Pillows [en]

There is a lady in her fifties who lives in the building opposite mine. Almost every morning, I see her put the pillows at the window to air them.

First, a piece of cloth to protect them from any dirt which might be living on the window-sill. Pillow number one. Pat it. Turn it over. Pat the second side. Pillow number two. Pat, turn, pat. Place next to pillow number one. Pillows three and four, on top of the first two. She takes her time. Always the exact same gestures. And then the night-gown. Shake, shake, imprison between pillows three and four, overlapping slightly for the purpose.

She comes back some time later, brings in the pillows, pulls the curtains – arranging the folds with care – and closes the window.

She never smiles. She doesn’t look happy. She doesn’t even really look there. I wonder what her life is.

CSS Discoveries [en]

I don’t know if everybody is aware of this (maybe it’s normal behaviour), but I thought I’d share my recent discoveries (as they caused me to bang my head against the wall and tear a few handfulls of hair out until I understood).

  1. clear: both – seems to ignore absolutely positioned divs, which means that if you are using {clear: both} to push your div to the bottom of the page, and that the “longest” div on your page is absolutely placed, you might not get the desired result.
  2. margin-top – seems to be ignored by ie5mac when applied to a floating div. Depending on the situation, you can try replacing margin-top by padding-top (if the div has no background or border, and all you really want to do is shift the contents downwards).

Hypothesis [en]

As you might have noticed by peeking at the sidebar, I’m currently reading The Web of Belief (W.V.O. Quine & J.S. Ullian). It is a little study of rational belief. What makes us believe this or that is true? How are our beliefs held together? What makes us give up one belief for another?

Truth and even reasonable beliefs cannot be deduced solely from observation or self-evident truths. In science as well as everyday life, we frame hypotheses to help hold together our web of beliefs. A hypothesis would explain, if it were true, some things that we already believe.

Hypothesis, where successful, is a two-way street, extending back to explain the past and forward to predict the future. What we try to do in framing hypotheses is to explain some otherwise unexplained happenings by inventing a plausible story, a plausible description or history of relevant portions of the world.

Five virtues count in favor of a hypothesis:

  • conservatism of existing beliefs
  • modesty – as opposed to extravagance
  • simplicity
  • generality
  • refutability

I find these are interesting criteria to measure one’s beliefs about the world upon.

Funny [en]

If you have a cat (even if you don’t), you’ll probably appreciate this Mapping of a Cat’s Brain. Bagha fits the portrait perfectly.

I first saw this brain map in India. There is a similar one for the dog – but unfortunately I was unable to find it online. Side-by-side, they’re hilarious, trust me!

Culture Shock and Virus [en]

When I started writing about my indian experience (it was a question of survival at the time) I jotted down a lot of notes about my culture shock. A compilation of all the little cultural differences that I noticed during my first weeks. Taken separately, these little things seem what they are – little. Together, they add up to create a big nasty shaking feeling: the so-called culture shock.

I was using Internet Cafés at that time (there were lots of them!), and at one point all my diskettes stopped working. That was after xoom.com had deleted the first version of my site, and Mythun‘s hard drive with all my backup data on it crashed.

Now that I’ve finally laid a hand on the culture shock notes I had managed to type up, my beloved anti-virus program started flashing and blinking and beeping (well no, it didn’t do that, since I don’t have a soundcard) – in short, telling me the file is infected. I cleaned it, and you can look forward to some more reading in a couple of days. Thank you, Inoculate PE!

Maybe that explains one or two things… hmm. Well, while you wait or run your anti-viruses, I’m going back to my greek philosophers.

India [en]

Oh, and if you enjoyed my logbook (well, even if you didn’t!), be sure to check out Eric Jain’s account of his travels there. He didn’t stay quite as long as I did, but he traveled much more – there are pictures and a map of his journey to keep you on track.

Web Gems [en]

Dug out of the web mine for you, I can’t remember exactly how or when.

While I’m here, here are a few sites that I visit rather regularly (but maybe not everyday).

  • cannboys: he walks upside down in Australia
  • bwg: the big white guy lives in Hong Kong
  • harrumph: Heather always has something to say
  • frequent ramblings: Ben does more than demystify geek jargon – the more you dig, the more you’ll get.

Groan [en]

Last night I installed IE6. I thought I was installing it alongside IE5.5 – I wanted both the browsers on my system. After reboot, I realized IE6 had been installed over IE5.5, so I uninstalled it.

Now, in Outlook Express, I get emails with blank senders (some of them, not all), and my mailing list sorting rules aren’t working anymore.

And of course my news server has been down for days so I can’t leave piles of messages on usenet to see if anybody else has the same problems…