boring friday night

I've just finished writing my ninth chapter...

it's too late to go to bxl, now, I feel tired after one day of reading pharmacokinetics...

I better rest, then tomorrow will climb into my lil' jet and roam to my GF's place for an intense day of... shopping!!! need to get a large carpet for the salon, so I'll stop scratching the parquet with my chairs... this will also, make cleaning it easier, I hope... wooden flloring is cool, but a pain to wash, since I can't use water as in the rest of the house. damn...

see you tomorrow!!!

Heidi & Richard's travels

Travel blog of a couple touring (I believe) the world.

Nothing special really, it would be better if they added:

• a little formatting to the page;
• turn those pictures, please;
• and finally, add some irony to the posts. we want to feel the culture shock!

6+(out of 10)

jump again!!! Next blog>>

New Road sign

A new road sign has been approved for use in Rome and its surrounding area:



I'm sorry for the english speakers who can't catch the joke.

the italian part of the banner says (more or less, I'm a liberal translator):

4 all others: You broke our dick!!! (kind of we're fucking tired of having cars parked here every damn morning, but in a heavily accented and grammatically unorthodox italian dialect) - sunday open.


thanks to the guys at fantanovoli.

Changing the world as a student...

What student does not dream of it? Some do not just dream, they go out and do it.

As Jawed Karim did, previously employed in Paypal, young millionaire when it was bought off by eBay for 1.5Bn US$, then founder of YouTube, just bought by Google for 1.65Bn US$.

And, he's still at school earning his master in Computer science... What will he do when he'll seriously enter the work arena?

From the New York Times. Click here or the title to jump to the original article (may require free subscription)

Pee and poo

How nice are they? can you imagine a better gift for your children?



they have keychain rings too...

thanks to Orac at Respectful Insolence

Random Bit of Fun

every one of you will see a different funny phrase. please copy them in the comments, if you fancy doing so.

They Eat Horses, Don't They?

This is the title of the second episode, second series of Ally McBeal... She and her companions are shocked that someone could consider eating such a noble animal.

Now, let me tell you one thing: I love horses. I do like the way they look, even if up close you can really see they're very stupid animals. it's as if God concentrated on their bodies, and forgot to make their brains up. No wonder they were outcompeted by artiodactyls(that would be deer, and antylopes, and let's throw in cows too), until men arrived and decided to saddle them. Horses, with their inefficient digestive system, would be all but extincts, weren't for the fact that men found them useful in battle. I believe they're good companions of mankind, a bit like dogs, and aurochs(now called cows). I love horses' rears, yes, particularly when cut in thin slices and sprinkled with garlic, chili and parsley, and quickly cooked on a fire... It tastes stronger, and better, than beef, it's got less fat, and more proteins and iron. That is, as far as I know...

Apparently, horses, dogs and cats deserve our 'respect', so they shouldn't be eaten. I do not agree. All animals deserve our respect, but this does not mean that they should not be eaten. We are carnivore apes, so we eat animals.


I mean, let's look at it from the biology viewpoint. Those animals wouldn't exist in the numbers they do, if it weren't for human's interest in them. We are devoting part of our resources to raise them, protect them from (other) predators, and as payment, now that they can not provide us with a hand on the work, we just ask that a portion of them to be culled, and served on our tables... it's just another example of symbiosis, where both parts are gaining. For the moment it's us eating them may be in the past it was the opposite (were there ever carnivore horses? I don't know). may be in the future roles will switch again - with many thanks to Stephen Baxter for exemplifying such a thing in 'Evolution', where future human-derived primates are herded by carnivorous rodents...

Studying PharmacoKinetics (again)

It's background-building time for me. I'm dead bored of things going over my head during meetings and such. I've gathered quite some knowledge in these nine months I have been here: I know what the Apparent Volume of Distribution of a Drug, or the Intrinsic Hepatic clearance, are, and how they correlate with measurable Physchem properties such as LogP or pKa. But the whole picture is unclear...

Even worst, most phases of drug development are absolutely obscure, especially in the upper tier, after chemistry is almost done.

So, here comes my new book, Handbook of Basic Pharmacokinetics

Handbook of Basic Pharmacokinetics by Wolfgang A. Ritschel and Gregory L. Kearns

An interesting read... today I've learned that taking fruit juices with your medicines is usually good, since many flavonoid and other natural substances in the fruit juices inhibit either CYP-450s (the main methabolic engine/enzymes in the body) or efflux transporter, and therefore increase the period of time the drug can act on the bodym, before being wasted away.

