Fotos Do Mes

Na boa, um pais com esse numero de jumentos nao pode ir para frente. 3 fotos que definem com quem voce compartilha uma mesma nacionalidade. Chore! 

Leitura De Sabado: MAIS Um Bom Artigo Defendendo Exercicios Leves

The Power of a Daily Bout of Exercise

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS

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PHYS ED

Gretchen Reynolds on the science of fitness.

This week marks the start of the annual eat-too-much and move-too-little holiday season, with its attendant declining health and surging regrets. But a well-timed new study suggests that a daily bout of exercise should erase or lessen many of the injurious effects, even if you otherwise lounge all day on the couch and load up on pie.

To undertake this valuable experiment, which was published online in The Journal of Physiology, scientists at the University of Bath in England rounded up a group of 26 healthy young men. All exercised regularly. None were obese. Baseline health assessments, including biopsies of fat tissue, confirmed that each had normal metabolisms and blood sugar control, with no symptoms of incipient diabetes.

The scientists then asked their volunteers to impair their laudable health by doing a lot of sitting and gorging themselves.

Energy surplus is the technical name for those occasions when people consume more energy, in the form of calories, than they burn. If unchecked, energy surplus contributes, as we all know, to a variety of poor health outcomes, including insulin resistance — often the first step toward diabetes — and other metabolic problems.

Overeating and inactivity can each, on its own, produce an energy surplus. Together, their ill effects are exacerbated, often in a very short period of time. Earlier studies have found that even a few days of inactivity and overeating spark detrimental changes in previously healthy bodies.

Some of these experiments have also concluded that exercise blunts the ill effects of these behaviors, in large part, it has been assumed, by reducing the energy surplus. It burns some of the excess calories. But a few scientists have suspected that exercise might do more; it might have physiological effects that extend beyond just incinerating surplus energy.

To test that possibility, of course, it would be necessary to maintain an energy surplus, even with exercise. So that is what the University of Bath researchers decided to do.

Their method was simple. They randomly divided their volunteers into two groups, one of which was assigned to run every day at a moderately intense pace on a treadmill for 45 minutes. The other group did not exercise.

Meanwhile, the men in both groups were told to generally stop moving so much, decreasing the number of steps that they took each day from more than 10,000 on average to fewer than 4,000, as gauged by pedometers. The exercising group’s treadmill workouts were not included in their step counts. Except when they were running, they were as inactive as the other group.

Both groups also were directed to start substantially overeating. The group that was not exercising increased their daily caloric intake by 50 percent, compared with what it had been before, while the exercising group consumed almost 75 percent more calories than previously, with the additional 25 percent replacing the energy burned during training.

Over all, the two groups’ net daily energy surplus was the same.

The experiment continued for seven days. Then both groups returned to the lab for additional testing, including new insulin measurements and another biopsy of fat tissue.

The results were striking. After only a week, the young men who had not exercised displayed a significant and unhealthy decline in their blood sugar control, and, equally worrying, their biopsied fat cells seemed to have developed a malicious streak. Those cells, examined using sophisticated genetic testing techniques, were now overexpressing various genes that may contribute to unhealthy metabolic changes and underexpressing other genes potentially important for a well-functioning metabolism.

But the volunteers who had exercised once a day, despite comparable energy surpluses, were not similarly afflicted. Their blood sugar control remained robust, and their fat cells exhibited far fewer of the potentially undesirable alterations in gene expression than among the sedentary men.

“Exercise seemed to completely cancel out many of the changes induced by overfeeding and reduced activity,” said Dylan Thompson, a professor of health sciences at the University of Bath and senior author of the study. And where it did not countermand the impacts, he continued, it “softened” them, leaving the exercise group “better off than the nonexercise group,” despite engaging in equivalently insalubrious behavior.

From a scientific standpoint, this finding intimates that the metabolic effects of overeating and inactivity are multifaceted, Dr. Thompson said, with an energy surplus sparking genetic as well as other physiological changes. But just how exercise countermands those effects is impossible to say based on the new experiment, he added. Differences in how each group’s metabolism utilized fats and carbohydrates could play a role, he said, as could the release of certain molecules from exercising muscles, which only occurred among the men who ran.

Of more pressing interest, though, is the study’s practical message that “if you are facing a period of overconsumption and inactivity” — also known as the holidays — “a daily bout of exercise will prevent many of the negative changes, at least in the short term,” Dr. Thompson said. Of course, his study involved young, fit men and a relatively prolonged period of exercise. But the findings likely apply, he said, to other groups, like older adults and women, and perhaps to lesser amounts of training. That’s a possibility worth embracing as the pie servings accumulate.

Musica De Sexta-Feira

Se estivesse pescando hoje em Minas a beira do rio grande das aguas cristalinas poderia parar para ouvir esse disco.

It was 40 years ago today....

Pensamentos Aleatorios: Modos De Gerenciamento De Empresas No Mundo

Europa Latina: dono pobre, empresa pobre;
Europa Superior: dono pobre, empresa rica;
USA: dono rico, empresa rica;
Brasil: dono rico, empresa pobre

Management styles.....

