Archive for August, 2007

Abbenedé vs. Lao-Tzu: lo scontro per la vita

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

Originally published sometimes back in 1999
Broken links have been updated

Nessuno di noi avrebbe scommesso sulla possibilità che uno scontro di questo tipo potesse mai avvenire, ma alla fine ce l’abbiamo fatta: il presente contro il passato, il futuro prossimo contro quello remoto, il trapassato contro il piuccheperfetto.

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Espoo Ciné Film Festival 2007

Tuesday, August 28th, 2007

I have seen really nice films this year at the Espoo Ciné Film Festival:

Have a sip?

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

As I was talking about different ways of getting a hangover, I decided to have a look at the real consumption of alcohol in some European countries. Here are the results.

Alcohol consumption per capita
Units: Liters of pure alcohol per adult (15 years and older)

Country ISO 1963 1973 1983 1993 2003
Czech Rep CZE 7.7 11.2 12.6 12.6 13.0
Europe   10.4 12.2 11.3 10.1 10.0
Finland FIN 3.1 7.4 7.9 8.4 9.3
France FRA 24.3 21.4 17.8 14.3 11.4
Germany DEU 11.1 14.1 13.2 13.5 12.0
Hungary HUN 8.6 11.9 14.6 13.1 13.6
Ireland IRL 6.3 10.6 8.8 11.4 13.7
Italy ITA 16.8 18.4 14.5 10.3 8.0
Netherlands NLD 4.8 10.3 11.2 9.7 9.7
Spain ESP 14.4 17.2 16.9 12.0 11.7
Sweden SWE 5.3 7.2 6.4 6.5 6.0
United Kingdom GBR 5.9 7.6 8.6 9.2 11.8

Source: Global Alcohol Database, World Health Organization (WHO).
Rationale for the statistics

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Beautiful is better than ugly

Wednesday, August 1st, 2007

Beautiful is better than ugly.
Explicit is better than implicit.
Simple is better than complex.
Complex is better than complicated.
Flat is better than nested.
Sparse is better than dense.
Readability counts.
Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
Although practicality beats purity.
Errors should never pass silently.
Unless explicitly silenced.
In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
There should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it.
Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
Now is better than never.
Although never is often better than *right* now.
If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
Namespaces are one honking great idea — let’s do more of those!

Tim Peters, “The Zen of Python”