Frankly, though, this one, featuring my old-time favourite Edward Norton, seems to be so much better: The Illusionist
In turn-of-the-century Vienna, a magician (Norton) uses his abilities to secure the love of a woman far above his social standing.
looks like a plan. I'd do the same, if I had magical powers :-)
Snooping around the IMDB, I found the trailer for this nice movie: School for Scoundrels... there's no vote as of yet, but I'll check it out on the torrent to see how it is and report to you... have a nice evening, guys and girls... ;-)
My counter below is burgeoning toward the one-hundredth visit. who will it be?
Until now, I've had mostly visit from Italy, and the UK (from my ex-lab). The one from Italy come from Turin, but mostly from Tuscany... The usual suspects here too...
Unexpected visits from all over the world, the US, Australia, India and so on... you're all wellcome!
now that I have a referrer list you can check where visiting people comes from, too. ;-)
UPDATE: and the one-hundredth is... PAC, if I am not mistaken, who's checking me out from his university public station. Him, or someone else from Pisa. Gio' may be? no way of knowing unless they come forward and confess...
What does Judas Unchained means? Frankly, I don't know. It's just the title of the book I am reading now. Follow up on last week's book, Pandora's Star, it did arrive in the post the same day I was done with its prequel... 
The commonwealth traversies goes on and on, charachters become more tri-dimensional, or may be not. Frankly, I enjoy the book but its main players are far from the detail of Hamilton previous cycle. It certainly is a page turner for me, and am looking forward to discovers what the Guardians are up to. i only hope it won't be another Deus Ex Machina like in the Naked God. In there, the solution did look enat, but lazy too... Too easy postulating a superhuman intelligence which fixes things for us... well, enough spoiling...
I just hope I'll manage to finish reading it before I fly to sardinia. or may be in flight. who knows?
have a nice week you all!
Minus three to the so long delayed holidays...
Minus two Presentations to go: one for Management, one for the Cardio Vascular Centre Of Excellence...
Minus one back pain to get rid of...
and then it's GO! Fly away where no gufo has been before!!!
(I dis-like Star Trek but have to admit liking their tag-line)
go!
only half an hour left before my presentation to the scientific committee which is supposed the judge the goodness of my first six months here at JnJ, and suggest new investigation routes... finger crossed.
I managed to swap slides in my presentation even now, hopefully nobody will grunt about their printouts diverging from what I am going to show...
well, that's it for now, more news to follow! and good luck to me!
that someone did stand up and supported animal testing. I'm sick of animal rights hypocrites... I know animal testing is unpleasant, and it would be nice to have an alternative. but there is none.
I am personally working for that - how many self declared animal-lawyers can say the same? Still, the day we will be able to get rid of those extremely valuable aids is very far in the future.
have a nice day!
ps: the Pro-Test organisation also has a blog, which act as more as a science-oriented discussion forum...
you put together Harvard's evolutionary (socio)biologist like Robert Trivers, and MIT's linguist Noah Chomsky?
a lot of interesting discussions, that is.
you can also look/listen at them:
they jump from one disparate subject to another: from the Iraq War to self-deception in animals...
funny that in the transcription it says that these two never met each other even if they did work in the same city... :-)
oh, and by the way: kudos to SEED for giving this (and others) away for free...
and thanks to the scientific activist for letting me know
Hey there, wellcome back. it's showtime again, so here comes a video grabbed from youtube where some fan put together BattlestarGalactica scenes with the theme from TopGun (Highway to The Dangerzone). Enjoy!
Hi there. for this weekend, I want to suggest my italian speaking friends a website where some wacko gather crazy questions about sex from various online 'forums' - one of them is from the infamous teen-magazine "Cioe`" - which bradly translated means "That is", but is an often used interjetion for teen agers, kind of 'dig it'.
so, click here - girlpower vs cioe - and enjoy!
Just a quick link to the very good BBC Radio Player. Not as simple as the Rai Radio Player (just six buttons, nothing more), but the sheer number of channels and broadcast prorams available makes it worth a check.
cheers, and thanks BBC for making this available to "offworlders" too... Kudos!
(best channel for open minds: BBC Channel 4)
So, suppose you forgot that monday last week was your birthday. Any reference is purely coincidental. Suppose you felt ashamed that you didn't buy a cake to share with your friends, so that you didn't say it to anyone. You obviously want to amend this.
The first idea that came up to my mind is to devote yourself at creating a new branch of physics, and manage to create a wormhole which acts as a time machine. you then step back in the future, drop to the nearest patisserie/supermarket, buy a cake - you birthday cake must obviously be produced the day of your anniversary. Finally, you step forward in time and you share the cake with your friends. However, since cakes have an 'eat me before
well, you're left with no friends, but a time machine, and that is reasonably cool. you can always go and look for new friends in different ages...
May be you're interested, may be you're not.
but here comes what's been keeping me awake at night - no, it's not my GF.
a book which is the follow up to 'The Lexus and the Olive tree' (which I haven't read yet). In essence, it talks about how the world market is being flattened by globalisation, and how this is going to impact our lives. Unfortunately, as many american books, after a good start he only stress the point over and over again...
