Galactica drowns

oh my god, I managed to see it... the sixth episode, I mean...

Apollo goes from fat to perfect six-pack in one episode... how can he do so? may be he's a Cylon...

and Baltar, confronted with the option to die for his humanity, willingly tells the cylons where to go and look for earth... then, there's the visibile pulsar, in the lion-shaped nebula... I didn't know Lion were diffused on a galactic level... may be we should stop all conservation efforts, here on Earth... after all, the galaxy is full of Lions... and cheetas, and zebras, and so on...

and, Cylons are arriving, having decided that this is their perfect holiday place. I hope they will not nuke historical cities in Italy, at least...

what else? oh, baltar is told by a cylon that they see reality as they like, a bit like the guy in Noir, that dreadful cyber-punk novel... or some Egan's short story of which I don't remember the title right now... and since he lives in a world of his own, he starts wondering whether he's a cylon or not. and does not enquire any longer on the mistery of the five missing cylon models... bah...

oh, I forgot... he volonteers to go and explore the base-ship which has fallen in the nebula, with all their crew apparently taken over by a disease... after all, he's a scientist, he can do nifty observations - that is, take a blood sample, snap some piccies with his digital camera, and strangle the only cylon left alive... urgh... how's that for science?

oh, yes, he discover the beacon which apparently made them sick, but he doesn't bother to study it any better... and the cylons, with their image-processing prowess, second only to those guys at CSI, find out anyway about it... urgh...

how can this series be plunging so desperately into a black hole? sob...

I better wait for the next ep of DH...

or, may be I should switch over to Lost.

Galactica...

may be I'll find the time to watch it, tonight. yesterday I just had to watch Desperate Housewives... and it was a very good episode, with one of the characters I liked most being shot to death in the blink of an eye... sigh...

Unleashing Darwin's Radio

Darwin's radio is one of Greg Bear masterpieces.

One day, some viruses who's been sleeping for million of years inside our DNA, wakes up and causes a bout of accelerated evolution all over the world. Pity that the book, wonderfully researched and constructed, falls short to deliver a decent end, with the 'next stage' of human evolution composed of children which know how to talk since their birth (and ok), express sentiments through facial colored patches, and have two lips and two tongues, which apparently enables them to conference-call natively... urgh...

anyway, the book dwelves deeply into the subject of HERV, Human Endogen RetroViruses, and here's Carl Zimmer writing on the NY Times about how some french lads (and gals) have been able to re-create one of them and free it from our DNA, where it's been embedded since the dawn of times... they called it Phoenix, like the mytical bird which is born again from its own ashes... I apologise for falling prey of the Frankenstein complex, but et's hope we will not burn ourselves with this new technology...

Hubble lives again!!!

A very interesting article, from the NY Times as usual, talking about the new repair and servicing mission to the battered Hubble Space Telescope.It also gives a nice perspective look to its whole story... kudos to NY Times for putting up such good stuff for free... ok they require registration but I can assure you they do not send you spam.

Study Sees ‘Global Collapse’ of Fish Species

no time for long blogging today... meeting and work are pulling me away...

but I can't leave you without food for your brain, the only one that doesn't decrease our life expectancy (according to my previous post).

so, here is an article of NY Times (again) reporting on some scientist warning us that the ocean(s) global ecosystem may collapse beyond repair by 2050 or so, if nothing is done to address the issue of overfishing and general destruction of marine habitat...

I've been looking into this for a while, and have learned that it's better to avoid certain kind of prawn, which are being fished to extinction... some fisheries, like atlantic salmon, are already very much diminished, whereas the kamchatka salmon is well and good 'cause the whole region was subject to heavy military use by the soviets during the cold war. funny how the human activity reputed most distructive very often ends up being the most respectful of the environment - if you don't consider the leftover of it, such as heavy metal poisoning the ground... but nature has its own way of tackling these problems, with time...

enough, back to modeling before a double meeting... see you soon!

Eat Less, Live More

Why does the world have to go against me? Ok, I love cooking, and as a consequence I love eating...

and I've always lived in the illusion that, supposed that I do enough exercise, i will not suffer any adverse effect from this... But no, some scientist confirmed (it was known since long time) that eating a low-calorie diet can dramatically increase your age-expectancy...

mouse fed 30% less, live 40% longer... not only, they tend to suffer less from old-age diseases... same apply to animals all across the spectrum...

Il troppo stroppia, would say my mum... it's true for spices, but most of all for the food we spice it with...

click on the link (or the title) for the full NY Times story...

note: written while emptying a vase of yogurth...

...and, we're back!

I'm, back from this long holiday 'bridge'. Didn't get round to have an Hallowen party with my GF, but we went to the ardennes or almost there, then off to mechelen to check out whether or the city, where we might move to next year, is nice. It is.


here's some piccies of the market square, which as every saturday is full of shops... we didn't buy anything there, but I fell in love of a nice yellow 'cappotto' of which I made present to marie... It fits her nicely... but no piccies of her with it, sorry :-P


I did quite like the city, it's very old style, definetly nicer than Turnhout, and very very close to Bruxelles, which makes for a very nice evening life, but also for expensive rent. but what the hell! I hope it will be worth the hour that I'll have to spend in the train every morning to get to work...

edit: sorry for the crappy mobile phone piccies, but my camera was out of memory... no, I wasn't running a homemade program on its meagre processor... I just foprgot home the compact flash card...

Lasagne

Last saturday some girl-friends willfully offered their hands to me, just to taste once again my wonderful pastalforno, also known as Lasagne(sorry, no piccies of them)... being my pretty lady there, I could not accept any of these offer (I'm glad for receiving them though!), but I nonetheless promised that I'd let them know how to prepare their own...

and here I am.

let's start. You need three things, other than slab-shaped pasta, to make a good dishful: ragu', a.k.a. Bolognese, Besciamella's sauce, which sounds italian but it's french in origins, and some more fillings.

First, the ragu': my mum makes it light, so get away from pre-made bolognese sauce you can buy in the market, they're just choke-full of meat and waaay too heavy. just get some minced meat, beef but also pork or turkey are good choices, let's say 200gr. that should be enough to make a lot of sauce. last time, I stir fried 200gr of turkey with some oil, finely chopped onion, a leaf of laurel and a garlic clove until the meat was cooked. then i poured in a big can of tomatoes (800gr). after that, you're pretty much done. add salt as you like, and may be some nut-meg powder. add whatever spice you like 'cause the more, the merrier the sauce. do not exagerate with quantities, though. spices are there to enhance flavour, not to cover everything else. this is particularly true for chilli. I dropped a whole dry chilli in the sauce. let it simmer until the tomato is cooked, and the sauce is not too thick... I'd give you a viscocity number but have no viscosimeter in my kitchen (yet)...

Then the besciamella/bechamelle... you can buy it, sure, but it's not worth a dime compared to the one you can make yourself: you just need butter, milk, flour and nutmeg (again!)... melt the butter and make a slurry (chemical term for paste) with the flour... let's say 50gr of butter, one spponful of flour... once the slurry is homogeneous, add the milk slowly, keeping the whole thing warm, but not boiling.
always stirring to avoid the flour to aggregate, add some nutmeg powder, then a pince of salt. stir and stir and stir while the milk evaporates, until the sauce reaches the correct viscosity... now you're in business!

oh, you need the filling, I'd go for cooked/roasted ham slices, and some more cheese - emmenthal is a good choice, or some grated mozzarella for pizza.

and the pasta, of course, emiliane barilla or whatever brand you favour...

just layer them down raw, or pre-cook them if you think one of your sauces is a bit too thick and may not have enough water to cook them once in the oven...

anyway, now layer down in a square oven pan, alternating them, ragu''n'besciamella (mix them with a spoon, pasta, ham'n'cheese, and again and again... after four or five layer, you should have enough...

layer some pasta on the top, and cover the whole thing with the leftover ragu'n'bechamelle... don't exagerate...

now, you can keep it in the fridge for half a day or some more, to let the sauces permeate the pasta...

or if you're in a hurry, just pre-heat the oven at 180, and stick the pan inside for, like, 45 minutes...

check half way through, the sauces should start to boil away, and the pasta on top should not burn, but get colored...

then the bell rings, take it out and enjoy!!! ciao!

