This is the legal equivalent of an ex-girlfriend request to be 'still friends'...

Get a life, but don't go that far that you can' be reached, should I still need you... D'oh!

Gufo Was Here...

Yesterday, I went here to look at Tulips and Hyacinths in flower. The colors were quite nice, although the whole thing at times did look more like an industrial estate than a garden...


View Larger Map

I must admit, though, that looking at the landscape painted in various colors was impressive. a Pity that Holland is so flat...

Piccies to follow.

Mi piace...

Allora, visto che una certa signorina (ancora x quanto?) mi ha invitato, mi ci appento fra le pause del lavoro...

Ecco il regolamento:
Indicare il link di chi vi ha coinvolti; (tick!)
Inserire il regolamento del gioco sul blog; (copia-incolla, ti adoro!)
Citare sei cose che vi piace fare; (non appena trovo il tempo)
Coinvolgere altre sei persone; (mi metteranno nella loro spam-list...)
Comunicare l'invito sul loro blog. (uhm... skippero' questa?)

Allora, si comincia:

- Mi piaciono gli animali, ma piu' di tutto i dinosauri, xke' son di questo pianeta, ma di un altro mondo...
- Mi piace leggere, possibilmente un libro sui dinosauri :-P, ma qualunque libro che mi faccia scoprire qualcosa di nuovo e' benvenuto.
- Mi piace andare in bici o camminare in montagna, in una foresta, e passo i fine settimana a chiedermi perche' non lo faccia piu' spesso.
- Mi piace cucinare, x gli amici o anche solo x marie, quando la sera si rientra a casa. Mi piace prender cose semplici e trasformarle magicamente nel mio fuoco alchemico... La rivincita del chimico che lavora al computer.
- Mi piace viaggiare, scoprire un posto nuovo, la gente che ci vive e anche le altre cose che lo rendono diverso da dove ho gia' vissuto. L'Africa, come a molti, mi ha rubato il cuore.
- Mi piace esser il primo, mostrare che sto un passo avanti, anche se non e' bello essere immodesti. Ma son fatto cosi'.
- Mi piace romper le regole non appena posso, x questo ho scritto sette cose che mi piacciono e non sei :-P

ed ora, gli inviti: Francesca, Antonio/Gaccu, Ilalice (o Ilalice?), Emiliano, Gupy, Luca (prima che lo inviti Paolo, lol!!!).

Attack Number One!!! Real Live Action!!!

Of course somebody had to get it on the (You)Tube.



But if anybody can point me to a website where I can buy this series, I'll owe him for ever. Seriously. This was one of my favourite sport series...

Xke ha cambiato sesso allora?

sxo si vedano...

Anch'io, anch'io!!!

Hilarious (encore...) se non si vede, cliccate sul titolo del post...

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...

My next steps.

I am toying with the idea of applying for research position in the anti-microbial, or generally anti-infective area.

The reasons? As far as I know, targets are easier to work with, more specifically, proteins are easier to Xtallize so that Structure-based drug design actually has some chance to work. Well, at least there's some material to start from. second, and most importantly, there is a resurgence of such diseases all over the world.

On the converse, though, big [pharma seems to have dropped this field as few doses of an antifungal or anti-viral are less remunerative than the long term treatment of a mentally or metabolically ill patient. But frankly, I don't like that area. It may be challenging, but also gets frustrating when your animal models have very limited analogy with the human condition.

One withdraw of such a coice is that such research positions are mainly available from small companies, and this means (ouch!) smaller salaries too. On the good side though, I'll be able to wear more than one hat, the environment will be more dynamic, and I may grow quicker, if I play my card well.

Well, good luck to me... Now, let's go and hunt down some bacteria!!!

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.

ForeRunning

Been using my new Forerunner 305 this morning.


Here's the recorded track from home to work along the motorway.

Its accuracy is remarkable... It even gets the lane right, most of the time, an operation that seems to be beyond of the abilities of my GPS navigator, which uses its maps to lock my position on the road.

The forerunner can get a precise lock just by staying in the passenger's seat... Great!!!

