49 Up

7 Up isn't just the brand of a fizzy lemonade, but also an interesting documentary created by some british lads, In 1964, they started following some people's lives at seven years intervals. They're now at the seventh instalment, and since 7x7=49, you can guess what the title refers to. I stumbled onto this documentary while looking for an underdog sport movie, but i think I'll keep a tab on it, and see if I can get my hands on it. It looks quite interesting...

I wonder, though, how much these people's life has been influenced by the documentaries... did people recognise them on the road? I don't think so. but may be having something like this in your CV can give you an edge. After all, the employer would be happy to keep you seven years, so that his firm would be featured in the movie too... mah?

anyway, click on the title to get the trailer (thanks Apple)

saturday morning fever...

Plenty of things to do today... wake up, shake up, abs, a bit of thesis writing, to the post-office to retrieve a fine (sigh), then lunch, down to bxl to meet the lady, and may be swimming. If I can get a swimsuit there. Also, I'm afraisd I'll have to help her to put up a computer-desktop... God of B&Q, bless me...

and, the fatter you are the more stupid too...

I always suspected it...

Neurology has published a paper where a correlation is shown between BMI and cognitive distress.

Now, the scatterplot which i see is dreadfull, and the line they draw through it not really significative. let's face it, the variability of the data is enormous. So, not having read the paper, I do have my doubts...

Also: as a sportsman, I do have a high BMI, but very low fat %age. how does this figure, then? Could this be cause of the variability? I would then expect to see some variability change along the years, may be?

thanks to Shelley for this.

Suing for being abducted by aliens?

No, really, I can't believe this...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German lawyer hopes to drum up more business by pursuing state compensation claims for people who believe they were abducted by aliens.

"There's quite obviously demand for legal advice here," Jens Lorek told Reuters by telephone on Thursday. "The trouble is, people are afraid of making fools of themselves in court."

Lorek, a lawyer based in the eastern city of Dresden who specializes in social and labor law, said he hoped to expand his client base by taking on the unusual work.

He has yet to win any abduction claims, but says there are plenty of potential clients, noting that extra-terrestrial watchdogs report scores of alien assaults every year.

"These people could appeal for therapies or cures," he said.

Lorek, 41, is pinning his hopes for success on a German law which grants kidnap victims the right to state compensation.

I don't understand who they want to sue. The Local Air Force for not adequately protecting the country's air space? this is bonkers!!!

repeat with me. Bonkers!!!

Thanks to Orac

It's a slow friday...

And I spent it almost all in meeting, presentation and some work here and there. not much. now what? I'd like to go out, but my GF is 100Km apart. not much, pity is 100Km of queues, so I better try to reach her tomorrow morning... Freinds here have their families, is not like in the UK where everybody was single or unmarried anyway, with no ties and happy to go out... not that I got many occasions, entrenched as I was in my routine... pity that when you want, you can't, and the other way around...

well, that's life, I guess... :-|

let's see if I can put in some scrolling text

yes I can... that's cool...

Ghost Rider

Here's the new Marvel movie on the ghist Rider. Personally, I've never read the comic but I know of a few people who were fan of it. So I may give it a try. Although I'm a bit bored with the whole superhero concept right now.

ps: click the link for some hi-res trailers...

Judas Unchained isn't that bad, after all...

Some posts ago, i complained about Judas unchained sucking. I still am of the same general opinion, but the few pages I read yesterday nudged the score a bit higher... I particularly appreciated the dialogue between the two person heading the largest corporation/dinasty of them all, CST/Sheldon. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs are the two scientist who created the QWormhole technology, and CST is the result of this. a monopoly over Trains-through-Wormholes transports which actually makes up the Commonwealth. They did, however, choose different paths in their life: Nigel, practical and no-nonsense, heads the dinasty. Ozzie, on the other hand, is the classic rebel genius of SF, always aiming to be the eternal underdog. they tackle life in very different ways, and same is true for the Primes menace. The dialogue halfway the book when the two finally manage to re-unite is very interesting, and adult, on both sides. I wonder how time Hamilton spent in writing it, and ironing any crease out of it. It is one of the best dialogue I've ever read, where the two tackle the very essence of their friendship, the responsabilities which come from their positions, and the very values which are important to them. Only for this, I feel the book deserves to be read.

I'm still a bit skeptics over the whole Starflyer idea, and I glimpsed the solution to the whole shebang. Not particularly elegant, I'd say, but I was also parially dissatisfied by the resolution of events in the Confederation's books. Dear peter, it looks like you've a penchant for the Deus Ex Machina. You do introduce it since the very begin, true, but even so, it's a dishonest way to close a story. Anyway, i'll suspend my final judgement until I read the END word in the book.

ciao ciao.

