LittleCamels.com

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”

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.

To quote from Whitman: "O me, o life of the questions of these recurring, of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish. What good amid these, o me, o life? Answer: that you are here. That life exists, and identity. That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse."

That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse.

Long live to the Dead Poets!

The Political Compass has an interesting test about being on the right, left, authoritarian or libertarian side. This is based on the distinction between the economic opinion (from right to left) and the social one (from authoritarian to libertarian).
So, my political compass looks like this:

Economic Left/Right: -5.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.26

So, it seems I belong to the Libertarian Left, somewhere between Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama (and even close to Mau). Not bad at all, isn’t it? I might even agree with that…

Take the test.

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O me! O life! Of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)

Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,

Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,

Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,

The question, O me! So sad, recurring - What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer

That you are here - that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

A few years ago I started to collect the translations of the famous book by Richard Bach "Jonathan Livingston Seagull". By now I own ten different versions. Since I haven’t found anything similar in the net, I decided to create a list of the available translations of the book. In the list you can also find links to some shops which sell the book. If you have a copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull in a language that is not included in the list, plase feel free to leave a comment, the book will be added to the list and you will be acknowledged.

See the list of translations of Jonathan Livingston Seagull

I found an interesting website called InfoNation which shows a huge amount of statistics of most of the countries in the world and also gives you the chance to create histograms.
I was interested in seeing the newspapers circulation in different EU countries (I also put the US as a foreign reference). It seems the hotter it is, the harder it is to find time to read

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Italia: spaghetti, pizza, mandolino, mamma? Not at all. Well at least, not only. Let me clarify this (once and forever).

I have never seen anyone playing a mandolino live. We Italians don't play mandolino (except maybe some old granpa in Neaples). It's not our traditional music instrument. It has never been. Spaghetti. Yes, we invented spaghetti. But let's face the truth: nowadays everybody eats spaghetti. It's a multicultural meal. Same thing for pizza. As well as the radio (invented by Marconi), the telephone (invented by Meucci, Bell just patented it), Tex Willer and many other things.

But that's history. Maybe you are wondering: what is Italy now? What do Italians (or Eyeties if you like) think and do now, in this very moment? Hard to tell. Italy is a complicated country. Many dialects, many different people and cultures. If you don't speak Italian, and you don't live or have never lived in Italy (that is, never trust an Italo-American), believe me: you can't get to know what happens in Italy.

Well, actually now there is a chance. The most important Italian newspaper, Corriere della Sera, has a section in English, called Italian life. Unfortunately, that is not a translation of all the news written in Italian, but just a collection of some articles written in the Italian edition. At least it's a good start. If you are interested in knowing not the peculiar news about Italy, but at least what Italian journalists writes about world news, that is a good place to start. Have a nice reading!

Come mi sono ripromesso da molto tempo, sto preparando una sezione del sito sul giornalista e scrittore italiano Indro Montanelli (Fucecchio 22.4.1909 - Milano 22.7.2001).
Anzi, sui suoi pensieri.
Anzi, sui suoi pensieri che ho fatto miei.
Per ora mi limito ad una citazione.

Update (4.3.2005): Now you can have a look at my pages about Indro Montanelli.