... that makes me proud of being part of the mankind, it is this man.



Tiziano Terzani, he's not a master, as he says, he's not a Guru. He's just a man who lived, and who understood. Very probably, in another place, in another time, they would have called him a Buddah, an Enlightened.

He wrote books, as he was a journalist. In this interview, he was dying of a cancer, and he says he's happy of his life, and of the incredible opportunity he had been given; last but not least, the opportunity to die serenely, now that he is 66. Was he ill at a younger age, say at 30, he would have not be so happy to die, he says, but now, now that it has fulfilled his life, now that he has an equilibrium, now that he's in peace with himself... he says he and his "hosts", his cancer, will live and die together.

His last sentence in this video, one of his advices (not teaching, he never wanted to teach), is: if you find a for in the road, where one road goes down, and the other goes up, get the one that goes up. You'll always find yourself in a better place.

And he was from Tuscany. As he's a man of the world, maybe I shouldn't say that, but hearing his adventures, his knowing, his wisdom in my own tongue, with that irony and views and happiness and life-force that are so much imbued in my homeland and so well know across the world, gives me a special kind of feeling.

Cheers for Falcon!

We have just committed version 1500:


gian@hplin:~/Progetti/falcon/core$ svn commit -m "Removed unneeded troublesome dependency"
Trasmetto manpages/CMakeLists.txt
Trasmissione dati .
Commit della Revisione 1500 eseguito.


Well, not a great news, but it was cool to cheer at it. With my fav beer :-).

Italy is slowly but steadily falling towards a new form of Fascism. As Primo Levi said, in the 60's, "it's today's Fascism, that is just missing the power to enforce itself to return being what it was, that is, the consecration of privilege and inequality".

To prevent this from happen again, there is just one way. Remember what happened, what caused fascism to raise and what it leaded to. And the horror it caused.

A person I know asked me, "why are we still re-vising what happened more than 60 years ago; why should be pity for a so distant fact, and for people of other races".

Because, I replied, there is one race I know: human. The people who suffered in the laghers, the people who was jailed and killed by Fascism and its descendant Nazism, wasn't of "a race", they wasn't a "kind". They was me. They all was me.

And I don't want this sort of things to happen to me, never again.

I proposed myself for a voluntary cooperation with CICAP, the "the Italian Committee for the Investigation of Claims on the Paranormal". They were searching for translators willing to lend a hand in translating material from "less common languages", like French, German and the like. So I wondered if they would have been interested in translations from Japanese.

The talk went on a bit, and a general interest on the relationships between Japan and paranormal things emerged. So, I started a bit of an investigation on the field.

It is well known that Japanese people have a traditional attraction towards supernatural and paranormal talks. While the first "gothic literature" in Europe is generally placed at the beginning of the '800, and individuated in works as "The Castle of Otranto" and "Wuthering Heights", Japanese literature is two-way bound with supernatural themes since the first records, and theatre pieces like "Yotsuya Ghost Story" produced in the early '800s was counting on an already solid tradition.

This may depend on the shamanic roots of the early Japanese culture, which changed into a more organized cult during the passage out of the pre-historic period into the early Japan as a central state emerged around 600 AD, but whose founding principles was never totally forgotten.

In the beginning, the search for people and associations seriously approaching paranormal phenomenon and claims of supernatural activities had been harder than I thought. I will digress on this aspect as my research progress.

However, I've been able to get in touch with an amazing set of fellow researchers, forming the ASIOS. The relatively young association (born in 2007) had already performed a quantity of investigations, promoted a series of books on scientific investigation (and dismantling) of "paranormal facts" and published a collective book called "The solving of mysteries". The president of the association, Mr. Honjou Tatsuya, replied to my first contact letter with an unexpectedly warm welcome.

I am so starting my journey in to the Japanese mysteries and the Japanese way to solve them. Isn't this exciting? :-)

If you have any news about weird things, mysteries, supernatural phenomenon and the like, and researchers on this field in Japan, I'd love you to send me comments on this article or mail me via my contact form.

Thanks!

I have already praised Suga Shikao skills in composing, lyrics writing and playing music. Yet, this metropolitan poetry is still very surprising.

In his song "Hikari no kawa", Shikao talks about her former lover passing him by on another car, in a traffic jam. It's the occasion to rethink to the past, and why it didn't quite work out, and to fantasize about the similarity of their story and what's happening as he loses her in the queue. And there's even space to think about not just the "story of them two", but about love and affection in general, as we live in cities where we become mechanized animals, half flesh and blood and half chips and gears. And all of this, without exaggerations, or epic conclusions; just told as it is, felt as it's felt, daily as it is. With the "stream of light" being just the row of car lights, and somehow, at the same time, being also much, much more. In perfect Shikao's unique style.

