Hello Kitty, kiss your 4$$ Goodbye

I hope that removing the image I linked from here to this post of mine, traffic on this website will not be driven any longer by people looking for the pretty jap-cat... Let's see if it works...

I am a genius.

This morning, I open facebook instead of starting to work straight away. Bad guy...
I notice that a friend, who seems to have the typical feminine passion for tests, has just taken the IQ tests. I've always been skeptic about the definition of Intelligence tested by such tests, yet after lunch I have not much to do, and I start it. I see that it only gives you 15 minutes. Panic. but the questions are mostly boring math in textual form, so start picking them randomly... Out of four answers I will at least answer 25% of them correctly, no? So,l if they're difficult (and should be if they want to test your intelligence), you stand a good chance of getting a decent score anyway... I only stop (ten seconds each) to answer the one with pictures, unless they're too complicated... otherwise, random for those too...

Hit the submit button that there's still 9 minutes plus left. The machine asks me if i want to share the results with my facebook friends. Uhm, I don't think i want to share a 78 with anyone... so no, thank you. Skip it.

Here's the result: 119!!! Definitely above the average!!!

Now, either I really am a genius, or I have a big reserve of good luck (stored in my fat abdomen), or may be the results are not really objective. I start thinking that being facebook populated by americans, they would never return a number lower than 100 for fear of being sued by all the lawyers or lawyer-capable rich dumbasses who may get it. me included. Well, no, i would not sue them. I am not going to waste my hard earned cash this way...

Anyway, it was fun... Albeit quite silly.

When will we come to a decent definition of 'intelligence'? Such as "the ability of a men to whoosh a girl into her bed by the use of any possible mean, either verbal, vocal or corporeal".

Italians are quite honest, after all

The Economist publishes a summary graph detailing how often european people use undeclared labour to purchase goods or services.
Quite surprisingly, Denmark, The Netherlands and Sweden come to the first places... Rather than, say, Italy. Is iot that we really buy less 'grey' goods and services? Or just that Italian don't even perceive buying sunglasses from the senegalese street-kiosk and paying the car's mechanic cash without fiscal receipt as 'the same kind of thing'? Me thinks the second one is more correct...

Finally, house prices start to fall...

The bane of every young couple, their ability to buy a house to live in without wasting money on the monthly rent, has been getting worse and worse for the past years everywhere in Europe. Luckily, things are starting to change, with a contraction of prices close to 2% in most European states. If it continues that way, may be in a couple of years' time I'll start considering buying one - by that time hopefully we (marie and me)should be more financially stable and able to take advantage of an eventual free fall of prices.

Dog eats mobile phone

It happened to a friend of mine.

I am so tempted to give her a ring or two... :-)

Evolution

Here is my new Xmas present:


Evolution, by Jean-Baptiste de Panafieu (Auteur), Patrick Gries (Auteur), Jean-Pierre Gasc (Préface). I was in a library in Liege and saw it cover, a snake skeleton, and had a look inside. It contains a huge amount of beautiful photos of different vertebrates skeletons, shot in black and white against a dark background. Just wonderful. It's 50EUR, but what the hell...

Rwanda!!!

update, appena preso il biglietto, x la modica somma di 1080 euro tutto incluso. cioe', 16 ore di volo (a+r) e dunque un bel po' di carburante.

date previste x il viaggio, dal 20 dicembre al 12 gennaio. quasi un mese, eh eh eh... mi sa che la mamma di marie mi mette a lavorare nei campi x pagarmi l'affitto...

ecco qua la mappa x i curiosi che non hanno idea di dove sia: Rwanda

L'idea e' di andare a vedere la regione del lago kivu, coi suoi vulcani. Fra le altre cose.

Wish me good luck. Proprio ieri ho avuto un incubo in cui mi trovavo nel bel mezzo di una guerra civile. mado'. per di piu' peggiorata dal fatto che alcuni dei cattivi sembravano avere poteri paranormali - come se non fosse gia' abbastanza orribile sentirsi gli spari dietro

Tornando alla marzulliana realta', le foto le posto se rientro, sopratutto se riesco ad avere la nuova fotocamera dagli US, dove costano la meta' (anche includendo le tasse)

Ciao ciao.

Luca

DMC-FZ18 Reviews, finally!!!

I have finally found some reviews of the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18. Here, and here. I am sold. I am ordering it as soon as I can from the US, together with a DMC-TZ3 for my lady. I still can't understand why prices in the EU are so outrageous, with the TZ3 costing 400 Euros and well below 300 US$ on the other side of the pond. Even counting in taxes, it still makes no sense.



Stay tuned for my next pictures, probably starting with my trip to Rwanda at year's end.