I wish I could upload the kml file so that you can have a look at my wanderings on google Earth... Well, may be not my way home, but it would be nice to fly over my next Rwanda trip by using Google Earth in 3D mode...

In the Easter Egg

First post in so much time...

A white Easter has come and gone, with some friends from the UK over to visit us. It was nice and we had a good time, toruing around and eating lots of good stuff...



Also, they acted as surrogate Easter Bunnies, delivering to me a new pair of isolating ear-phones for my MP3 listening, plus the ultimate gadget, a GPS-enabled watch with cardio-pulse recorder...



Now I can finally track my errings, up and down belgium, within a few metres... Now particularly interesting I know, but it'll come in handy when I want to geo-tag some pictures during trips and so on... Plus I can upload my tracks and treks to Google Earth, to look at them frm above and brag about with my friends ;-)

Ain't that nice?

Happy Easter to everyone!!!

Evolution of foods

Some scientist have analysed the evolution of recipes through time in four different cookbooks, and concluded that traditional cuisine evolve quite slowly, mosty because special ingredient are difficult to replace.

I wonder if some sort of tree of cooking could be built from gastronomic traditions of various populations and how it would relate to migrations, either known or presumed to have happened before historical records began...

update: in fact, since recipes are memes, as in the original definition of Dawkins, it may really turn out to be an interesting exercise...

Amazon.com 4 the Amazon

After reading a piece on conservation-lease of land in developing countries, a reader (Simon Edwards) had an idea:

Simon Edwards wrote:

March 04, 2008 01:50

Let's get Amazon.com to start saving the Amazon! Imagine what a great publicity stunt it would be both for Amazon.com and for leased conservation if they adopted a "Save Your World" business approach. Everyone would write about it! They wouldn't even need to launch an advertising campaign, the story would sell itself. Amazon.com has nothing to loose; they could even make it optional: "add 50 cents to the price of your book, and Amazon.com will match your donation to preserve one hectare of the Amazon for one year." Everyone wins! I implore everyone who reads this, do what you can to spread this idea. Post it on blogs, email it to Amazon.com, whatever. Maybe somehow it will seep through and someone will act on it. Only one way to find out!

So Amazon, let's make it happen.

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...

Wisdom, or lack thereof...

It's taken thirty years to convince my lonely wisdom tooth to emerge from his burrow... It was a tiny sliver of enamel poking up of my upper-right mandible, only a couple of years ago... Then, it came out bit by bit, and my tongue learned every feature of its contorted surface. It never was much of help in chewing, having come out sideways compared to the other teeth. But alas, I didn't mind too much - it was a welcome (well tolerated) guest in my mouth...


Wisdom teeth have, by the way, quite an interesting scientific story. They come out later in life, after you've been adult for a while, and that's why they're called wisdom teeth. At least, that's my educated guess. Why do they come out later in life? because this way our ancestors would have at least a spare tooth when the other molars were rotten, or just too worn out. I guess they used them on much tougher food that we do today... Charles Darwin himself cites the wisdom teeth as 'rudimentary', in "The descent of Man', which I am reading right now in the new, concise edition curated by Carl Zimmer.



But let's go back to my single lonely tooth. Suddenly, just a couple of weeks ago, a dull pain started to manifest itself, and playing with my tongue and finger over it (just imagine the scene) I self-diagnosed that the last, invisible addition to the smile had started to push against the neighbor... yesterday took a dive and, for the first time in years, and only the third time in life, I went to the dentist.

She opened my mouth wide open, looking inside and poking with her shiny metal tools... And prodding around, found a cavity, my first cavity, in my little wisdom tooth... The bastard. Last one to come out, first one to cause me troubles... }8-[

She suggested to take it out, and I buggered off with an excuse (not before being asked to pay 84 Euros for the privilege), with the promise that I'll show up next wednesday to let her play a bit more with her pliers and drills.

She has, I noticed when she took out her mask, the most beautiful lips I've ever seen up close. Hopefully, having a crash on my dentist will help me bear the pain she'll inflict me. Ouch!