This comments in an intricate code I am in charge to check really saved my day


TopicLock itLT = LockTopic (Tpc); // lock topic
LockCache(); // lock cache


... in the sense that I am gonna laugh for the rest of the day.

I have recently bought a new classic guitar, an Alvaro 4000-EF (it's hand-crafted; you won't find it in the on-line catalog). It has an excellent sound and a very sensible microphone-pickup pair, which seems to be able to capture even the most subtle resonances.

I composed a small, slow tune exposing some of the resounding frequencies of this little marvel: Notturno sulla seconda corda.

Other than having a top notch professional sound quality, this guitar is also extremely playable; it just requires gentle touches for the barré to hold, and it's pretty forgiving about light pressures in difficult positions. Also, it responds pretty linearly to string touch; althoug it's easy to play it piano, it's easy to get clean fortissimos, and the expression range comes out pretty docile at the touch of the right hand nails.

Just, I got to find "its strings". Every guitar has its own strings. The "quality" of the strings is not always directly resulting in better sound on a given guitar; some even famous guitar find their mating strings in poor quality, low duration strings. It's a trial and error process.

Tonight, after dinner...

Wife: "Dear, would you please brew me a coffee?"
Me: "No way."
W: "Oh, please, dear!"
M: "Got to run, I am writing..."
W: "It's a matter of life and death... and not mine."
M: "... I am brewing your coffee."

I met up with Tatsuno Kazuo works more or less by chance.


An interview about the involvement of Mr. Tatsuno in the activism against the highway tunnel under the Takao Mountain.

While searching for materials to deepen my study of Japanese, I hit this book of his called Bunsho no kakikata, or "How to write". His work left a deep impression on me, so much that I tried to gather all his writings, the "book shaped" ones, on which I could lay my hands on.

One of his suggestion goes like...

If you want to dig a hole, start tracking it's borders. The wider the borders, the wider the hole will be. The deeper you'll be able to go without loosing sight of what you're doing.

Preparatory works. I do believe in those; as a programmer, I clear the ground from potential problems in advance, and ... I draw a big circle around the area I want to solve.

Tatsuno talks of writing, but he means "your job", and then "your work", and then "your life". Another suggestion is to write something. Each day. I'll try to follow it.

For a programmer, tomorrow is the next time you turn on your PC.

I've been able to write the first prototype of "The Evolution Game".

It's a competitive programming game where two falcon scripts are fighting for survival in an arena with limited space and resources. The new twist in it is that, except for extremely naive strategies, it's practically necessary for each script to evolve and mutate in order to win.

We plan to build a contest on that, inviting programmers to submit their scripts, and see who is the best evolutionary programmer in the world.

There's also a small secret, that people experts of fractals, high order numerical-math, statistics and evolutionary computation will probably spot very soon. But I will keep silent about this 'till the end of the contest.

For now, I am pretty impressed about the power of the TEG program itself. I thought I could support an arena of 100x100 cells, each being a running Falcon script, called back several times per turn (one to five), at 1 turn per second, after introducing a bit of concurrent calculations. Contrarily to my expectations, the prototype, which is still largely unoptimized and totally single threaded, is running a 100x100 arena at five to eight turns per second. The script used in the prototype are largely trivial, but even making them three times as complex as they are, we'd still have a better performance than I expected after having introduced all the possible optimizations and parallelism.

We're gonna have fun with this toy.

I can't stop thinking at this song as a precursor of Sekka No Shinwa (the Legend of the Snow Petals). Takase Kazuya weaves a round arrangement, able to evoke the vastness of an empty sky with whirling wind. A wind, as this song says, that can bring new life.

Eiko words are always more introspective and emotional than Kotoko's. The slow, solemn, female voice of Eiko and the joyful melodic line merges wonderfully with the restless background produced by Kazuya, in one of their best joint works ever.

I've been cherishing this translation for some years now, but I finally decided on a gentle request of a visitor of my Blog, which is also a great fan of Eiko and loves to dance her songs.

There are songs that you overhear without paying too much attention to them. You just generally like them, but nothing more. 'Till, one day, you stop listening really what the singer has to say and you find a little jewel where you just spotted some glowing in the sand.