Oba, Deu BRAZIL ZIL ZIL No NYTIMES

Infelizmente pelos mesmos motivos de sempre....

November 26, 2013

Brazil Is Entranced by a Tale of Love, Taxes and Bribery

By SIMON ROMERO

RIO DE JANEIRO — There were the boxes of Cuban cigars, which cost about $500 each at a shop in Vila Nova Conceição, one of the most exclusive districts of São Paulo, and the $2,260 bottles of Vega Sicilia Único, a legendary Spanish red. Throw in a Porsche Cayenne, speedboat jaunts to tropical islands and all-night soirees with high-end escorts, and what do you get?

The unlikely lifestyle of a Brazilian tax inspector.

In one of the most salacious corruption scandals to captivate Brazil in years, the municipal government of São Paulo, the nation’s largest city, is reeling from revelations of a scheme in which investigators claim that a group of tax inspectors allowed construction companies to evade more than $200 million in taxes in exchange for bribes.

“We always had marvelous dinners, excellent trips by private plane to Angra dos Reis,” Vanessa Alcântara, 27, the former companion of one of the inspectors charged with accepting bribes, said in a televised interview, referring to the oceanfront city that is a playground for Brazil’s elite.

The titillating details of the scandal are emerging as an offshoot of a custody battle between Ms. Alcântara and Luis Alexandre Cardoso de Magalhães, 41, a low-ranking São Paulo official. Brazilians are absorbing their confessions and accusations against one another, some of which have been nationally televised, in a case that underlines how political corruption remains entrenched despite landmark efforts to send corrupt officials to jail.

So far, the scandal has tinged the administration of São Paulo’s current mayor, Fernando Haddad, and of his predecessor, Gilberto Kassab. Investigators say the bribes to Mr. Magalhães and his colleagues were largely used to gain approval for real estate projects.

A top aide to Mr. Haddad, Antonio Donato, resigned after tax inspectors implicated in the scheme told prosecutors that some of the bribes were channeled to Mr. Donato when he was a city councilman. Mr. Donato denied that claim on Tuesday, and Mr. Haddad said in a statement that his administration put an end to the inspectors’ actions shortly after he took office this year.

Intercepts of phone calls by Mr. Magalhães suggest that he met Ms. Alcântara in 2011 at Bamboa, a São Paulo nightclub frequented by prostitutes. She disputes that account, which Mr. Magalhães repeated over the weekend on the Globo television network, contending that they met when she tried to sell him a cellphone plan.

But when it comes to living high from ill-gotten gains, the estranged couple seem to agree on a lot of things.

Mr. Magalhães, who chose to cooperate with investigators after his arrest in October, described how developers delivered bags of cash, some containing about $30,000, on a weekly basis to his office. The money was then divided among four municipal officials, he said, recounting how he burned through much of his haul by spending more than $4,500 a night on prostitutes.

“I spent because the money was coming in,” he said. “I wanted to live.”

In telephone intercepts and newspaper interviews, Ms. Alcântara said she and Mr. Magalhães, who had a child together, would count the money in her living room, on occasion finding more than $180,000 on their hands. Prosecutors estimate his fortune at $8 million, an amount difficult to reconcile with his annual salary of about $82,000.

Ms. Alcântara said he used some of the money to decorate her apartment at a cost of $50,000, and local newspapers have reported that they would splurge on $2,200-a-night suites at a designer hotel and meals at steakhouses with $380 bottles of Charmes-Chambertin Grand Cru, a coveted French wine.

The high life apparently ended when Ms. Alcântara became enraged over what she saw as the meager monthly child support Mr. Magalhães offered her after they separated, prompting her to talk to prosecutors.

As is sometimes the case in the cycle of Brazilian corruption scandals, celebrities can emerge from such intrigue.

One aspirant to such status is Nagila Coelho, 38, a personal trainer who is now a romantic companion of Mr. Magalhães. She is planning to start her own line of bikinis, according to a report in Folha de São Paulo, a Brazilian newspaper. Ms. Alcântara, meanwhile, is mulling a venture into politics.

She said she already had a slogan: “Being a thief is easy; I’ll be honest amid all the thieves.”

Bordeaux: A Enganacao Continua, Mas Ha Boas Noticias

Do departamento de artigos requentados...(algumas coisas nao mudam mesmo).

Para quem nao sabe importo, degusto, compro, olho vinhos. Alguns por vezes sao de Bordeaux. 

Continua sendo um misterio como os franceses conseguem vender algo com um preco muito superior ao que vale. Seria somente oferta x procura? Ou aquele rotulo bonito colocado num vinho de € 2.50 justifica a compra e a venda? 

Importei alguns rotulos e se comparar preco com preco quase todos apanham dos vinhos de outros paises. Os otimos bordeaux? Carissimos. Os bons bordeaux? Tambem muito caros. Os bordeaux de entrada? No oceano de milhoes de garrafas ha poucas boas alternativas.