Yesterday

I happened to listen to this song some minutes ago...
For the first time, I listen to what it said. Sad. Yet that's how I felt two years ago. Now things are different, may be better, yet I still feel something piercing my heart when I think back... So, here's to the past:

Yesterday
All my troubles seemed so far away
Now it looks as though they're here to stay
Oh, I believe
In yesterday

Suddenly
I'm not half the man I used to be
There's a shadow hanging over me
Oh, yesterday
Came suddenly

Why she
Had to go I don't know
She wouldn't say
I said
Something wrong now I long
For yesterday

Yesterday
Love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh, I believe
In yesterday

Why she
Had to go I don't know
She wouldn't say
I said
Something wrong now I long
For yesterday

Yesterday
Love was such an easy game to play
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh, I believe
In yesterday

(hum to "I believe in yesterday")

Not Alway Free market is the way to go...

At least, that's what the German government, publishers, retailers and consumers altogether say, defending a system threatened by the opening of discounting on german-language books in Switzerland. Until now, the price of a german book would have been the same whether you bought it in the shop down the road, online or... well I can't think of an alternative, but you get the idea.

This helped small sellers, and small publishers, to keep at bay big chains, fostering a wider, and arguably better, market.

What can I say? Good luck to the Germans. I will alway cheer on anybody who's pro-books.

Who would have thought so?

Once again, Carl Zimmer surprises us: I thought he was concentrating solely on his soon-to-come book on E. Coli, instead he's busy on many fronts, the latest of which to come to fruition to us non-paying readers is his NY Times piece on migratory birds sleep. Check it out, as it is certainly worth. I, in my humble ignorance, would never have though that a bird could fly non stop for eight days. now, that's ENDURANCE.

House prices from the satellites

Wow, this is very Web 2.0.


a website, http://www.housepricemaps.co.uk/, where you can check how much were the houses around yours sold for. Only if you're in the UK, at the moment. But one day, all this power will be at our fingertips for the whole world.

They are at it again...

I mean, trying to wipe out plasmodium malariae... or, at the very least the disease it causes, by using knock-out plasmodii cultured in live anopheles to create a vaccine. They extract them and inject them in humans. 65% success rate, high enough to make me consider sticking my forearm in one of the boxes where the mosquitoes incessantly buzz.

I wonder why don't they do like this, to vaccine people. I mean, it's not as if keeping mosquitoes alive is any difficult. just stick your arm in the box twice a day and they should have plenty of blood. so the vaccinated themselves shall provide the maintenance. Wanna see that, instead of genociding the anopheles as we already tried and still is advocated by Olivia Judson (who propose to use bio-engineering defective anopheles to do so), the buzzing insects will switch side and become our allies? Now, that would be cool. and perverse, sort of...

We are not happy with wrecking the ecosystem, we're recluting the worst components of it in our own personal army...

I really don't understand the talk of eradication, though. what the hell do they want to eradicate, with a vaccine? It would not be a problem if, like smallpox, the parasite went only from man to man. then, vaccine the whole population and the bug will not be able to jump any longer. But in a parasite which can affect more than one species, as Plasmodium can, what use would it be to vacinate all man? as soon as you stop, the reservoir of bacteria in cows, or camels, or whatever, will kick back. Ditto if you vaccine those species, unless you vaccine them all. I can just picture the hunt for the smallest african mammals in order to vaccinate them...

I am sorry, but it doesn't sound sound to me. I'd side with the 'control' side, for the moment being.

Where do you come from?

I have just discovered (thanks to my new friend massimo) an exciting and massive DNA-testing of people sponsored by the National Geographic: The Genographic Project. In practice, you subscribe, get e-mailed at your place a DNA-testing kit, then spit on it, send it back and they'll let you know where your ancestors came from. Of course you know who your father was, and your grandfathers and so on... But then? This way, if you're italian you'll discover that may be you're one of the few survivors of the pre-indo-europaean populations, or may be a late-comer born out of a barbaric rape following the Roman Empire fall. Who knows? May be this will be my Xmas present to myself. And may be I'll give one too, so that I'll discover when the common ancestor of Marie and mine lived. You never know, we may be cousins (yes, at the 7569th level may be).

A hurdle on the road to personalised cancer treatment

The new Nature is out, (since a couple of days, in fact) with a nice piece on the difficulties facing the development and approval of biomarkers-based cancer diagnostic assays.

Quickly, they work by taking a broad look at the proteins (or RNA, or else) expressed in your body at the moment, and compare them with similar sample in healthy and sick people. if the fingerprints (protein prints, or RNA-prints, or else-prints) match, then there's a good chance that you may share the same medical condition.

Trouble is, these tests do not yet seem able to differentiate between different kind of cancer enough to be useful in suggesting a treatment. To do so, large, long, expensive clinical trials are necessary. And the companies that produce those diagnostics do not have that kind of money. Pharmaceutical companies do, and they also have some interest in this: with clear diagnoses and treatment indication,s their drugs could be given only to patients likely to responds. Of course, this means that they would sell more or less drugs than they currently do. It can go both ways.

However, there are good chances. If it is true that the UK government will soon require certainty of effect on drugs before re-imbursing them to the company, then such a test would act as a shield in those cases where the drug were not to work nonetheless. I guess a middle ground will have to be found, with the government accepting a certain rate of failure in the prediction of the treatment and therefore shouldering the price of ineffective drugs rather than unloading it onto an already unstable pharmaceutical complex. Whether you like them (us) or not, the world needs new medicine and that's the most efficient way to create them.

let's play

Thanks to Alice:

1 - Prendi il libro che hai più vicino, vai a pagina 19, scrivi la linea 11:
pagina 19 e' occupata da una figura... tipico.