Shimamiya Eiko's "Ozone", from "Endless Loop", is one of those songs. It's simple and elegant in its melody, yet catchy. You just listen to it and get slowly grabbed by the skillful and female voice, by the solid yet discrete underlying arrangement, by the simple and elegant piano inciso.

And when the melody and harmony finally convince you, you start to listen the song. A monologue thought as a dialogue with her lover, now gone, and the pain he caused. Oh, there's plenty of those songs around, you'd say.

Yeah, but this one is overwhelmingly sincere. In our western culture, where emotion bursts are regarded as clumsy and outrageous, openly saying "I wish you to cry" is considered bold, at least. But here, she goes on about half of the song telling him what her imagination is making up with him now. Precisely.

This description of her state of mind, of what her mind is doing, is so deep, so real, so touchy that you just have to feel like her. A fine piece of lyrics, being able to move anyone while still being not poetic, but plainly, just, "told".

"Ora et labora" (pray and work) is St. Benedict's Rule. But few know this saint whereabouts at the time in which he founded his order. The homeland of this words is located halfway between Tusany and Romagna, in an area that is now a natrual park, and that I visited in the last day of my vacation.

The trip starts right below Forlì, a relatively big town near San Marino, which is connected to Florence through the Tosco-romagnola street. The first interesting place you meet there is Castrocaro (Pricey Castel), guarding the street. Engraved in a scenario of unpaired beauty, you finally reach San Benedetto, (St. Benedict), in the heart of the National Park of the Casentino's Forests. This is very likely the sight St. Benedict did see while writing the rule.

The Church where the order has been founded is incredibly small, but the original paleochristian nucleus is even smaller; there just the space for a small display containing the fingers of the saint. If you have three or four hours to spend in the area, a visit should be paid to the Acquacheta (silent water) falls. It's a place cited in Dante's Divine Commedy for it's beauty. We didn't have so much time, but this is the river silently flowing besides the church.

Finally, you descend down in the upper Chianti region. A stop to eat wild boar based cuisine is absolutely in order. No where in the world you can eat food like this, and nowhere in the world you can taste it while drinking the local Rùfina red wine, which taints the tongue and lasts longly in your mouth and in your throat after you drink it.

My dream vacation ended on a bench of Prato (Lawn) Railway Station, north of Florence, where you wait the trains cherished by warm winds, sighting the last rolling hills of the Appenino mountains.

Again, a short account of my daily trip.

Today we took a trip down in the north part of a region called "Marche" (Marquis lands). Up to about 150 years ago, this area was under the temporal dominion of the Church, and this area was its north landmark, called "Montefeltro" (Cushion Mountains). This area is known to be one of the most beautiful landscapes in Italy, pointed with sharp mountains raising up to 1400 mt. and rolling hills fiercely farmed through the millennia. Bravely facing San Marino, the last, mighty Fortress of Saint Leo held safe the farthest lands of the Popes. The Forthres, built in the late part of the Renaissance, was so militarily effective that it played a major role enven in World War II. Yet, this place is famous to have been the jail of the Giuseppe Balsamo, Count of Cagliostro. The Church condemned him to be buried alive in this cell; the door of the cell was sealed before he was sent there and he was cast down in it through a trapdoor in the ceiling, through which he was also fed.

We then reached Pennabilli, where the Dalai Lama paid back a visit to the hometown of a monk that visited Tibet in 1600 (and making a bit of proselytes there). The place where a Tibetan bell and some prayer rolls have been placed resembles a corner of Tibet itself; just, a bit greener.

We then crossed the Carpegna pass at 1007 mt., and went down to the Lake of Mercatale (Marketplace) and Sassocorvaro (Raven-grabber stone). In some magical landscape that cannot be told, but just seen, crossing roads right through the crest of the mountains, we reached the Fortress City of Urbino (a merge of late Latin and early Italian meaning "Citadel", "little city"), now practically a University Town (and as such, lively with students and pulsing with culture and youth). I made quite a long set of shots, but the fascinating part of the town here is the contrast between the massive buildings and the landscape on which they are laid down. There isn't a single meter running horizontal; you're constantly climbing and descending steep waypaths. In this short, just let me summarize the impact of the majestic buildings through the front "false entrance" of the Duke Palace, built just to face the valley, as the real entrance is on the other side, and a way mark stating that this alley is called "Turn of Death street". Every stone must have an interesting story to tell here.

We then came back to San Marino; after all, still a very Italian place, as you can tell from this pizza restaurant, where we had one of the best pizzas in our life. Just, as delightful as Italy may be, if it were just run thoughtfully.