...and, we're back!

back from the halloween crazy...

I've been to the ardennes, for a day of snooping around, and cooking. I did get a pheasant and I stuffed it with vegetables, and slammed it in the oven for one hour and a half...

my GF was doubtful at first, noticing how the poor thing stank...

but after roasting it, the bloody stench went away, and she chopped away at her part...

pity she didn't like it stuffed with apples... next time will look for some recipes on the i.net to make it better.

or may be i'll look for some other meat...

biche?

thirteeen scary things for halloween

it's a very american-centered article, but ehy, what the hell, it's fun to read... or scary, since all the people depicted in there are real...

so, there you go, the scariest candidate president, the scariest judge, the scariest eco-vandal, and so on...

ciao ciao for today, I'm off to Liege/Luik for a short span of holidays, and thesis-writing...

MC Hawking

click on the link, then "Watch this movie", and enjoy an Justice League-style cartoon of Stephen Hawking defeating those fundamentalist pussies!!! yahey!!! Go, Dr Astro!!! (rather unimaginative name, though)

thanks to James Hrynyshyn, lost in the Island of Doubt (I guess that's somewhere in the sea of uncertainty)

too busy to damn blog...

sorry guys, I've been to busy these days to blog. may be coming ones when i'll be home writing up. who knows?

in the meantime, enjoy the gallery on the right hand side. history and good food from the ardennes ;-)

NUTS-BattleOfArdennes

and my mid-summer visit to Luxembourg with some cousins... ;-)

Ferragosto06-Lux

the working bee...

Ehy, it's been a long time... and now I'm back with an interesting pointer to Carl Zimmer's latest post in his Loom... the bees genome has been sequenced, and may shed lights on how genes do interact to form not only a complex organism, but also a complex society...

follow the link and enjoy! 18 big papers in Science/Nature/GenomeResone week due to the completion of this study! wow! that's a buzz!!!

as for me, light work week this one. only two days, today and tomorrow, then off to my GF place to enjoy some holidays, but mostly writing up. I hope to have a tenth chapter ready in two weeks at the most. and may be submit by Xmas. wouldn't that be nice?

Wild Rabbit with Wild Mushrooms and Red Wine

This artistic picture shows the back of a wild rabbit (ventral side, you can see the kidneys if you squint)... I grabbed it on my way home from the pool. Grabbed from the market, I didn't stop hunting in the common park, thank you...

Anyway, it was already clean... I just dropped the chopped courgettes and wild mushrooms in the same wok, some oil and a liberal sprinkle of salt and pepper, and started the fire...

once the vegetables (and the fungi) were softened, i did add some red wine and cooked until the meat would detach itself easily from the bones... still some juice frm the wine and the cooking water...

as a final touch, coarsely chopped parsley, rosemary and basil, and a spoonful of moutarde de dijon...

it did taste wonderful, believe me!!!

had I had more time (and more rabbit too), I'd have stewed it in casserole with some juicy cream...

US Marines censorship

Apparently, the USMC is censoring the web-access for its soldiers. I think: fine, they're cutting down porn - what's left on the soldier list then? news? duh!

no, really, they're censoring left-leaning websites too...

but read this ina positive light: if they're censoring, someone in the USMC did show interest towards that... So, maybe there's still hope for a decent-minded USofA...

and now i stop ranting, and get back to work...

PalaeoBlog

Uhm, dinosaurs... can you ask for something better, after lunch? well, ok, something else may be... but I'll stay happy with dinosaurs...



a blog to stick in your bookmarks/favourites... ;-)

no, what's shown in the picture is NOT a dinosaurs... just one of their descendants...

Again, on maps...

Some time ago, shelley at retrospectacle posted a piece about a research in PNAS showing how english cab-driver do have an enlarged hyppocampus, the portion of our brain in charge of navigation... I did pick up the news and posted on my turn, too...

Now, here's a new paper about navigational abilities (and not). This time, the researchers have looked at navigational stratehgies of male/female, either straight or homosexuals. And they've apparently found out that gay males do use the same strategies than girsl use, i.e. less reliant on compass and a map, and more on landmarks...

They conclude that gay men's brains are a patchwork of female and male charachteristics, and therefore gay-ness is gen-related. How they make the logical jump, I'm not sure, since I can't see the reason why they rule out environmental effects on the development of said navigational abilities...

it's nature vs nurture all over again...

thanks to GrrlScientist

Whales...

Darren naish has three interesting posts about rorquals, i.e. whales which fill their mouth of water (and other stuff) to feed, such as the Blue Whales... the techniques is called lunge-feeding, and that's why these whales have such huge mouths... the adults blue whales' jaws, at seven metres each, are the largest single-piece bone of all animal world.

One, two, and three

:-)

edit: as Darren correctly points out, not all rorquals lunge-feed.

edit2: I once dreamed of swimming with whales off the coast of canada. It's been the start of my new life :-)

Abortion by... gun!!!

This is a true story: A woman in the US didn't have the money to pay for an abortion, and his BF didn't want to foot the bill. So, she did almost carry to term the pregnancy, but a few days before giving birth, she shot herself in the belly, killing the fetus. I guess she had to wait that long to make the aim more accurate...

Still, it's unthinkable...

Now, she's being prosecuted for illegal abortion, but not for murder, since the baby wasn't born yet... gosh I feel sick...

thanks to Grrlscientist

yet another weird news blog

fanny and weird news... for your amusement...

typing machine...

found this on the net... how cool!!! (thanks daniele)

My Colliding Galaxies

I've recently posted a picture taken from Hubble, showing two colliding galaxies...

and today, playing with some biological activity data (some compound's activity against various cancer cells - can't say more about them) I got this nice picture.



it does resemble the two colliding galaxies, doesn't it?

I get back to my stats, now...

As if there was any need...

a NY Times paper saying that for hospital is more economic to include poor frequent patients in their charitable prevention programs, than continuing to provide them with emergency care when they get sick. *duh*

I feel sickened by the lack of foresight of the human race as a whole... this thing is well known, yet government and the people who elect them try to push private health care which leads to embarassing situation such as Texas', where 25% of the population isn't insured...

shame on us...

edit: I forgot: the piece

yesterday's recipe...

Yesterday I tried to cook something new... Kind of veggie+fish-flavoured risotto, but didn't have any rice, so I went for pre-cooked, dry wheat. I did like it, so here it is... sorry for the crap piccie, it was taken with my phone's camera...

and here comes the recipe:

put one nugget of butter in the wok, with some chopped courgette, spinachs, mushrooms. some chilly too, and a pince of salt. stir-fry them, while you prepare some fish stock (it: brodo, fr: bouillon).

drop in the bouillon some pre-cooked wheat (grano, ble`)... boil it for some minutes, then throw away most of the bouillon, keeping enough to finish off the wheat cooking. I keep it in a bowl, you never know if you need some more.

pour the wheat together with its bouillon in the wok, and finish them off... once cooked, sprinkle with fish-mix dry herbs (or better the fresh equivalent), and a nugget of gorgonzola if you like... that's it. enjoy! and let me know if you liked it...

Whaling, uninterrupted...

Shelley at retrospectacle has an interesting piece about whale hunting: she puts together various sources showing that even if new, supposedly better ways of killing them are available, they are not used since they are too expensive. Even worst, there's not enough data to backup the claim that grenade-tipped harpoon kill whales more

I feel all this is very barbaric. Killing endangered and somehow intelligent species is unacceptable.

Shame on Norway and Japan for behaving like this... and Iceland for following suite now, after a twenty-one year moratorium... and i thought that, after the ecological catastrophe they lived in the past centuries, Icelandic were seriously minded about conservation... we humans just don't live enough to learn the consequence of our actions...

spam spam spam!!!

I recently discovered the original meaning of spam, thanks to my work-mate Russell...

it stands for... I don't remember now, but some kind of Ham that was the only easily available meat after the war in Great Britain...