2 - Se estendi il tuo braccio destro, cosa riesci a toccare?
il laptop, la bottiglia d'acqua, la cioccolata, la PSP nuova, l'ombrello, milioni di altre cose. questa scrivania e' ingombra. e poi ho le braccia lunghe.

3 - L'ultima cosa che hai visto in tv?
Il notiziario delle 7 della BBC

4 - Senza guardare, che ora è?
boh. 13.45?

5 - Adesso guarda, che ora è?
14.21 - sto perdendo tempo eh?

6 - Oltre al suono del computer, cosa riesci a sentire?
sibil-rozio del condizionatore. il ticchetio dei tasti. porta che sbatte. i tacchi di barbie girl.

7 - Quanto tempo sei stato fuori di casa la volta che sei stato più tempo fuori?
sei mesi. ma mi sa che l'abbandono comincia ora.

8 - Cosa stavi facendo prima di scrivere questo Journal?
leggevo gli altri blogs. invece di lavorare

9 - Cosa indossi ora?
camicia bianca con quadri marroni piccoli e leggeri, pantaloni in velluto a righe crema con sovra-toni verdicchi, maglione in lana verde. mutande rosse. credo... controllo. affermativo.

10 - Cos'hai sognato stanotte?
non ricordo.

11 - Quanto tempo hai riso l'ultima volta?
mezzo secondo.

12 - Cosa c'è sulle pareti della tua stanza?
due lavagne piene di formule e numeri. il bistrattato Credo della ditta. un calendario con avvenimenti fittizi. scritti da me. che si son poi avverati. scary!

13 - Hai notato qualcosa di strano ultimamente?
quando sto seduto, mi fa freddo alle gambe. x quello ho appena calato il giubbottone in pelle sulle coscie.

14 - Cosa pensi di questo giochetto di domande?
troppo lungo.

15 - L'ultimo film che hai visto?
South Park - Bigger, longer and uncut.

16 - Se diventassi milionario cosa compreresti?
Una casa in campagna dove passare il tempo a coltivare l'orto, e osservare animali ed insetti. e le piante crescere.

17 - Qualcosa su di te...
Strano ma pigro.

18 - Se potessi dare una cosa al mondo, cosa daresti.
Dinosauri.

19 - Ti piace cantare?
In macchina, visto che la radio e' rotta.

20 - Cosa pensi di Bush?
L'uomo tipico.

21 - Hai una bambina, senza pensarci, come la chiami?
Sara.

22 - Invece è un bambino, come lo chiami?
Paolo.

23 - Ti piacerebbe vivere in uno stato estero?
Ci sto in belgio. essendo appena rientrato da casa (Sardegna) non e' proprio il massimo.

24 - Cosa ti piacerebbe di dicesse Dio arrivato in paradiso?
Hai sbagliato la scommessa. Mi reggi sti fulmini nel mentre che li lancio?

25 - Chi vorresti che rispondesse a queste domande?
Chiunque capita nel mio blog e proprio non ha altro da fare.

Finito.

Ugly Scansion Microscopy...

Ugly Overload posts a nice link to an interesting yet disturbing set of Pictures from the Time and CNN.

Title, The Fascinating, Frightening World of Insects.

Everyone can find his less favourite picture here, mine is this one though:



the caption simply says: Dust Mites
Seen at a magnification of 350x, a group of Dermatophagoides pteronyssinus forage for human skin on a bedsheet.

Brr... The fascinating thing here is the fact that a whole ecosystem surrounds us in our houses, and we are mostly unaware of it. For this dust mites, my bedlinen are the equivalent of north american prairies for buffaloes, and my girflriend vigorously stirring them every morning a kind of atlantidean catastrophe brought about by a beautiful yet indifferent goddess :-)

Back to Blog

... and back to work too.

After ten days spent in Sardinia, between two weddings (again, my congrats to Giangi and Alessandra, and Miriam and Manlio - I reallly appreciated the parties)

Sardinia was wonderful this time of the year, with clear blue skies and a diamond sun shining. I even managed a brief escape to the sea, Platamona was clear as crystal and inviting...

Mostly, I messed about with old and new friends, and wasted some mornings looking for a gps/pda substitute to my defunct Mio. I ended up being disappointed and decided to try and resuscitate it. Hack!

In the next few days, I shall try to post something.

I am still working part time on my paper, may be i'll post some layman explanations since they keep coming in my mind and I can't fit them in the boring and uninteresting scientific style requested by todays publications.

Man, this sucks. You hope to be the next Carl Zimmer, instead you found yourself forced to be the next George Bush. Ok, may be not that bad, but definitely boring. Ugh!

And again on Belgium splitting...

The NY Times this time.

Gingerbread Haka!!!

a movie in tune with the rugby world cup



grazie a mio fratellino paolo.