My Praise to Amazon.com

This could seem a fan boy post but it's something different actually.
Here's why-  Without delving deeply into what's my "view", generally speaking I tend to see the market as a tool. A system of tools and procedures which emerged in human history as the most efficient way to regulate exchanges among humans. By exchanging goods and services humans can -theoretically- acquire advantages, something they need, the resources to reach a scope and so on. You can go on generalizing until reaching the concept of markets like a system to propel progress to the human race. Passing from theory to practice -very down to earth- and narrowing the scope of our lens, markets can be used by the agents to generate resources either by exploitation (of other agents) or by creating a wealth spyral sticking toPareto efficiency as much as they can.
If you're wondering what has all this to do with Amazon, then you should try to suppress your yawns and go on reading.
I'm an Amazon customer since several years and I have always kept a not-so-casual look to their evolution as a company. The technological advancement of their store is really interesting because while sticking to a simple layout (even if not so gorgeous or clean) in the years they introduced some functions which are now considered a must for mass market oriented web stores. Just think of the whish list, the product rate, the reviews, the recommendations, the goods tracking, the customer generated reviews and so on. If you take a closer look you will also realize that all these improvements aren't just decoys to lure consumers to buy products but are tools created to serve the users (here's a fundamental change of terms), as much as a good shop assistant (so rare a resource these days) could do.
Keeping on the same direction we find the Amazon Kindle, which represented if not the first, the most successful e-book reader device. They marketed 3 version of the Kindle in the U.S. so far and recently they introduced the last generation of the Kindle to several countries worldwide. Even if the device is not deprived of conception defects, it’s generally a well designed, solid and sleek device well integrated in an outstanding bookselling platform.
And now we come at the very reason which pushed me to write this brief post to express my praise to Amazon as an example of a company which is able to produce wealth and benefits either for its shareholder or for its stakeholder and customers.
Yesterday I received this e-mail from the Kindle Support Team.

Hello,
Good news! Due to strong customer demand for our newest Kindle with U.S. and international wireless, we are consolidating our family of 6" Kindles. As part of this consolidation, we are lowering the price of the Kindle you just purchased from $279 down to $259. You don't need to do anything to get the lower price--we are automatically issuing you a $20 refund. This refund should be processed in the next few days and will appear as a credit on your next billing statement.
We'll also send you a follow-up e-mail to confirm the refund once it has been completed.
We hope you enjoy your new Kindle. Please send us your feedback at: Kindle-feedback -at- amazon -dot- com
Sincerely,
The Kindle Team

I think there’s no need to comment it. It summarize why I’m still an Amazon customer after something 10 years or so.

I got Wave!!

I got Google Wave!
I'll write about this wonderful new social and communication tool from Google later, but for now I must thank my friend Mirthis so much for providing me with an invitation to the Wave.

My birthday gift

Happy birthday to me!
Here's what I bought for my birthday (finally shipped to EU)
Kindle Wireless Reading Device (6" Display, U.S. & International Wireless, Latest Generation) - can't wait to get my hands on it!!!

Image's copyright of Amazon.com, Inc.

The beginning of Linux

This is the beginning.

Thanks to Linus. For all

The Best Beer in America

If you're a statistics and infographics lover as I am, then you should check Cool Infographics blog to have your regular treat. If you're also a beer maniac then this cool poster will make you happy.
Mike Wirth calls himself a designer, educator and artist and with good reasons! He does his art starting from statistics to create a good looking and striking way to present data concerning different domains.
In this case it's beer.
It happens that he collected data from Great American Beer Festival medal winners (1987-2008) and used them to update the original 2008 map with new helpful charts to show the best and worst breweries divided for each state of the Union based upon the number of medals won. So you discover that if you plan a beer cultural trip, then Colorado, California and Wisconsin are the 3 top states you wanna visit. Always according to the map you should spare time by avoiding Oklahoma, Lousiana, Missisipi and the Dakotas unless you want to discover some hidden treasure overlooked by the festival jury. Another interesting graphics are the histograms showing the best American breweries with each bar as the composition of the amounts of bronze, silver and gold medals won.
Great work Mike!

