American freedom and democracy

Russia Today reports:

The terrifying legislation that allows for Americans to be arrested, detained indefinitely, tortured and interrogated — without charge or trial — passed through the Senate on Thursday with an overwhelming support from 93 percent of lawmakers.

Only seven members of the US Senate voted against the National Defense Authorization Act on Thursday, despite urging from the ACLU and concerned citizens across the country that the affects of the legislation would be detrimental to the civil rights and liberties of everyone in America. Under the bill, Americans can be held by the US military for terrorism-related charges and detained without trial indefinitely.

Additionally, another amendment within the text of the legislation reapproved waterboarding and other “advanced interrogation techniques” that are currently outlawed.

That’s exactly the same freedom and democracy that the US is violently spreading to the rest of the world… This is a rather predictable milestone in The War on Terror.  Terrorists are still winning.

Chinese New Year

I’ve mentioned a few times on this blog that I’m a big fan of Chinese culture.  Today, at the office, we had Chinese New Year celebrations will plenty of home-made food (cooked by our Chinese colleagues) and red decorations all around.  That inspired me to read some more about China on Wikipedia and even try my hand at calligraphy.

The above image depicts my third attempt, which was good enough to be readable and was actually recognized by at least one Chinese person as “this is actually pretty good“.  Let’s all call that my best wishes for all of you this year.

P.S.: If you wander what that one means, I used this image as the source of inspiration.  Wikipedia says it means “When wealth is acquired, precious objects follow”.  Having no idea myself, I’m inclined to trust that.

New University of Cyprus library

Cyprus Mail reports that the construction of the new University of Cyprus library has begun.  It will take a while, so the doors are expected to open some time in September, 2014.  While reading through the article, one particular paragraph took me a while to understand.

The library’s collection, which will be housed in an impressive dome-shaped building holding  around 600,000 books, more than 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books all in digital format plus 10,000 audio books and 150 databases. Its contents will be accessible to all Cypriots.

My first thought was that the library will hold 600,000 books in digital format and that the new building is being constructed to accommodate that storage.  I thought that was a bit excessive.  After all, I used to have an e-book library of more than a 1,000 titles and they were living nicely on a single hard disk.  Digital storage is cheap these days and the size of drives keep growing.  How much space does one need to store 600,000 books in digital form? – I thought.

The size of books in my collection are somewhere between 500 kilobytes to a couple of megabytes.  Let’s assume 1 megabyte for an average book.  How much space is there on a modern hard drive?  I’ll assume 2 TB (terabytes).  How many average books can we store on such a disk? 2 TB / 1 MB = 2,000,000,000,000 / 1,000,000 = 2,000,000.  I know, I’m approximating things a lot with terabytes, megabytes, and average book sizes.  But with a single 2 TB disk holding 2,000,000 books, give or take, I don’t think a new building is in order.  3 TB and 4 TB hard disks exist already.  By September 2014 we’ll probably have way more than that.  Even a few of those connected together for backups, “150 databases” and such will provide a lot of storage, while being the size of a device that is easy to hide at home.  New building? Really?

Of course, once I re-read the paragraph a few times, I realized that I’m on a totally wrong foot here.  It read more like:

  • 600,000 books (print)
  • 30,000 magazines and 40,000 books (digital)
  • 10,000 audio books (digital)
  • 150 databases (digital?)

While the digital part of that library will easily fit on one or two hard drives, the 600,000 printed books collection does indeed need some storage space.

I am all for knowledge and education, and I’m glad that this effort is being taken and that all these books will be available to all Cypriots.  But if I was to express a wish, I’d say : please push for digitizing all those books and make them available on-line.  Cyprus is good, but why not share with the rest of the world?  Especially now that we do have the technology.

Office poetry

I’m about to share some office poetry with you.  To better understand it, here’s some context for you:

  • The whole office is non-smoking area.  Those who need to smoke, have to go on floor up (from where I am), to the balcony.
  • Most of the important things are discussed on that balcony and not in the meeting rooms, so even non-smoking people frequent it.
  • On Fridays, it is customary to have a long lunch somewhere out, with a pint or two.  After which people still come back to the office to finish the day’s work.

Now that you know everything you need to know, here is some poetry from the internal instant messenger exchange between me and a colleague of mine.  These are just from today.

Leonid Mamchenkov:
For all week’s troubles to dismay
We should have lunch at TGI Friday.
We’ll eat and drink and have a cheer
Not to forget a glass of beer.
It will be cold such as the ice
And overall it will be nice.
Mihai Milea:
Let’s get ready for a feast
Pull some ribbs out, like a beast
That’s how hungry now I feel
Let’s all eat and then we chill
Leonid Mamchenkov:
We are going out for lunch
With an Easy Forex bunch
We will eat and drink and laugh
Until everyone’s had enough
We’ll come back and work a bit
Until everyone will quit
Cause today is Friday’s rest
And I wish you all the best
Mihai Milea:
Poems, rhymes, that’s all we do
Let’s go out and get some food!!!!!!!!
Leonid Mamchenkov:
If we go up, you’ll have a smoke.
I don’t want to, so I’ll grab a coke.
Breeth some fresh air, rest the eyes.
It’s an hour or so until we say goodbye’s
here is a grim one :
While we are here, trying to pay the bills,
Why don’t we do upstairs something that kills?
There is no question that I’m looking to answer.
You, however, should be careful – smoking causes cancer.
Mihai is busy, Sam’s disappeared.
I’ll go alone – the air has cleared.
No more smell, no more smoke.
It sounds just fine, but something’s broke.
Mihai didn’t like the last one, complaining about the rhymes.   I tried to get away with this one then.
That was a dunk.
Because I am drunk.
But you aren’t too good,
You are breaking my mood.