I also learned that the average man pee about 1.5 litre per day, and that looks like a lot to me...

all in all, lot of snippet of informations, useful to drop casually in conversation to impress girls ;-) well, girls who are impressed by encyclopedic man, that is... :-D

ok, may be not the one about pee... that's for today's canteen lunch :-P

Extinction caused by changes in earth'r rotation tilt?

No big meteorite striking Earth anymore then? What do we make of the iridium stratus in Gubbio, then?

wait a minute, the paper is talking only about mammals: If rodents in Spain are any guide, periodic changes in Earth’s orbit may account for the apparent regularity with which new species of mammals emerge and then go extinct, scientists are reporting today.

and it only consider the last 22 million years... So, BIG catastrophic extinction are safeguarded. The one they're talking about now are 'single species' extinctions, explaining the already known average period of 2.5My for a single species' time on Earth. you know, Australopithecus isn't here anymore, same for prehistoric horses and so on... nothing so exciting...

anyway, one more piece of the puzzle slots in.

cheers...

No Comments anymore...

I don't know if nobody is commenting anymore just because I'm plain boring, or because they're encountering difficulties as I did until a few days ago... Now it seems to have been fixed for me... so, why is nobody posting a even freaking "Sod Off" in my blog? mah...

GalacticaBlog

And a new blog under the spotlights!!!

This time it's about the most discussed sci-fi series of this years, battlestar Galactica. Insights and discussion on the most recent hot-topics...

;-)

Oh, No, Not Again!!!

Once again, I've been given some weird food... the chef really seems to be in some sort of meat+fruit trance, this week...

today was rabbit hamburger(!) with prunes...

picture is coming :-|

Taste wasn't bad, rabbit didn't taste as good as wild english rabbit though... and after eating all the prunes and potato croquette I was pretty much nauseated... URGH...

Again on Virtual Spaces...

Becoming less and less Virtual... Sony, Sun and opther big corporate follow the example of reuters and set up shop in Second Life... I don't know how this may affect the mood of people there... what kind of escapist fantasy is supposed to be, when contaminated by all aspects of the real world? and what about competition? would Sun win over a virtual-based corporate founded by what is in the real world a housewife?

Nissan has taken a creative approach to this: Beginning a promotional venture in a virtual world is still a relatively inexpensive proposition compared with the millions spent on other media. In Second Life, a company like Nissan or its advertising agency could buy an “island” for a one-time fee of $1,250 and a monthly rate of $195 a month. For its new campaign built around its Sentra car, the company then needed to hire some computer programmers to create a gigantic driving course and design digital cars that people “in world” could actually drive, as well as some billboards and other promotional spots throughout the virtual world that would encourage people to visit Nissan Island.

I guess the other will do similar things...

and where there's money, here comes the vultures... On Tuesday, a Congressional committee said it was investigating whether virtual assets and incomes should be taxed.

(from the NY Times)

Andromeda went bang at the dinosaur's time...

It was punched through by another nearby galaxy, known as M32...

Just imagine the two galazies getting closer, slowly being distorted by their reciprocal gravitational attractions, and shockwaves of matter and energy being blasted all around at terrific speeds...

dust ripples from the collision have been discovered in the infra red...



and this isn't all...

Since Andromeda is "only" 2 million Light Years away, and we (aboard the Milky Way) are heading straight to it, in a few billions years we'll have another big impact... the two galaxies will merge into an elliptical one... :-) I wish I were there to see the event... may be a bit accelerated, since a collision which takes some ten million years to happen may become a bit boring after a while...

An american family in paris...

ah ah I'm jump-blogging again...

actually I haven't stopped since yesterday...

here's a blog form an american family who's moved to paris... usual jokes and such, but it's decently written so it makes for a good read from time to time... and for an italian it's always fun to see people making fun of french, even when who does so is an american... ;-)

I love Gmail

it's the best web-based e-mail service I've ever tried. Ever. Full stop.

I love the concept of discussion and the way it's implemented, I love the labels, I love the interface and the seamless integration of chat and e-mail. I love the automatic recording of my chats, and the search-through-them function... I do have some gripe with its filters, but ehy, one can't be perfect... and may be it's just me who doesn't know how to use it properly. is there a search keyword like Contains: ? that would be useful.

and multiple condition for a single filters would greatly improve the experience, too... :-P

I'm never one hundred percent satisfied...

Sombrero...

Since space is a main theme today, here we go, one of the nicest galaxies around...


commonly known as Sombrero... you can guess why... it is a big (800 billion stars or so) spiral galaxy, part of the Virgo supercluster, some thirty million light years away. It is seen almost from the revolution plane. The dark line is composed of dust clouds all around its rim, rich not only in dust (like my home) but also in young stars (unlike my home ah ah)...