I wonder how the same word came to identify unwanted e-mails... I guess because Spam wasn't the best kind of ham, so no children wanted to eat it?

anyway, the spam level in my gmailbox has been growing ever since I stopped emptying it... Google says that they get deleted after one month of staying there, and so it did happen that they reached a peak of roughly 300, then stayed there for some time... but since some days ago they have started growing again in number, and they've now breached for the first time the 500 wall...

congratulations luca...

may be this depends from putting my email (link it's wrong ah ah)in webpages and blogs all aorund the world... where it can be picked by spiders and such... mah... who cares... kudos to google 'cause all my spam is intercepted without me having to do anything, rather differently from my yahoo account where it doesn't really matter whether I flag some mails as spam, the next issue of the same newsletter will end up in my mailbox... damn... way to go, yahoo... although your new (java-based) simil-thunderbird interface has some points over gmail's...

MultiVariate QSAR...

busy busy busy this week, with a three-day course on Multivariate QSAR modelling to follow... I've been playing with data, fitting and interpreting... lots of pretty pictures, pity i don't have the time to post any... nor that they are too interesting for someone not statistically minded...

but to quench your thirst, I'm linking a nice post from PZ Myers talking about embryos 500 millions years old!!!

the paper in science describes how the embryos (coming from china) have been scanned with many techniques down to the sub-cellular level, revealing striking similarities (but also not) with existing organisms...

enjoy!!!

Violent movies decrease real violence...

again from FrontalCortex: it looks like Violent Movies do decrease violence in the immeidate surroundings when they're shown... kind of violent-minded people go and watch them, instead of committing rape and crime themselves...

how about love movies? do they decrease sex meetings in the same way? or is the effect more pronounced after showing? how about whether or not love movies cause an increase in rapes due to single/violent people coming out of cinema horny and frustrated? :-|

scary scenario...

Clean Water

Here comes an intelligent post pointing out how half today's world population does not have access to water as clean as the roman did, two thousand years ago...

This is definitely depressing...

A failure of politics in the wider sense of the world. The writer points out how in Calcutta, it's easier to get a reliable internet dsl connection than a reliable water pipe... :-|

La bataille des ardennes

I've been to the Ardennes this weekend, to see the places where the famous battle was fought... The region is very very nice, agricultural with lots of grass and trees, and rolling hills all over the place... nice twisty roads where to drive, too...


Pictures come from my Picasa webspace. you're
welcome to click on them and snoop around other albums...


and the food was fantastic too... we went to leo's wagon, an old wagon (orient express-style) refubished as a restaurant. Unfortunately, there was no space for the lot of us in the wagon, bu the menu was the same, and pretty good... more piccies to come...



I'm sorry if the pictures are a bit lopsided, but the wine in the region was goood.... oh goood...

boring friday night

I've just finished writing my ninth chapter...

it's too late to go to bxl, now, I feel tired after one day of reading pharmacokinetics...

I better rest, then tomorrow will climb into my lil' jet and roam to my GF's place for an intense day of... shopping!!! need to get a large carpet for the salon, so I'll stop scratching the parquet with my chairs... this will also, make cleaning it easier, I hope... wooden flloring is cool, but a pain to wash, since I can't use water as in the rest of the house. damn...

see you tomorrow!!!

Heidi & Richard's travels

Travel blog of a couple touring (I believe) the world.

Nothing special really, it would be better if they added:

• a little formatting to the page;
• turn those pictures, please;
• and finally, add some irony to the posts. we want to feel the culture shock!

6+(out of 10)

jump again!!! Next blog>>

New Road sign

A new road sign has been approved for use in Rome and its surrounding area:



I'm sorry for the english speakers who can't catch the joke.

the italian part of the banner says (more or less, I'm a liberal translator):

4 all others: You broke our dick!!! (kind of we're fucking tired of having cars parked here every damn morning, but in a heavily accented and grammatically unorthodox italian dialect) - sunday open.


thanks to the guys at fantanovoli.

Changing the world as a student...

What student does not dream of it? Some do not just dream, they go out and do it.

As Jawed Karim did, previously employed in Paypal, young millionaire when it was bought off by eBay for 1.5Bn US$, then founder of YouTube, just bought by Google for 1.65Bn US$.

And, he's still at school earning his master in Computer science... What will he do when he'll seriously enter the work arena?

From the New York Times. Click here or the title to jump to the original article (may require free subscription)

Pee and poo

How nice are they? can you imagine a better gift for your children?



they have keychain rings too...

thanks to Orac at Respectful Insolence

Random Bit of Fun

every one of you will see a different funny phrase. please copy them in the comments, if you fancy doing so.

They Eat Horses, Don't They?

This is the title of the second episode, second series of Ally McBeal... She and her companions are shocked that someone could consider eating such a noble animal.

Now, let me tell you one thing: I love horses. I do like the way they look, even if up close you can really see they're very stupid animals. it's as if God concentrated on their bodies, and forgot to make their brains up. No wonder they were outcompeted by artiodactyls(that would be deer, and antylopes, and let's throw in cows too), until men arrived and decided to saddle them. Horses, with their inefficient digestive system, would be all but extincts, weren't for the fact that men found them useful in battle. I believe they're good companions of mankind, a bit like dogs, and aurochs(now called cows). I love horses' rears, yes, particularly when cut in thin slices and sprinkled with garlic, chili and parsley, and quickly cooked on a fire... It tastes stronger, and better, than beef, it's got less fat, and more proteins and iron. That is, as far as I know...

Apparently, horses, dogs and cats deserve our 'respect', so they shouldn't be eaten. I do not agree. All animals deserve our respect, but this does not mean that they should not be eaten. We are carnivore apes, so we eat animals.


I mean, let's look at it from the biology viewpoint. Those animals wouldn't exist in the numbers they do, if it weren't for human's interest in them. We are devoting part of our resources to raise them, protect them from (other) predators, and as payment, now that they can not provide us with a hand on the work, we just ask that a portion of them to be culled, and served on our tables... it's just another example of symbiosis, where both parts are gaining. For the moment it's us eating them may be in the past it was the opposite (were there ever carnivore horses? I don't know). may be in the future roles will switch again - with many thanks to Stephen Baxter for exemplifying such a thing in 'Evolution', where future human-derived primates are herded by carnivorous rodents...

Studying PharmacoKinetics (again)

It's background-building time for me. I'm dead bored of things going over my head during meetings and such. I've gathered quite some knowledge in these nine months I have been here: I know what the Apparent Volume of Distribution of a Drug, or the Intrinsic Hepatic clearance, are, and how they correlate with measurable Physchem properties such as LogP or pKa. But the whole picture is unclear...

Even worst, most phases of drug development are absolutely obscure, especially in the upper tier, after chemistry is almost done.

So, here comes my new book, Handbook of Basic Pharmacokinetics

Handbook of Basic Pharmacokinetics by Wolfgang A. Ritschel and Gregory L. Kearns

An interesting read... today I've learned that taking fruit juices with your medicines is usually good, since many flavonoid and other natural substances in the fruit juices inhibit either CYP-450s (the main methabolic engine/enzymes in the body) or efflux transporter, and therefore increase the period of time the drug can act on the bodym, before being wasted away.

I also learned that the average man pee about 1.5 litre per day, and that looks like a lot to me...

all in all, lot of snippet of informations, useful to drop casually in conversation to impress girls ;-) well, girls who are impressed by encyclopedic man, that is... :-D

ok, may be not the one about pee... that's for today's canteen lunch :-P

Extinction caused by changes in earth'r rotation tilt?

No big meteorite striking Earth anymore then? What do we make of the iridium stratus in Gubbio, then?

wait a minute, the paper is talking only about mammals: If rodents in Spain are any guide, periodic changes in Earth’s orbit may account for the apparent regularity with which new species of mammals emerge and then go extinct, scientists are reporting today.

and it only consider the last 22 million years... So, BIG catastrophic extinction are safeguarded. The one they're talking about now are 'single species' extinctions, explaining the already known average period of 2.5My for a single species' time on Earth. you know, Australopithecus isn't here anymore, same for prehistoric horses and so on... nothing so exciting...

anyway, one more piece of the puzzle slots in.

cheers...

No Comments anymore...

I don't know if nobody is commenting anymore just because I'm plain boring, or because they're encountering difficulties as I did until a few days ago... Now it seems to have been fixed for me... so, why is nobody posting a even freaking "Sod Off" in my blog? mah...

GalacticaBlog

And a new blog under the spotlights!!!

This time it's about the most discussed sci-fi series of this years, battlestar Galactica. Insights and discussion on the most recent hot-topics...

