labels on the side bar

so that you will be able to browse my posts by subject. :-)

Remember a Giant...

of italian journalism: Indro Montanelli.

I learned history from his books, rather than the school-suggested textbook, and God it was funnier! I still remember with fondness the wide open eyes of my history teacher, when I told her that Julius caesar was a womanizer (and gay too), citing don't remember who (svetonius? boh!) called him Moechus Calvus.

Go and read up his story, certainly more movimented than most of us.

A Venn's Diagram for the state of the Union

I took it from Pharyingula, cited so many times in here that you don't really need the link anymore I guess. Just google it. Feel lazy today uh? Ok I inserted it.

Also on pharyngula, the incredible news of a woman with one more nipple in her foot

Eran Trecento, giovani e forti...

e sono morti...

yes I am talking about the Termopilae battle, and the new movie 300 based on Frank miller's comic which re-tells the story.

My dear friend daniele is longing to see it, although the NY Times review I sent him didn't quite covince him. I couldn't be bothered to read it. But I did check the IMDB, and the movie has quite a high rating, at 8.4. Not half bad, having jumped as high as #156 in the best 250 movies ever (for the voters of the site). Unless the 17848 voters are all Miller fanboys, i can't see how the movie can't be bad. I'll check it out, then.

I guess there will not be much suspense, though, with the ending known since two thousand and a half years... :-|

for some reviews in italian, go here.

Pasta with Bottarga

first, a link to it.

then, the way I make it:

first off, these are ingredients for 4 hungry italian boys, so scale them accordingly:

- 5-600 gr of pasta (yes, that's 125-150 gr each: I did say we were hungry)
- a bunch of parsley, flat leaf if possible 'cause it's softer and it cuts better...
- 50-80 gr of butter, if you really have to substitute it with margarine, but believe me it's not healthier :-)
- two cloves of garlic, as fresh as possible if you can.
- one strong chili pepper dry or fresh.
- and yes, some 50 gr of bottarga, freshly grated/ground.

ok, start putting the water on the fire. some 4 liters should be fine, plus a fistful of salt.
in the meanwhile it gets hot, you finely chop the garlic and the chili, melt the butter in a sauce pan (a wok is perfect, if you have one, 'cause you'll need to mix the pasta in it afterwards) and put them in. leave like that for two to three minutes, make sure that the butter is on the verge of boiling but do not burn the garlic. in those three minutes, you finely chop the bunch of parsley, and you add them to the pan. leave one minutes and then shut the fire off.

now, your water should almost done, when it's happily boiling pour in your spaghetti, barilla number 3 if you can find them or any other kind of dry pasta you like. it'll cook itself just stir it from time to time.

don't keep your thumbs idle, though, you grind/grate the bottarga and pour it in the wok, mix it with the rest until it adsorbs the butter and creates a kind of sauce. if it's too dry, add a little bit of butter or olive oil or else some water from the pasta (diet choice).

roughly drain the pasta before it's "al dente", and turn on the fire behind the wok/saucepan. pour the pasta in with a lil bit of cooking water (a few spoonful, or what's left if you drain it quickly), and stir vigorously, until the sauce has spread more or less evenly. then divide it in portion and serve. enjoy! (keep the dishes slightly warm, so that the pasta will stay warmer while you eat it)

variation:

- chives instead of parsley, black pepper instead of chili, and so on. just experiment!!!

luca




other recipe with pictures (that's where I took them from - mine looks much more different, with lots of parsley and ground garlic all over the place

Silly me, you may need to buy it. (never tried it, though)

Keep an eye on this guy

He always has something interesting to talk about: in this case, an exhaustive article about the varying size of genomes in different animals (and plants too) with a rationalisation of why this may happen (hint: varying metabolism levels)

Many thanks to Science for keeping this nice piece freely available

House Hunting

I've spent the weekend doing two things. No wait, three, of which two had to do with houses.

First on saturday morning, We (me and Marie) set off to Breda, to join my MI colleagues in the effort of bringing down the ceilings of Wendy's place. It was nice, I got to know the whole of her family, Henry (husband), Kirsten and Maren (daughters), Jasper (helpful son). Other colleagues were present as I said, Daniele, Pascal, Libuse, Theo, his wife keeping the little ladies entertained. Is that it? yes, that's it. Pretty heavy job a nice change for us, whose hardest work is pressing buttons, be them those of a keyboard, or at the most the coffee machine's.

