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?

Folding Bicycle

I am considering to buy one, to keep in the car more or less always, so that when I need to go some medium distance I can use it...

For example in Antwerp, where parking in the centre is impossible and/or expensive, it'd be nice to park far from it, for free, then cycle there in two or three minutes.

Same at work, when I need to go to the bank, or the doctor, and so on...

The problem, is they're quite pricey... I've been suggested to go buy them in the netherlands where the market is larger and I could probably get a fair price for a model from last year... uhm...


The one you can see in the picture is a cool prototype... Called The Locust, probably because of its green color.

Let's see if I have any money left by the end of the month...



Or may be I could get this one?

Every little helps...

On 15/02/2008, An ingenuous friend wrote me:

SE GOOGLE AVESSE UNO SCHERMO NERO, VISTA LA GRANDE QUANTITA' DI
PERSONE
CHE LO USANO, SI CALCOLA CHE SI RISPARMIEREBBERO CIRCA
750MEGAWATT/ORA.

COME RISPOSTA A QUESTO GOOGLE HA CREATO UNA VERSIONE IN NERO,
CHIAMATA
BLACKLE, CON ESATTAMENTE LE STESSE FUNZIONI DI QUELLA IN BIANCO, CON
UN
CONSUMO DI ENERGIA MINORE... INOLTRE STANCA MOLTO MENO GLI OCCHI!!!

FALLO SAPERE E USALO, OGNI PICCOLA COSA CONTA.

http://www.neroogle.it

Scusate il francesismo, ma che coglionata.

La lampada dietro al mio schermo LCD resta accesa sia che il pixel sia bianco, sia nero.

Il colore e' dato dal pixel stesso che filtra la luce, facendola passare o meno...

Nel caso dei tubi catodici vale la stessa cosa, visto che il consumo principale e' dato dal tenere il cannone elettronico ad alto voltaggio, non dalla corrente effettiva sparata contro lo schermo. D'oh!!!

Ma chi si inventa certe cose?

Luca

Terrific!!!

What wouldn't I do to waste time...



thanks to my dear friend Dario for showing it to me...

Let's try to embed a podcast

The one from The Economist, for example:



It works!!!

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...

Boredom...

I am bored. I should correct my paper and get it finally submitted, but it's stronger than me and can't just decide whether to accept the corrections suggested by a co-author or not...

Scientific publications are so troublesome (at least for me) that I am almost tempted to give up on this career and pursuit a job in finance (lol, not really) or any other field where you are not required to write up your stuff. It's not that I don't want to share, I am more than happy of that and well willing to talk about my work. It's just that I am very very bad at writing up, possibly because none of the endless literature courses during my school in Italy ever concentrated on the basic of good and understandable writing.

IYou can see it from how long the previous phrase was. In Italy long phrases, branching in two or three nested level get you a premium by the professor. Ow, all this sucks. I wish I was like many of my colleagues, with a much wider cultural span but much more 'able' to do the job... They're like very sharp knives, good to cut steaks, whereas I am the jack of all knives (d`uh!) - with multiple skills but none up to an acceptable level.

Enough complaining. I'm leaving work early to discover the joys of having a Makro card - Then I will try to correct the paper in the evening at home, with the advantage of Word XP which lets you see the correction and the original at once...

see you soon...

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.

Yuk!!!

George Bush at one recent G8 meeting, caught in the act of massaging Angela Merkel...

Ewww... May be he wanted to seduce her off the Tokyo Treaty?

Big Scarlet A

I've pasted a big scarlet A in my profile. For the non-cognoscendi, this is to show to everybody on the planet (well everybody with an internet connection) that I am an Atheist.

Yes, one of those godless creatures that only rely on their own judgement to act morally and make the world a better place, out of personal interest and not for fear of punishment.

With this, I mean not to despise people who feel that belief is important in their life, and certainly I don't want to stay on the side of those who assert religions are at all costs a bad things. I believe that they have a certain value, if nothing else as a way for humans to cope with a very very complex and indifferent universe. It must have had an evolutionary advantage, otherwise it would not be here. Or to be more precise, what caused religions to develop in our minds must have ALSO had an evolutionary advantage. May be religion is just a side-effect of arts, or story-telling?

Alas, I hope it's just a short transitory phase in our evolutionary path... Kind of teenagers' mood swings.

But back to the big scarlet A, you can click on it to get one yourself. Or not. Your choice.

new new digital camera...

D-40X with 18-55 and 55-200mm - which, because the camera is not full-frame (thanks to Luca for explaining me this bit), in fact are more like 24-70, and 70-300. Even better for naturalistic photography. I found it for 989 EUR at the Carrefour near home. The D-40 with the same objectives goes for 649 EUR, and the only difference is a 6Mpizel sensor rather than a 10Mpixel.


That's a steep price hike for just the sensor (as far as I can tell, the rest is absolutely the same). Plus I have the doubt that less resolution may actually improve the quality by diminishing the noise. less elements for the same size, means larger elements, so more light per pixel. And I've had lots of troubles with the new TZ-3 because of low luminosity.

So... May be the old new digital camera is better. And cheaper. Mah?

Of Mouses, and Moles...

After coming back from Rwanda, I was greetend by the discovery of a teeny tiny mouse in the house. She (as I assessed) had spent some two weeks eating her way through the bread my GF left in a basket, and making a cosy nest inside one of my oven gloves, by using the other one as source of fluffy bits...



I gently caught it with a towel, swiftly checked whether it was male or female, then let it out in the garden after he swore he would not enter the premises again.