Science Shots

Ehy, I never saw this one before...

short news from Science...

first one: getting a tattoo can decrease your sense of touch (duh!) did they really need to perform the experiments? what next? eating too much could diminish your appetite for the next few hours?

second news, a wonderful piccie of the Antennae, a couple of galaxies crunching themselves into a blaze of light...



If I can fnd the large one on the HST website I'll update... (here it is, zoomable and clickable (flash))

and there's more news... new caves at yellowstone, cyclons on jupiter, and on and on and on...

check it out...

If you don't sleep...

you will not learn well the day after...

but, you will still be able to remember bad things.

students deprived of their sleep did perform 40% worse in memory tests than students well rested.

but, and here's the kicker, they did perform only 19% worse in words with negative emotional charge, such as 'cancer' or 'jail', and 59% worse in good things such as 'cookies' and 'holidays'...

I do agree with the authors of the paper, who suggest an evolutionary safeguard mechanism to avoid forgetting threats.

this way, if something bad happened the day before, you still have a chance to avopid it... neat uh?

A dry moon...

Science announces that what seemed to be ice on the moon, is most likely a weird radar reflection from rough terrain... I know one or two things about radars due to my previous acquaintances :-) Believe me, it's a mess, not the clear-cut things that we are shown in movies... :-|

anyway, back in topic, I never particularly liked the idea of going back to the moon to build a permanent base. I'd rather have my (tax) money spent on serious studies on going to mars, which looks like a much more interesting place to visit. and for more than a political stunt and flag sticking...

Mars Direct, here we come!!!

Crazy ideas...

I thought those people at slashdot posting their disassembling of an old SNES/cabinet/loo to install inside a modern PC were crazy, but this guy really goes over the top. He plans on using cockroaches to play a video game, through a motion capture system implanted on them, and I guess translating the event in the game into light cues for the cockroach to react to...

if it's not the craziest idea I've ever heard, it's almost there...

good luck man...

The Loom is in a frenzy...

Carl Zimmer put out two posts in a day! go read.

one about Mushrooms

one on complexity to go on the National geographic's website. The original article is nicely and freely available. I hope this drives up the website traffic enough that publishers understand it's useful to give something away for free...

yeah piracy is good once again!!! or may be we should say free stuff is good!!!

again early in the morning...

again at work at 6.30. No, I'm not workaholic, but my GF came to visit me yesterday. very much appreciated - pity she forgot her swimsuit so the planned outing to the city pool didn't come up as planned. In alternative, a nice dinner with risotto con zucchine e zafferano, e spiedini d'agnello... with a good cannonau della romangia to help everything to go down easily... nice nice nice...

so, why this early? yet again, she's to catch the 6.30 train, and even if the station is like 200m away, I don't feel like letting her walk on her own... especially when i'm up anyway... I'm one of those person who simply can't sleep anymore when awakened... vabbe'. never mind...

earlier in, earlier out, more time this af'noon to swim, and write up... ehy, more time to blog too ;-)

have a nice day.

You are what you eat...

And this may explain why belgian are so weird-looking :-P

look what I have been served for lunch today:

yes, you see correctly, in the upper right corner there's actually a cluster of four fried meatballs, surrounded by an army of... caramellised cherries, of the kind we italians would only dream of putting on ice creams (we call them amarene)

now, it was, surprisingly, good. the contrast betwee the sweet/sour of cherries and the fried meatballss was pleasant... if you like that kind of thing.

now, i don't know what piint I actually want to make, just wanted to bring to your knowledge that diversity in cuisines is even larger than in chemistry! ugh!

One more interesting Blog

jump-blogging again, I found an "english teacher abroad" blog full of interesting (and well written) snippet of japanese life... I'll stick it in my blog-to-follow list... thanks Mike

Correlating Good Grades and Success in Life

Here's a post (yes, I'm still jump-blogging) where a singaporean teacher advocates that good grades do not always make for good jobs outside work. His analysis is clear, and I do agree on some points: you don't need a degree with distinction to perform well in the workplace, from my experience it takes more passion and focus, than proper cleverness or knowledge.

I do not agree on him that people who go back from work to uni to 'do their masters' are forced to do this because they do not perform well at work. quite the opposite, from what I see... People who go back to academia for a masters do so 'cause they want to step up in the career ladder, never satisfied with what they're doing/earning at the time...

and if it's true that, as he says, people who didn't do well at uni may well earn more than their distincted colleagues, that's hardly the case for 'teachers/professors', whose rewards very rarely are in the money they earn...

