Goodbye blog, welcome Facebook

I realised that I need no blog to share my ideas with all of you friends, now that facebook gives me the opportunity of expressing my mood, post links, videos and other objects. So I guess this is my last post here. I am sure you will not miss me. If you do, just come on and visit me: http://www.new.facebook.com/reqs.php#/profile.php?id=643947002&ref=profile

When brains are outlawed...

An old blog post found thanks to the guys at Freakonomics...

When Wonderbras are outlawed, only outlaws will have wonderbras

August 24, 2006 · 3 Comments

It is once again safe to wear gel-filled bras on airplanes.The TSA pretty much HAD to do this as it realized the only other move would have been to ban breast implants as well which would have shut down LAX.

Hilarious...

Occupational Questions...

Stephen Dubner, one of the two people behind Freakonomics, comes up with a bleg forwarded by a reader:

When I’m at a party and get asked what I do (I am an architect), I always hear one of the same five responses:

+ What kind of architecture do you do?

+ Hey, you can design my dream home!

+ I like Frank Lloyd Wright, do you think he’s good?

+ My brother/father/aunt is an architect.

+ I thought about going into architecture.

All of these responses are fine, but just knowing how consistent they are, it makes me wonder in what ways I ask stereotypical questions of others.

It would be nice to avoid this by having a list of what jobs get what kinds of responses. This idea has led to many interesting party conversations — because many times, the responses are not so nice!

So here’s my bleg question: what are the typical responses you hear when you tell people what you do?

So, how about myself? Well I have given up (mostly) trying to explain people what I do in detail...

I am a computational chemist. people usually says one of these two things:

• - A what?!?
• - Complicational Chemistry? Uh, interesting... I sucked at chemistry in high school / college / primary / whatever...

So, how about you?

Science for the masses. In Italian

A new blog I just happened to strike on, while reading The Loom (which, if you don't know, recently left Seed's ScienceBlogs for Discover magazine.

It's called "i divagatori scientifici", and looks like the guy has very wide interests. For the moment the number of posts is on the low side but hey... You can't have it all...

I'll stick it in my blog roll.

Next: Who on Earth keeps visiting this blog?

Benefit for bringing to term a pregnancy.

This is Hilarious.

After suggesting the Freakonomics blog to a friend, I went off to read some posts myself.

In particular, one of the posts captured my attention, about a study correlating Depression and abortion rates in Australian women...

Then I start reading the comments, and I find out that the Australian government recently raised child benefits, instituting a 4000US$ Baby Bonus which can be claimed for every pregnancy brought to term. That's right, you get the 4000 bucks not only for bringing to light a live baby, but also if he/she's stillborn.

Factsheet is here.

this brought me to think how hard the legislator job really is, when to draft a law it has to account for almost every possible case!!! It's akin to programming, in fact, where every outcome of an expression must be guessed before hand to avoid crashes or the program malfunctioning. Only, there are no known debuggers for politics. Not yet...

Richard Dawkins goes to the movies with PZ Myers

They went together to a free (as in beer, not as in speech) pre-screening of Expelled, a documentary about the lack of controversy between Evolutionary theory and IDiocy.

Anyway, PZ Myers was singled out by the security guards and asked to leave, whereas the much less illustrious Tricky Dicky was let in.


He's said to have gone berserk half-way in the projection, dismembering several spectators before being put to rest by the bite of an intelligently designed bull-mastiff. Lol. What a quintessentially english gentleman...

Get the full story here.

We are moving...

Following the example of the Rabbit, I may soon be moving to WordPress, importing all my old post and such over there.

The reason, quite simply, is the lack of pre-made 3-columns templates on Blogger.

I know I could modify myself the html to allow for that, but I can't be arsed. After all, that's the age of internet 2.0, we users are not supposed to know what html is, exactly like you don't need to know electronics to operate a TV. And since I am no enginneer and want a wide-screen blog in these times of wide-everything, I am getting a new one exactly how I would get a new TV.

It's as simple as that.


So, you will temporarily be able to find me at: http://gufodotto.wordpress.com

Upload your blogrolls then...
Luca

PS: I will possibly use the opportunity to start another, science-only related blog. I haven't decided yet what its name is going to be, but I will try to write down a diary of what my work is about... Let's see how it shapes up...

Michael Pollan has a blog, too!

One of my favourite writers/journalists has a blog, about good agriculture and good food.

Check it out: On The Table

and make sure you read how agricultural policies of developed states influence the things we eat.

It's a pity he does not update it more often...

Have an Ice Day!!!