Abaixo de R$ 50.00 vira um reality show de horrores. Compensa (depois lavo a boca com sabao) comprar um vinho chileno por  R$ 50.00.

A boa noticia? Ha poucos, mas muito bons Bordeaux blanc! no mercado. Bem melhores que muita bomba da america do sul pela mesma faixa de preco. Pesquise Bordeaux Blanc que acha coisa boa no mar da vida.

Para os iniciantes: Rhone, Loire e outras oferecem boas opcoes.

F-1 E O Transito Em SP

Do departamento de pessoas ignorantes, com agencias:

Mais uma vez o transito em direcao (e na saida) de Interlagos estava caotico. De motoristas de Corcel II 1976 ate Porsche SUV todos acham que precisam ir de carro ao autodromo. Nao ha alternativas.

Na internet as reclamacoes foram as mesmas, cidade imbecil, prefeito isso, governador aquilo, pais de quinto mundo, etc.

Tsk tsk. O trem vai vazio para Interlagos, limpo por dentro e com A/C funcionando. 

Os pobres e os ricos no Brasil padecem do mesmo mal: Burrice aguda incuravel.

Eles gostam disso...

Bom E Barato: Comidas

Restaurante Chiado. La na decadente e cara Moema. Todos sabem quem sao os donos, etc etc.  Bom portuga por um preco razoavel, ao menos se comparado os precos que so imbecis pagam por aqui. 

Atendimento muito bom; zero de estacionamento. Prepare-se para pagar R$ 15.00 pelo tal de valet.  Absurdo cotidiano em SP.

Na PF jamais pagaria isso, mas foi no corporativo.

Vale a pena uma visita. BBB.

Musica De Sexta-Feira

Sao Paulo com cara de SP dos anos 70.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3znOTuT4K8

Dica Cultural: Biografia Semi-Autorizada

Talvez nem tanto cultural...mas vamos la: Em tempos de F-1 no Brasil estou lendo um delicioso livro sobre um carinha que tem alguns cru cru na carteira.

Bernard Ecclestone.

Descobri que tenho algumas coisas em comum com o bilionario londrino: Pavor de desperdicio e amor por dinheiro acima de tudo. 

So falta ser sabio/sabido como ele e viver mais 400 anos para chegar perto da fortuna do cara.

Para os bem entendidos o livro apresenta algumas falhas... mas nada que comprometa o importante: saber o que he, de onde vem essa pessoa. 

Comparo Bernie com os picaretas do vinho, dos restaurantes, das lojas. Gente que perde reputacao, nome, honra por R$ 5,000. Oh gawd.....

Baratinho no kindle. Nao sei se ha em portugues.

http://www.amazon.com/No-Angel-Secret-Bernie-Ecclestone/dp/0571269362

Perguntar Nao Ofende: O Milagre Do Panettone De Natal

Voce ja reparou quanto tempo dura aberto um panettone caseiro e um desses de supermercado? Eu tambem.

Nem os vermes vao comer essa geracao atual de gourmets.

Humanos? No, thanks.

Quebra-Quebra News

Sera a culpa somente da pizza de R$ 90.00? 

Mais uma pizzaria grande manda embora 30% do staff. Pizzaria capa de revista...famosa.... daquelas com pianista tocando toda a noite....

Decidem mandar gente embora a corrigir precos dos produtos, dos vinhos, do ponto de onde estao. 

Muitos ainda nao viram que a solucao passa por outros pontos. Cortar staff he agua com acucar. O buraco de longo prazo esta em outro lugar.

Leitura De Sabado: Sobre Bem x Mal

Sam Harris (opa, alguem o conhece ai?) nessa otima entrevista. Boa leitura

The Roots of Good and Evil

An Interview with Paul Bloom

Paul Bloom is the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University. His research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. He has won numerous awards for his research and teaching. He is a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology and a co-editor of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, one of the major journals in the field. Dr. Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science and for popular outlets such as The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. He is the author or editor of six books, including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil.

Paul was kind enough to answer a few questions about his new book.

*  *  *

Harris: What are the greatest misconceptions people have about the origins of morality?

Bloom: The most common misconception is that morality is a human invention. It’s like agriculture and writing, something that humans invented at some point in history. From this perspective, babies start off as entirely self-interested beings—little psychopaths—and only gradually come to appreciate, through exposure to parents and schools and church and television, moral notions such as the wrongness of harming another person.

Now, this perspective is not entirely wrong. Certainly some morality is learned; this has to be the case because moral ideals differ across societies. Nobody is born with the belief that sexism is wrong (a moral belief that you and I share) or that blasphemy should be punished by death (a moral belief that you and I reject). Such views are the product of culture and society. They aren’t in the genes.

But the argument I make in Just Babies is that there also exist hardwired moral universals—moral principles that we all possess. And even those aspects of morality—such as the evils of sexism—that vary across cultures are ultimately grounded in these moral foundations.

