Wild Rabbit with Wild Mushrooms and Red Wine

This artistic picture shows the back of a wild rabbit (ventral side, you can see the kidneys if you squint)... I grabbed it on my way home from the pool. Grabbed from the market, I didn't stop hunting in the common park, thank you...

Anyway, it was already clean... I just dropped the chopped courgettes and wild mushrooms in the same wok, some oil and a liberal sprinkle of salt and pepper, and started the fire...

once the vegetables (and the fungi) were softened, i did add some red wine and cooked until the meat would detach itself easily from the bones... still some juice frm the wine and the cooking water...

as a final touch, coarsely chopped parsley, rosemary and basil, and a spoonful of moutarde de dijon...

it did taste wonderful, believe me!!!

had I had more time (and more rabbit too), I'd have stewed it in casserole with some juicy cream...

US Marines censorship

Apparently, the USMC is censoring the web-access for its soldiers. I think: fine, they're cutting down porn - what's left on the soldier list then? news? duh!

no, really, they're censoring left-leaning websites too...

but read this ina positive light: if they're censoring, someone in the USMC did show interest towards that... So, maybe there's still hope for a decent-minded USofA...

and now i stop ranting, and get back to work...

PalaeoBlog

Uhm, dinosaurs... can you ask for something better, after lunch? well, ok, something else may be... but I'll stay happy with dinosaurs...



a blog to stick in your bookmarks/favourites... ;-)

no, what's shown in the picture is NOT a dinosaurs... just one of their descendants...

Again, on maps...

Some time ago, shelley at retrospectacle posted a piece about a research in PNAS showing how english cab-driver do have an enlarged hyppocampus, the portion of our brain in charge of navigation... I did pick up the news and posted on my turn, too...

Now, here's a new paper about navigational abilities (and not). This time, the researchers have looked at navigational stratehgies of male/female, either straight or homosexuals. And they've apparently found out that gay males do use the same strategies than girsl use, i.e. less reliant on compass and a map, and more on landmarks...

They conclude that gay men's brains are a patchwork of female and male charachteristics, and therefore gay-ness is gen-related. How they make the logical jump, I'm not sure, since I can't see the reason why they rule out environmental effects on the development of said navigational abilities...

it's nature vs nurture all over again...

thanks to GrrlScientist

Whales...

Darren naish has three interesting posts about rorquals, i.e. whales which fill their mouth of water (and other stuff) to feed, such as the Blue Whales... the techniques is called lunge-feeding, and that's why these whales have such huge mouths... the adults blue whales' jaws, at seven metres each, are the largest single-piece bone of all animal world.

One, two, and three

:-)

edit: as Darren correctly points out, not all rorquals lunge-feed.

edit2: I once dreamed of swimming with whales off the coast of canada. It's been the start of my new life :-)

Abortion by... gun!!!

This is a true story: A woman in the US didn't have the money to pay for an abortion, and his BF didn't want to foot the bill. So, she did almost carry to term the pregnancy, but a few days before giving birth, she shot herself in the belly, killing the fetus. I guess she had to wait that long to make the aim more accurate...

Still, it's unthinkable...

Now, she's being prosecuted for illegal abortion, but not for murder, since the baby wasn't born yet... gosh I feel sick...

thanks to Grrlscientist

yet another weird news blog

fanny and weird news... for your amusement...

typing machine...

found this on the net... how cool!!! (thanks daniele)

My Colliding Galaxies

I've recently posted a picture taken from Hubble, showing two colliding galaxies...

and today, playing with some biological activity data (some compound's activity against various cancer cells - can't say more about them) I got this nice picture.



it does resemble the two colliding galaxies, doesn't it?

I get back to my stats, now...

As if there was any need...

a NY Times paper saying that for hospital is more economic to include poor frequent patients in their charitable prevention programs, than continuing to provide them with emergency care when they get sick. *duh*

I feel sickened by the lack of foresight of the human race as a whole... this thing is well known, yet government and the people who elect them try to push private health care which leads to embarassing situation such as Texas', where 25% of the population isn't insured...

shame on us...

edit: I forgot: the piece

yesterday's recipe...

