  ».

—Le cochon, un mythe sur le gril

Anne Chemin, Le Monde 17.09.2015

Amades afegeix, al Costumari:

Hi ha una pràctica màgica, usada per molts pobles primitius de maneres molt diverses, encaminada a provocar la pluja, a base de regar el sòl amb sang humana o animal. El costum infantil n'és probablement una resta, cristianitzada per la creueta de palla.

Aristotle on the echo of time

We should take it, indeed, that pretty much everything else too has been discovered many times, or rather an unlimited number of times, in the long course of history.

—Politics, Aristotle (Book VII:10, 1329b1)

tr. C.D.C Reeve, Hackett 2017

Artistic Fancy

Just as every big building has its foundations deep in the earth, so, too, does the structure of human culture on which construction work was done by the millennia. In these dark chambers of the soul are the powers of imagination that once governed all mankind, the titanic family of old wishes and old dreams. When they break out of the depth, they emerge as architectural structures, paintings, poetry and music.

—From Beethoven to Shostakovich: The Psychology of the Composing Process, Max Graf

Philosophical Library, New York (1947)

Wagner

Before [I reached this stage] I had to master the skill of musical expression, much as one learns a language. But now I had thoroughly learnt the language of music; I had mastered it like a true mother tongue; and so I no longer needed to concern myself over formalities of expression in that which I had set forth: [expression] stood at my command wholly as I required it, to communicate a particular view or sensation from inner necessity. [...] From what has been said, the content of that which must be expressed by the word and tone poet becomes self-evident: it is the purely human, released from all convention.

—Richard Wagner, Drei Operndichtungen nebst einer Mittheilung an seine Freunde

tr. William Ashton Ellis

Müller and Schubert

"Ich träumt' in seinem Schatten
So manchen süßen Traum."

—Der Lindenbaum, Wilhelm Müller

from Winterreise, music by Schubert (D911)

Aristotle on "acquiring by doing"

But most people do not do these, but take refuge in theory and think they are being philosophers and will become good in this way, behaving somewhat like patients who listen attentively to their doctors, but do none of the things they are ordered to do. As the latter will not be made well in body by such a course of treatment, the former will not be made well in soul by such a course of philosophy.

—Ethics, Aristotle (1105b)

tr. David Ross, Oxford (2009)

Mirall trencat

No es queixava mai de la seva vida perquè, segons a quines hores, a tres passos del cavallet, sentia una escalfor al cor i una mena de bogeria al cervell que res del món no hauria pogut donar-li fora de la seva feina. Des del seu colomar, tot mirant l'estesa de terrats plens de roba blanca que la marinada feia¹ gronxar, pensava que no s'hauria volgut canviar amb ningú.

—Mirall trencat, Mercè Rodoreda (XIII)

Obres completes vol. 3, edicions62 (1984)

But how happy is a just man?

"Then if one turns it around and says how far the king is removed from the tyrant in truth of pleasure, he will find at the end of the multiplication that he lives 729 times more pleasantly, while the tyrant lives more disagreeably by the same distance."

—The Republic, Plato (Book IX, 587e)

tr. Allan Bloom, Basic Books (2016)

Nabokov on drafts

An artist should ruthlessly destroy his manuscripts after publication, lest they mislead academic mediocrities into thinking that it is possible to unravel the mysteries of genius by studying canceled readings. In art, purpose and plan are nothing; only the result counts.

—Introduction to Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (pp. 15), tr. Nabokov 1964

Plato on Philosophy

"Then, as it seems, this wouldn't be the twirling of a shell but the turning of a soul around from a day that is like night to the true day; it is that ascent to what is which we shall truly affirm to be philosophy."

—The Republic, Plato (Book VII, 521c)

tr. Allan Bloom, Basic Books (2016)

Russell's got it right

First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and writing, i.e. of advertising.

—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness (1935)

How to learn mathematics by reading Plato

Plato's writings are famous for their logically rigorous and conversational tone. For the mathematically-inclined out there, the dialogues resemble in many ways usual mathematical proof-writing. To be more specific, Plato begins with axioms (assumptions), and develops a purely logical argument¹ which he concludes with or without a contradiction.

For example, in the Republic (Book I, 331e) the idea of being just is elaborated upon. Beginning with an axiomatic constructions following Simonides:

Polemarchus: "That it is just to give to each what is owed."

