Absurdities

A collection of small absurdities.

Private theft: Yesterday while I was walking back from lunch I noticed a youth unscrewing the antenna from a car in a somewhat furtive fashion. I enquired if he was stealing the antenna, and he claimed he actually knew the owner of the car (thus verifying that it was not his). There were also some young people across the road laughing (probably the whole thing was harmless), however I pretended to photograph the situation with my mobile phone. The immediate Italian reaction was that I was violating their privacy. 

Cheating: There is a fair bit of cheating in Italian universities. A student just submitted to me a program of which, he insisted, he had written every symbol. He was unable to explain the program. Worse, the problem was to modify a program which I had written so that 95% of the code was written by me. A colleague received a program from an Italian student in which the comments were in Turkish.

Great thinkers:
L’edizione 2010 di Abitatori del tempo si compone di 10 appuntamenti, dal 15 gennaio al 26 marzo 2010, in 9 Comuni della Brianza, tutti dedicati alla riflessione sul senso della vita e la complessità della condizione umana nelle riflessioni e nei problemi posti da filosofia, teologia, arte e scienze.
Protagonisti degli incontri i maggiori pensatori ed esponenti del pensiero filosofico contemporaneo: Emanuele Severino, Giuseppe Rizzardi, Massimo Marassi, Vincenzo Vitiello, Giulio Giorello, Salvatore Natoli, Stefano Serra Capizzano, Carlo Sini, Elio Franzini.