Ankylosaurs' week is almost over...

Darren Naish has kept his promise to publish one wonderful post x day about Ankylosaurs for a whole week!!! There's only one day left but may be he'll skip to rest...

Go and read them all right now, cause they're worth it...

I personally loved Ankilosaurs when I was a child and used to play with it and beat the crap out of a plastic T-Rex with his knobby, armored tail.

Incidentally, my little brother used to keep the model dinosaurs in between cattle and poultry in his plastic little farm... Do you think he knew that chicken and T-Rex were, after all, very close genetically?

Folding Bicycle

I am considering to buy one, to keep in the car more or less always, so that when I need to go some medium distance I can use it...

For example in Antwerp, where parking in the centre is impossible and/or expensive, it'd be nice to park far from it, for free, then cycle there in two or three minutes.

Same at work, when I need to go to the bank, or the doctor, and so on...

The problem, is they're quite pricey... I've been suggested to go buy them in the netherlands where the market is larger and I could probably get a fair price for a model from last year... uhm...


The one you can see in the picture is a cool prototype... Called The Locust, probably because of its green color.

Let's see if I have any money left by the end of the month...



Or may be I could get this one?

Every little helps...

On 15/02/2008, An ingenuous friend wrote me:

SE GOOGLE AVESSE UNO SCHERMO NERO, VISTA LA GRANDE QUANTITA' DI
PERSONE
CHE LO USANO, SI CALCOLA CHE SI RISPARMIEREBBERO CIRCA
750MEGAWATT/ORA.

COME RISPOSTA A QUESTO GOOGLE HA CREATO UNA VERSIONE IN NERO,
CHIAMATA
BLACKLE, CON ESATTAMENTE LE STESSE FUNZIONI DI QUELLA IN BIANCO, CON
UN
CONSUMO DI ENERGIA MINORE... INOLTRE STANCA MOLTO MENO GLI OCCHI!!!

FALLO SAPERE E USALO, OGNI PICCOLA COSA CONTA.

http://www.neroogle.it

Scusate il francesismo, ma che coglionata.

La lampada dietro al mio schermo LCD resta accesa sia che il pixel sia bianco, sia nero.

Il colore e' dato dal pixel stesso che filtra la luce, facendola passare o meno...

Nel caso dei tubi catodici vale la stessa cosa, visto che il consumo principale e' dato dal tenere il cannone elettronico ad alto voltaggio, non dalla corrente effettiva sparata contro lo schermo. D'oh!!!

Ma chi si inventa certe cose?

Luca

Terrific!!!

What wouldn't I do to waste time...



thanks to my dear friend Dario for showing it to me...

Let's try to embed a podcast

The one from The Economist, for example:



It works!!!

Gufodotto's Shared Items

Look up there...

Since I often comment about news I read on the i.net, and now I don't get much time to wrte on them, I put up a new feed burner with a few of those I think it would be nice to share with you. It's all thanks to google's reader, which I restarted using since my blogroll was getting too long to keep a daily eye on all of them...

On the diary side of my life, I managed to start correcting the paper and hopefully will get it done by the end of the week. If I can get away from the internet, that is...

Boredom...

I am bored. I should correct my paper and get it finally submitted, but it's stronger than me and can't just decide whether to accept the corrections suggested by a co-author or not...

Scientific publications are so troublesome (at least for me) that I am almost tempted to give up on this career and pursuit a job in finance (lol, not really) or any other field where you are not required to write up your stuff. It's not that I don't want to share, I am more than happy of that and well willing to talk about my work. It's just that I am very very bad at writing up, possibly because none of the endless literature courses during my school in Italy ever concentrated on the basic of good and understandable writing.

IYou can see it from how long the previous phrase was. In Italy long phrases, branching in two or three nested level get you a premium by the professor. Ow, all this sucks. I wish I was like many of my colleagues, with a much wider cultural span but much more 'able' to do the job... They're like very sharp knives, good to cut steaks, whereas I am the jack of all knives (d`uh!) - with multiple skills but none up to an acceptable level.

Enough complaining. I'm leaving work early to discover the joys of having a Makro card - Then I will try to correct the paper in the evening at home, with the advantage of Word XP which lets you see the correction and the original at once...

see you soon...