Now, this is just wonderful...

The Mars reconnaissance Orbiter satellite flying over Mars has snapped up a picture of the Victoria crater just when Opportunity was on its edge (it'll try to descend to its bottom as soon as the earth-based pilots work out a safe way). The instrument used was the HiRISE.

The Picture is just awesome... down I've put a thumbnail. Click on the link to see a version were the position or the rover is annotated - click on the one below to get a huge 4045x5085 pixel version - you can actually see the rover in it!!! isn't that something?



It makes me feel mars as a living planet, with the blue-ish streaks on the upper part (caused by wind-blown dust?), and the cracked bottom, like a lake dried in the summer. but also an alien place, with big and small craters constituting the main terrain's feature...

I wish one day I'll get there... for the moment, I'll keep dreaming about it.

ps: thanks to John M. Lynch for letting me know about this.

Is Bush really christian?

Or does he just use his "christianity" to score political points? I always guessed that, but now we seem to have a confirm.

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, [David Kuo] the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

I guess the same can be said about Berlusconi, devoted (and divorced) catholic... or almost any other politician, real or fictitious (The Saldana dinasty from Hamilton's Confederation books comes to my mind...)

North Korea and their new toy...

It's the most discussed news of the world in these days: north korea has apparently managed to detonate (or may be fizzle) a test nuclear device... may be, this article argues, they didn't need to do it. They've done it anyway. (duh!) Far from being justified by the need of gathering info, the experiment was a clear political message to the world. Was the message "Don't mess with us"? or was mor elike "Ehy look what we can do, how about giving us some more gifts? Otherwise we'll sell them to AlQaeda(or Hezbollah?) in bundle with our missiles"...

On the origin of dogs

I've cited Darren Naish quite often in here. His is one of my favourite blogs, although I did neglect to check it for quite a while (I had read everything he wrote until last month). Now, he's up with a nice new post on the (controversial) origin of dogs. Also, he's hit big time appearing on BBC news 24 (and world news) to comment about jurassic marine reptiles... Congratulations, Darren!!!

Use your hands!!!

A nice post on how to do math until 100 with your hands. a ten-fold improvement over what I could do until today, which was just counting up to ten...

I'm tempted to put myself down to practice it... if only i could justify it to my bosses as 'learning time'...

Yet again one otious after lunch post

don't have much to write about, so I'll post a small rant I jotted down today as soon as I arrived. It's supposedly written in the same style of the general announcement we receive from management and HR: it's a rant related to the fact that some smartasses at HR thought it was a nice idea to spend time and money on sending us a fake box of a nonexistent drugs, Smartolan, supposed to help us relive ethe stress of working here. A nice idea I'd appreciated much more, hadn't it been that in this times we are constantly reminded that there's no money for traveling around at conferences. But apparently there is enough in other departments to waste it around...

never mind, here it comes... I edited something to reduce the lawsuits risk...

Dear employee,

Ginseng Pharmaceutica NV is pleased to announce that their new treatment against acute idiocy has been approved by the regolatory authorities. Under the brand name of Smartolan, the product (3,6-idio,4-parastupid dudecaine) is expected to provide revenues in the order of 15 billion US$/year, mostly from sales to other corporate HR departments.

I don't have to remember how hard the development of this product has been. After initial identification of a likely target in 1955, upon hiring of the first HR manager here at Jansenn, in incredible amount of work has been poured in to alleviate these almost-human beings of their handicap. Initial tests on Guinea pigs and rats were promising, with a 50% improved IQ measured as time required to exit through a maze. A big hurdle to overcome for the project was the complete lack of effect of Smartolan on the next pre-clinical trial, Post-doctorate associates, notoriously cheap to hire, test and fire. this was most likely due to their particular physiology (the already high IQ may have played a role too). Fortunately, efficacy on more expensive lab animals such as Dogs and Monkeys was confirmed.

Clinical trial were performed, for the first time in the story of our company, in house, on a large subset of the HR department allegedly suffering of the affection. the resting part was kept as control in this innovative double blind. More than 85% of the person treated showed a 1.5-fold increase in IQ and general awareness, with the lower 30% actually reaching the level of sub-normal person (80>IQ>100). Unfortunately, a good 15% of the patients didn't show any answer to the drugs, a particular sub-population now called "Natural-born-HR" for which only gene therapy may provide help for the foreseeable future.

