A Sora Rosa

I was listening to this song today, written by Antonello Venditti, in 1987. I don’t know why he wrote these words, what motivated his intentions but I could not resist to find it extremely actual with what I am living today, what Italy is becoming, how politics is driving our country. I started translating the lyric but then I stopped. It is written in the dialect from the region of Rome but besides that it is impossible to translate poetry. Maybe you will find your mean in the words anyway.

A Sora Rosa me ne vado via,

ciò er core a pezzi pe’lla vergogna,

de questa terra che nu mm’aiuta mai

de questa gente che te sputa n’faccia,

che nun’ha mai preso na farce in mano,

che se distingue pe na cravatta.

Me ne vojo annà da sto paese marcio,

Che cià li bbuchi ar posto der cervello,

che vò magnà dull’ossa de chi soffre,

che pensa solo ar posto che po’ perde.

Ciavemo forza e voja più de tutti

Annamo là dove ce stanno i morti,

anche se semo du ossa de prosciutti

ce vedrà chi cià li occhioni sani

che ce dirà: “venite giù all’inferno

armeno ciavrete er foco pell’inverno”.

Si ciai un core, tu me poi capì

Si ciai n’amore, tu me poi seguì

Che ce ne frega si nun contamo gnente

Se semo sotto li calli della ggente.

Sai che ti dico, io mo’ me butto ar fiume,

così finisco de campà sta vita

che a poco a poco m’ha ‘succato l’ossa

più delle pene de satana immortale.

Annamo via, tenemose pe’mano,

c’è solo questo de vero pe’ chi spera,

che forse un giorno chi magna troppo adesso

possa sputà le ossa che so’ sante.

Antonello Venditti,  A Sora Rosa, Centocittà, 1987

Cloudalicious of my blog

Have been playing with cloudalicio.us lately, and I have to admit that is a great resource for understanding the people’s vie of a certain web resource. For instance I realised that lately the perception of the readers of my blog started to converge around the tags: “mapmemo”, “mapas” (spanish for maps), “pesquisa” (spanish for search)”, which I think is correct.

Cloudalicious

Cloud Blog

Tags: , , ,

TomTom navigator

TomTom navigator is one of the best navigation softwares out there. I could not believed till I could test the mobile version with a bluetooth GPS. It is great and so sensible that could be actually used even for pedestrian navigation. The interface is very well organized and easy to interact with. These guys did a tremendous job also in compressing the maps into a manageable dimension for a mobile phone. All the maps for Switzerland stays in 25 Mbyte, which leaves free room for application on a 64 Mb memory card.

3D Uk Small

Copyright notice: the present content was taken from the following URL, the copyrights are reserved by the respective author/s.

Tags:

Some paintings

Graham Toms is a good friend of mine. He is a multi-talented artist. He paints, he makes sculptures, animations, 3D graphics, … but above all is a great person.

Today he sent me two of his last paintings, which I find great. He is also looking for commissions, so if you are interested, drop him a mail at toonfactory[at]fsmail.net.

Jacobs Ladder



The Circus Of Life 03

The common language of space

B. Hillier. The common language of space: a way of looking at the social, economic and environmental functioning of cities on a common basis. [url]

————————

This paper proposes that in addition to urban research which seeks to provide answers to policy questions involving the built environment, there is also a need for research which directly addresses the physical and spatial complexity of the built environment itself as the main variable of interest, and explores any effects it may in itself have on the functioning of the urban system. This type of research reflects the questions architects and urban designers typically ask, rather than those that preoccupy planners. For such research to be effective, the physical complexity variable must be controlled at the level at which real design decisions are made. Space syntax research attempts to do this by treating built environments as systems of space, analysing them ‘configurationally’, and trying to bring to light their underlying patterns and structure. Results from space syntax research into the structure and functioning of cities show a consistency which suggests that space can be used in this way as a general means of investigating the structure and function of cities, that is, it may be the common language of the city. On the basis of this common language, it is argued, it should be possible to build a domain theory of built environments as structural and functional entities in themselves, and this will lend greater precision to studies of its interactions with other domains.

Tags: ,

maps.a9

Maps.a9 is a new map service from google that allows the user to see pictures of the street selected on the two-dimenstional map of the city. The pictures were entered by vans equipped with powerful GPS receivers so that each picture was correctly taken.

This was one of the application we were sketching and thinking about many times during these two last years. They did it. However in our vision the power rester to the people. We were thinking about a more collaborative mechanisms to provide the source data.

(thanks Antonio for the link)

Map.A9

Tags: , ,

The Nimbus Project: semantic location

Nicolas is back and, as always, he keep pinging me with interesting links. One of them lead me to this Nimbus project, whose aim is to achieve a formal description of the space to support location based services.

To support developers of location-based services we created the Nimbus framework. Nimbus provides a common interface to location data and hides the position capturing mechanisms. To achieve an optimal flexibility, it provides physical coordinates as well as semantic information about the current location. With Nimbus, mobile users can switch between satellite navigation systems such as GPS, positioning systems based on cell-phone infrastructures, or indoor positioning systems without affecting the location-based service. As our infrastructure is self-organizing, it is flexible and easy to extend.

I found also that another researcher is working on the same issue, trying to extend and enhance the model.

Tags: ,

Reversing Google Sets

I found two interesting articles, both written by this guy, Both article concentrates on how Google Set should actually works. The author tries to operate a reverse engineer on the base of few observation on the actual way the algorithm should work.

He seems to suggest a parsing of the web content that should take into account the frequencies by which a word is counted in the same context/profile. However s/he seems to suggest that the algorithm parses the pages looking for tables or lists. This seems to be quite limiting and I personally think that in fact there should be some more complicated workings that possibly relays on clustering or similar statistical method.

Funny enough, the author suggest that similar techniques might be used to solve linguistic problems, and A.I. situations where there is the need to get to the actual meaning of the words.

Tags: ,

Clusty

I just found this “new” web search that is supposed to be innovative. I wonder if anybody used it for a while and wants to share his/her opinion about it.

Clusty is the search site owned and operated by Vivísimo that aims to change the way people search online. It uses our award-winning Clustering Engine to organize search results into folders grouping similar items together. Thus a search for ‘pearl’ organizes the top 250-500 results into subject folders such as Jewelry, Pearl Harbor, Pearl Jam, Steinbeck Novel and Daniel Pearl. Clusty allows users to focus on the area of interest without all the chaff.

Tags: , ,