Yesterday I tried to cook something new... Kind of veggie+fish-flavoured risotto, but didn't have any rice, so I went for pre-cooked, dry wheat. I did like it, so here it is... sorry for the crap piccie, it was taken with my phone's camera...

and here comes the recipe:

put one nugget of butter in the wok, with some chopped courgette, spinachs, mushrooms. some chilly too, and a pince of salt. stir-fry them, while you prepare some fish stock (it: brodo, fr: bouillon).

drop in the bouillon some pre-cooked wheat (grano, ble`)... boil it for some minutes, then throw away most of the bouillon, keeping enough to finish off the wheat cooking. I keep it in a bowl, you never know if you need some more.

pour the wheat together with its bouillon in the wok, and finish them off... once cooked, sprinkle with fish-mix dry herbs (or better the fresh equivalent), and a nugget of gorgonzola if you like... that's it. enjoy! and let me know if you liked it...

Whaling, uninterrupted...

Shelley at retrospectacle has an interesting piece about whale hunting: she puts together various sources showing that even if new, supposedly better ways of killing them are available, they are not used since they are too expensive. Even worst, there's not enough data to backup the claim that grenade-tipped harpoon kill whales more

I feel all this is very barbaric. Killing endangered and somehow intelligent species is unacceptable.

Shame on Norway and Japan for behaving like this... and Iceland for following suite now, after a twenty-one year moratorium... and i thought that, after the ecological catastrophe they lived in the past centuries, Icelandic were seriously minded about conservation... we humans just don't live enough to learn the consequence of our actions...

spam spam spam!!!

I recently discovered the original meaning of spam, thanks to my work-mate Russell...

it stands for... I don't remember now, but some kind of Ham that was the only easily available meat after the war in Great Britain...

I wonder how the same word came to identify unwanted e-mails... I guess because Spam wasn't the best kind of ham, so no children wanted to eat it?

anyway, the spam level in my gmailbox has been growing ever since I stopped emptying it... Google says that they get deleted after one month of staying there, and so it did happen that they reached a peak of roughly 300, then stayed there for some time... but since some days ago they have started growing again in number, and they've now breached for the first time the 500 wall...

congratulations luca...

may be this depends from putting my email (link it's wrong ah ah)in webpages and blogs all aorund the world... where it can be picked by spiders and such... mah... who cares... kudos to google 'cause all my spam is intercepted without me having to do anything, rather differently from my yahoo account where it doesn't really matter whether I flag some mails as spam, the next issue of the same newsletter will end up in my mailbox... damn... way to go, yahoo... although your new (java-based) simil-thunderbird interface has some points over gmail's...

MultiVariate QSAR...

busy busy busy this week, with a three-day course on Multivariate QSAR modelling to follow... I've been playing with data, fitting and interpreting... lots of pretty pictures, pity i don't have the time to post any... nor that they are too interesting for someone not statistically minded...

but to quench your thirst, I'm linking a nice post from PZ Myers talking about embryos 500 millions years old!!!

the paper in science describes how the embryos (coming from china) have been scanned with many techniques down to the sub-cellular level, revealing striking similarities (but also not) with existing organisms...

enjoy!!!

Violent movies decrease real violence...

again from FrontalCortex: it looks like Violent Movies do decrease violence in the immeidate surroundings when they're shown... kind of violent-minded people go and watch them, instead of committing rape and crime themselves...

how about love movies? do they decrease sex meetings in the same way? or is the effect more pronounced after showing? how about whether or not love movies cause an increase in rapes due to single/violent people coming out of cinema horny and frustrated? :-|

scary scenario...

Clean Water

Here comes an intelligent post pointing out how half today's world population does not have access to water as clean as the roman did, two thousand years ago...

This is definitely depressing...

A failure of politics in the wider sense of the world. The writer points out how in Calcutta, it's easier to get a reliable internet dsl connection than a reliable water pipe... :-|

La bataille des ardennes

I've been to the Ardennes this weekend, to see the places where the famous battle was fought... The region is very very nice, agricultural with lots of grass and trees, and rolling hills all over the place... nice twisty roads where to drive, too...


Pictures come from my Picasa webspace. you're
welcome to click on them and snoop around other albums...


and the food was fantastic too... we went to leo's wagon, an old wagon (orient express-style) refubished as a restaurant. Unfortunately, there was no space for the lot of us in the wagon, bu the menu was the same, and pretty good... more piccies to come...



I'm sorry if the pictures are a bit lopsided, but the wine in the region was goood.... oh goood...