A very different misconception sometimes arises, often stemming from a religious or spiritual outlook. It’s that we start off as Noble Savages, as fundamentally good and moral beings. From this perspective, society and government and culture are corrupting influences, blotting out and overriding our natural and innate kindness.

This, too, is mistaken. We do have a moral core, but it is limited—Hobbes was closer to the truth than Rousseau. Relative to an adult, your typical toddler is selfish, parochial, and bigoted. I like the way Kingsley Amis once put it: “It was no wonder that people were so horrible when they started life as children.” Morality begins with the genes, but it doesn’t end there.

Harris: How do you distinguish between the contributions of biology and those of culture?

Bloom: There is a lot you can learn about the mind from studying the fruit flies of psychological research—college undergraduates. But if you want to disentangle biology and culture, you need to look at other populations. One obvious direction is to study individuals from diverse cultures. If it turns out that some behavior or inclination shows up only in so-called WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich Democratic) societies, it’s unlikely to be a biological adaptation. For instance, a few years ago researchers were captivated by the fact that subjects in the United States and Switzerland are highly altruistic and highly moral when playing economic games. They assumed that this reflects the workings of some sort of evolved module—only to discover that people in the rest of the world behave quite differently, and that their initial findings are better explained as a quirk of certain modern societies.

One can do comparative research—if a human capacity is shared with other apes, then its origin is best explained in terms of biology, not culture. And there’s a lot of fascinating research with apes and monkeys that’s designed to address questions about the origin of pro-social behavior.

Then there’s baby research. We can learn a lot about human nature by looking at individuals before they are exposed to school, television, religious institutions, and the like. The powerful capacities that we and other researchers find in babies are strong evidence for the contribution of biology. Now, even babies have some life history, and it’s possible that very early experience, perhaps even in the womb, plays some role in the origin of these capacities. I’m comfortable with this—my claim in Just Babies isn’t that the moral capacities of babies emerge without anyinteraction with the environment. That would be nuts. Rather, my claim is the standard nativist one: These moral capacities are not acquired through learning.

We should also keep in mind that failure to find some capacity in a baby does not show that it is the product of culture. For one thing, the capacity might be present in the baby’s mind but psychologists might not be clever enough to detect it. In the immortal words of Donald Rumsfeld, “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Furthermore, some psychological systems that are pretty plainly biological adaptations might emerge late in development—think about the onset of disgust at roughly the age of four, or the powerful sexual desires that emerge around the time of puberty. Developmental research is a useful tool for pulling apart biology and culture, but it’s not a magic bullet.

Harris: What are the implications of our discovering that many moral norms emerge very early in life?

Bloom: Some people think that once we know what the innate moral system is, we’ll know how to live our lives. For them it’s as if the baby’s mind contains a holy text of moral wisdom, written by Darwin instead of Yahweh, and once we can read it, all ethical problems will be solved.

This seems unlikely. Mature moral decision-making involves complex reasoning, and often the right thing to do involves overriding our gut feelings, including those that are hardwired. And some moral insights, such as the wrongness of slavery, are surely not in our genes.

But I do think that this developmental work has some interesting implications. For one thing, the argument in Just Babies is that, to a great extent, all people have the same morality. The differences that we see—however important they are to our everyday lives—are variations on a theme. This universality provides some reason for optimism. It suggests that if we look hard enough, we can find common ground with any other neurologically normal human, and that has to be good news.

Just Babies is optimistic in another way. The zeitgeist in modern psychology is pro-emotion and anti-reason. Prominent writers and intellectuals such as David Brooks, Malcolm Gladwell, and Jonathan Haidt have championed the view that, as David Hume famously put it, we are slaves of the passions. From this perspective, moral judgments and moral actions are driven mostly by gut feelings—rational thought has little to do with it.

That’s a grim view of human nature. If it were true, we should buck up and learn to live with it. But I argue in Just Babies that it’s not true. It is refuted by everyday experience, by history, and by the science of developmental psychology. Rational deliberation is part of our everyday lives, and, as many have argued—including Steven Pinker, Peter Singer, Joshua Greene, you, and me, in the final chapter of in Just Babies—it is a powerful force in driving moral progress.

Harris: When you talk about moral progress, it implies that some moralities are better than others. Do you think, then, that it is legitimate to say that certain individuals or cultures have the wrong morality?

Bloom: If humans were infinitely plastic, with no universal desires, goals, or moral principles, the answer would have to be no. But it turns out that we have deep commonalities, and so, yes, we can talk meaningfully about some moralities’ being better than others.

Consider a culture in which some minority is kept as slaves—tortured, raped, abused, bought and sold, and so on—and this practice is thought of by the majority as a moral arrangement. Perhaps it’s justified by reference to divine command, or the demands of respected authorities, or long-standing tradition. I think we’re entirely justified in arguing that they are wrong, and when we do this, we’re not merely saying “We like our way better.” Rather, we can argue that it’s wrong by pointing out that it’s wrong even for them—the majority who benefit from the practice.