So that after a while I lost interest and cast it aside. it's been lying on my kitchen floor for two weeks until my GF picked it up.
Now, it's been substituted by a very clever book by Peter F Hamilton, author of the acclaimed (by me, if nothing else) "Reality Disfunction" cycle. The new Book is called Pandora's Star (click here to read the prologue on the author's official web page)
As in the Reality Disfunction cycle, humans have spread along the galaxy but this time using WormHoles rather than Spaceships. The first chapter is very good indeed, and after that is a jump of three hundred years in the future, to when a neighboring (only one thousand light years away from Earth) star is secluded from the rest of the universe by mean of a gigantic shell of exotic matter - The Dyson Pair, since there are two of them, puzzle the human, which decide then to send their first faster-than-light spaceship to investigate - 'cause wormholes don't get that far without five or six intermediate steps, and each one needs very expensive infrastructure to be mantained.
The Universe is accurately detailed as in Hamilton's tradition, and reminds strongly of the Hyperion universe. However, it lacks credibility in the semi-fantasy social ordering, and the absolute monopoly over technologies such as Force fields and WormHoles transport - the Corporation who runs the latters can decide to cut everybody off the Commonwealth, and I can believe the governments would allow that. and if so, after three hundred years I'd expect the same technology to be available to everybody, so that worlds cut out would eventually form a kind of shadow commonwealth... mah... annyway, as Space Operas go, there's certainly a lot of meat and high-tech-babbling and gizmoes and stuff to keep me entertained. a tad below the previous saga, though. you can't beat the combination spaceships+zombies, can you?
happy birthday to me...
Hi everybody, I'm 32 today... since the crucial date of 33 (Jesus Christ's age) is approaching, I thought about making a balance of my life to date:
- find a nice girlfriend (check)
- starting a family (on the way there)
- being liked by my friends (check... ehr... right?)
- getting a degree (check and a half)
- getting a job (half-check)
- starting my own religion (to do)
- lifting one hundred Kg on the bench (check)
- parachuting (to do)
- win the nobel prize (to do)
I believe it's all... I guess this puts me above JC in the list of accomplished things. after all, He didn't have a degree, one of his friends betrayed him to death, and as for girlfriend... well, let's skip over it. Over all, he only managed to start a religion, ad get hung like a thief. sad uh? Luckily, I am here to dave the day... Ok I stop being such a pun and start my first honest day of work as a thirty-two year old... what? boy? man? bah, whatever...
a zent'annos!
here's the question. should I subscribe to adsense advertisement and let them stick some box with ads from which I can gain a sh*tload of money (unlikely since the measy trafic of this weblog, but you never know...)
Frankly, I don't think I should. if only 'cause they'd go somewhere where I don't want them to be... On the other side, I'm very curious about what kind of ads google will think are 'appropriate' to this blog... but what if once subscribed I can't get the bloody thing out of my html code?
any suggestions? any one who's already had experience on this?
and here it is a blog (italian only, I'm sorry) with some hilarious signposts/graffiti from (w)all(s) over the world...
just an example of what you'll find in there:
damn, I had to hack the html code in the site to grab the pic. I hate when people disable the right-click menus...
I've finally made it. I managed to wake up early enough to go to swim right before working... I know that many readers may find this very strange, and borderline crazy, but that's the best way to start the day for me. I've been going to the gym, or to swim, or both, in the morning for the mosty part of my extended PhD time. and before, at University in Italy, I would study until 10 and then rush down to my friend Fulvio's gym (PaleXtra 2000 - Fulvio, come on, put up a nice web site!!!).
I had abandoned this healthy habit after moving to the new house in April - in fact I started doing sport in the evening after I moved to Belgium. But I didn't like it, really, in the evening I like to relax, watch a lil bit of TV (I have a penchant for humour romantic TV series, such as Ally Mc Beal, and Desperate Housewives). So it really wasn't ideal to trin after work. Some people find it relaxing. It takes the stress they accumulate during the day, at work. I don't. Sport is not for relaxing, is for training. And your mind must be fresh if you want to be able to handle those weight seriously.
But work here has been getting heavier and heavier, and at the evening I pledged to finish off my PhD thesis, so I had to relinquish something. Either my lovely girlfriend, or sport. Which way would you have gone?
What convinced me to do the effort to get back was a streak of pain in my back in the last week (some friends say this was 'caused' by my GF, but I like to think of myself as a gentleman so I can't confirm (nor deny). Anyway, it made work impossible, thanks to the wonderful hammock/chairs that some architect decided would fit the hyper-space workplace. I'd rather sit on a wooden bench.
but never mind, 'cause this pushed me to enter the water once again. which is good, I have to shed some weight (not really, rather put up some in the right places) and get back in shape for my brother's wedding the end of this month. Otherwise the suite I bought last year will not fit me...
well, I haven't spoken too much about swimming, in this post. may be next time. have a nice day! :-)
Keeping an eye on who visits the blog is important. this way I'll have a better idea of who's reading it, and then I may modify my posts accordingly. Since the NeoCounter has expired, I decided to switch over to another free counter: StatCounter
it should appear on the right hand side bar, more or less like this:
