Modular origami

     Tetrahedron, intersection of two tetrahedrons, intersection of three tetrahedrons, intersection of five tetrahedrons, pyramidal or starlike icosahedron, stars of different colours with six modules, stars of your favourite soccer teams.  

Let's say (it) to Calvino, in fact let's not say it

     Writing you is Silvana Calabrese, twenty-three years old, with a degree in Communication Sciences at the University of Bari. Few people remember that in 1984, Italo Calvino was invited by Cambridge Harvard University, in Massachusetts, to deliver a series of six lectures on free subject that took the name of American Lessons. He chose to illustrate some literature values which he should save: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency or coherence. He called them Six memos for the next millennium. The author argued that the mastery of their own language was a moral and social deep value, because it’s the only weapon capable of opposing the loss of form that has infected the world, making senseless and shapeless people life, and the only tool that’s able to make so clear and crisp the nuances of thought and imagination.

     Calvino called the precision which would follow the confidence, the ability to process complex and articulated speech without running into contradictions. Extolled the value of the accuracy, as opposed to the tendency to approximation that characterizes contemporary society.

     At the end of the series of conferences, emerged the idea of the writer’s work as a challenge to the degradation of society with the specific weapons of the language.

     This assumption, while going back to 1984, is revealed present, indeed futuristic, because it seems that Calvino has predicted the linguistic immaturity of youth, so linked to linguistic bad habits "we say" and "pratically" that spread like the plague, and exactly how the plague, they don’t discriminate by class or education level. By television journalists to physicists at Geneva CERN, many souls are affected by this virus.

     The "say" is sociable: it goes to "pratically" to "roughly", the "whatever other" and "i.e.", occurring as a nightmare.

     What Calvino could "we say" of this expression/pleonasm, sign of linguistic weakness that laps every day new people and don’t leave them never and never.

     And then, "we say" it forever, but we know it?

     At first, it’s presumptuous to use the plural if the speaker isn’t the spokesperson for a group and then, it’s a clear sign of loss of control over their own language.

     But the worst phenomenon which I happened to attend is contagion: learners make large use of  it and the lights follow their example.

     So... don’t say (it) to Calvino. 

     Source “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, June 25, 2010, p. 22.

Balloon sculptures. A poodle

With the mentor Pope Francesco we restore the sense of faith

While I address a salute to Pope Ratzinger, who with the withdrawal from the Petrine ministry has shown humility of mind, we welcome to the papal throne Jorge Bergoglio who measure accurately the choice of the pontifical name directing it towards Francesco. The Holy Father greets us with fraternal way and asks us to pray for him so that he’ll be able to fulfill his mission of spiritual guide for the faithful. In addition to pray we have the moral duty to help him in this goal. How? Reflecting on the meaning of faith, indeed, restoring it because prayer, severed from the action, loses much of its value. 

The faith isn’t acquired from the breviary, and isn’t consolidated with the knowledge of religion, because it means hearing with the soul. It finds its raison d’être in the constant dialogue that we should establish with the conscience and that also should involve the atheist because must not only be the fear of God to be a deterrent to evil actions. In theory it’s simple approaching the subject, but the perception and the daily application of righteousness is a matter that requires caution. Since the world is characterized by free will (by God’s will) and by the lack of balance between good and evil, health and sickness, wealth and poverty, we’re often impelled to believe that luck and joy are attributable to awards that the Lord gives us for having done good. But that reasoning can’t be applied to the less fortunate people.

We haven’t understood that the distribution of rewards and punishments doesn’t take place in earthly life, but rather the Judgment Day. But how to explain the inequalities? Whether or not you believe they’re trials to which we’re subjected. It even might come to argue that it’s a kind of little tricks of God to test our behaviors. Who leads a wretched life is put to the test and will have to continue to have faith and doing right even when he/she sees the evil and no chance of redemption, but only the constant social and human deterioration.

While those who live in comfort and they enjoy the luck of meet the good people, get a good job, get married with a kind and caring consort, have children or grandchildren in good health and healthy, he/she is equally placed in front of a trial. He/she will thinks that everything is owed him/her or that is receiving deserved rewards and this will make he/she greedy, proud, haughty and without the slightest regard for others. He/she will pray and will go to the Holy Mass, but he/she won’t carry out ever acts of faith, those which by definition are unconditional and dictated only by the humble consideration towards each other and not with a view to profit. 

Source: “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, March 20, 2013, p. 16. 

Carvings. Swan with apple and bud with zucchini

Legacy of Apple. The lesson from Steve Jobs

The obstacles make the man

     The death of Steve Jobs brings us back to June 12, 2005 when Stanford University, on the occasion of the delivery of degree parchments, it could hear the speech by the head of Apple, who had left the University. Isn’t a contradiction. The expensive college didn’t seem to provide him an opportunity, and not even the clarity to understand his vocation. 

     Following curiosities and interests made his way to unexpected results. The skills acquired free were, some time later, a practical application in his life. Everything happens for a reason. Drop out of college to find new life elsewhere has created a ramification of events on a global scale. Even behind the paradox of being laid off by created company, though lost, he discovered the presence of a superior design: "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again." Wrapped in creativity he founded NeXT, Pixar (that created the first computer animated film, Toy Story) and with his wife, another great 'holding': family. In quality of avid reader of the newspaper "The whole earth catalog," he recalls the maximum of the last no.: Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. Firmly convinced that the failures are the best place for forced to think differently and creatively, Jobs claimed that there was no reason not to follow our heart, "Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown out our inner voice. We must have the courage to follow our heart and intuition. They know what we really want to become". Commit us to his message continues to thrive among young people.

     The Rectors/Deans tells fables when stating the capacity of the University to train competitive youngs. Still, sometimes we feel compassion for the student who flew over the area of study instead of studying it. Since one student has the ability to determine which teaching is "profitable" for his training? And since he/she know what thing will take to meet the challenges imposed by the world of work? It’s well known that many are used to study a little and less they try to do it, they feel it so hard and so difficult to concentrate. But humor them is a badly: off creativity, reduces the flame of insight and preclude the opportunity to discover their real vocation. History, art, novels, films and Steve Jobs teach us that the presence of an obstacle is the necessary condition to harden. Are the obstacles to embellish path and goal. A training institution should encourage students to cope with the difficulties and not make soften it. Or abandon them. Support and advice are essential, but we must give them the desire to assert themselves and not make them crippled. 

     Source: "La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno", an italian newspaper, October 11, 2011, p. 24.

South Est Railways: the real troubles come after road accidents

     The driving school manuals recommend to drive appropriately to the characteristics of the vehicles and the road conditions and traffic by taking the precautions dictated by common sense and showing strong civic sense. But sometimes the inevitable happens. 

     Off the car, it sets in motion a perverse mechanism known and inevitable. The involved people in the mildest sinister leave the scene, but they finance any act, and enter in the field new characters, insurers, loss adjusters and body shop mechanics. As defenders, midfielders and attackers, they pass the ball themselves, indeed the numeric digits with a lightness that doesn’t suit to the sum of monies. Numbers are inflated and there is no stop to this habit. Often it seems that the expert/loss adjuster who, having read the vehicle, estimated the damage is in possession of the same price lists of bodywork mechanics with astronomical prices for repair abrasions, and not deep scrapes or dents (it spoke in a service of the italian show "Le Iene/The Hyenas"). Insurers provide compensation for damages, within the maximum, and then inflict their deadly blow in the policy rates. From body shop mechanic, more and more like a goldsmith, went few people. When accidents cause only property damages, you can take advantage of the form of an accident and friendly report prepared by the two drivers involved in order to make a complaint to the insurance. The module expected to be realized sketch illustrating the dynamic impact. There is always in some left any left individual who seeks to take advantage by declaring dynamics and attributions of blame that deviate from reality. This is the case of collisions occurred against the blue bus of the South Est Railways. Stay away from them because if your car were to collide with one of them, in spite of the accident and friendly report and the consolidated involvement liability (Article 2054, clause 2 of the Italian Civil Code), they declare that thay has received damages greater extent than those actually caused. The abrasions become dents. In addition they award sole responsibility for what happened to the small drivers. The compensation claim that they send will be accompanied by descriptions that don’t respect the logic of the trajectories and the mechanic principles, branch of physics that studies the movement. South Est Railways, let’s make sure that the blue Pacific, like the ocean, recalls the beauty of the waters and not the depth able to swallow the human honesty. 

     Source: “La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno”, an italian newspaper, Friday, May 18, 2012, p. 24.