Now, only weeks after, I have moles in my garden, poking their little volcano-like mounds of grounds here and there, under my watchful eye. They do not seem scared of me, so they keep pushing ground out even if I stand directly over the mound. Unfortunately, I can not catch them wit the camera, which is a pity since I have never seen one in my life - I don't think they are common in Sardinia, or may be they aren't there at all. Here's a piccie of them: aren't they cute critters?



Now I am on the lookout for a human way top get them out of there, not because I mind them (actually, quite the opposite) but I know the neighbors may and could resort to poison (but on which bait? what do moles eat? worms and/or tubers I guess?) Even worst, somebody may decide to cruelly drown them by sticking a hose pipe in their holes...

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)

IR or Time-lapse? Questo e' il problema.

Ho comprato una webcam x 8 euro, ieri. dovevo aprirla x levarne il filtro IR, ma alla fine non ce l'ho fatta. Me la son portata appresso a lavoro, ed ecco che mi vien in mente un'altra cosa. xke' non usarla x fare un time-lapse movie della vista dalla finestra, con l'albero che lentamente riprende vita con l'arrivo della primavera?

edit: ci provo, con l'aiuto dell'unico sw free che mi consente di prender meno di un fps - HSSVSS.

x ora una semplice ripresa a 1 frame x minuto del panorama fuori dall'ufficio. domattina se il risultato e' decente, vediamo se si puo' fare qualcosa di piu' lungo.

e' un peccato che la qualita' della webcam sia cosi' bassa:


magari se questo va a buon fine prendo una webcam decente o trovo un modo di usare la vecchia digicam.

EDIT: in verita' la cam va piu' che bene, solo che era messa di default ad una risoluzione schifosa e la interpolava via sw, il che la rendeva estremamente lenta. Ora fila che e' una meraviglia. Wow!!! solo 8 EUR x l'equivalente di una webcam hercules con ottica in vetro (che di euro ne vien 50).

Infrared photography

I recently heard on the naked science podcast that pointing a remote control to my camera phone I could see it flashing, because the sensitivity of the CCD inside extends to the near-IR.

It wrks! And it gave me a terrible case of cognitive dissonance to look at the remote through the screen, then with the naked eye, then with the screen again and so on. I just could not believe it, PhD in physical chemistry notwithstanding my mind was not prepared to accept it.

Anyway, the cool factor of the thing pushed me to show it to all my friends (real, as virtual) and to look on the i.net for more info about it, and possibly for how-to on how to build a proper IR-camera.

I discovered that few of them IR-capable cameras are sold, mostly for forensic use, possibly because you can see through clothes. In general, CCD are screened against IR not for this reason, but because the color yield is altered by the IR noise.

Anyway, there are plenty of descriptions on line and may be this evening I'll buy a 9.99 EUR webcam to open it and remove the IR filter. I already have a ten diode IR lamp at home, so may be it'll be enough to get nice pictures of my house in human-eye darkness.

More to follow!

Wind

I've taken a LOT of wind last weekend in Oostende, going around to take this pictures. The least you can do is to have a look at them.

Do you believe that forks are evolved from spoons?

In fact, from recent genetic studies it is clear how the cutlery center of biodiversity is China, where an endemic population of primordial chopsticks still lives. From these, or a similar concestor, the ancestor of knives emerged, with a successive speciation into steak, fish and butter knives. More recently, a second clade gave birth to spoons and forks, with both adapting to different gastronomic niches and accordingly varying in size.

Loosing my Italian

It's finally happening. Mentre il mio amico Paolo festeggia l'avvento del suo inglese nativo, cioe' del momento in cui parla direttamente in questa lingua invece che dover tradurre back and forth dall'italiano, io mi rendo conto del contrario. Quando leggo in Italiano, mi suona strano, e cerco continuamente di ritradurlo in inglese, come a correggere gli errori di un incompetente (ma inesistente) doppiatore.

Arrgh!!!

LolCats!!!

I discovered yesterday this fantastic internet phenomenon of taking pictures of animals and adding funny caption to them, most often in a degenerate, gangster-rapper-like form of English language.

Here's one example:

It has been hard to get back to work after seeing the first few, yesterday.
In between the piccies I also found a funny movie posted on youtube:



So go here for moar funny pictures.

How much the (OECD) world invests in R&D

It's in this nice graph, from the latest edition of Nature. Sad to see Italy lagging behind, I did not expect the 4% that Sweden pulls but at least 2%, come on!!!

The latest analysis from the US National Science Board confirms that Israel leads the world in its economic devotion to research and development (R&D).
Its civilian R&D spending in 2005 accounted for 4.71% of gross domestic product (GDP), more than twice the average among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Although US R&D investment was the world’s largest ( $340 billion ) and in 2004, it was more than that of the rest of the G7 nations combined, the report offers some evidence of a slight decline in its standing.
Its 2.57% share of GDP is comfortably above the OECD average of 2.25%, but both South Korea and Switzerland have leapfrogged ahead of the United States by this measure since the board’s previous report in 2006.
Germany could now be poised to do the same.
Most countries are investing more in R&D than they were, says Arden Bement, director of the National Science Foundation, which published the report.
For example, although China ranks 23rd in GDP share ( just 1.34% ) it has pulled ahead to third in total R&D investment with an estimated $115 billion in 2005.

I am most surprised at the incredible figure for Israel expenditure: almost 5% of the GDP in R&D. and I thought they had to spend all of their GDP in weapons to keep their many enemies at bay...