;-)

Oh, No, Not Again!!!

Once again, I've been given some weird food... the chef really seems to be in some sort of meat+fruit trance, this week...

today was rabbit hamburger(!) with prunes...

picture is coming :-|

Taste wasn't bad, rabbit didn't taste as good as wild english rabbit though... and after eating all the prunes and potato croquette I was pretty much nauseated... URGH...

Again on Virtual Spaces...

Becoming less and less Virtual... Sony, Sun and opther big corporate follow the example of reuters and set up shop in Second Life... I don't know how this may affect the mood of people there... what kind of escapist fantasy is supposed to be, when contaminated by all aspects of the real world? and what about competition? would Sun win over a virtual-based corporate founded by what is in the real world a housewife?

Nissan has taken a creative approach to this: Beginning a promotional venture in a virtual world is still a relatively inexpensive proposition compared with the millions spent on other media. In Second Life, a company like Nissan or its advertising agency could buy an “island” for a one-time fee of $1,250 and a monthly rate of $195 a month. For its new campaign built around its Sentra car, the company then needed to hire some computer programmers to create a gigantic driving course and design digital cars that people “in world” could actually drive, as well as some billboards and other promotional spots throughout the virtual world that would encourage people to visit Nissan Island.

I guess the other will do similar things...

and where there's money, here comes the vultures... On Tuesday, a Congressional committee said it was investigating whether virtual assets and incomes should be taxed.

(from the NY Times)

Andromeda went bang at the dinosaur's time...

It was punched through by another nearby galaxy, known as M32...

Just imagine the two galazies getting closer, slowly being distorted by their reciprocal gravitational attractions, and shockwaves of matter and energy being blasted all around at terrific speeds...

dust ripples from the collision have been discovered in the infra red...



and this isn't all...

Since Andromeda is "only" 2 million Light Years away, and we (aboard the Milky Way) are heading straight to it, in a few billions years we'll have another big impact... the two galaxies will merge into an elliptical one... :-) I wish I were there to see the event... may be a bit accelerated, since a collision which takes some ten million years to happen may become a bit boring after a while...

An american family in paris...

ah ah I'm jump-blogging again...

actually I haven't stopped since yesterday...

here's a blog form an american family who's moved to paris... usual jokes and such, but it's decently written so it makes for a good read from time to time... and for an italian it's always fun to see people making fun of french, even when who does so is an american... ;-)

I love Gmail

it's the best web-based e-mail service I've ever tried. Ever. Full stop.

I love the concept of discussion and the way it's implemented, I love the labels, I love the interface and the seamless integration of chat and e-mail. I love the automatic recording of my chats, and the search-through-them function... I do have some gripe with its filters, but ehy, one can't be perfect... and may be it's just me who doesn't know how to use it properly. is there a search keyword like Contains: ? that would be useful.

and multiple condition for a single filters would greatly improve the experience, too... :-P

I'm never one hundred percent satisfied...

Sombrero...

Since space is a main theme today, here we go, one of the nicest galaxies around...


commonly known as Sombrero... you can guess why... it is a big (800 billion stars or so) spiral galaxy, part of the Virgo supercluster, some thirty million light years away. It is seen almost from the revolution plane. The dark line is composed of dust clouds all around its rim, rich not only in dust (like my home) but also in young stars (unlike my home ah ah)...

Science Shots

Ehy, I never saw this one before...

short news from Science...

first one: getting a tattoo can decrease your sense of touch (duh!) did they really need to perform the experiments? what next? eating too much could diminish your appetite for the next few hours?

second news, a wonderful piccie of the Antennae, a couple of galaxies crunching themselves into a blaze of light...



If I can fnd the large one on the HST website I'll update... (here it is, zoomable and clickable (flash))

and there's more news... new caves at yellowstone, cyclons on jupiter, and on and on and on...

check it out...

If you don't sleep...

you will not learn well the day after...

but, you will still be able to remember bad things.

students deprived of their sleep did perform 40% worse in memory tests than students well rested.

but, and here's the kicker, they did perform only 19% worse in words with negative emotional charge, such as 'cancer' or 'jail', and 59% worse in good things such as 'cookies' and 'holidays'...

I do agree with the authors of the paper, who suggest an evolutionary safeguard mechanism to avoid forgetting threats.

this way, if something bad happened the day before, you still have a chance to avopid it... neat uh?

A dry moon...

Science announces that what seemed to be ice on the moon, is most likely a weird radar reflection from rough terrain... I know one or two things about radars due to my previous acquaintances :-) Believe me, it's a mess, not the clear-cut things that we are shown in movies... :-|

anyway, back in topic, I never particularly liked the idea of going back to the moon to build a permanent base. I'd rather have my (tax) money spent on serious studies on going to mars, which looks like a much more interesting place to visit. and for more than a political stunt and flag sticking...

Mars Direct, here we come!!!

Crazy ideas...

I thought those people at slashdot posting their disassembling of an old SNES/cabinet/loo to install inside a modern PC were crazy, but this guy really goes over the top. He plans on using cockroaches to play a video game, through a motion capture system implanted on them, and I guess translating the event in the game into light cues for the cockroach to react to...

if it's not the craziest idea I've ever heard, it's almost there...

good luck man...

The Loom is in a frenzy...

Carl Zimmer put out two posts in a day! go read.

one about Mushrooms

one on complexity to go on the National geographic's website. The original article is nicely and freely available. I hope this drives up the website traffic enough that publishers understand it's useful to give something away for free...

yeah piracy is good once again!!! or may be we should say free stuff is good!!!

again early in the morning...

again at work at 6.30. No, I'm not workaholic, but my GF came to visit me yesterday. very much appreciated - pity she forgot her swimsuit so the planned outing to the city pool didn't come up as planned. In alternative, a nice dinner with risotto con zucchine e zafferano, e spiedini d'agnello... with a good cannonau della romangia to help everything to go down easily... nice nice nice...

so, why this early? yet again, she's to catch the 6.30 train, and even if the station is like 200m away, I don't feel like letting her walk on her own... especially when i'm up anyway... I'm one of those person who simply can't sleep anymore when awakened... vabbe'. never mind...

earlier in, earlier out, more time this af'noon to swim, and write up... ehy, more time to blog too ;-)

have a nice day.

You are what you eat...

And this may explain why belgian are so weird-looking :-P

look what I have been served for lunch today:

yes, you see correctly, in the upper right corner there's actually a cluster of four fried meatballs, surrounded by an army of... caramellised cherries, of the kind we italians would only dream of putting on ice creams (we call them amarene)

now, it was, surprisingly, good. the contrast betwee the sweet/sour of cherries and the fried meatballss was pleasant... if you like that kind of thing.

now, i don't know what piint I actually want to make, just wanted to bring to your knowledge that diversity in cuisines is even larger than in chemistry! ugh!

One more interesting Blog

jump-blogging again, I found an "english teacher abroad" blog full of interesting (and well written) snippet of japanese life... I'll stick it in my blog-to-follow list... thanks Mike

Correlating Good Grades and Success in Life

Here's a post (yes, I'm still jump-blogging) where a singaporean teacher advocates that good grades do not always make for good jobs outside work. His analysis is clear, and I do agree on some points: you don't need a degree with distinction to perform well in the workplace, from my experience it takes more passion and focus, than proper cleverness or knowledge.

I do not agree on him that people who go back from work to uni to 'do their masters' are forced to do this because they do not perform well at work. quite the opposite, from what I see... People who go back to academia for a masters do so 'cause they want to step up in the career ladder, never satisfied with what they're doing/earning at the time...

and if it's true that, as he says, people who didn't do well at uni may well earn more than their distincted colleagues, that's hardly the case for 'teachers/professors', whose rewards very rarely are in the money they earn...

I can only talk for my field and a few others that I know, but usually the salary scale is:

Industry > Academia > School.

mah... may be things really are different in Singapore...

Jump-Blogging again...

The 'next blog>' button up there is a temptation... I like to stop from time to time and just click it... sometimes I have to close the firefox tab immediately 'cause the blog is sexually oriented (you will not believe how many people blog their sex life... :-( How lame.

Some others, I'm just bored by advertisement blogs, or pointless blogs (like my own eh eh)...