Obstetricians used to deliver babies without washing their hands, and many mothers and babies died as a result. They were doing it wrong—wrong by their own standards, because obstetricians wanted to deliver babies, not kill them. Similarly, given that the humans in the slave society possess certain values and intuitions and priorities, they are acting immorally by their own lights, and they would appreciate this if they were exposed to certain arguments and certain facts.

Now, this is an empirical claim, drawing on assumptions about human psychology, but it’s supported by history. Good moral ideas can spread through the world in much the same way that good scientific ideas can, and once they are established, people marvel that they could ever have thought differently. Americans are no more likely to reinstate slavery than we are to give up on hand-washing for doctors.

You’ve written extensively on these issues in The Moral Landscape and elsewhere, and since we agree on so much, I can’t resist sounding a note of gentle conflict. Your argument is that morality is about maximizing the well-being of conscious minds. This means that determining the best moral system reduces to the empirical/scientific question of what system best succeeds at this goal. From this standpoint, we can reject a slave society for precisely the same reason we can reject a dirty-handed-obstetrician society—it involves needless human pain.

My view is slightly different. You’re certainly right that maximizing well-being is something we value, and needless suffering is plainly a bad thing. But there remain a lot of hard questions—the sort that show up in Ethics 101 and never go away. Are we aspiring for the maximum total amount of individual well-being or the highest average? Are principles of fairness and equality relevant? What if the slave society has very few unhappy slaves and very many happy slaveholders, so its citizens are, in total and on average, more fulfilled than ours? Is that society more moral? If my child needs an operation to save his sight, am I a better person if I let him go blind and send the money to a charity where it will save another child’s life? These are hard questions, and they don’t go away if we have a complete understanding of the empirical facts.

The source of these difficulties, I think, is that as reflective moral beings, we sometimes have conflicting intuitions as to what counts as morally good. If we were natural-born utilitarians of the Benthamite sort, then determining the best possible moral world really would be a straightforward empirical problem. But we aren’t, and so it isn’t.

Harris: Well, it won’t surprise you to learn that I agree with everything you’ve said up until this last bit. In fact, these last points illustrate why I choose not to follow the traditional lines laid down by academic philosophers. If you declare that you are a “utilitarian,” everyone who has taken Ethics 101, as you say, imagines that he understands the limits of your view. Unfortunately, those limits have been introduced by philosophers themselves and are enshrined in the way that we have been encouraged to talk about moral philosophy.

For instance, you suggest that a concern for well-being might be opposed to a concern for fairness and equality—but fairness and equality are immensely important precisely because they are so good at safeguarding the well-being of people who have competing interests. If someone says that fairness and equality are important for reasons that have nothing to do with the well-being of people, I have no idea what he is talking about.

Similarly, you suggest that the hard questions of ethics wouldn’t go away if we had a complete understanding of empirical facts. But we really must pause to appreciate just how unimaginably different things would be IF we had such an understanding. This kind of omniscience is probably impossible—but nothing in my account depends on its being possible in practice. All we need to establish a strong, scientific conception of moral truth in principle is to admit that there is a landscape of experiences that conscious beings like ourselves can have, both individually and collectively—and that some are better than others (in any and every sense of “better”). Must we really defend the proposition that an experience of effortless good humor, serenity, love, creativity, and awe spread over all possible minds would be better than everyone’s being flayed alive in a dungeon by unhappy devils? I don’t think so.

I agree that how we think about collective well-being presents certain difficulties (average vs. maximum, for instance)—but a strong conception of moral truth requires only that we acknowledge the extremes. It seems to me that the paradoxes that Derek Parfit has engineered here, while ingenious, need no more impede our progress toward increased well-being than the paradoxes of Zeno prevent us from getting to the coffee pot each morning. I admit that it can be difficult to say whether a society of unhappy egalitarians would be better or worse than one composed of happy slaveholders and none-too-miserable slaves. And if we tuned things just right, I would be forced to say that these societies are morally equivalent. However, one thing is not debatable (and it is all that my thesis as presented in The Moral Landscape requires): If you took either of these societies and increased the well-being of everyone, you would be making a change for the good. If, for instance, the slaveholders invented machines that could replace the drudgery of slaves, and the slaves themselves became happy machine owners—and these changes introduced no negative consequences that canceled the moral gains—this would be an improvement in moral terms. And any person who later attempted to destroy the machines and begin enslaving his neighbors would be acting immorally.

Again, the changes in well-being that are possible for creatures like ourselves are possible whether or not anyone knows about them, and their possibility depends in some way on the laws that govern the states of conscious minds in this universe (or any other).

Whatever its roots in our biology, I think we should now view morality as a navigation problem: How can we (or any other conscious system) reduce suffering and increase happiness? There might be an uncountable number of morally equivalent peaks and valleys on the landscape—but that wouldn’t undermine the claim that basking on some peak is better than being tortured in one of the valleys. Nor would it suggest that movement up or down depends on something other than the laws of nature.

