Spontaneous similarities

`Inglourious Bastards' poster:



I look at it and think: `Hmm, Brad Pitt would look good in the role of young Don Vito Corleone.'



Although Mr. Pitt is not Italian.

How to understand Russia and its history

In LiveJournal community nytimesinmoscow a question was posed: what can't Americans understand about Russia?

I suggested the following answer:

Americans don't understand that there are almost no century-old traditions of fighting for freedom in Russia, but there is a great tradition of despotic slavery instead.

Nevertheless, Americans are able to understand this, for there is a good concept in Philosophy of Russian History that helps to. This concept is described, for instance, in works of russian-american historian A. Yanov and russian dissident V. I. Novodvorskaya. Its essence is there are five competing traditions in the history of Russia. There are 1) Scandinavian and 2) Slavic traditions; progressive ones but very poorly supported among Russians. There is also 3) Horde tradition, and due to this one Russia can not overcome imperial consciousness. There is 4) Byzantium tradition being the source of Russian loyality to authoritarism. And there is 5) the Wild Field tradition which can easily be recognized in Russian revolts and which makes Russian culture so unique romantic and controversial.

It is because of domination of traditions 3) and 4) the genesis of totalitarian monster of USSR was possible.

Unfortunately, not only Americans misunderstand it. Most of Russians have no idea of this all as well.

Science Tattoos

Science tattoos. Funny.

If I made such a tattoo, I'd choose 'universal property' picture



for I always forget how it looks when I need it.

Or, possibly, I would define left and right subgroup cosets

gN and Ng

on my left and right hand respectively, for I incessantly confuse one with another. (And generally, I often have problems with remembering where is 'left' and where is 'right' when it comes to math definitions, whilst in casual life I never have such problem.)

My poor English is so poor

Okay, now I'm publishing some posts here. Unfortunately, I don't have much practice in English writing, so these blogspot posts would be a good bit of help, I suppose. Let me know if I use some wierd phrases or words here, will you? :-)

(Oh, I guess I better find some readers first, LOL.)

Movimento Pela Alexandra

(video in Russian)

This video is being discussed in Russian blogs now. It's sort of news report about the girl that had been taken care of in Portugal by a couple of local citizen while her biological mother somewhy was not concerned about her own daughter's fate, health and so on. Not long ago, the mother took girl by force (but fully according to law) into the hell of her native country. And now she beats her 6-years old daughter in sight of cameras telling that "she was spoiled by those Portugese", the girl is crying, and this all is shown on Russian TV in prime-time. "They returned home and lived a long and happy life"—that kind of news report, yeah.

Completely surrealistic video. I just can't understand... Are those "journalists" joking? Maybe that's some kind of "irony"? What's this all about?!

I'm singing a petition for little Sasha come back to Portugal.

Here is the English-version (Google-translated) of Movimento Pela Alexandra blog xaninhanossa.blogspot.com.

Blogspot: arrival

Okay, I've reserved my account name here.

I feel, sooner or later this will be my permanent blog. But for now, I still write in here.