I can only talk for my field and a few others that I know, but usually the salary scale is:

Industry > Academia > School.

mah... may be things really are different in Singapore...

Jump-Blogging again...

The 'next blog>' button up there is a temptation... I like to stop from time to time and just click it... sometimes I have to close the firefox tab immediately 'cause the blog is sexually oriented (you will not believe how many people blog their sex life... :-( How lame.

Some others, I'm just bored by advertisement blogs, or pointless blogs (like my own eh eh)...

But some other times rewarded by nice blogs like Green Submarine. I stopped during my peregrination 'cause I recognised Pippi LongenStock, also known as Pippi Calzelunghe in italy... One of my childhood idols...

Ecco sono qui
Pippi Calzelunghe così mi chiamo;
credo proprio che
una come me non c'è stata mai!
Ogni volta che
devo far qualcosa combino guai,
ma alla fine poi
vedo che son tutti amici miei!

Why do trees change colors in autumn?

Here comes a question which I often asked myself. why do trees have to change the colors to the leaves, just before dropping them? isn't this a waste of resources on the trees side? why they don't just suck their leaves empty, and then drop them?

Carl Zimmer at the loom has an interesting piece about this. enjoy!

Piracy is Good

Hi everybody,

yesterday I was out of stuff to watch while eating, both Battlestar galactica and Ally Mc beal were busy downloading (ahi ahi ahi, bad person, me, I'm a pirate yes...). So I went for another smallish file (200MB) which i got from the torrent, titled Piracy-isGood-small.mov. I was expecting a short documentary about how BSG had been downloaded from the UK to the US, and how this ensured the success up there... But I got much more... A two-hours lesson on how television work today, and how will likely work in the near future. the first slide was titled something like:
October 18th, 2004 : the day TV died. the date in question was the first airing of BSG's miniseries on sky one UK.
It turned out to be quite interesting. The guy, talking during this australian TV conference, draws some interesting parallels... and since he's a very good speaker, the two hours literally fly away.


He envisages a future where, thanks to software like bittorrent getting rid of the middlemen (distributors, and broadcasters), advertisers will be able to directly produce and distribute branded shows, saving a shedload of money and at the same time keeping a high level of quality, or at least, of customer satisfaction, since only good shows will be 'popular' then easy to download thanks to the peculiar way BT and the new p2p sharing softwares work. Moreover, the more successful a show will be, the less 'expensive' every appearance will be for the advertiser/producer, since he's not paying for the distribution itself. This is a complete reversal of TV advertising's current business mode, where if you want to be seen by more people you have to pay proportionately more. All this, and much more, in the in-depth analysis that the speaker does...

But the link in the title is a web page tackling the same argument, and, for what I can see, it's the summary of the guy's speech. I can't link directly to the .mov file, since I can't check dodgy websites from work - but you can easily get it, just go to http://www.tvtorrents.com/ and select Battlestar galactica as series. it will be there. sit down, relax, and enjoy the future...

history of PC TV Ads

That is, history of TV advertisement for PC. nice blog post found by chance... lots of links (slow) to googlevideo and youtube for watching the stuff yourself...

I may have not liked Judas...

but what Peter Hamilton is brewing for us smeels like an interesting tea pot...

click up there to read the Confederation Timeline starting from Judas Unchained and encompassing (I believe) the Dreaming Void... I'll earmark some pounds to buy his next book then...

and congratulation for the new son!

The Mile High club

This refers to people who have sex on the plane... usually, in the toilet, I would educately guess.

but what if you had your B787? with bed, kitchen, cinema room and bubble bath? all for your enjoyment? Well, if you want and can afford it you can have it.

I mean, there seems to be quite a market for this kind of things. 39 747 are currently privately owned. and many more of other kind. I guess it's above Rockstars level, I'm thinking more Oil-sultans and such...

from the paper: In addition to its size, which will allow for even more luxury, the A380 has a feature that may appeal to the most status-conscious of owners, who may travel with underlings. That feature harks back to the days of ocean liners, where social classes were physically segregated.

“The A380 will offer a chance to separate the senior V.I.P.’s from the junior V.I.P.’s because you have two decks, and they can be kept apart,”

Google's sun shines high

Google is looking for solar power... not all the energy will come out of it, agreed, but it's a reasonable step in the good direction. the mor epeople buys this cells, the lower the costs, the more people will be able to afford them. and it's not like we're going to run out of silicon anytime soon... may some rare earth but this may be fixed I hope...

from the article: “Big companies targeting the kind of demographics Google targets are falling all over each other to be greener than each other”

let's just hope it's not a fad...