However, it is a glorious day for our company and we look at the possibility of using the new revenue stream not as input for more sterile scientific research, but to allow more generous travel allowances and possibly even company cars to HR secretaries who have until now been denied this staple of corporate employment.

Idiotically yours

Mark Van Stupiid (HR and PR director)

disclaimer: the author of this e-mail was involved in the Smartolan clinical trial and was found to be part of the unresponsive 15%.

ps: Guys don't fuck me up. This better NOT leave our machines ok? no forwarding, no showing around please. I could be fired for this.

I have seen it!!!

I managed yesterday to watch the first and second episode of BattleStar Galactica, season 3. and the short verions of this post is: It Rocks!

I mean, for being a TV series, it is becoming increasingly adult... It shows the human population oppressed by monotheistic robots which justify every thing they do with a higher call. It really strikes me as a very strong and decise criticism of the current middle-east politics of the US. And I'm frankly puzzled by the way some people see it the other way around.

The way they treat serious issues as suicide bombers and the reaction politcal and not to them is very very adult. And I like to see how every body does what it can to survive, how people are forced to make difficult choices...

and some characters are finally being fleshed out decently, until now I thought that Col. Tigh was there just as a negative example, a counterpoint to Adama. but not, his is the most poignant quote of this season so far: "Does it really matter whether the guy I command ride on a viper or starp themselves a belt of explosives? they're just as dead at the end." (I don't remember exactly right now, but more or less this is the sense.)

Plus, the acting is still good, for a TV series that is... the only gripe I have is with the scenery, if I had started colonising a planet, I would have expected a much sparse population, with a more agricultural setting. As it is, it looks like most people just hang around in tents day in day out, planning a rebellion... who produces the food? are they supported by cylon poop? or what? I don't think it would have been more expensive - they just had to hire some western series set-up, and they'd be done... but hey, they would then stomp on joss Whedon's feet and his wondrous Firefly/Serenity...

All in all, however, I heartily recommend this new season. Se Il buon giorno si vede dal mattino, it is going to be so damn good... can't wait... ;-)

StarBuck (the elder) does not agree...

Again on BSG: Dirk Benedict, aka "face" in the A-Team, but most importantly first person to incarnate Lt. StarBuck in the first series, does not like at all the change of sex his old character has been given in the 2003-to-date series. He says that something has been lost in castration... I personally, enjoy much more Katee Sackoff than him as Starbuck, as my mind simply can't see the Face onboard a Viper. I always expect to see a cigar smoking Hannibal Smith shouting with complacency: "Ah, adoro i piani ben riusciti!"

Luckily, someone else thinks it my way...

so, Go Starbuck!!! and Go Boomer!!! (certainly the most tender cylon around... I leave the sexyest's palm to Number Six)

ps: by the way, the article from dirk benedict certainly is very very well written, for me... he almost convinced me... almost. I still believe that the new starbuck is more suited for the new series. and this one is better than the old one tout court. except may be for the damned octagonal pieces of paper...

what am I doing?

it's after lunch time, so my brain is slowly recovering from the lack of blood. it all went down to the GI tract to help digest the substantious meal that Janssenn gladly subsidizes. Today, it was country omelette with herbs and bacon and (sic!) potatoes, a soup with something (plus chilly mush, my favourite addition) and two slices of country bread to pooch in it... finally, a cup of tea and a small apple almond and cream pie...

the morning I've been trying to finish off at least one of a two-parts work on IKs inhibitors. can't talk about the details, but after getting a series of hits from a software charged with finding molecules electrostatically similar to some nine known inhibitors, I'm regrouping said hits, and selecting only one-hundred molecules which hopefully will be diverse between them. let's hope so...

other than this, i decided to give up the car from now on, unless necessary. I bought a bus pass for the coming month, and in nice days I'll try to cycle as I have been trying to do in the summer. coming by car turns out to be very stressing, as either i come here very early, or I clash with huge traffic and parking difficulties. Coming by bus, someone else does the driving, I can sleep some more, and during the wait (just outside my apartment) and the fifteen minutes trip I can enjoy a good read. This way I can skip on reading at night, time which I can use more proficuously on my thesis. all in all, a pretty good deal for 25 euros/month. and the car is always there if I need it. that is, in the weekends or for heavy duty shopping :-)

Battlestar Galactica drives a lot of traffic

Just write down a post on BSG, and your counter will tick quicker, thanks to technorati and to the fact that people go there to see what people is saying, and where... useful to know... so, here's a useful piece of knowledge for you. now let's see if it works with this post... :-P

edit: no it doesn't... let's try tomorrow with a reasoned review of BattleStar Galactica season 3, episodes 1 and 2.