At midday, I stopped that and started cooking my worldwide renowned pasta with bottarga (dried ovaries of cod-like fishes), who was very appreciated. I'd have called it a day, already, but it wasn't nearly done: whereas the other restarted to bring down the third room, Marie and me quickly changed and left for Mechelen, where we had six (!) houses/apartments to check.

Pretty good fun, if it hadn't been for some misunderstanding between me and various agents who messed up my carefully crafted timetable. But, (there's always a but) marie and me could not agree on any of the houses really. the stylish one which I liked (inhabited by a couple of (gay?) musicians had two very steep flight of stairs, which would make it very difficult to move stuff in and out. Another one, which I insisted for visiting, she liked but I absolutely hated. Old and badly mantained, with a nightmarish layout.

Luckily, we managed to intrude ourselves unexpected in a apartment which we both liked: no surprise, being it the most expensive of the bunch. here it is:



Click on it to go to the google map. I'd post the pictures, but hopefully the weblink will be broken once the house is taken off the market by ourselves. Anyway, as you can see from the pictures it's in a nice green area. the road it sits on is quite trafficked, there's a hypermarket just down the road, which is however a good thing for us - plus, over that wood in front there's a double rail-line, but nothing to fret about: the house is anyway new and quite well sound-proofed, so no troubles for sleeping at night (or at day, should we want to). The garden on the back is simply huge, and I can foresee many many barbecues in it. Of course me being me, I al;ready checked how far the nearest swimming pool is (2.8 Km):



The station is close enough for a bike ride every day, so hopefully i'll get rid of my car sometime in the near future. the idea is to move in the begin of june. Which incidentally means no africa trip, and I'm also going to forgo my training in perugia - substituted by a more useful one in Oxford anyway - end of June, so that I can move and settle down before leaving.

On Sunday morning, we took advantage of the sunny weather to stroll around at the national botanic garden in Meise:



Very nice place, we managed to go straight through it from the entrance in the village side 'til the greenhouses, which we visited in their entirety (albeit quickly). I'd like to post some pictures of the inside but they are crap since I didn't have my camera, only my mobile phone. X-P

In the afternoon, another tour of a nice green area, the region around the lake de la cambre (in Ixelles):



On the monday, no work for me, I tried to arrange a meeting with the owner of the house we liked, but couldn't make it. we just went to visit another one, which we didn't like particularly, so we decided to stick with the one we already applied for. cross your fingers for us, guys and girls. We'll let you know more later on!!!

Wish I was like him?

The NY Times has an article about Terence Tao, probably the most gifted mathematician of this generation. At age two, he knew hot to read and count. At seven, he was tackling calculus, At 20, he had a PhD. So, do I wish i was him? Uhm, I don't know. He himself admits he wasn't perfect in all fields, getting frustrated when asked to write essays, for example. Also he does not know any language other than english, from what he says: he certainly is excellent in his own fields, far more than I'll ever be in my own (whichever that is). Still, I would not exchange my place with his. better for both I guess. I am sure he would not enjoy to be a still running PhD at the age of 32 :-D - that, and I am better looking ;-)

Jon move up come on, I can't wait for ever to get that damn title. One more year and I will give up science and transfer to organised crime. Much more fun, and safer occupation.

Nietzsche

Un nuovo blog da leggere - in Italiano. Non son sicuro dello stile che l'autore usa. non capisco se vive a cavallo fra gerusalemme, tokyo e NY. o magari in un paesino della bassa padana. mah... importa poco. xo' sembra avere una maniera originale di pensare. x cui ve lo link, dategli uno sguardo. ;-)

Parasites, parasites...

I've managed to complete a few chapters of my copy of Parasite Rex. Incredibly interesting, more so since Carl Zimmer does freely update on the state of parasitology research on his blog. Yesterday, for example, with an interesting piece about the evolution of human crabs (piattole) and lices (pidocchi). (trackback)

Happy women's day

as per topic. something like a hundred+ years ago a bunch of women died in a fire... here you can get the whole story.

Women of all the world, get this digital bunch of flower from me:

The mistery of the vanishing honeybees

you may not know it, but honeybees do provide an incredibly important service to us - other than honey, that is. In fact, much more important than honey. They do pollinate the vast majority of crops, to the point that one out of every three bites we take would not be there if it wasn't for them.