Reversing Outsourcing...

from the NY Times: Where once the brains of India left for more lucrative pastures in the United States, today a handful of fresh American college graduates are sampling the fruits of the Indian economic boom.

What's more to say? It is to be expected. growing companies will look for talents everywhere they can find them, and with increasing life standards in the developing countries, people are not against moving over there at least for a limited time. What's more, with the pay they'd usually perceive in the US they can live three to four times as luxuriously in India. And even when they are not supposed to move over there, and they become the faces those companies offer to foreign markets, it's important to see the playing field being leveled from both sides...

What's the likelihood...

Of visiting twice the same blog by hitting twice, in two different days the (next blog>) button up there on the right hand side? I don't know. But it just happened to me. went there on friday, and now again. So I though I'd share with you, since I like what's written on it.

Not The Country Club

and the picture of GW Bush is funny.

'nuff said.

Religion can be a good thing...

I always knew it. Being born in a catholic country (the catholic country for excellence, one could say), I know that people can have a positive attitude towards the environment, not the disastrous one that theo-con evangelical have in the US. But it's nice to see someone over there pulling his weight...

Over the last five years, Father Morris has sharply reduced his small parish’s energy use and emissions of carbon dioxide, the compound most scientists believe has led to global warming, and he has organized other congregations across Michigan to do the same.

that's good...

by the way, it's not like evangelical are all EVIL:

Over the last year, religious activism on global warming has won much attention. Last February, 86 evangelical Christian leaders backed an initiative to combat global warming, a move that broke the evangelical movement’s broad silence on the issue but exposed stark divisions.

that's what the priest teaches: “If we are made in his image, we should mirror his image in our dominion over the Earth,” Mr. Wickersham said. “He is creative and sustaining, not destructive.”

it's a neat and convincing message I'd say, one that certainly can appeal to people who have a good hearth and care about their own children. The other? well, quite frankly, I'd give them one last opportunity to redeem themself, then would have them shot. with bio-degradable bullets, of course :-)

And another blog to add...

to your favorites: Galactic interactions. very nice posts about cosmology and astronomy... haven't read much. unofrtunately, like all people trying to enlighten the masses, Rob Knop's blog is plagued by nuts convinced they've got it figured all, and science establishment is covering all up. But he and his blogs' habitues put up a good fight against the dark side...

First steps in acknowledging Virtual Spaces

Reuters is opening his first news agency in a virtual space: namely, the MMORPG Second Life. Being there almost one million inhabitants, it was almost time, you could say. The articles Mr. Pasick files will be strictly about — and addressed to — Second World players. Reuters CEO downplays this all to a playful touch of PR, but I see it differently. With the growing importance of Virtual Arenas, more and more will be happening there, especially when information exchange is concerned... One days, things will be decided up there that will exert an effect in the real space. Think of it has the Internet Special Interest Groups that Bruce Sterling protrayed in "Island in the net". Behold the future in making!

EDIT: next steps, is a daily news on what's been happening on World Of Warcraft...

eBooks: will it work this time?

I have an e-book reader. it's a java thingy in my cell phone. never used it. the screen is tiny, and even if it weren't, in which occasions I'd enjoy a book, without having the opportunity to have the book physically there?

moreover, screens are awful for reading. Sony is trying to shake this up with its next big thing (well, they hope so)


It’s a handsome half-inch-thick nine-ounce slab, a bit smaller than 5 inches by 7 inches, “bound” in a protective leatherette cover. You can turn pages individually, or jump ahead 10 percent of the book at a time. A “mark” button produces a visual dog-ear on the page corner.

What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

let's hope it will work this time. and let's also hope that prices for downloads will not be exceedingly high. I laugh at people buying iTunes songs. I want part of the money saved in not having to print the stuff to be shifted onto me. not only in more money for the freaking shareholders. pah! Until then, I'll happily do without e-contents.

Welcome, alessandro...

I know you've visited... :-)

Early posting today...

Good morning everybody... I'm here at work at 6.40, as usual during my mondays. most people find it hard to wake up on mondays. me too, but when you've to throttle 100 busy Km of motorways to get here you better start early. and when as today it's not me the one who has to travel, I still hve to bring her to the rail station. so, my wake up time doesn't change...

so, here I am... at least this way I'll be able (hope) to leave work early, and go off to the swimming pool to test my new swimsuite. Like children, I believe that new sport gear makes you perform better... I remember when I used to get new (albeit unbranded) trainer socks, and after trying them for like ten metres sprints, I would proudly declare to my mum that thanks to them I felt I was running faster, jumping higher, and longer... ah, childhood... when every dream comes true... may be I'll post some more about my childhood, in the following posts... who knows? for now, back to gritty day-to-day work.