Darren Naish has lots of goodies

Have been missing its his new posts, since he moved to scienceblogs.

So, go and check them out!!!

Big cats
(these are two posts)

Seriously big squirrels: check out the piccie.

a post on Rhynos used during wars (fact or fiction?)

Narwhal's Sonic Lance (no it's not something out of sci-fi)

weekend preparations...

As preparation for the weekend, it's started to rain again, as usual...

Well, luckily I didn't wash the car, and most certainly will not wash it tomorrow, unless the sun shines so strong when i wake up that I need sun glasses. ah! not a chance, I'd say...

let's see how it turns out...

plus, my machine today is sluggish like never, there must be something (firefox with 141MB of RAM?) which is dragging it down... Memory leak? who knows? but even so, having 1GB of RAM I should have more than enough juice left to run the house, no? Nope: windows task manager says: mem usage 1411248K/2502016K. So I'm crunching on Virtual memory only. pants!

Ok, may be it's also my fault for keeping firefox + excel + word it open for one or two weeks at a time, before being forced to reboot.

But why, ho why, does this only happen on windows?

I have a new address

So, it's done. I signed the contract (co-signed, since Marie signed with me) and from the first of june we'll be living together. Woah! Big move uh?

Lots of things to do now, organise for the utilities contracts to be moved, which one to keep out of the various ones, when exactly move and so many tiny little things. I guess I am becoming adult. Finally. It was well time...

Back to work now, it's going to be hectic today, and plenty of things to do before leaving. tomorrow, I am off with some friends and colleagues at Durbuy, for the chocolate festival - although it sounds like just a market, on the net. mah...

Sunday at home cleaning, resting, watching movies, unless saturday evening I head off to BXL to catch my GF coming out of work. We'll see.

By all means, have a nice weekend you too!!!

Coffee Break

Curiosita': a che ora fate pausa? quante al giorno? con chi? avete una stanza comune x staccarvi dall'ambiente del lavoro/studio?

all'Uni di Soton c'era una stanzona dove tutti si riunivano, miriade di sedie, e due signore inglesi attempate (sotituite poi da una punk, e una cinesina niente male) che servivano in cambio di una modica offerta x te' e biscotti.

qua le coffee area son sparse un po' x tutto il compound. I Chimici Computazionali si riuniscono nell'area comune del rispettivo piano, ma si tengono separati dagli oncologi (le cui biologhe son uno spettacolo da guardare, specie SuperGirl che c'ha il fisico atletico e due puppe da paura)

Dove lavoro io invece, in ADMETox, ognuno va x conto suo, alcuni semplicemente alla macchinetta del loro piano - noi tre moschettieri si va alla cucina/meeting room appena creata. stefan si fa il suo te', vikash preme i tasti della macchinetta x un caffe', io invece verso un qaurto di litro di latte nella tazza, caffe' solubile ed altre spezie e zicco tutto nel microonde. si parla di biologia (io), o di porno (stefan), o di chissa' che altro (vikash) mentre si spera che Barbie girl passi vestita provocante. :-)

Did you ever wonder where you are?

How your work connect to that of other people around you? Somebody did, and decided to scourge citations from 800,000 scientific papers to assemble this map:



I am currently somewhere where it says "Therapeutic Research" (lower left), but have been between "Material" and "Physical Chemistry", and almost reached "Computer Science" already.

Click on it to download it, but be careful, it's huge. 5.7MB.

Never mind conservapedia

Many people (including Carl Zimmer) seems very worried about conservapedia, a wiki-like-pedia essentially full of rubbish. Don't worry, I say to them... People who visits it are mostly intelligent people who think of it as an alternative to the daily visit at The Onion, or AvantNews. And those few who visits it as source and repository of conservative information, well, they would not visit wikipedia anyway. Just let them wither away, and let's just hope that we outbred them, and not the other way around as it happens in Idiocracy, a movie I talked about some time ago...

have a nice sunday. I am off to see the science tunnel with a friend, after lunch.