Oh, I'm sorry I wiash I could write more on the foolishness of marketing and moving around bees as if they were people, on the crazyness of instituting no-fly- zones for bees to avoid them pollinating citruses and so obtain seedless clementine (!), and other americanities (but I am pretty sure the rest of the world has similar practices. I just don't have the time, so go and read the NY Times piece.

new pictures

linked on the sidebar...

for your education, they were taken in Platamona, during the second day of my sardinian holidays last september...

click on the slideshow botton to see the slideshow (duh!) with my comments too...

they only need to add some nice transitions, and some background music to Picasa to make a complete slideshow...

Vanishing forests

Carl Zimmer, the author of Parasite rex, has a piece on the NY Times regarding the Tanzanian Eastern Mountain Arc, where the surviving patches of forest, encroached by human development, contains an enormous quantity of species to be still discovered. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like there will be time enough for biologist to even describe the species before they are driven to extinction, let alone make efforts to preserve them.

This all development business makes me sad. When people all over the world will understand that your success is not measured by how many children you have but how well you can rear them? Most people still behave as if we were hunter gatherers, sparse on an enormous territory and barely able to leave a dent on it, whereas this is not obviously the case anymore. And hasn't been for the past three hundred years to say the least.

I understand the need for providing means for a decent life to all the people alive on the planet right now, I do understand their strong will of having descendant.
I do also concede that they are entitled to the same level of life that we westerners enjoy. pity that the world can't cope with this all.

It's just OUR problem. If we mess up the environment, we will not wipe out life from the planet. Life is tough and in a couple of million years will be able to recover from it. may be more, but it will no doubt on this. But we are a fragile species, and our very same advanced society relies on a stable environment to prosper. Exactly the thing we are messing with. Good luck to us all.

Thoughts from Kansas has a comment on the article too.

PARASITE REX

I've finally received this book in my mailbox. I did order it after Dr Tatiana's Sex Advices to All Creation, but that one got lost in the post, so I had to notify Play.Com of this and have a replacement copy sent. They rocks!!! So much better than even Amazon (no link for them, eh eh).

Anyway, now it's here, in all the splendor of his colored scansion-micrography cover art. And God it's disgusting!!! I've only managed to read the preface in a quick sto at the loo after lunch, and yet I was captured, and revolted too - never mind the situation I was in, sitting on the company's WC, but reading about the effect of Tripanosoms or even worse, Onchocerca Volvulus, really scares the shit out of me. Luckily, as I said, I was already ibn a good sitting position. Did I mention that the author, Carl Zimmer, has a very nice blog called The Loom? He also writes for the NY Times, and National Geographic, but also Forbes. ;-)

Well, I guess I'll know what to read tonight, since I forgot at my gf's place :-(
Good Omens and Culture Matters (which was lent to me by her brother)

You all, have a nice evening!

Being a PostDoc

I feel morally obliged to post a link to the second Postdoc Carnival.

I've read a handful of post from there today, and I find strange how most of the post-doc posting are seeing their temporary research as a way to enter Academia - I, on the converse have accepted an industrial PostDoc as a way to stick my foot inside industry. Otherwise, the situation we PostDoGs feel here is pretty much the same, as far as frustration are concerned. Thankfully though, I'm part of a glorified trio of PostDoc involved in science-only, rather than being glorified technicians in the labs like some other complain.

Tribute to Carl Sagan

thanks to Coturnix

California Scientists Map God Genome

from AvantNews

By Ion Zwitter, Avant News Editor
Davis, CA, July 22, 2010

Researchers at California's UC Davis announced today the successful completion of a three-year, highly secretive project to map God's genetic code. Originally commissioned by filmmaker James Cameron, who supplied the research team with holy genetic material on which to perform the study, the results of the God Genome project are expected to profoundly influence human conceptions of divinity and origin.

Amazing!!!

There's more than one tool user on this planet. that much we knew. chimp abitually use sticky sticks to eat Termites... (edit: the list of users of toolw is apparently quite long and includes not only primates, but even birds such as owls, and crows)

But actively hunting??? With spears? Made from branches sharpened with their teeth? That is unheard of!!!

I am sorry for all the exclamation marks!!! here's a link to the pre-print of the paper, from Current Biology website. Enjoy!

Up! Darren Naish has something to say too. I usually listen to him...

Scramble!!!

Yesterday, I heard, then saw, two fighter planes flying low over our buildings. No, I didn't think Pfizer or GSK had launched a pre-emptive strike against J&J. But since I just caugh a glimpse of them, I coudln't identify them properly. So went looking for what kind of planes does the Belgian (or alternatively, the Dutch) Air force uses. I found the answer in this nice and accurate website, where lots of detailed info on which armed forces and government corps have planes and copters in service are freely available (albeit not easily found). Kudos!