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Why rejecting email from "certain countries" may be a bad idea
Even in this age of private and public organizations merrily handing out their email Gmail or some other “cloud” provider, there still are lots of organizations that run their own email server. This is better, in my opinion, for reasons I have already explained in “Wanted: Virtual Personal Email Servers”. Every now and then, however, the administrator of one of those servers goes online and asks something like “how can I automatically refuse or delete all email coming from certain countries?”
Primo Levi explains the importance (and the absence) of ebooks in Public Libraries
67 years ago Primo Levi was deported to Auschwitz. 64 years ago he published a book about that experience titled If this is a man. 24 years ago Primo Levi died. Today Primo Levi reminded me of the absurdity of certain laws and wastes of public money, and how the technology could help culture. Today I met a high school student who, having to read If this is a man to write a report, borrowed in the closest Public Library the copy that you see in these photos.
Word clouds, the images that help to see what a speech is about
About 25 years ago I read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. For whatever reason, one of the things that impressed me the most was the passage in which Asimov portrays the power of (automatic?) mathematical analysis to discover the real meaning of some text (1):
Louis Vuitton bags and intellectual property
Yesterday, by pure chance, I discovered an absurd story. Nadia Plesner is a Dutch Danish painter. Her last work is Darfurnica, a modern version of Picasso’s Guernica that you can see in the thumbnail here.