But some other times rewarded by nice blogs like Green Submarine. I stopped during my peregrination 'cause I recognised Pippi LongenStock, also known as Pippi Calzelunghe in italy... One of my childhood idols...

Ecco sono qui
Pippi Calzelunghe così mi chiamo;
credo proprio che
una come me non c'è stata mai!
Ogni volta che
devo far qualcosa combino guai,
ma alla fine poi
vedo che son tutti amici miei!

Why do trees change colors in autumn?

Here comes a question which I often asked myself. why do trees have to change the colors to the leaves, just before dropping them? isn't this a waste of resources on the trees side? why they don't just suck their leaves empty, and then drop them?

Carl Zimmer at the loom has an interesting piece about this. enjoy!

Piracy is Good

Hi everybody,

yesterday I was out of stuff to watch while eating, both Battlestar galactica and Ally Mc beal were busy downloading (ahi ahi ahi, bad person, me, I'm a pirate yes...). So I went for another smallish file (200MB) which i got from the torrent, titled Piracy-isGood-small.mov. I was expecting a short documentary about how BSG had been downloaded from the UK to the US, and how this ensured the success up there... But I got much more... A two-hours lesson on how television work today, and how will likely work in the near future. the first slide was titled something like:
October 18th, 2004 : the day TV died. the date in question was the first airing of BSG's miniseries on sky one UK.
It turned out to be quite interesting. The guy, talking during this australian TV conference, draws some interesting parallels... and since he's a very good speaker, the two hours literally fly away.


He envisages a future where, thanks to software like bittorrent getting rid of the middlemen (distributors, and broadcasters), advertisers will be able to directly produce and distribute branded shows, saving a shedload of money and at the same time keeping a high level of quality, or at least, of customer satisfaction, since only good shows will be 'popular' then easy to download thanks to the peculiar way BT and the new p2p sharing softwares work. Moreover, the more successful a show will be, the less 'expensive' every appearance will be for the advertiser/producer, since he's not paying for the distribution itself. This is a complete reversal of TV advertising's current business mode, where if you want to be seen by more people you have to pay proportionately more. All this, and much more, in the in-depth analysis that the speaker does...

But the link in the title is a web page tackling the same argument, and, for what I can see, it's the summary of the guy's speech. I can't link directly to the .mov file, since I can't check dodgy websites from work - but you can easily get it, just go to http://www.tvtorrents.com/ and select Battlestar galactica as series. it will be there. sit down, relax, and enjoy the future...

history of PC TV Ads

That is, history of TV advertisement for PC. nice blog post found by chance... lots of links (slow) to googlevideo and youtube for watching the stuff yourself...

I may have not liked Judas...

but what Peter Hamilton is brewing for us smeels like an interesting tea pot...

click up there to read the Confederation Timeline starting from Judas Unchained and encompassing (I believe) the Dreaming Void... I'll earmark some pounds to buy his next book then...

and congratulation for the new son!

The Mile High club

This refers to people who have sex on the plane... usually, in the toilet, I would educately guess.

but what if you had your B787? with bed, kitchen, cinema room and bubble bath? all for your enjoyment? Well, if you want and can afford it you can have it.

I mean, there seems to be quite a market for this kind of things. 39 747 are currently privately owned. and many more of other kind. I guess it's above Rockstars level, I'm thinking more Oil-sultans and such...

from the paper: In addition to its size, which will allow for even more luxury, the A380 has a feature that may appeal to the most status-conscious of owners, who may travel with underlings. That feature harks back to the days of ocean liners, where social classes were physically segregated.

“The A380 will offer a chance to separate the senior V.I.P.’s from the junior V.I.P.’s because you have two decks, and they can be kept apart,”

Google's sun shines high

Google is looking for solar power... not all the energy will come out of it, agreed, but it's a reasonable step in the good direction. the mor epeople buys this cells, the lower the costs, the more people will be able to afford them. and it's not like we're going to run out of silicon anytime soon... may some rare earth but this may be fixed I hope...

from the article: “Big companies targeting the kind of demographics Google targets are falling all over each other to be greener than each other”

let's just hope it's not a fad...

Reversing Outsourcing...

from the NY Times: Where once the brains of India left for more lucrative pastures in the United States, today a handful of fresh American college graduates are sampling the fruits of the Indian economic boom.

What's more to say? It is to be expected. growing companies will look for talents everywhere they can find them, and with increasing life standards in the developing countries, people are not against moving over there at least for a limited time. What's more, with the pay they'd usually perceive in the US they can live three to four times as luxuriously in India. And even when they are not supposed to move over there, and they become the faces those companies offer to foreign markets, it's important to see the playing field being leveled from both sides...

What's the likelihood...

Of visiting twice the same blog by hitting twice, in two different days the (next blog>) button up there on the right hand side? I don't know. But it just happened to me. went there on friday, and now again. So I though I'd share with you, since I like what's written on it.

Not The Country Club

and the picture of GW Bush is funny.

'nuff said.

Religion can be a good thing...

I always knew it. Being born in a catholic country (the catholic country for excellence, one could say), I know that people can have a positive attitude towards the environment, not the disastrous one that theo-con evangelical have in the US. But it's nice to see someone over there pulling his weight...

Over the last five years, Father Morris has sharply reduced his small parish’s energy use and emissions of carbon dioxide, the compound most scientists believe has led to global warming, and he has organized other congregations across Michigan to do the same.

that's good...

by the way, it's not like evangelical are all EVIL:

Over the last year, religious activism on global warming has won much attention. Last February, 86 evangelical Christian leaders backed an initiative to combat global warming, a move that broke the evangelical movement’s broad silence on the issue but exposed stark divisions.

that's what the priest teaches: “If we are made in his image, we should mirror his image in our dominion over the Earth,” Mr. Wickersham said. “He is creative and sustaining, not destructive.”

it's a neat and convincing message I'd say, one that certainly can appeal to people who have a good hearth and care about their own children. The other? well, quite frankly, I'd give them one last opportunity to redeem themself, then would have them shot. with bio-degradable bullets, of course :-)

And another blog to add...

to your favorites: Galactic interactions. very nice posts about cosmology and astronomy... haven't read much. unofrtunately, like all people trying to enlighten the masses, Rob Knop's blog is plagued by nuts convinced they've got it figured all, and science establishment is covering all up. But he and his blogs' habitues put up a good fight against the dark side...

First steps in acknowledging Virtual Spaces

Reuters is opening his first news agency in a virtual space: namely, the MMORPG Second Life. Being there almost one million inhabitants, it was almost time, you could say. The articles Mr. Pasick files will be strictly about — and addressed to — Second World players. Reuters CEO downplays this all to a playful touch of PR, but I see it differently. With the growing importance of Virtual Arenas, more and more will be happening there, especially when information exchange is concerned... One days, things will be decided up there that will exert an effect in the real space. Think of it has the Internet Special Interest Groups that Bruce Sterling protrayed in "Island in the net". Behold the future in making!

EDIT: next steps, is a daily news on what's been happening on World Of Warcraft...

eBooks: will it work this time?

I have an e-book reader. it's a java thingy in my cell phone. never used it. the screen is tiny, and even if it weren't, in which occasions I'd enjoy a book, without having the opportunity to have the book physically there?

moreover, screens are awful for reading. Sony is trying to shake this up with its next big thing (well, they hope so)


It’s a handsome half-inch-thick nine-ounce slab, a bit smaller than 5 inches by 7 inches, “bound” in a protective leatherette cover. You can turn pages individually, or jump ahead 10 percent of the book at a time. A “mark” button produces a visual dog-ear on the page corner.

What distinguishes Sony’s effort from all the failed e-book readers of years gone by, however, is the screen.

The Reader employs a remarkable new display technology from a company called E Ink. Sandwiched between layers of plastic film are millions of transparent, nearly microscopic liquid-filled spheres. White and black particles float inside them, as though inside the world’s tiniest snow globes. Depending on how the electrical charge is applied to the plastic film, either the black or white particles rise to the top of the little spheres, forming crisp patterns of black and white.

let's hope it will work this time. and let's also hope that prices for downloads will not be exceedingly high. I laugh at people buying iTunes songs. I want part of the money saved in not having to print the stuff to be shifted onto me. not only in more money for the freaking shareholders. pah! Until then, I'll happily do without e-contents.