Bloom: I agree with almost all of this. Sure—needless suffering is a bad thing, and increased well-being is a good thing, and that’s why I’m comfortable saying that some societies (and some individuals) have better moralities than others. I agree as well that determining the right moral system will rest in part on knowing the facts. This is true for the extremes, and it’s also true for real-world cases. The morality of drug laws in the United States, for instance, surely has a lot to do with whether those laws cause an increase or a decrease in human suffering.

My point was that there are certain moral problems that don’t seem to be solvable by science. You accept this but think that these are like paradoxes of metaphysics—philosophical puzzles with little practical relevance.

This is where we clash, because some of these moral problems keep me up at night. Take the problem of how much I should favor my own children. I spend money to improve my sons’ well-being—buying them books, taking them on vacations, paying dentists to fix their teeth, etc.—that could instead be used to save the lives of children in poor countries. I don’t need a neuroscientist to tell me that I’m not acting to increase the total well-being of conscious individuals. Am I doing wrong? Maybe so. But would you recommend the alternative, where (to use my earlier example) I let my son go blind so that I can send the money I would have paid for the operation to Oxfam so that another child can live? This seems grotesque. So what’s the right balance? How should we weigh the bonds of family, friendship, and community?

This is a serious problem of everyday life, and it’s not going to be solved by science. 

Harris: Actually, I don’t think our views differ much. This just happens to be a place where we need to distinguish between answers in practice and answers in principle. I completely agree that there are important ethical problems that we might never solve. I also agree that there are circumstances in which we tend to act selfishly to a degree that beggars any conceivable philosophical justification. We are, therefore, not as moral as we might be. Is this really a surprise? As you know, the forces that rule us here are largely situational: It is one thing for you to toss an appeal from the Red Cross in the trash on your way to the ice cream store. It would be another for you to step over the prostrate bodies of starving children. You know such children exist, of course, and yet they are out of sight and (generally) out of mind. Few people would counsel you to let your own children go blind, but I can well imagine Peter Singer’s saying that you should deprive them of every luxury as long as other children are deprived of food. To understand the consequences of doing this, we would really need to take all the consequences into account. 

I briefly discuss this problem in The Moral Landscape. I suspect that some degree of bias toward one’s own offspring could be normative in that it will tend to lead to better outcomes for everyone. Communism, many have noticed, appears to run so counter to human nature as to be more or less unworkable. But the crucial point is that we could be wrong about this—and we would be wrong with reference to empirical facts that we may never fully discover. To say that these answers will not be found through science is merely to say that they won’t be established with any degree of certainty or precision. But that is not to say that such answers do not exist. It is also possible to know exactly what we should do but to not be sufficiently motivated to do it. We often find ourselves in this situation in life. For example, a person desperately wants to lose weight and knows that he would be happier if he did. He also knows how to do it—by eating less junk and exercising more. And yet he may spend his whole life not doing what he knows would be good for him. In many respects, I think our morality suffers from this kind of lassitude.

But we can achieve something approaching moral certainty for the easy cases. As you know, many academics and intellectuals deny this. You and I are surrounded by highly educated and otherwise intelligent people who believe that opposition to the burqa is merely a symptom of Western provincialism. I think we agree that this kind of moral relativism rests on some very dubious (and unacknowledged) assumptions about the nature of morality and the limits of science. Let us go out on a scientific limb together: Forcing half the population to live inside cloth bags isn’t the best way to maximize individual or collective well-being. On the surface, this is a rather modest ethical claim. When we look at the details, however, we find that it is really a patchwork of claims about psychology, sociology, economics, and probably several other scientific disciplines. In fact, the moment we admit that we know anything at all about human well-being, we find that we cannot talk about moral truth outside the context of science. Granted, the scientific details may be merely implicit, or may remain perpetually out of reach. But we are talking about the nature of human minds all the same.

Bloom: We still have more to talk about regarding the hard cases, but I agree with you that there are moral truths and that we can learn about them, at least in part, through science. Part of the program of doing so is understanding human nature, and especially our universal moral sense, and this is what my research, and my new book, is all about.

- See more at: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-roots-of-good-and-evil#sthash.mMSGVy0Z.dpuf

Perguntar Nao Ofende

E eis que ja anunciam com grande alegria e muitos !!!!!!! nas padarias, casas de jogos de bicho e em blogs a chegada do vinho portugues que he um equivalente ao Don Peor chileno em termos de qualidade e preco. Uma bomba por R$ 800, R$ 900.00. 

E pior, fazem fila para comprar esse bom vinho. Ponto. Somente bom.

Brasil deve ser o paraiso para quem leva dinheiro de trouxa. Voce conhece outro lugar assim? Eu nao.

Musica De Sexta-Feira

Faz falta. Fez muito.

O Milagre Do Espumante Barato

Existe alguns paises que produzem vinhos espumantes feitos de ''uvas'' que sao bem baratinhos. E esses espumantes estao invandindo bem o mercado brasileiro. 

Consumidor brasileiro ainda nao descobriu que nao ha milagre. Se um produto custa muito mais barato que o concorrente implora-se por uma razao. 