Google and YouTube

I've come to appreciate YouTube... at the begin, I did look at it as a good idea, but was half expecting people to misuse it. that is, I did fear it would be full of pr0n. but more and more people seem to be using it for useful purposes, from sharing short snippet of TV they particularly liked (didn't I post a link to the BMW M5 ads some time ago? yes I did), to self-adverstisement of natural photography.

Finally, some big player has noticed this little phenomenon, and has bought it. the big player is, as you may have guessed, Google, which seems to be looming over the internet as a sort of benignant Big Brother.

I do Love Picasa, and Gmail is my primary email now. I do write this on Google-owned blogspot. Google already had his own Video hosting service, I dopn't know much about the tech behind but youtube and gvideo seemed to be pretty similar.

In short, google seems to be aggregating all that makes the network a collaborative, bottom-to-top thing. Thanks god, I feared it may just become another TV with infinite channels. may be there's still hope...

the onlt Gthing I didn't keep on my HD is Gchat. I'm sorry google, there's way to go before you get close to Skype. at least that was the situation when I last checked.

Surf's Up

Lots of CGI animation movies coming up this season... and in between them it's the (first?) such feature from Sony: Surf's up. click on the title link to enjoy the retro story of a young penguin surfer trying to imitate his begone idol, Big Z!!! Trailer courtesy of apple.

it looks fun... let's see how it shapes up when it hits the silver screen...

ps: penguins seems to be more nad more favourite. Starting from Neon genesis Evangelion onward, I count more and more apparitions of them: Madagascar, plus the similar one from disney... and now Cold feet and this one... may be Linux is having an effect after all?

Children of men

Is it that good? The story doesn't look particularly original, to me... I have seen it in at least three books. And frankly, I'd rather have a cinema version of Darwin's Radio than this unknown to me mixed-genre book... However, people seems to be shocked at how beautiful this movie is... may be this new alfonso guy really nailed it?

funny though, how humanists change their opinion. if a sci-fi movie is good, then it can't be classed in sci-fi... ah ah... as if sci-fi was all like cinematographic sci-fi, all explosion and implausibility... quite the opposite, I'd say... good written sci-fi is hard core, realistic, and most of all gives your brain food for thought. Umpah!!!

uhm... seen the trailer, I don't know what to say... not yet convinced, but may give it a try...

Somewhere, somebody's blog just blew up...

Click on the link, and you'll see that the authors of South Park appreciate Battlestar Galactica too... :-)

They both (BSG and SP) won this "Peabody's Award". Me, I've never heard of it but I'm sure they both deserve it.

ps: the title refer to a comment made after the two guys came down from the podium... it's a joke but it shows how the information panorama is changing, thanks to the distributed network of blogs powering more and more the information exchange. a big difference from the early days of centralised top-to-bottom information diffusion through agencies. Specialised news agencies are certainly still important in some fields, but for the rest, their role is being severely undermined by the ease of access and pervasive presence of the network. (the interweb, as Clarkson calls it)

Judas Unchained sucks...

at least for the moment...

I've been reading this monumental piece by Peter F Hamilton, second part of the Commonwealth saga. I haven't finished it yet, and I'll probably get to the last page within one week or so, but the problem is that it's getting boring...

I fell however that I can already draw a judgement about the whole saga. Unless the next hundred pages get a decise improvement, my answer is that it sucks. And even if they were, i am afraid it may be too late. The real problems are not with the plot, but with the background. I mean, I can suspend my unbelief only for a certain amount... Ok we have a world-scene very different from what we saw in the confederation books. In the confederation, starships were connecting the various planets. In this one, it is trains through wormholes (nice victorian touch, I'd expect nothing less froma british author). In both cases, fancy technologies allow a more or less unchanged humanity to get along reasonably well... but this is where the good parallels end. And everything goes awry in the Commonwealth.

In the confederation, starships are common place, but what really defines the unioverse are Edenists. Transhumans which share a sort of multiple personality through the 'affinity' bond, genetically spliced within them before birth.

They are masters of genetic engineering, at the point in which their spaceships are living and sentient beings. But even so, the human side shows up in the fact that some of them are renegades, and the technologies they rely on have been pirated more than once. It's only an ethical problem to keep the rest of humanity from embracing them.

Now, confront this with the Commonwealth, where the defining point is the WornHole technology. Dear Good peter would like us to believe that, once the demon is out of the bottle, no government has tried to replicate the thing to suit its own agenda. Instead, everybody is queueing ordinately to the two guys who seemingly engineered the first one, paying their dues to help them build an unrivalled commercial empire.