Welcome, alessandro...

I know you've visited... :-)

Early posting today...

Good morning everybody... I'm here at work at 6.40, as usual during my mondays. most people find it hard to wake up on mondays. me too, but when you've to throttle 100 busy Km of motorways to get here you better start early. and when as today it's not me the one who has to travel, I still hve to bring her to the rail station. so, my wake up time doesn't change...

so, here I am... at least this way I'll be able (hope) to leave work early, and go off to the swimming pool to test my new swimsuite. Like children, I believe that new sport gear makes you perform better... I remember when I used to get new (albeit unbranded) trainer socks, and after trying them for like ten metres sprints, I would proudly declare to my mum that thanks to them I felt I was running faster, jumping higher, and longer... ah, childhood... when every dream comes true... may be I'll post some more about my childhood, in the following posts... who knows? for now, back to gritty day-to-day work.

49 Up

7 Up isn't just the brand of a fizzy lemonade, but also an interesting documentary created by some british lads, In 1964, they started following some people's lives at seven years intervals. They're now at the seventh instalment, and since 7x7=49, you can guess what the title refers to. I stumbled onto this documentary while looking for an underdog sport movie, but i think I'll keep a tab on it, and see if I can get my hands on it. It looks quite interesting...

I wonder, though, how much these people's life has been influenced by the documentaries... did people recognise them on the road? I don't think so. but may be having something like this in your CV can give you an edge. After all, the employer would be happy to keep you seven years, so that his firm would be featured in the movie too... mah?

anyway, click on the title to get the trailer (thanks Apple)

saturday morning fever...

Plenty of things to do today... wake up, shake up, abs, a bit of thesis writing, to the post-office to retrieve a fine (sigh), then lunch, down to bxl to meet the lady, and may be swimming. If I can get a swimsuit there. Also, I'm afraisd I'll have to help her to put up a computer-desktop... God of B&Q, bless me...

and, the fatter you are the more stupid too...

I always suspected it...

Neurology has published a paper where a correlation is shown between BMI and cognitive distress.

Now, the scatterplot which i see is dreadfull, and the line they draw through it not really significative. let's face it, the variability of the data is enormous. So, not having read the paper, I do have my doubts...

Also: as a sportsman, I do have a high BMI, but very low fat %age. how does this figure, then? Could this be cause of the variability? I would then expect to see some variability change along the years, may be?

thanks to Shelley for this.

Suing for being abducted by aliens?

No, really, I can't believe this...

BERLIN (Reuters) - A German lawyer hopes to drum up more business by pursuing state compensation claims for people who believe they were abducted by aliens.

"There's quite obviously demand for legal advice here," Jens Lorek told Reuters by telephone on Thursday. "The trouble is, people are afraid of making fools of themselves in court."

Lorek, a lawyer based in the eastern city of Dresden who specializes in social and labor law, said he hoped to expand his client base by taking on the unusual work.

He has yet to win any abduction claims, but says there are plenty of potential clients, noting that extra-terrestrial watchdogs report scores of alien assaults every year.

"These people could appeal for therapies or cures," he said.

Lorek, 41, is pinning his hopes for success on a German law which grants kidnap victims the right to state compensation.

I don't understand who they want to sue. The Local Air Force for not adequately protecting the country's air space? this is bonkers!!!

repeat with me. Bonkers!!!

Thanks to Orac

It's a slow friday...

And I spent it almost all in meeting, presentation and some work here and there. not much. now what? I'd like to go out, but my GF is 100Km apart. not much, pity is 100Km of queues, so I better try to reach her tomorrow morning... Freinds here have their families, is not like in the UK where everybody was single or unmarried anyway, with no ties and happy to go out... not that I got many occasions, entrenched as I was in my routine... pity that when you want, you can't, and the other way around...

well, that's life, I guess... :-|

let's see if I can put in some scrolling text

yes I can... that's cool...

Ghost Rider

Here's the new Marvel movie on the ghist Rider. Personally, I've never read the comic but I know of a few people who were fan of it. So I may give it a try. Although I'm a bit bored with the whole superhero concept right now.

ps: click the link for some hi-res trailers...

Judas Unchained isn't that bad, after all...

Some posts ago, i complained about Judas unchained sucking. I still am of the same general opinion, but the few pages I read yesterday nudged the score a bit higher... I particularly appreciated the dialogue between the two person heading the largest corporation/dinasty of them all, CST/Sheldon. Nigel Sheldon and Ozzie Isaacs are the two scientist who created the QWormhole technology, and CST is the result of this. a monopoly over Trains-through-Wormholes transports which actually makes up the Commonwealth. They did, however, choose different paths in their life: Nigel, practical and no-nonsense, heads the dinasty. Ozzie, on the other hand, is the classic rebel genius of SF, always aiming to be the eternal underdog. they tackle life in very different ways, and same is true for the Primes menace. The dialogue halfway the book when the two finally manage to re-unite is very interesting, and adult, on both sides. I wonder how time Hamilton spent in writing it, and ironing any crease out of it. It is one of the best dialogue I've ever read, where the two tackle the very essence of their friendship, the responsabilities which come from their positions, and the very values which are important to them. Only for this, I feel the book deserves to be read.

I'm still a bit skeptics over the whole Starflyer idea, and I glimpsed the solution to the whole shebang. Not particularly elegant, I'd say, but I was also parially dissatisfied by the resolution of events in the Confederation's books. Dear peter, it looks like you've a penchant for the Deus Ex Machina. You do introduce it since the very begin, true, but even so, it's a dishonest way to close a story. Anyway, i'll suspend my final judgement until I read the END word in the book.

ciao ciao.

Now, this is just wonderful...

The Mars reconnaissance Orbiter satellite flying over Mars has snapped up a picture of the Victoria crater just when Opportunity was on its edge (it'll try to descend to its bottom as soon as the earth-based pilots work out a safe way). The instrument used was the HiRISE.

The Picture is just awesome... down I've put a thumbnail. Click on the link to see a version were the position or the rover is annotated - click on the one below to get a huge 4045x5085 pixel version - you can actually see the rover in it!!! isn't that something?



It makes me feel mars as a living planet, with the blue-ish streaks on the upper part (caused by wind-blown dust?), and the cracked bottom, like a lake dried in the summer. but also an alien place, with big and small craters constituting the main terrain's feature...

I wish one day I'll get there... for the moment, I'll keep dreaming about it.

ps: thanks to John M. Lynch for letting me know about this.

Is Bush really christian?

Or does he just use his "christianity" to score political points? I always guessed that, but now we seem to have a confirm.

More than five years after President Bush created the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, [David Kuo] the former second-in-command of that office is going public with an insider’s tell-all account that portrays an office used almost exclusively to win political points with both evangelical Christians and traditionally Democratic minorities.

I guess the same can be said about Berlusconi, devoted (and divorced) catholic... or almost any other politician, real or fictitious (The Saldana dinasty from Hamilton's Confederation books comes to my mind...)

North Korea and their new toy...

It's the most discussed news of the world in these days: north korea has apparently managed to detonate (or may be fizzle) a test nuclear device... may be, this article argues, they didn't need to do it. They've done it anyway. (duh!) Far from being justified by the need of gathering info, the experiment was a clear political message to the world. Was the message "Don't mess with us"? or was mor elike "Ehy look what we can do, how about giving us some more gifts? Otherwise we'll sell them to AlQaeda(or Hezbollah?) in bundle with our missiles"...

On the origin of dogs

I've cited Darren Naish quite often in here. His is one of my favourite blogs, although I did neglect to check it for quite a while (I had read everything he wrote until last month). Now, he's up with a nice new post on the (controversial) origin of dogs. Also, he's hit big time appearing on BBC news 24 (and world news) to comment about jurassic marine reptiles... Congratulations, Darren!!!

Use your hands!!!

A nice post on how to do math until 100 with your hands. a ten-fold improvement over what I could do until today, which was just counting up to ten...

I'm tempted to put myself down to practice it... if only i could justify it to my bosses as 'learning time'...