Sabe aquele gostinho de abacaxi que muitos vinhos brancos e espumantes tem? Voce acha que vem somente das leveduras, nao he?

Guess again.

Ha um comercio grande daquilo que sobra em industrias de sucos integrais de abacaxi. Esse resto pode resultar em mosto que resulta em, em em em? Fermentacao. 

E assim a magica aparece. Um vinho mais barato pronto para ser adicionado ao vinho base do espumante. 

Voce acha que um selo de controle de origem com fiscalizacao seria seria bem-vindo por todos em alguns paises? Eu tambem nao.

Cuidado ao abastecer seu carro com gasolina a R$ 1.80 o litro. Depois nao reclame.

Bebo mais, mas bebo pior!!!

Perguntar Nao Ofende: Nova Bolha

Com agencias

Departamento de bolhas em formacao. 

Quantas lojas de bolos mais pode uma cidade sustentar? 

Nova moda agora he ter casa de bolo. Se voce acha que isso tem forma, cara, aroma e gosto de ''frozen yogurt'' voce esta certo.


Strange days indeed. 
ummmm, a bolha esta quase no ponto

Comer Bem E Barato? Procura Que Acha

Ironias da vida. O carinha abre uma casa de carnes ''finas'' em bairro onde supostamente ha gente ''rica''. E para desgosto e surpresa de todos as vendas nao acontecem como esperado. Competicao, pessoal quebrado (mas ainda nao devolveram a mercedes para o banco), ponto nao tao bom.

Mas no apagar das luzes o gajo tem uma boa ideia: Oferecer comida e ver no que da.

O resultado he otimo: Carnes uruguayas e argentinas com otimo preco em forma de almoco. Arroz, salada, feijao tropeiro ou similar, um pedacao de 150 ou 200g assado da maneira que o criente quer. 

Preco?? R$ 30.00 por um prato muito similar ao das casas mais famosas onde cobram R$ 100.00 pela mesma coisa.

Acougues finos se viram e fornecem otimas refeicoes a precos excelentes. 

Onde? Em varios bairros de SP. Fique de olho. Dessa vez me recuso a fazer propaganda de graca.

So paga para comer caro quem he trouxa...... serio.

Leitura De Sabado (Alto Nivel)

Eu falo/escrevo/escuto/leio em alguns idiomas (grande coisa). Atesto que minha personalidade muda em cada idioma, um pouco.

Tem como ser malandro em alemao? Tem como ser certinho em carioques? Tem como ser triste em italiano?

Boa leitura

Multilingualism

Johnson: Do different languages confer different personalities?

Nov 5th 2013, 12:06 by R.L.G. | BERLIN

LAST week, Johnson took a look at some of the advantages of bilingualism. These include better performance at tasks involving "executive function" (which involve the brain's ability to plan and prioritise), better defence against dementia in old age and—the obvious—the ability to speak a second language. One purported advantage was not mentioned, though. Many multilinguals report different personalities, or even different worldviews, when they speak their different languages.

It’s an exciting notion, the idea that one’s very self could be broadened by the mastery of two or more languages. In obvious ways (exposure to new friends, literature and so forth) the self really is broadened. Yet it is different to claim—as many people do—to have a different personality when using a different language. A former Economist colleague, for example,reported being ruder in Hebrew than in English. So what is going on here?

Benjamin Lee Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called “Whorfianism”, this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist, which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought.

This influence is not necessarily linked to the vocabulary or grammar of a second language. Significantly, most people are not symmetrically bilingual. Many have learned one language at home from parents, and another later in life, usually at school. So bilinguals usually have different strengths and weaknesses in their different languages—and they are not always best in their first language. For example, when tested in a foreign language, people are less likely to fall into a cognitive trap (answering a test question with an obvious-seeming but wrong answer) than when tested in their native language. In part this is because working in a second language slows down the thinking. No wonder people feel different when speaking them. And no wonder they feel looser, more spontaneous, perhaps more assertive or funnier or blunter, in the language they were reared in from childhood.

What of “crib” bilinguals, raised in two languages? Even they do not usually have perfectly symmetrical competence in their two languages. But even for a speaker whose two languages are very nearly the same in ability, there is another big reason that person will feel different in the two languages. This is because there is an important distinction between bilingualism and biculturalism. 

Many bilinguals are not bicultural. But some are. And of those bicultural bilinguals, we should be little surprised that they feel different in their two languages. Experiments in psychology have shown the power of “priming”—small unnoticed factors that can affect behaviour in big ways. Asking people to tell a happy story, for example, will put them in a better mood. The choice between two languages is a huge prime. Speaking Spanish rather than English, for a bilingual and bicultural Puerto Rican in New York, might conjure feelings of family and home. Switching to English might prime the same person to think of school and work. 