Noisebridge hacker space

I stumbled upon this awesome geek community called Noisebridge. It's a hacking den and a work space spawning lots of interesting projects belonging to various fields of technology and science.
Noisebridge takes inspiration from famous European hacking spaces like Metalab, CBase, MAMA and ASCII and shares its DNA with many of the other hack clubs around the world pin pointed by Hackerspaces.
Noisebridge is an educational non-profit corporation, 501(c)3 public charity status. We provide infrastructure and collaboration opportunities for people interested in programming, hardware hacking, physics, chemistry, mathematics, photography, security, robotics, all kinds of art, and, of course, technology. Through talks, workshops, and projects we encourage knowledge exchange, learning, and mentoring.
At Noisebridge they have someting for every geek's taste. You like playing video games, you want to learn a programming in Python, the chinese language,how to hack locks and to speak to deaf people, and so on...
One thing that struck me was Sensebridge which is the group dedicated to cyborg group. Their motto is "If you can't beat the robot armies, join them." and they work on projects to enhance human senses or feeding sensitive information which shouldn't be accessibly to human biology. Among their projects there's a compass vibro-anklet, a Ultrasonic Hearing / Echolocation, a Technicolor Dreamcoat and more.
Here's the list of  senses humans don't possess and could be implement in cybernetics projects.
* Magnetism, magnetic north
* Electric Fields, voltage & amperage (of which we are not a part)
* Echolocation/Radar
* Accurate absolute range finding
* Ultraviolet/Infrared
* Spectroscopy
* Inaudible Sounds
* Radiation Level
* "Tremorsense" (or telling the location of movement through vibrations in the ground)
* GPS location
* Non-accelerating motion
* Accurate angle detection
Enlist today for the Cylon converter project! :P

The Treat of the Week #008

You think Planet of the Apes came from nothing? Everything in the world is based on something. That's why Open Source is so vital. People continuously grab inspiration from works of other people to fed their imagination and create more work of art, science, technology, etc...
I don't really know if this sculptures by Emmanuel Frémiet gave inspiration to the creators of Planet of the Apes or King Kong, but the fact is that the creations of this XIX century artist are both beatiful and disturbing.
The images, taken from Dinosaurs and Robots, are in order:
Orangutan Strangling a Borneo Savage [1895]
Gorilla Carrying off a Woman [1887]

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

It's been a while since I planned to write about this book but today I've seen on the Boing Boing newsletter a link to the upcoming movie and I finally decided it was time.
The Road is a novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy which takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States. It's the story of a father and his children struggling to survive on their journey towards the sea, a mirage of salvation in a world stripped of almost every glimpse of life.
The Road was awarded in 2006 with the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
I consider myself a sort of an avid reader and this is the second book I ever read in my whole life that was able to convey me such emotions to represent, literally, a mystic experience. I'm not joking here, I can hardly call The Road a book. It's more likeo an artifact capable to communicate with the most inner part of your self. As soon as you begin to read it you get caught in a way that has something of violent in it, you feel sometimes mentally raped; you are hit by such an emotional shock wave that you feel as if you're your world is spinning and you're losing contact with the reality beyond the book. This The Road made me feel desperation, grief, desolation and fear in such a way I can hardly say having ever felt in my life. Call me lame but at a certain point the image conveyed was so strong (perhaps because I'm a father also) that I had to shut the book in the middle of the night. I felt so disturbed that I had to move The Road away from my bed side and I felt stupid and prehistoric to act as if I had to exorcize the evil. Call me lame but I had nightmares for a whole week and I awaited three more before I felt enough comfortable to resume the reading.
As a book -a storytelling artifact- The Road is basically perfect. I don't feel comfortable to call it a work of art as because its very nature is so solid it appears as something that was never conceived, that was just there just like a rock fallen from the sky. The writing style is as barren and bleak as the world where father and son walks. The literary choices are engineered in way they are more than mere style operands, they're like code classes and functions which make the magic unravel.
The world is blasted. It's unclear what happened, it could have been a ecosystem collapse or a nuclear holocaust on a massive scale. The biosphere has gone, animals and plants have long since dead, dust has covered everything and it's whirling so thick that the sun is always covered. It's a cold bleak world. Humanity has barely managed to survive and most of the few human beings are wrecked bands of cannibals.
Realizing that they can't survive the upcoming winter, father and son decides to head towards the sea hoping to find some sort of comfort and unconsciously identifying it as the goal that makes the struggle, day after day, against the extinction constantly at their heels. The Road is full of symbolism. The father is the one which fights to protect the child and keep a walled defense of coherence against the waves of madness which repeatedly threats to overwhelm them. The child basically represents life. It's frail yet strong and so love radiating to represent even a risk to the couple own survival. They carry a gun with only two bullets which represents their last hope of salvation by committing suicide. They call themselves "the good guys" which are somehow saving the world from the "bad guys" by "carrying the fire" and they look for others of their species while they travel.
It's strange but the reader point of view is so intimate that you feel somehow like a ghost (maybe the one of the suicidal mother of the boy) which walk with them day after day, be with them as they scavenge waste and derelicted buildings in search of something to eat to prevent them from starvation. You feel you're cold sweating and panting as you're with them, crouching in the weeds trying to hide from cannibals.
You must buy The Road right now. Ask someone who owns a copy to lend it to you. Do what you can to grab this artifact then read it in the dead of the night and shiver and sob and cry. I assure you will never forget this experience.
I leave you with the trailer of the upcoming movie. At the moment I am unable to create an opinion on the base of what it shows. My sensation is that it could be a good movie but never something comparable to the book. I know everybody says that of movies based on books but if I was able to convey you even a glimpse of what is The Road or -better- you have read it, then you know what I mean. You can't recreate The Road, it'd be something like travelling through a star -physically- and then watch a movie depicting it.