Then Plato (incarnated in Socrates' figure) demands clarification, like a good mathematician would do in sight of shaky grounds:

Socrates: "Well, it certainly isn't easy to disbelieve a Simonides [...] However, you, Polemarchus, perhaps know what on earth he means, but I don't understand."

Previously, Socrates had raised an issue with the current definition that Polemarchus defends:

Socrates: "Everyone would surely say that if a man takes weapons from a friend when the latter is of sound mind, and the friend demands them back when he is mad, one shouldn't give back such things, and the man who gave them back would not be just [...]."

In other words, the current definition gives an undesirable corollary. This hints at the fact that our definition of what is just is necessarily wrong! Socrates continues:

Socrates: "Then Simonides, it seems, means something different from this sort of thing when he says that it is just to give back what is owed."

And Polemarchus reveals something crucial:

Polemarchus: "Of course it's different, by Zeus, [...] For he supposed that friends owe it to friends to do some good and nothing bad."

Polemarchus has secretly instrumentalized the notion of what is just by setting a logical condition (not an obvious one) on his argument; that is, that one owes to his friend if one has something that belongs to him and that something shall be used to do some good. But we never agreed on that, and we haven't even defined what it is for some action to be good or bad! Moreso, Socrates poses an interesting question:

Socrates: "Now, what about this? Must we give back to enemies whatever is owed to them?"

Hence Polemarchus faces the need to twist his definition around, forcing it to adjust to our desirable conclusions: we shall not give back to enemies what is owed to them, save for "some harm", obviously! Hence Polemarchus adds another condition to being just, to giving back: that it must be "fitting". To summarize:

Definition: To be just is to give back what one owes, assuming the following conditions hold:
   (1) One has something that belongs to someone else,
   (2) What is given back shall be used to do some good, and
   (3) It must be fitting for that specific "someone else".

Whew! In any case, Socrates eventually causes the definition to be "depurated":

Polemarchus: "[...] I no longer know what I did mean. However, it is still my opinion that justice is helping friends and harming enemies."

This is easier to handle, in terms of deriving logical conclusions from it. Socrates asks for clarification yet again:

Socrates: "Do you mean by friends those who seem to be good to an individual, or those who are, even if they don't seem to be, and similarly with enemies?" [...] "But don't human beings make mistakes about this, so that many seem to them to be good although they are not, and vice versa?"

Polemarchus: "They do make mistakes." 

Socrates: "So for them the good are enemies and the bad are friends?"

Polemarchus: "It looks like it."

Socrates: "Yet the good are just and such as not to do injustice?"

Polemarchus: "True."

Socrates: "Then, according to your argument, it's just to treat badly men who have done nothing unjust?" 

A Q.E.D. or ∎ would finish off this section well enough, for all I know! Polemarchus struggles with accepting that his definition is essentially wrong:

Polemarchus: "Not at all, Socrates, [...] For the argument seems to be bad."

Socrates finally suggests, again like a good mathematician, to fix our definitions:

Socrates: "[...] Let's change what we set down at the beginning. For I'm afraid we didn't set down the definition of friend and enemy correctly." 

Let us recap. It all began with an apparently harmless assumption, which in fact required further clarification and detail. In mathematical terms, this is equivalent to stating an axiom with "undefined" vocabulary, like postulating the existence of the real numbers without defining number first. After adequate adjustments were made (sometimes, as is the case, a clear sign of bad foundations), the axiom was restated in a much more succinct form. This reduced form finally allows us to transparently derive an "undesirable conclusion" from it, a logical fallacy in technical terms.

This is in fact a dialectical version of "proving the inconsistency of a theory". As far-removed as this might seem, we encounter such fallacious arguments every single day on TV, newspapers, discussions, and a long etcetera. Reading Plato can help mathematicians the same way it can help regular folk in their daily lives: freeing us all from the tyranny of words.

Salvador Giner sobre Catalunya

Tenemos tres dimensiones que no sabemos poner juntas. Política, económica y cultural. Somos una vieja nación europea. Tenemos más de mil años pero somos una región económica española, integrada totalmente y, después, somos una autonomía política. En otros países, estas tres dimensiones encajan. Aquí, no. Esto nos hace esquizofrénicos. Genera buenos poetas y gente melancólica, o también gente que confunde el Barça con la patria, y es momentáneamente feliz.