So there are two very good reasons (asymmetrical ability, and priming) that make people feel different speaking their different languages. We are still left with a third kind of argument, though. An economist recently interviewed here at Prospero, Athanasia Chalari, said for example that:

Greeks are very loud and they interrupt each other very often. The reason for that is the Greek grammar and syntax. When Greeks talk they begin their sentences with verbs and the form of the verb includes a lot of information so you already know what they are talking about after the first word and can interrupt more easily.

Is there something intrinsic to the Greek language that encourages Greeks to interrupt? Consider Johnson sceptical. People seem to enjoy telling tales about their languages' inherent properties, and how they influence their speakers. A group of French intellectual worthies once proposed, rather self-flatteringly, that French be the sole legal language of the EU, because of its supposedly unmatchable rigour and precision. Some Germans believe that frequently putting the verb at the end of a sentence makes the language especially logical. But language myths are not always self-flattering: many speakers think their languages are unusually illogical or difficult—witness the plethora of books along the lines of "Only in English do you park on a driveway and drive on a parkway; English must be the craziest language in the world!" What such pop-Whorfian stories share is a (natural) tendency to exoticise languages. We also see some unsurprising overlap with national stereotypes and self-stereotypes: French, rigorous; German, logical; English, playful. Of course.

In this case, Ms Chalari, a scholar, at least proposed a specific and plausible line of causation from grammar to personality: in Greek, the verb comes first, and it carries a lot of information, hence easy interrupting. The problem is that many unrelated  languages all around the world put the verb at the beginning of sentences. Many languages all around the world are heavily inflected, encoding lots of information in verbs. It would be a striking finding if all of these unrelated languages had speakers more prone to interrupting each other. Welsh, for example, is also both verb-first and about as heavily inflected as Greek, but the Welsh are not known as pushy conversationalists.

Neo-Whorfians continue to offer evidence and analysis that aims to prove that different languages push speakers to think differently. One such effort is forthcoming: “The Bilingual Mind” by Aneta Pavlenko, to be published in April. Ms Pavlenko speaks to François Grosjeanhere. Meanwhile, John McWhorter takes the opposite stance in "The Language Hoax", forthcoming in February. We'll return to this debate. But strong Whorfian arguments do not need to be valid for people to feel differently in their different languages. 

Musica De Sexta-Feira

Nada melhor para uma semana dessa.

Grandes Vinhos, Pequenos Precos

Onde, quem, como, quando?

100% dos vinhos que tomei ate hoje feitos com petit verdot eram otimos. E quando o preco ajuda entao...melhor ainda.

Dois vinhos que curti bastante pela qualidade e pelo custo: Lorca Petit Verdot (argentina) e Morkel petit verdot (Sudafrica). Ambos ja bem evoluidos, mas a petit nem liga para isso. Gosta mesmo he que o tempo passe. Fica otima apos 10 anos. O morkel ja esta com 9 aninhos. Faltou um pouco de acidez para ficar melhor, mas pelo preco... Quem encontrar esses dois vinhos, pode pega-los sem susto.

R$ 70.00 e R$ 60.00 respectivamente. Not bad para petit verdot.

Check'em out. 

Pensamentos Aleatorios

Sempre desconfie de:

• medico ortomolecular com rugas e aparentando idade maior que a do RG.
• cardiologista sedentario e fumante
• endocrinologista gordo
• dentista com dentes sujos
• sommelier crente que nao gosta de vinho
• economista de agencia de banco (como diz Buffett, se fosse bom nao estaria trabalhando ali)
• advogado que diz ''seje'', ''houveram''.
• blogueiros de vinhos que comecam frases com ''o amigo....
• importadores que confundem tre bicchieri com trambiquere
• vendedores de vinho que respondem "todos gostam'' a pergunta ''esse vinho he bom?"

Vamo trabalha.

Um Brunello Que Vale R$ 80.00?? @#!%!!#$!

Degustacao as cegas poe tudo no lugar mesmo. Iniciantes e experientes tomadores de vinhos ficam sem saber o que dizer as cegas.

Brasileiro ainda adora tomar rotulo. Nem sabe o que tem na taca, mas se eh para se mostrar, manda servir os vinhos de sempre. Desde champagne vagabundo ate os chilenos caríssimos.

Por isso que vive pagando muito caro por vinhos que não valem ¼ do que custam. Meio de semana abro um Brunello super pontuado, agnatta 2001. Coloco as cegas para degustação e.....? D. Barata avalia o vinho como bom e lhe da R$ 80.00 de valor justo.

O mesmo vinho já havia sido degustado as cegas por sommeliers experientes que lhe deram R$ 50.00. Somente o dono do restaurante desconfiou e deu bem mais que isso pelo vinho.

Já me cansei  de ter decepções com brunello e barolo. Hoje em dia não tomo nem os que importo (salvo se alguém comprar uma garrafa e me der uma).

Conversa que já rolou aqui: Fique com os ótimos vinhos de R$ 50.00 ~ 80.00 que há muita coisa boa nessa faixa.

Ah, falei que o brunello valia R$ 80.00 e não que custava R$ 80.00. Era um brunello de R$ 400.00.