Yet again one otious after lunch post

don't have much to write about, so I'll post a small rant I jotted down today as soon as I arrived. It's supposedly written in the same style of the general announcement we receive from management and HR: it's a rant related to the fact that some smartasses at HR thought it was a nice idea to spend time and money on sending us a fake box of a nonexistent drugs, Smartolan, supposed to help us relive ethe stress of working here. A nice idea I'd appreciated much more, hadn't it been that in this times we are constantly reminded that there's no money for traveling around at conferences. But apparently there is enough in other departments to waste it around...

never mind, here it comes... I edited something to reduce the lawsuits risk...

Dear employee,

Ginseng Pharmaceutica NV is pleased to announce that their new treatment against acute idiocy has been approved by the regolatory authorities. Under the brand name of Smartolan, the product (3,6-idio,4-parastupid dudecaine) is expected to provide revenues in the order of 15 billion US$/year, mostly from sales to other corporate HR departments.

I don't have to remember how hard the development of this product has been. After initial identification of a likely target in 1955, upon hiring of the first HR manager here at Jansenn, in incredible amount of work has been poured in to alleviate these almost-human beings of their handicap. Initial tests on Guinea pigs and rats were promising, with a 50% improved IQ measured as time required to exit through a maze. A big hurdle to overcome for the project was the complete lack of effect of Smartolan on the next pre-clinical trial, Post-doctorate associates, notoriously cheap to hire, test and fire. this was most likely due to their particular physiology (the already high IQ may have played a role too). Fortunately, efficacy on more expensive lab animals such as Dogs and Monkeys was confirmed.

Clinical trial were performed, for the first time in the story of our company, in house, on a large subset of the HR department allegedly suffering of the affection. the resting part was kept as control in this innovative double blind. More than 85% of the person treated showed a 1.5-fold increase in IQ and general awareness, with the lower 30% actually reaching the level of sub-normal person (80>IQ>100). Unfortunately, a good 15% of the patients didn't show any answer to the drugs, a particular sub-population now called "Natural-born-HR" for which only gene therapy may provide help for the foreseeable future.

However, it is a glorious day for our company and we look at the possibility of using the new revenue stream not as input for more sterile scientific research, but to allow more generous travel allowances and possibly even company cars to HR secretaries who have until now been denied this staple of corporate employment.

Idiotically yours

Mark Van Stupiid (HR and PR director)

disclaimer: the author of this e-mail was involved in the Smartolan clinical trial and was found to be part of the unresponsive 15%.

ps: Guys don't fuck me up. This better NOT leave our machines ok? no forwarding, no showing around please. I could be fired for this.

I have seen it!!!

I managed yesterday to watch the first and second episode of BattleStar Galactica, season 3. and the short verions of this post is: It Rocks!

I mean, for being a TV series, it is becoming increasingly adult... It shows the human population oppressed by monotheistic robots which justify every thing they do with a higher call. It really strikes me as a very strong and decise criticism of the current middle-east politics of the US. And I'm frankly puzzled by the way some people see it the other way around.

The way they treat serious issues as suicide bombers and the reaction politcal and not to them is very very adult. And I like to see how every body does what it can to survive, how people are forced to make difficult choices...

and some characters are finally being fleshed out decently, until now I thought that Col. Tigh was there just as a negative example, a counterpoint to Adama. but not, his is the most poignant quote of this season so far: "Does it really matter whether the guy I command ride on a viper or starp themselves a belt of explosives? they're just as dead at the end." (I don't remember exactly right now, but more or less this is the sense.)

Plus, the acting is still good, for a TV series that is... the only gripe I have is with the scenery, if I had started colonising a planet, I would have expected a much sparse population, with a more agricultural setting. As it is, it looks like most people just hang around in tents day in day out, planning a rebellion... who produces the food? are they supported by cylon poop? or what? I don't think it would have been more expensive - they just had to hire some western series set-up, and they'd be done... but hey, they would then stomp on joss Whedon's feet and his wondrous Firefly/Serenity...

All in all, however, I heartily recommend this new season. Se Il buon giorno si vede dal mattino, it is going to be so damn good... can't wait... ;-)

StarBuck (the elder) does not agree...

Again on BSG: Dirk Benedict, aka "face" in the A-Team, but most importantly first person to incarnate Lt. StarBuck in the first series, does not like at all the change of sex his old character has been given in the 2003-to-date series. He says that something has been lost in castration... I personally, enjoy much more Katee Sackoff than him as Starbuck, as my mind simply can't see the Face onboard a Viper. I always expect to see a cigar smoking Hannibal Smith shouting with complacency: "Ah, adoro i piani ben riusciti!"

Luckily, someone else thinks it my way...

so, Go Starbuck!!! and Go Boomer!!! (certainly the most tender cylon around... I leave the sexyest's palm to Number Six)

ps: by the way, the article from dirk benedict certainly is very very well written, for me... he almost convinced me... almost. I still believe that the new starbuck is more suited for the new series. and this one is better than the old one tout court. except may be for the damned octagonal pieces of paper...

what am I doing?

it's after lunch time, so my brain is slowly recovering from the lack of blood. it all went down to the GI tract to help digest the substantious meal that Janssenn gladly subsidizes. Today, it was country omelette with herbs and bacon and (sic!) potatoes, a soup with something (plus chilly mush, my favourite addition) and two slices of country bread to pooch in it... finally, a cup of tea and a small apple almond and cream pie...

the morning I've been trying to finish off at least one of a two-parts work on IKs inhibitors. can't talk about the details, but after getting a series of hits from a software charged with finding molecules electrostatically similar to some nine known inhibitors, I'm regrouping said hits, and selecting only one-hundred molecules which hopefully will be diverse between them. let's hope so...

other than this, i decided to give up the car from now on, unless necessary. I bought a bus pass for the coming month, and in nice days I'll try to cycle as I have been trying to do in the summer. coming by car turns out to be very stressing, as either i come here very early, or I clash with huge traffic and parking difficulties. Coming by bus, someone else does the driving, I can sleep some more, and during the wait (just outside my apartment) and the fifteen minutes trip I can enjoy a good read. This way I can skip on reading at night, time which I can use more proficuously on my thesis. all in all, a pretty good deal for 25 euros/month. and the car is always there if I need it. that is, in the weekends or for heavy duty shopping :-)

Battlestar Galactica drives a lot of traffic

Just write down a post on BSG, and your counter will tick quicker, thanks to technorati and to the fact that people go there to see what people is saying, and where... useful to know... so, here's a useful piece of knowledge for you. now let's see if it works with this post... :-P

edit: no it doesn't... let's try tomorrow with a reasoned review of BattleStar Galactica season 3, episodes 1 and 2.

Google and YouTube

I've come to appreciate YouTube... at the begin, I did look at it as a good idea, but was half expecting people to misuse it. that is, I did fear it would be full of pr0n. but more and more people seem to be using it for useful purposes, from sharing short snippet of TV they particularly liked (didn't I post a link to the BMW M5 ads some time ago? yes I did), to self-adverstisement of natural photography.

Finally, some big player has noticed this little phenomenon, and has bought it. the big player is, as you may have guessed, Google, which seems to be looming over the internet as a sort of benignant Big Brother.

I do Love Picasa, and Gmail is my primary email now. I do write this on Google-owned blogspot. Google already had his own Video hosting service, I dopn't know much about the tech behind but youtube and gvideo seemed to be pretty similar.

In short, google seems to be aggregating all that makes the network a collaborative, bottom-to-top thing. Thanks god, I feared it may just become another TV with infinite channels. may be there's still hope...

the onlt Gthing I didn't keep on my HD is Gchat. I'm sorry google, there's way to go before you get close to Skype. at least that was the situation when I last checked.

Surf's Up

Lots of CGI animation movies coming up this season... and in between them it's the (first?) such feature from Sony: Surf's up. click on the title link to enjoy the retro story of a young penguin surfer trying to imitate his begone idol, Big Z!!! Trailer courtesy of apple.

it looks fun... let's see how it shapes up when it hits the silver screen...

ps: penguins seems to be more nad more favourite. Starting from Neon genesis Evangelion onward, I count more and more apparitions of them: Madagascar, plus the similar one from disney... and now Cold feet and this one... may be Linux is having an effect after all?