—Salvador Giner, entrevista ElDiario.es

Blake's songs

And we are put on earth a little space
That we may learn to bear the beams of love.

—William Blake, Songs of Innocence (5. The Little Black Boy), 1789.

Clarifications on Assembly

Over the span of the function’s execution, EBP is pointing to the current stack frame making it possible to access local variables and function arguments via EBP+offset. 

It is also possible to use ESP for the same purpose, although that is not very convenient since it changes frequently. The value of the EBP could be perceived as a frozen state of the value in ESP at the start of the function’s execution.

-- Dennis Yurichev, Reverse Engineering for Beginners (1.9, p. 68)

Mendelssohn

It was an easy step to associate Mendelssohn with those Victorian attributes from which the new century tried to distance itself—shallowness, hypocrisy, prudishness, and all the rest. And so, by 1911, for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Donald F. Tovey felt compelled to update the reprinted, eu­logizing Mendelssohn article from the tenth edition by W. S. Rockstro, a student of the composer in Leipzig during the 1840s, by noting that “Mendelssohn’s reputation, except as the composer of a few inexplica­bly beautiful and original orchestral pieces, has vanished”.

—Todd, R. Larry. 2003. Mendelssohn : A Life in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Time and the River

 Zeus, who guided mortals to be wise,has established his fixed law--wisdom comes through suffering.Trouble, with its memories of pain,drips in our hearts as we try to sleep,so men against their willlearn to practice moderation. 

    -- Agamemnon (from the Oresteia), Aeschylus

These lines came to my mind immediately after a quick RMA brought back a fully functional, but completely empty laptop. It had decided to shut down and refuse to charge, and fear was all I knew from that point on. Bottom line; I had refused (by means of laziness) to properly backup my files, I lost them, and willed to never let that happen again.

My current backup solution is simple; a single online copy, hosted on Backblaze's B2 cloud service. It is a fantastic service, with extremely good prices and integrated in many third-party programs, for Linux users like me. I found out about rclone a while ago (written on top of rsync) and decided to give it a try: after battling over encrypted buckets, i managed to upload most of my important files.

The next step was to make backups automatic, otherwise I'd be missing the whole point. So i found out about cron (protip: use corntab to validate your time formatting) and its smart formatting:

00 22 * * * /home/scripts/backup.sh 

(this script runs every day at 22:00).

However, my computer is not turned on 24/7; there must be a way for the computer to run 'lagging' tasks. And here comes anacron, which deals exactly with that. By default anacron runs, and most importantly, runs scripts as root, so I had to create my own local 'anacrontab'.

mkdir ~/.anacron
mkdir ~/.anacron/cron.{hourly,daily,weekly,monthly} ~/.anacron/spool
touch ~/.anacron/anacrontab

Now edit this new 'anacrontab' (replace 'your-user' by the obvious thing):

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/home/aszkid/bin
HOME=/home/your-user
LOGNAME=your-user
# period  delay  job-id  command
1  5   your-user.cron.daily    nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.daily
7  10  your-user.cron.weekly   nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.weekly
@monthly  5  your-user.cron.monthly  nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.monthly

This file will execute all scripts, at their due time, under each of 'cron.daily' etc. Protip: do not write file extensions! For some reason (it might be in the doc), anacron refuses to run files with extensions (e.g. '.sh' files).

And finally we edit our usual user 'crontab' to run anacron through 'crontab -e', and add the following lines:

01 * * * * /usr/sbin/anacron -t /home/your-user/.anacron/anacrontab -S /home/your-user/.anacron/spool
01 * * * * nice run-parts /home/your-user/.anacron/cron.hourly

Reboot (to be safe), and you're good to go.

Et c'est la Nuit

La lune est rouge au brumeux horizon;
Dans un brouillard qui danse, la praire
S'endort fumeuse, et la grenouille crie
Par les joncs verts où circule un frisson; 

Les fleurs des eaux referment leurs corolles;
Des peupliers profilent aux lointains,
Droits et serrés, leur spectres incertains;
Vers les buissons errent les lucioles; 

Les chats-huants s'éveillent, et sans bruit
Rament l'air noir avec leurs ailes lourdes,
Et le zénith s'emplit de lueurs sourdes.
Blanche, Vénus émerge, et c'est la Nuit.