Pseudomonas syringae is an extremely interesting bacterium, which I discovered reading Olivia Judson's latest post on cloud-dwelling bacteria.

Usually, plants growing in cold regions use special chemicals as anti-freeze. This bacterium, though, secretes Ice Nucleation-active proteins to make ice crystals grow at temperatures as high as -2C. The crystals cause damage to cell walls of plants, and the bacterium vacuums up the nutrients released.

So, they use ice crystals as straw, although the name "syringae" doesn't come from there. Rather, it comes from the plants they were isolated from at first:

It is named after the lilac tree (Syringa vulgaris), from which it was first isolated^[2]

(from the wikipedia)

and always on the theme of vampires from the cold, the new Penny Arcade strip is out!

Double blind scientific review

John Denney over at Evilutionary Biologist makes an interesting point: How often and how much knowing the reputation of the author of a paper influences the opinion we get from reading it?

The discussion was sparked by a piece on the journal Nature.

Would it not be better if the review process was double blinded, as it happens in the case of clinical trials of new drugs?


I do happen to think it is a good idea too.

It is certainly possible to guess who the author of the paper is from the subject, his writing style and (possibly) the amount of self-citations(!).

But one more hurdle to accepting a paper as a gold nugget just because it's been crapped up (down) by Dr Eminent can't hurt, can he?

I am personally in the middle of the final touches to my paper before submission - and I think that another good point of it is that reviewers who will happen to read it (if it gets accepted for review, that is) will not know my name so they will not black list me for future collaborations.

Oh, come on, a bit of self-confidence, Dr Fenu...

Do supermarkets make our lives better?

The BBC radio program "World Have Your Say" points to an opinion piece by food critic Jay Rayner discussing whether or not supermaret are a good or evil force in our fight for better, affordable food.

I have to admit that I quite like his position, founding it well reasoned and far from the anti-supermarket crowd rants...

Yes, supermarket "are bloody convenient", as he points out. But they are not the "the dismal and anonymous places" they are made out to be... The people working in there are just, well, people, and they are as likely to behave nicely or badly with their customers as any other "small-retailer" who has been put out of business by them.

Also, I may add, from my personal experience, in Italy the small distribution is suffering now the revenge of customers who until now were forced to pay extortion prices for goods often 1/3rd cheaper in the supermarket.

And as Jay thoughtfully points out, all those chef recommending exotic ingredients would not be able to offer recipes for less than 5 pounds if it weren't for the big scale economies that allow big chain to sell these foods at a lower price.

There certainly is a lot to be done to force supermarket to pay an honest price to farmers... But as long as people pushes them to have cheaper and cheaper food, they're going to attempt anything they can to provide them with it. Once people will start demanding high quality food, we will see a shift in the chains' modus operandi. Not one second before.

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?

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...

New Blog on the block

I just discovered Desktop Tales, a blog (in Italian) where marco publishes, among other things, the comic strip with the same name, featuring a Mac and PC commenting current news from the computer world and not.

I loved it, so I thought you may want to have a look too.


Thanks to [Emo] for spreading the news.

Old Blog Out, New Blog In

Ho cambiato il mio blog rool, non quello degli amici ma quello dei blog da seguire.

Sparisce GalacticaBlog, che da tempo non seguivo, fondamentalmente xke' l'autore e' un fascista (ah ah) appassionato di una serie che fascista non e' ma che da tempo non mi piace piu'.

Ed arriva Verso Itaca, che invece ho scoperto x caso (seguendo link da uno dei blog amici) e che penso rivisitero' in seguito. x cui, benvenuto ne mio blog roll (che per il momento rolla ben poco)

Daphne has a blog!!!

Full of pretty sketches!!! Go and check it out!!!

http://daphne-daphn3.blogspot.com/

Rosario Elettronico.

And from the blog of the guy who was once my comic book pusher, comes the electronic rosario.

Anatomy of a Balloon Animal

I am stealing this post from the beautiful Streetanatomy blog:

Anatomy of a Balloon Animal

FreeRice.

Do something fun. Guess the synonym of the words on the screen, and climb to harder and harder levels. 40 of them overall.

Do something good. for every correct answer, the sponsor of the game will donate ten grains of rice through the United Nations. It's not much, but every little helps.


my level right now: 32 - I've donated 500 grains so far. At 20mg x grains, it's less than a hundred grams though.

thanks to Versus Itaca for the link.

Laelaps is on Scienceblogs!

Congrats to Brian!!!

You all, go and read his wonderful piece on Dinosauroids (or rather, lack of).