Children of men

Is it that good? The story doesn't look particularly original, to me... I have seen it in at least three books. And frankly, I'd rather have a cinema version of Darwin's Radio than this unknown to me mixed-genre book... However, people seems to be shocked at how beautiful this movie is... may be this new alfonso guy really nailed it?

funny though, how humanists change their opinion. if a sci-fi movie is good, then it can't be classed in sci-fi... ah ah... as if sci-fi was all like cinematographic sci-fi, all explosion and implausibility... quite the opposite, I'd say... good written sci-fi is hard core, realistic, and most of all gives your brain food for thought. Umpah!!!

uhm... seen the trailer, I don't know what to say... not yet convinced, but may give it a try...

Somewhere, somebody's blog just blew up...

Click on the link, and you'll see that the authors of South Park appreciate Battlestar Galactica too... :-)

They both (BSG and SP) won this "Peabody's Award". Me, I've never heard of it but I'm sure they both deserve it.

ps: the title refer to a comment made after the two guys came down from the podium... it's a joke but it shows how the information panorama is changing, thanks to the distributed network of blogs powering more and more the information exchange. a big difference from the early days of centralised top-to-bottom information diffusion through agencies. Specialised news agencies are certainly still important in some fields, but for the rest, their role is being severely undermined by the ease of access and pervasive presence of the network. (the interweb, as Clarkson calls it)

Judas Unchained sucks...

at least for the moment...

I've been reading this monumental piece by Peter F Hamilton, second part of the Commonwealth saga. I haven't finished it yet, and I'll probably get to the last page within one week or so, but the problem is that it's getting boring...

I fell however that I can already draw a judgement about the whole saga. Unless the next hundred pages get a decise improvement, my answer is that it sucks. And even if they were, i am afraid it may be too late. The real problems are not with the plot, but with the background. I mean, I can suspend my unbelief only for a certain amount... Ok we have a world-scene very different from what we saw in the confederation books. In the confederation, starships were connecting the various planets. In this one, it is trains through wormholes (nice victorian touch, I'd expect nothing less froma british author). In both cases, fancy technologies allow a more or less unchanged humanity to get along reasonably well... but this is where the good parallels end. And everything goes awry in the Commonwealth.

In the confederation, starships are common place, but what really defines the unioverse are Edenists. Transhumans which share a sort of multiple personality through the 'affinity' bond, genetically spliced within them before birth.

They are masters of genetic engineering, at the point in which their spaceships are living and sentient beings. But even so, the human side shows up in the fact that some of them are renegades, and the technologies they rely on have been pirated more than once. It's only an ethical problem to keep the rest of humanity from embracing them.

Now, confront this with the Commonwealth, where the defining point is the WornHole technology. Dear Good peter would like us to believe that, once the demon is out of the bottle, no government has tried to replicate the thing to suit its own agenda. Instead, everybody is queueing ordinately to the two guys who seemingly engineered the first one, paying their dues to help them build an unrivalled commercial empire.

More than this, another so called 'dinasty' possess monopoly on the other important technology, force fields. and none of these two are trying to gut each other by intruding in the other's turf. ah! I'm sorry, but that's unbelievable... I just can't believe that, after three hundred years, the technology isn't still commonplace. I mean, that's three hundred years. Just look at what happened with lasers, once they went public!!! they're commonplace after only thirty years.

and in three hundred years, control over WHs has been so strict that only one of them has been used for an illegal heist? ah! again, this is just wishful thinking. It is blatantly avoiding to look at gibson's first law of technology, which asserts: "The streets will find its uses". meaning that every technology is applied by normal people and criminals alike in ways unforeseen by their inventors... no matter how hard the writer try to set up the scene in order to avoid this. and replicating a three hundred years old tech should be easy enough for the syndicates, which are still seemingly strong in the commonwealth...

Ph!

Other than that, the characters just do not have the verve of the Confederation people. Kime is may be the most human, the ex pilot of the first (and last) Mars Space mission, turned enterprise captain when its mission is interrupted by the two geniuses with a hand-made spacesuit and their newly fangled wormhole...

The SI, the multi-conscoiusness which results from the fusion of the first AI and many other human minds thereafter, is extremely under-utilised in the plot, yt it would seem that it has big stakes on human survivals. After all, its physical location is still somewhere in CW space. Plus, it's made of human minds, after all. The justification given for itssympathetyc neutrality is good enough, but still, I'd expect them to pull their own weight in the battle. Anyway I believe that it could be safely assumed that for weapons inventiveness the SI may not be able to match the trillion of humans minds, albeit separate.

The only thing I'd save is the enemy, MorningLightMountain. Incredibly inhuman, and really alien in its behaviour. But even there, I seriously doubt that a life form would be able to exterminate everything in his own path, and keep itself clear of parasites... I mean, think of it: a planetary intelligence, a single species, with a very high biological uniformity, uninclined from what we read to genetically engineer itself... why didn't human try to use bio-weapons, of which they're masters, against it? enough for the moment. I'll continue ranting about it later...

the perfect present for me:

Ever wondered what the perfect present for me? Every year I get an endless stream of scarfs, rubbed/coated socks (sorellina, take a note, 'cause I don't need a new pair every year :-P)... I do enjoy some of the surprises, but frankly, very rarely I have been as glad as I was when as a 12-years old I used to receive an astronomy book from my godfather...



so here is my perfect present, finally... a framed picture of the astronaut's footprint on the lunar soil...

or, as an alternative:

a picture of "Buzz" looking at the US flag in the same venue...

scroll down for more ideas, though... A bit pricey, but definitely worth my face when I'll rip the wrapping, I promise... :-)

Slow Step...

Enygmatic title, this post... I'm going to brag (no, once again!) about a passion of mine...

I'm a sucker for Mitsuru Adachi and his quintessentially adolescential (teenage) manga...

I'm not a teen-ager anymore (if age is additive, I'm in fact two teen-agers, by now). But I confess that I still enjoy reading his manga... I didn't even discover them during my teen years, but way after that, well into university, thanks to the very much younger friend Paolo...

Usually Adachi talks(draws) about sport, high-school, and one or more triangle-love... some people say that they are all the same basic story, but that familiarity also confort the reader that they'll find what they're looking for...

Battlestar Galactica Season 3 is finally out...

yep it is... and it's apparently very good...

we left the humans in a bad situation at the end of the second series, they settled down on a planet by popular vote, and after Cylons arrived en masse the "Adama" navy jumped clear of the system... a pretty grim situation uh? I'm curious to see how it all shapes up...

so tonight I'll probably skip my Ally McBeal to make space for it... or at least start the download... :-P do the same guys, I know some of you have been waiting for this...

ps: in the title link, a page with a music clip comparing the old and the new series. it rocks!!! (but I can't make it appear in here... Frak!)

Il coccodrillo come fa?

I'm bored of writing in elnglish only, so may be you'll find some posts in italian (or french, who knows).

The reason for this is simple. some things I can't express properly in english, and for some other italian doesn't cut it.

so, let's go for a mix-up... kind of my brain right now.

anyway, have a nice week / buon inizio di settimana a tutti!

Luca/Gufo

ps: the title refers to a song which i founf myself singing while cycling to work today... a child's music hit of some years ago, in Italy... click on the link to download mp3 and lyrics (if you're so inclined)

acc!!!

this morning I woke up at four o'clock. some clever person in the building has decided that they need heating at four o' clock in the morning, I can't fathom why - old people having sex over the blanket? urgh, that's disgusting...

anyway, thanks to this unknown, my bedroom had a nice thrumming noise since four o'clock (I better repeat, freaking four o'clock in a bicycle!!!), so I couldn't sleep.

what do you do when you can't sleep? well, I wasn't hungry, didn't really want to read, so I decided to advance a lil bit my work. so went in the salon and started working at my thesis, cataloguing the files in my 250GB LaCie hard drive... sometimes I just loose some of them and it's a pain in my bum when I still have to write them up in the thesis... I also ealised how many missing pieces there are... found a few errors here and there too late now to correct... I'll just have to gloss over them...

all in all, a proficuous day until now...

now I am off to the postoffice to get two registered mails, which I strongly suspect to be more parking fines... or may be God (if there's any) has decided to stop hassling me and may be my appeal has had success... I really am through with turning my money over to the state for a misplaced road sign not complying EU regulations. rant!!!

well, you all, have a nice day!!! ;-)