L'heure du berger, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896) 

Echoes of a conversation on tradition

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
  That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
  Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
  Where down the blind are driven.

-- Eros Turannos, Edwin Arlington Robinson 

Schoenberg y la evolución musical

Sin duda, nuestros antepasados consideraron perfectos los modos eclesiásticos, lo mismo que nosotros el mayor y el menor; el número siete tiene tanta fuerza simbólica como el dos, y en vez de las dos esferas de expresión que hoy admite la teoría ellos consagraron con su fantasía probablemente siete. Si a los antiguos se les hubiese mostrado el futuro --es decir, que cinco de sus siete modos iban a desaparecer, quedando solo dos, como hoy se nos muestra que nuestros modos mayor y menor se reducirán a uno solo--, ellos hubieran con toda certeza argumentado en contra de la misma manera que lo hacen nuestros contemporáneos; hubieran hablado de desorden, de anarquía, de carencia de caracterización, de empobrecimiento de medios artísticos y de cosas semejantes, como hoy hacen, lamentándose, todos aquellos a los que no gustan los resultados de la evolución musical actual porque prefieren quedarse sentados calentitos junto a su estufa, sin querer comprender que en todo progreso, si se quiere ganar algo en alguna dirección, hay que perder algo en otra.

Harmonielehre, Schoenberg (1910)

Capítulo V

Thank you Mary O'Hara

"[...] Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,
Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy;
Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,
And bring back the features which joy used to wear.
Long, long be my heart with such memories filled!
Like the vase in which roses have once been distilled--
You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,
But the scent of the roses will hang round still."

-- "Farewell!--but whenever", Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

"On the other hand, they say that while art does brighten and vivify the unillumined and withered dryness of the Concept, does reconcile its abstractions and its conflict with reality, does enrich the Concept with reality, a purely intellectual treatment [of art] removes this means of enrichment, destroys it, and carries the Concept back to its simplicity without reality and to its shadowy abstractness."

-- Hegel,  Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Arts

Volume I, p. 6 

On the matter of phylologie

"philology, n." – Phylologie, loue of much babling.

–H. Cockeram, English Dictionary (1623)

Admittedly anachronistic, but funny nonetheless; 'philology' was understood as 'love of talk or argument' as per OED, rather than (broadly speaking) the 'study of literature'.

La nostra riquesa oculta

Carlyle donava, per Shakespeare, les Índies. Quan Espanya va vendre a Alemània les illes Palaos i Carolines, un crític d'allà va dir que la seva nació hauria fet més bon negoci comprant, pel mateix preu, un poeta... És riquesa. Riquesa oculta, miserablement oculta, aquesta nostra.

-- La riquesa oculta, Glosa11-1-1906, Eugeni d'Ors

WIFI and Hell

For lack of time, the gist of this whole affair is described as follows: if you have a Realtek Wireless Card on your computer (most probably, on your laptop) and your Linux distribution doesn't seem to play well with it (no WIFI, connection drops randomly after a few minutes, etc), go ahead and do this:

1. Clone 'rtlwifi_new' package from GitHub -- these drivers are polished and work much better than the ones built in the kernel
2. make
3. sudo modprobe -rv rtl(driver)
4. sudo make install
5. sudo modprobe -v rtl(driver)

In my case, my WIFI card is the model RTL8821AE, so the driver's full name is 'rtl8821ae'. God bless the Holy Open Source brotherhood of programmers!

Escoltant... [26/01/17]

• Grandes ciclos, Cuerda y órgano (03/01/17) -- RTVE Radio Clásica
• pastoral en fa mayor (lovely)
• benedictus en re-bemol mayor (choral)
• te deum en la menor
• (Reger, 12 piezas para organo)
• Greisengesang D778 (Schubert, orch. Reger, text by Rückert)
• "Und nur dem Duft der Träume gib Dach und Fach!"

Escoltant... [25/01/17]

• Solo jazz, Jimi Hall revivido (10/01/17) -- RTVE Radio Clasica
• Solo jazz, John Coltrane en el Village Vanguard (09/01/17) -- RTVE Radio Clasica