More than this, another so called 'dinasty' possess monopoly on the other important technology, force fields. and none of these two are trying to gut each other by intruding in the other's turf. ah! I'm sorry, but that's unbelievable... I just can't believe that, after three hundred years, the technology isn't still commonplace. I mean, that's three hundred years. Just look at what happened with lasers, once they went public!!! they're commonplace after only thirty years.

and in three hundred years, control over WHs has been so strict that only one of them has been used for an illegal heist? ah! again, this is just wishful thinking. It is blatantly avoiding to look at gibson's first law of technology, which asserts: "The streets will find its uses". meaning that every technology is applied by normal people and criminals alike in ways unforeseen by their inventors... no matter how hard the writer try to set up the scene in order to avoid this. and replicating a three hundred years old tech should be easy enough for the syndicates, which are still seemingly strong in the commonwealth...

Ph!

Other than that, the characters just do not have the verve of the Confederation people. Kime is may be the most human, the ex pilot of the first (and last) Mars Space mission, turned enterprise captain when its mission is interrupted by the two geniuses with a hand-made spacesuit and their newly fangled wormhole...

The SI, the multi-conscoiusness which results from the fusion of the first AI and many other human minds thereafter, is extremely under-utilised in the plot, yt it would seem that it has big stakes on human survivals. After all, its physical location is still somewhere in CW space. Plus, it's made of human minds, after all. The justification given for itssympathetyc neutrality is good enough, but still, I'd expect them to pull their own weight in the battle. Anyway I believe that it could be safely assumed that for weapons inventiveness the SI may not be able to match the trillion of humans minds, albeit separate.

The only thing I'd save is the enemy, MorningLightMountain. Incredibly inhuman, and really alien in its behaviour. But even there, I seriously doubt that a life form would be able to exterminate everything in his own path, and keep itself clear of parasites... I mean, think of it: a planetary intelligence, a single species, with a very high biological uniformity, uninclined from what we read to genetically engineer itself... why didn't human try to use bio-weapons, of which they're masters, against it? enough for the moment. I'll continue ranting about it later...

the perfect present for me:

Ever wondered what the perfect present for me? Every year I get an endless stream of scarfs, rubbed/coated socks (sorellina, take a note, 'cause I don't need a new pair every year :-P)... I do enjoy some of the surprises, but frankly, very rarely I have been as glad as I was when as a 12-years old I used to receive an astronomy book from my godfather...



so here is my perfect present, finally... a framed picture of the astronaut's footprint on the lunar soil...

or, as an alternative:

a picture of "Buzz" looking at the US flag in the same venue...

scroll down for more ideas, though... A bit pricey, but definitely worth my face when I'll rip the wrapping, I promise... :-)

Slow Step...

Enygmatic title, this post... I'm going to brag (no, once again!) about a passion of mine...

I'm a sucker for Mitsuru Adachi and his quintessentially adolescential (teenage) manga...

I'm not a teen-ager anymore (if age is additive, I'm in fact two teen-agers, by now). But I confess that I still enjoy reading his manga... I didn't even discover them during my teen years, but way after that, well into university, thanks to the very much younger friend Paolo...

Usually Adachi talks(draws) about sport, high-school, and one or more triangle-love... some people say that they are all the same basic story, but that familiarity also confort the reader that they'll find what they're looking for...

Battlestar Galactica Season 3 is finally out...

yep it is... and it's apparently very good...

we left the humans in a bad situation at the end of the second series, they settled down on a planet by popular vote, and after Cylons arrived en masse the "Adama" navy jumped clear of the system... a pretty grim situation uh? I'm curious to see how it all shapes up...

so tonight I'll probably skip my Ally McBeal to make space for it... or at least start the download... :-P do the same guys, I know some of you have been waiting for this...

ps: in the title link, a page with a music clip comparing the old and the new series. it rocks!!! (but I can't make it appear in here... Frak!)

Il coccodrillo come fa?

I'm bored of writing in elnglish only, so may be you'll find some posts in italian (or french, who knows).

The reason for this is simple. some things I can't express properly in english, and for some other italian doesn't cut it.

so, let's go for a mix-up... kind of my brain right now.

anyway, have a nice week / buon inizio di settimana a tutti!

Luca/Gufo

ps: the title refers to a song which i founf myself singing while cycling to work today... a child's music hit of some years ago, in Italy... click on the link to download mp3 and lyrics (if you're so inclined)