Stay tuned. More to follow...

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.

Almeno l'itagliano... Impalalo!!!

Tanto x ripostare qua qualcosa che mi ha fatto ridere quando mi e' arrivato via e-mail... l'N-esima catena umoristica...

1. Mi puoi disinnescare la segreteria telefonica? (Ordigni moderni...)

2. Soffro di vene vorticose. (Sarà un ballerino...)

3. Di fronte a queste cose rimango putrefatto! (Che schifo!)

4. In farmacia: Puoi darmi un 'una tantum'? (forse si chiama 'tantum verde'?)

5. Quando muoio mi faccio cromare. (Valido!)

6. Arriva il treno, hai blaterato il biglietto? (.....)

7. Come faccio a fare tutte queste cose simultaneamente?
Dovrei avere il dono dell'obliquità! (la torre di Pisa???)

8. Un'onda anonima ha travolto i surfisti. (e nessuno la sa riconoscere???)

9. Almeno l'italiano... sallo! (Eh...)

10. Basta! Vi state coagulando contro di me!(trasfusione?)

11. E' nel mio carattere: quando qualcosa non va, io sodomizzo! (Stategli lontano!)

12. Anche l'occhio va dalla sua parte... (Si chiama strabismo...)

13. Non so a che santo riavvolgermi. (Una videocassetta devota....)

14. Avete i nuovi telefonini GPL? (No mi spiace solo benzina!!!)

15. Il cadavere presentava evidenti segni di decesso. (Ma va?! Strano)

16. Prima di operarmi mi fanno un'autopsia generale. (Auguri!)

17. Vorrei un pacco di cotone idraulico. (Ha una perdita???)

18. Abbiamo mangiato la trota salmonellata. (Ancora auguri!)

19. Vorrei un'aspirina in supposte effervescenti. (Quando si dice faccia da culo...)

20. Vorrei una maglia con il collo a volpino. (Non era lupetto?....)

21. Devo andare dall'otorinolalinguaiatra. (che dire...)

22. Ho visitato palazzo degli infissi a Firenze. (....si ci sono infissi alla finestre e allora??)

23. Vorrei una pomata per l'Irpef. (Herpes è difficile...)

24. Se lo sapevo glielo divo! (Ovvio...)

25. Usare il DDT fa diventare più grande il buco nell'Orzoro. (Addio colazione)

26. Tu non sei proprio uno sterco di santo. (Meno male...)

27. Tu l'hai letto il fu Mattia Bazar? (Antonella Ruggero???)

28. E' andato a lavorare negli evirati arabi. (Contento lui...)
29. Lo scontro ha causato 5 feriti e 10 confusi. (Uno dei confusi sei tu??)

30. A forza di andare di corpo mi sono quasi disintegrata. (O disidratata??? Alla faccia della diarrea!)

31. Mia nonna ha il morbo di Pakistan. (....)

32. La mia auto ha la marmitta paralitica. (...e al posto dei cavalli ha le sedie a rotelle??)

33. Verrà in ufficio una stragista per il tirocinio. (Si salvi chi può!)
34. Sono momentaneamente in stand-bike. (L'attesa in bicicletta....)

35. Che lingua si parla in Turchia? Il turchese. (...è logico)

36. Davanti alla sua prepotenza resto illibato. (....si....)

37. Scendi il cane che lo piscio. (...guinzagliato però!!!!)

38. Da vicino vedo bene, è da lontano che sono lesbica.(Aiuto...)

39. C'è una peluria di operai. (Che schifo!!)

40. E' inutile piangere sul latte macchiato. (Meglio farlo su un bel cappuccino...)

41. Sono sempre io il cappio espiatorio (L'impiccato)

42. Beviamo una Magnum di Kruger. (salute)

43. Signora, vorrei 100 grammi di prosciutto senza polistirolo. (...che faccio un po' fatica a digerirlo...)

44. Mi sono fatta il Leasing al viso. (..pensavo un mutuo...)

Ed infine (AUTENTICA sentita oggi in uno studio medico)....
“.... ci ho l’ernia letale”